Rite of Passage

19Feb10

Rite of Passage, 90 x 106 inches, Cotton Quilt

The first language we speak is touch.

-Ina May Gaskin

There is something so womanly about quilt making.  I have always thought so.

The making of this quilt has accompanied me on an incredible spiritual and physical journey.  I started making it during a lonely period of solitude here in Maine. It was early winter.  I decided to bring it with me when I went to New Mexico for a couple of months with my sweetheart.  There I pieced squares together on a borrowed sewing machine and used a towel on the kitchen counter as my ironing board.  By the time I returned to Maine, it was spring, most of the squares were complete… and I was 10 weeks pregnant.

I put the project away in order to focus on inhabiting the bubble of bliss that was my pregnancy and with the birth of our beautiful baby in the fall, I was transformed into a new version of myself.  I never knew I had such a capacity for love.  I couldn’t believe the enormousness of this new little person!  I felt expansive but also very vulnerable without the bubble of bliss around me.   I wanted my quilt to cover our bed.  I wanted to rest beneath it.  I wanted to study the colorful blocks while nursing my baby to sleep.

Slowly but surely I found time to work on the quilt again and as I emerged into life as a mother, it was finally completed.

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Tags: art, babies, Maine, motherhood, New Mexico, pregnancy, quilt, transformation