This morning I woke up with songs in my head and a words of a blog post flitting around my head. its a good day to write. Well, and pack up boxes. But that’s a story for another day.
Journaling is part of my life experience. For a number of years I attended journaling retreats focusing on different types, styles, and even reasons for writing our hearts out on paper, or keyboarding into a computer, much akin to what I do here on the blog. At one retreat the leader had a poster board of a quilt drawn by a retreatant from a previous session. The retreatant wrote, “Journaling a Journey of the Heart.” With some conversation with her this became the basis of a quilt. While doing the hand lettering I made a wee bit of a wording change using “to” instead of “of”. The meaning, and even sentiment completely changes, and both are accurate, and I daresay essential. Moving to the Heart, to the coeur is moving toward knowing who we are deeply.
While packing up this house to move I’ve gone through so much paper, stuff, and things that hold deep memory and a lot that doesn’t hold any memory at all. While looking through a box in my office I happened upon a reflection written during RCIA way back in 1992. In reading this I found a recurring theme prompting me to think, a lot, which is in some way what led me here to this post.
The recurring theme: peace.
Second theme: know yourself.
As we are whole human beings knowing ourselves and being at peace are concurrent desires. We are most at peace when we know who we are, who’s we are. We belong in community, we are part of a community, and we long for acceptance of who we are as individuals and further a closeness in friendship and relationship with both family and in our chosen career/faith/life path. This is where things become most challenging as when conflicts arise, or difference of opinions surface, our/my peace is sometimes set aside giving rise to thoughts racing through my brain that someone won’t…oh you get the drift.
Back to the retreat idea.
So the retreat idea is: Quilting, a Journey to the Heart. The retreat would offer time to stitch, time to reflect, and focused conversations reflecting on our struggles, who we are as quilters, our greatest joys, and where we find life as quilt makers. Quilt making is a process of discovery of our likes, dislikes, the tools that work best, the fabrics that make our hearts flutter with the excitement of a four year old on their birthday, the right threads, batting, and piecing style This changes over time, and often with significant shifts along the way. Our quilts as unique as who we are, not quite fitting in a particular genre, speaking deeply of our hearts, expressing a longing for friendship, community, and the acceptance we deeply desire as individuals.
I’ve written before that giving up the “I wanna be just like you when I grow up” has freed me to become the quilter I am, to accept that the quilting I do is in some respects the same as others, and very different. We are at once informed by those whom we are privileged to meet, interact with, and get to know.
All of this is to say the retreat I’ve longed to create for quilters, way down deep in the recesses of my being, is becoming clearer in my brain.
And so I go off to pack a bit more, getting ready to leave this place and with Bilbo Baggins I say, “I think I’m ready for another adventure!”
Happy Quilting,
Teri
PS Please remember my upcoming book!
