At the Intersection of Divine and Cloth

For years, I have been trying to create an image of my very well-defined sense of the divine. I've used colored pencils, pastels, sticks with acrylics, sticks with oil and the net result is always the same.

I discover yet again that I cannot draw.

But folks over at Spirit Cloth say everyone can draw and so I ran out and bought two art pencils and a copy of Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain. I am sure that when I actually get beyond page 2 and remember where I put those pencils, my hands may start to express what I see.  But until then, well, I just close my eyes and get lost in the vision.

I believe that our day-to-day world is like a blanket...a colorful cloth of the ordinary and perhaps even the extraordinary stuff that entails being alive. And every once in a while, there's something shining in a little tear at the seams. A shimmer of godliness that we touch, only here and there. When you knit an intimate moment with a friend...when you hear a longlost voice on the phone and you had just dreamed about that person the previous night...when your garden makes beefsteak tomatoes or a bunch of titanium gives you back what your arthritic knee took away.

What you touch when you feel grateful.

Anyway, that's what...wait, did someone say "cloth?" "Colorful cloth?"  Like this?

individual blocks on the design wall

I spent the summer sewing all my woven blocks together, with no real big picture in mind other than I just wanted to weaven them all together. They were originally random events, these weavings, and so putting them together left...you guessed it...holes scattered between all the blocks. 

But I still didn't think of what must already be obvious to you. But this month, I got well on my way into my class in the Jewish mystical text written by my new boyfriend, The Rebbe of Ger. He echoes the Hassidic principle that the material world was formed by an implosion that scattered sparks of the divine throughout the world. It is our job to retrieve these sparks, to bring them together again. And when we do an act of kindness, of charity, of just acting righteously, well,we feel the light of the spark we just picked up.

See why I love this guy? Better yet, see why I love quilting?

blocks woven together, with little sparks filling in the holes

Betty Edwards, eat your heart out.