This weekend I’m going to a mindful mending retreat. Between spasms of social anxiety, I’m looking forward to it.

Really, mindful mending is something I’ve been doing all summer.

At first, my stitches were really uneven. I stabbed myself with my needle regularly. My sewing is still nothing like the perfect stretches of straight, even stitches that you’ll see if you search online for sashiko stitching, but it has also noticeably improved since I started.

I’ve always enjoyed mending. Before this summer, I tended to lean towards iron-on patches and machine-stitched repairs. I have a plaid table cloth with a little fabric owl-shaped patch with button eyes machine-stitched over a hole years ago.

I regularly repair gaping holes in the crotches of One’s jeans, a casualty of  #bikelife. It touches my heart that at 16, he still turns his jeans in to me when they get ripped. Mending his clothes has become a prayer for his safety when he’s out doing tricks on his bike. It’s not an idle prayer – he’s been hit by a car three times in the past year and still seems to believe in his youthful immortality.I started hand sewing my mends because my sewing machine broke not long after #memademay wrapped up.

Thanks to the internet, I had a new machine two days later, but I kept hand sewing, because I found I liked the repetitive motion of sewing row after row. After I got a couple of leather thimbles and some rubber finger grippies, I was really in business.

I would stitch in the morning, afternoon, and in the evening in between my other responsibilities. I did it during quiet time. I mended all the things that needed mending from bed sheets to tablecloths to knit leggings. I actually asked my kids if they had any more clothes that needed patching.

In contrast, my meditation practice has been limping along, at least if you compare it to where it was. I went from regularly meditating an hour to an hour and a half a day. I would start with 30-40 mins. each morning, and usually do another 20 mins. at lunch and 20 mins. at bedtime. I’m down to 20-25 minutes most mornings, and a single shorter session in the evening. TLDR, my total time is half of what it was.

I don’t know what it has been about the summer, but it feels like my mental stamina did a face plant.

I have mostly been kind with myself when I’m meditating, struggling to stay under when my mind is counting, making lists, or telling stories, the typical distractions I encounter. Other days I feel like whatever I experienced at my retreat in the Netherlands is “wearing off.” That if I let my meditation practice continue to decrease, that I’ll lose the ability to do it completely and not be able to get it back.

One of the positive things about this has been the discovery of hand sewing. I’d read many times about doing things meditatively or mindfully. I like the idea of it, but I’m crap at multi-tasking, and I have been able to break through with truly meditative activities just a few times.

As I continued to hand sew, though, something happened. The sewing itself had become meditative, even though the stitches weren’t perfect, and I would often have to put my mending down to tend to the kids.

For me, meditation IS prayer, and while often I am tempted to put less than neutral adjectives on my current traditional meditative practice (“fail,” and “garbage” readily come to mind), I’m grateful that another practice has risen up to stand in the gap – and maybe that was the point all along, to cross over into meditative activities.

When I read Women Rowing North, Mary Pipher said something that caught my attention. She started one chapter by saying she once found a jar full of her prayer requests from ten years earlier. Going through the requests, she discovered each one had been answered by the passage of time. I get hung up on time. How long I meditated. How much alone time I get. If I spent enough time working on a project. How much time I spent cleaning when I could have been done much sooner if I’d asked my kids to work together and help me (and endured the complaining that comes with that). If I spent enough time outside. How long the kids left me alone during quiet time.

I’m again reminded that I believe in a God who isn’t limited by time. A God who has been able to use my uneven stitches to help me find a way forward into being present and chill when my way isn’t working.