9-patch pieced hand work to mark the first birth in my natal family in 43 years: my great-niece is to be born imminently. An unexpected and great joy!

 

This needlework is meant to represent all her family, living and ancestral,

looking out with her into a golden-green-blue-brown of a North American autumn,  rivers making their way to the Atlantic ocean at the edge of this quilt.

 

 

 

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The quilt is made of remnants, cut into squares of one and a half inches

 

 

These squares are sewn together with running and back stitches to form nine-patch squares of one and a quarter inch.

 

 

9 nine-patch squares are sewn together to make larger squares

These are encased by one and a quarter inch patches of blue cloth

 

 

Nine completed large, blue-enclosed squares are joined by pink gingham, also a remnant and gifted to me by a friend

 

 

Because only God is perfect, two of the large squares have one extra line of Autumn.

 

 

 

Squares and gingham are sewn onto medium-weight cotton batting

 

 

 

The back of the quilt is lightweight Indian cotton hand block, originally a dupatta

 

 

sewn onto the reverse of the cotton batting

 

 

Edging of blue gingham, also a gifted remnant, around all sides of the quilt completes the work

 

 

The pink gingham is semi-transparent.  Here the quilt hangs in a window.  It is 47 inches by 46 inches.

 

 

The dupatta is semi-transparent also.  This is the reverse of the quilt hanging in a window

 

 

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This done, I return to the 9-patch pieced hand work on which I have worked periodically all year:

a work made of remnants of black, white and red cotton and white muslin:  

6 patches wide and  getting longer and longer

 

 

 

This accompanies one of the longest and hardest disciplines of my life: 

living in and accommodating the tension of the tragic gap without sinking into apathy, hate, cynicism, forgetfulness, or irate stridency.

 

 

 

The tragic gap is a phrase of the Quaker elder and educator, Parker Palmer (American born 1939).

 

 

 

It means the gap between the war, massacres of innocents, political malfeasance and cowardice which surround us

and what we know can be different, what we know – in an ideal world – we would do differently. 

Standing means accepting our impotence; accepting that the time for radical change has not yet come;  

and doing whatever we can do in our lives with our means towards the common good;  

understanding, Palmer says, that in so doing, we have joined a very large ‘mystical community’ of people working towards common goods.

 

 

 

 

The very large difficulty on the very near horizon now is that the time may have come to give up hope of certain kinds of change: effective action against climate change, for instance, because we are reaching the 25th hour.

 What then? I don’t know what then.

Meanwhile,

this work hangs in a window when I am not working on it.  It takes on all the shades of the day, dawn to dusk.

 

 

 

Sometimes it crouches like a strange, threatening porcupine

 

 

 

and sometimes it is almost cocoon-like seductive

 

 

 

waiting to grow longer.

 

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