A Spiritual Journey in Purple and Green

My life is an exercise in energy and chaos: I'm a social dance teacher.

That means I am always in motion, always adjusting, and always teaching people to learn how to forgive themselves.

People think that when they dance, they have to be perfect. So they are afraid to try it. Part of my job is to take the fear and mystery out of the equation. Every time I put on the music for my students to practice, I say, "Make a lot of mistakes, and giggle a lot." I give them permission to be NOT perfect. I point out that not being perfect is fun. It's easy to see why I did not go into the medical profession.

When I am not dancing, I love to sew. Costumes, quilts, dolls; I love the creative process with fabrics as much as I love the creative process of dancing. I made hundreds of masks for my dancers when quarantine started. While I couldn't teach (except for online classes over Facebook Live), my dancers were out there with jobs at Target, and restaurants, having to interact with other people. I made them special masks for Halloween and Christmas. I added lace, and little charms, and sequins, and belly dance coins. Then, while I was emboidering a pair of Colonial pockets for myself, I realized I could embroider masks. My beekeeping friend got honeycomb and bees. Then I found the patterns for mandalas.

The little mandalas for my friends' masks were fun, and only took a little bit of time. But by now I've discovered something I used to know when I was a teenager, and I'd long since forgotten: there is something absolutely magical about hand embroidery.

Embroidering isn't just hand sewing. Yes, the physical motion of threading a needle is the same when you are preparing to sew on a button as when you are attacking a blank piece of Aida cloth. The motion of pushing and pulling the needle through the fabric is the same for embroidering as it is for sewing on that button. But that's where the similarity ends. One is a moment of utility. It doesn't matter if the button is going on a newly-made garment or it's a quick repair job. Sewing on a button does not feed your soul. Creating beautiful things that are painted with a palette of hundreds of colors of embroidery floss: that is a soulful experience.

Poets have written about the mystical charms of a woman at her embroidery. They aren't wrong. It's a journey to the center of yourself. Time spent embroidering is time spent in stillness. You cannot hear the outside world screaming, and banging, and nagging at you. There is a word for that state of being: meditation.

Mandalas, of course, are considered an aid to mediation. They are meant to focus attention, establish a sacred space, create a spiritual journey. All of which are natural parts of the process of embroidery.

I had not done counted cross stitch since I was a teenager, but when I found that I could get patterns online, I absolutely HAD to do this perfect merging of energy and stillness. Every stitch is time spent in "my happy place." It is also a metaphor for my life's balance of chaos and order.

The important thing in counted cross stitch is to follow the pattern carefully. Starting from the center and working out, any mistakes will be magnified as you move outwards. And oy, I kept embroidering while watching TV after dinner, and there are LOTS of mistakes.

Every mistake becomes a choice. Do I rip out the stitches, or do I adjust the pattern and keep going? Unlike dance, where a mistake cannot be undone, just dealt with, here I had the option of either living with it, or redoing it.

Sometimes, the answer was to rip it out, and sometimes the answer was to live with it. And, isn't that the secret to life? Knowing what to leave, what to change, and when?