Post #3135: Disjointed

This fall has been lovely, but somehow everything feels a little…. interrupted. A result of much to-ing and fro-ing – to Vancouver, to the cabin, to Ottawa, to Victoria, and so on. In some ways I enjoy the variation in locale – but as I’m having a hard time maintaining basic routines with all this out and about and I look forward to mid-November when I am done with all travel (except day trips to the city for meetings) until the new year.

What that means is that while I’ve managed to finish a few things in the studio since September, I’ve not been much for documenting. A garment gets finished and it goes right into the rotation (or a suitcase if I’m on my way out for a few days).

It also means that I’m not writing consistently, which is a practice of some importance to me but does require a space around my days which I don’t currently have. Fortunately, this weekend I am going to a writing retreat with my old writing group, and mid-November I am planning a week alone at the cabin to meditate and write (and meet with our electrician). The simple act of setting aside this time feels right at the moment, even though both activities will take me away from home some more.

Earlier this week I finished my first piece of boro cloth which you can see in the photo at the top of this page. I started it back in September, but then set it aside and it took forever to get the last lines of stitching in. The fabrics I used for my first experiment in recomposed textile all came from garments that I made over the summer and I’m quite happy with the resulting fabric – disjointed, and yet unified by the stitches that run across it and create whole cloth from small scraps.

I don’t know what the thread winding through everything in my life is at the moment. Except that I am practicing being *in* my life no matter where I physically am and what I am doing – which helps creates a sense of whole from sometimes disjointed days or months. Meditation helps with that, and I’m getting to the cushion most days right now. Processing things in writing and photographs here also helps, which I’ve been doing less than I’d like.  

All my practices are portable. Stitching, meditation, writing – and yet it can feel like such a struggle to maintain them when I’m in between one thing and another. I suppose it’s about developing constancy of mind more than anything – and that is the lifelong hill that I’m climbing (and probably just about the time I get there, dementia will set in anyways).