Family history, roots, and quilting
I’m hosting my first virtual breathwork group in a looong time next week! Join me on Zoom for a virtual Spring Equinox gathering of breathwork, journaling, and (optional) sharing to connect to your body and feelings, somatically honor your aliveness as the Earth wakes up around us, and set intentions around what you'd like to feel and experience this season. The exchange is $15 and recording will be sent to all. More details & sign up here!
I’m thinking about this quote from the Gee’s Bend Quilts exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art a lot as Q and I move closer to getting married this spring! I quilted them a wall hanging with our new last name on it (below is Chi Chi being helpful with it) and that felt like a kind of spell toward a new kind of family, a new kind of home.
I couldn’t agree more that quilting can connect to family history. I sew using my grandmother’s machine, that my aunt taught me how to use. I’m right now starting to make a piece from old fabric my grandma gifted to me, scraps and snippets of what’s left from what she used to make a dress for my great aunt, a shirt for my mom. The quilts I’ve made for my partner, my grandmother, my sibling, are weaving a story, a kind of family history and archive that we’re building now. They’ve all been for different things - a move far away, a cancer diagnosis, an upcoming wedding - but they are all, at their roots, stories of love.
In this time of year where things are starting to bloom and we turn our attention towards the blooming, I am also thinking about what are the roots are. More literally, of course, with family history like Mensie Lee Pettway mentions above. But also the roots of my desires, my choices, my decisions. What is my desire for certainty rooted in? What is a decision to go for this and not that rooted in? Love for myself, hope, desire? Obligation, fear, shame?
It’s all interesting information. I might choose to move from a place of obligation, fear, shame anyway. But I might not. My therapist likes to use the term “choice points” for moments where you move intentionally instead of automatically. Even if I choose to feed the roots of fear, making it a choice point can be a first step.
Something that felt deeply inspiring about seeing the quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend was the way they broke the quilting “rules” and moved toward imperfection. They broke classic patterns open and used what they had like pockets of faded overalls. One of my favorite quilts was the glorious bowed piece on the left side of this picture.
As Q and I stood in front of it, a father next to us wondered aloud what had gone wrong with the quilt. Of course, I have no idea what the artist was thinking or what her intentions were. But I ~ couldn’t help but wonder ~ what if the “imperfection” of it was on purpose? What if it turned out exactly how she wanted it to, even if it looked different than other people expected it to?
I like to think it did.
I’m interested in what blooms from the roots of our most free, creative, loving, connected selves.
With care,
Eryn
P.S. Let’s tend to what’s blooming together at the spring equinox breathwork gathering next week <3