This past spring, I learned there would be a Mindful Making Retreat about an hour away from me, co-taught by Katrina Rodabaugh and Meg McElwee. I’ve made a number of Meg’s patterns this spring and summer and have been gradually embracing the idea of slowing my sewing down and making it more of a practice than a drive.
That has been a process. My typical M.O. is to bring all my other responsibilities to a halt, let my children run feral, and whip up a top or a pair of shorts as quickly as possible.
This past spring, I posted about our forlorn backyard. The space was characterized by packed dirt and scattered scrap metal. It was well into spring, I thought. I was sure that was as good as it got.
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.
Trying to find a socially acceptable way to discharge negative emotions has been a lifelong quest for me.
As a high schooler, after watching the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, I would regularly yawp out in nature when things got to be too much.
Since then, I’ve discovered swimming, live music, and waterfalls. All of those things are weather- and location-dependent, or “subject to availability.”
Sometimes I can let it all out in a meditation. I can’t plan an outcome for a meditation and expect success. That isn’t how it works for me. Often, when I’m at my most stressed, I’m also at my lowest functioning, and it’s really hard to be clear-headed about my options for de-escalation.
Have you been there?
I’ll talk about the book pictured above in a minute, but can we first talk about how it’s also a photo of a housewife reading a tawdry romance novel?
One of the hunks I’ve bitten off in the past year is shame. I want to look at how it’s showing up and how I’m dealing with it. One of the most recent examples is that I went from reading mostly historical fiction for much of my adult life, to this year reading a LOT of nonfiction, especially spirituality books.
I wasn’t giving myself a break from this type of reading and was feeling overwhelmed with my reading list and also a little burnt out. When I gave romance a try this spring as a way of giving my brain a break from the nonfiction, I felt a certain amount of shame.
