The Heart of Practice
Stitching Grief Over Time
February workshops are off to a creative, inspiring start, and you’re invited — sign up here. Ground down into your hands and connect in creativity: learn meditation, journaling, paper marbling, and bookbinding. If you’re curious about starting, strengthening, or sustaining a creative, writing, or meditation practice, my virtual 1:1 sessions may be a good fit. As always, pair your creative practice with selections from Odette Press.
Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,...
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Heart Sutra
“Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don’t pack whatever is easiest or most available into the emptiness. Hold out for the right medicine. You will recognize it because it makes your life stronger rather than weaker.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves
In the light of Sunday we take sharp metal and pierce through the fibers of pages, puncturing the valley of the fold and forming holes. My students are gathering paper and attention equally in the process of binding books, each stitch a metaphor for forwardness while the city sits in a momentary stillness. That afternoon the light is quiet, sunlight dances, and through the window in the corner, the day shines. Together we talk, gather, listen. We fold, measure, bind. In contrast to tech and the immediacy of mechanization, what we are doing is slow. Surely, this could be all be over easily if we took our fingertips to that place of immediacy and opened our phones. But that would be a different story entirely, one absent any feeling, or the light, the sound, the tone.
To become sensitive is to hone your alertness, and become attentive. To focus solely on book and stitch draws yourself in, binding together time (precious material) with materials that may seem small and insignificant (thread and paper) and combining them to form something strong and new. One stitch, then the other, then the book is complete, and the step is then to fill up the pages, to combine phrases, and tell the story. There is a rhythm and a hum to the process, and as in breathing, or steadiness of drumbeat, a book is brought together in increments, in the slow continuity between gathering pages as page and stitch combine. Moving together through challenge and the process of learning something new, amassing something satisfying in the process, and I think of practices that bring us closer to ourselves and each other in the balance between solitude and community — or to voice astrology, the poles of Leo (summer, sol, sun, self) and Aquarius (winter, collective, water bearer).
Transfixed by effort, thread, and feeling of February, we take tools, take hands, feel paper and pay attention. Any moment can be a conversation between you and life, and finding yourself woven together in the company of others, no matter how temporarily, can bring you close to the strings of another. Each threads made up of past, present, and future, each with their own lines of thinking, lineages, roots and values, and histories. Your breath and your heartbeat is your continuity: a single continuous line across time, a precious and necessary increment of air between where you start and the beat where you end. Connected to your heartbeat, your breath is an intricate dance between you and the air, a tether between the internal, the external, a stitch in the non-separateness with nature.
The first February I remember being ripped apart was the year the snow came and seemed to last forever. I was eighteen, still knotting together the threads of myself, forming myself from the shape of the incoherent when the incomprehensible came. The month was winter, was gray, was more haze than anything, and in an atmosphere that felt hard, bleak, gray, and cold, covered in unending snow — a season where one could not see one’s hand in front — we were curled up in the dorm rooms, wound up and brought together by nature of death and winter.
That time was different. I knew mostly how to work and sing and study and try and create and how to drink too much then. I coped with what I had, did the best with what I knew I could, until the sensitive person I came to love in fullness only after he chose to leave the planet suddenly faded away.
Like grief, the storm that passed through that year took our horizons and made feeling and sensing acute. Snow obscures distances, and visibility vanishes, and that month became a labyrinth, where the only way out was in circles, until something new came through. Vanishing into dorm rooms, clouds of snow came and blanketed us in the frozen shroud of obscuration. He was an Aquarius, too, my friend, whose pain was too much to bear the water of, whose choice of departure opened me too wide, too fast, too soon, as if cracking the spine on a book, a rupture that gave voice to the depths of pain felt only in absence. This is a story, a torn stitch, a rupture I do not wish on anyone.
It was the depth of pain he felt and looking at people and the demise of this planet, that brought him to an end. To me he was a sentence still in motion, while the volume closed on his own heartbeat. In the blurred, initial impact of rupture, I was sutured together in the connection of family and friends, of practice and page, mat and breathing. Movement, whether by word, breath, or body, became the channel that allowed the current to emerge and pass through, and I folded and unfolded, so that the water of emotion I came to bear could stay vital and healthy and not stagnate.
In memories that play back like a movie that I live within vividly and apart from, I remember driving down the highway in the days after in the half-awake haze of trying to understand. Met and held in the eyes, arms, and care of friends, I was brought into, and then out of, the canyon of feeling, coming to know the shape of pain as grief carved a crevasse through me. Looking to the eyes of friends, family, and looking to the sky, I turned my view to the monotony of distance passing, into the color and blur out of car windows. Driving south on the highway that carves a passage through the city became the path to soothe and suture as I entered into the altar of grieving. Pages turned, and time passed, and later pain became wonder, of what it means to be finite and infinite, to choose to depart this life for soil after, to become again air, mist, matter.
Something happens with vision when fielding the impact of grief, and the opening has a chance to become the medicine. Vision is obscured, as in snowstorm, but the lens of gratitude, when applied, becomes lesson, and memories are more vivid in hindsight. There were the nights he’d come to meet me, all eighteen and caffeinated, working too late and half asleep, covered in enthusiasm, late night, synchrony, and printmaking ink. There were the hours spent talking and listening, and the moments when the threads between late night and early morning would blur like winter’s vision, and we would stitch each other together, breath by breath, conversation by conversation, speaking to existential wonder, dread, tenderness, a pain that would rise and pass as the daylight emerged, and laughter, too. How in spite of cinderblock walls, and looming grades, and the too-cold tiled floor, together we traversed the outline of nature, learning the language of sound, environment, and paper, drawing concepts and ideas about what it would be like to breathe a kinder world into being.
What matters in this life, and what do we choose to stitch, repair, and bring back together? There are people who bring you together, and moments that rip you apart. There are people who live like stitch or sutra, weaving their presence together like hand or cup to give you a boost, a leg up, to see the broader view or hold the moment, the ones who make themselves into book, stitch, or basket, who become boat, bridge, or wing, speak to some staying or feeling or possibility, who take our hands and hold them and say listen. We’re in this together. We’re taking a deep breath. We’re making our way to the other shoreline.
Speaking to her own story of stitch and the medicinal, in The Faraway Nearby Rebecca Solnit writes,
“The English and Latin word suture has the same root as Sanskrit sutra or Pali sutta…The sutras, the most sacred texts of Buddhism, were named for the fact that they were originally sewn…The term sutra, as in the Platform Sutra, the Heart Sutra, or the Lotus Sutra, generally means a teaching by the Buddha himself or one close to him, as distinguished from the scholarly and philosophical texts that piled up afterward…The word is said to have arisen from the actual sewing or binding of these old palm leaf books, but it must have had some more metaphorical sense, as though the sutras’ words and meanings run throughout all things and bind them together, as though the threads are paths you can follow and veins through which life flows.”
Self and other, we measure, we rip out stitches, we stitch each other together, we laugh until our sides hurt, we come together, we find ourselves laughing so hard we cry, which is to say, in stitches. Sitting around on the day of the sun, sewing up pages, facing the day, and looking to the faces of neighbors and my students, I consider the ways we bring ourselves back together. What is it that draws us in toward each other, linking stitches together, ripping us apart? Why choose words to divide, to cut, in a time where kindness is a fierceness needed as balm and bringer together?
Grief is a seed that plants itself in the earth of your life and says open sesame. It arrives and drops nowness into a moment as if boulder hung on the tender end of thread, and sometimes when the student is not ready, the teacher still appears anyway. For years, I thought if I ran away from feeling, found my way around the feeling, it would cease to exist, see itself out, and say its goodbyes. Sometimes a moment is a wound, and we do not realize it, sometimes a moment is balm in the moment and wound in hindsight and then wound again, but we learn from the wound as opening, as teacher; any emotion is a story asking for some channel of body, mind, conversation, spot in the sunlight, or page to work through.
The first sutra of Patanjali’s speaks to the practice of yoga being now. It’s a simple sutra, one that connotes beginning. Now begins the practice of yoga. A breath is a stitch and rhythm of nows stitched together, and the practice is a lineage, a line of yoking, a joining of bringing oneself together with body and breathing. Combining mind with page and body with breath became the running stitch that brought, and continues me back into and toward a coherence with life as I became at once crashing wave and solid shoreline, and grief rises, passes, and fades away.
It could have been grief that led me there, in the ways that wonder or pain can build momentum, but in the aftermath of a much smaller wound, I take myself to a museum. Seeking solitude, but still some togetherness, I wound myself through the near-cavern of those enclosed spaces, looking through glass, twisting around like tendril or apparition around galleries and through the doorways, giving my eyes spaces to roam, roving for something with color, something bound together, pulled along by wonder, crowd, and intrigue.
If you see me in a gallery, I am the one bending my knees to take in not just the book, once I’ve found it, but stopping to see the way it’s bound, looking under and around to find the stitches. Books teach about power, about story, about rupture, about endurance, and the possibilities for stitching back together and repairing. Historically made in guilds or together in communities, each part of a book was a task and skill often belonging to one person: each person had a job, and it was an increment, and in the end, each book was made and bound together. Sutured together are the hundreds of years-old bound codices, brought back together after some fracture, split, or wound.
But sometimes a story is wordless or resists being bound, or requires voices to be the connecting line, and there are stories that exist beyond volumes, those that have existed and will continue existing in generations beyond the confines of words and bindings. Many practices are stitches shared in the vibrancy of life and real time; as Judith Lasater writes, “the brevity of the [yoga] Sutras underscores the fact that a teacher/interpreter was considered essential” writing how many sutras were given as teachings in conversations or chanting in oral traditions. Being in the world, gathering self back together with breath and word, or stitched back together in the company of people, connection can be a balm that brings us back together, and grief may ask for ear or voice: it sits you down, gives you materials, becoming teacher.
What matters in this life, and what do we choose to stitch back together? As we sit together and drive the sharp points of metal awls through the valley of folded pages, we slow down. We locate breath, our sensitivity, giving ourselves our focus, our stories, and our fingertips. I think about what’ll come to fill those valleys, that corner, that canyon, the blank horizon, the opposition of pages, remembering the value and the power of story. I wonder about the stories we stitch together, about whose stories are forced to silence, and whose meet their demise far, far too early.
Sometimes a moment is amorphous: a haze by which you know there is more but cannot see past and through the fog, only can sense slowly and step as carefully as you stretch out your hand, and hope your way forward, and learn to feel for what you need, and sense, and trust the process. You take the same hands by which you cannot predict the future but can bring something together, no matter how small, even if making a single stitch is the next part of your story’s action and arc. I have often wondered what my friend would say of now, all the noise and sound around us, about the wide blue sky and the moments of obscuration. I wonder about the art he would have made, and imagine a world where anyone falling apart can be held in tenderness, and be held and affirmed in their sensitivity, whether man, woman, person. What could a world look like where the words we string together or the ways we hold each other could be balm or stitch, a moment like suture to bring together after the pain of rupture?
Snow covers the ground and melts away, and overtime grief becomes workable, manageable, something that can be stitched and unbound and wound back together. Grief arises, pointing to you wound, and is a gift, showing you to the places where you are human. Though loss sometimes feels in mind and body like a death in itself, the feeling gives voice to your aliveness. Time expands, grief becomes smaller, the box around it wider, and you may expand your capacity to hold it and still it is collaborator, wisdom, teacher. Grief becomes a map, shows you where you are, how you care, and how deep the caverns go in the heart of the subterranean, and how to pull yourself out, and grab the hand over another, and the space of your care and connection.
I write this on the openings pages of another February. The ground is clearing and I am clearer and I see the world in sincerity, clarity, and though I cannot see past the day’s chapter I am determined to cover the ground ahead of me and not close the chapter. Running toward life, I learn from the past and stitch my breath to the present. I take a thread, pull on it, and tie a knot, replacing the heavy weight of grief with the strength of ligaments, of breath and body, of seeing and joy. Breath meets breath, bridging the gap between one day and the next, and I cover miles in thought and in life, building strength in mind as much as ligaments.
I have spent the last weeks searching for a single word, phrase, as if a string of words alone could be the sole stitch or balm watching words and power being used to separate instead of suture. Wishful thinking. I imagine what my friend would say of this now, and this present tense if he’d chosen his own continuity, and I don’t know. I don’t have answers for the big, enduring, and broad, but I do have breath and page and the understanding that there is power in the seemingly small and insignificant. We have paper, word, each other, lines of thinking, dinner table, and mostly importantly, breath, in everything we string, stitch, or knot or bind together in continuation. My hands, breath, these practices become stitch, ligament strengthened, a bridge between shorelines. A boat from one shore to the other.
I look into the horizon, and around at my students, at the lessons of friendship, and practices that make friends of ourselves, or the ways we stitch each other together in a time where it is ripe to say the world is falling apart because of what we think, feel, believe, and are witnessing. I think about pages, words, books as I stitch breath, word, book, idea with myself and pour it out for each other. We have dinner table, breath in lungs, water in our glasses, and each other, and the present is a stitch, a suture between the lived past and our futures.
In grieving, as in the First Noble Truth, we come to name and notice the presence of suffering and then work to alleviate the cause of pain at the root. We take what we have, what we can, and aim toward a future, and stitch something of meaning. We bring together ourselves and each other by nature of art, by stitches of laughter, of dinner, of continuation of breath. Becoming the fibers of us, a moment of rupture or departure meets us, becoming teacher. We integrate it, as thread, as tendril, and it does not go away but becomes part of the stitch we use to bring our lives together. Pulling the thread, your task is to drive the needle forward, find the balance between tension and releasing. The thread could be running, yelling, could be humor, could be focus, could be drumbeat, or cooking, or tenacity, or conversation, could be activity.
If the world has a wound, and a person is a volume, and words can be healing or wounding, what kind of world do we want to breathe into, to bring to form, to open up into? What are you stitching together in the sprint, the spring, the long run? Notice rupture, puncture, stitch, and stick together. Share your voice, and story.
Nourished By, Nourishing:
Baking sesame focaccia, swirling kale into soup, a five mile run, an hour-long Brian Eno track, sleep, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra and the reminder that “There are many reasons to treat each other / with great tenderness”.
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