Last Friday I posted A Question?

My question was about this…

… and I didn’t say anything else about it because I didn’t want to influence the response at all. And I would really like to thank everyone who replied. I so much appreciate the thoughtfulness and consideration that went into all of your responses.

Apart from A Question? I didn’t blog anything last week because I was so overwhelmed with sadness and I’m not going to go into that here. I do emotional literacy in the stereotypical English way – not often and not well! – but I was determined to keep sewing and I thought making something would make me feel better but I was at a loss for what to sew. So I thought I’d try modifying a New York Beauty block to make something like this image…

…which I drew and began to make a needlepoint piece of (destined to remain a UFO forever, I think) years ago. It was originally inspired by the quotation: ‘The person in the heart is is the person in the sun’ which crops a lot in the early Upanshads, particularly the Chandogya, but I modified the idea to have the person juggling rain drops because that struck me as more realistic.

To start with I was aiming for a modern solids look and thinking cushions but when I got to this stage I couldn’t think how best to quilt it and I thought ‘sometimes you just to give up to the universe’. That seems an odd thing to have thought out of the blue about the quilt, life and everything but I decided just to go with it. And for some reason prayer flags came to mind. Lately, I seem to keep meeting people enthused about all things Tibetan.

Lungta-style prayer flags hang along a mountain path in Nepal

And I listened to this You Tube Video of crystal singing bowls, played by Deborah Van Dyke and Valerie Farnsworth accompanied by the art of Jack Haas. It was like a sort of sewing meditation and might be worth doing from time to time just for the peacefullness of it. The sound is extraordinarily beautiful and the images are stunning.

And, beginning with shadow quilting, I listened and sewed in circles and cried a lot – which didn’t help with even stitches and straight lines but gave it a certain character – and I made myself a rule not to unpick anything and not to imagine it perfect but just to change direction or colour when I thought it looked like it needed it and to accept however it turned out (life, the quilt and everything!).

And I listened to this wonderful TED TALK:

Kathryn Schulz: Don’t regret regret

“We’re taught to try to live life without regret. But why? Using her own tattoo as an example, Kathryn Schulz makes a powerful and moving case for embracing our regrets”

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

And just kept sewing and doing all the steps of regret just how she describes. Except I still have a way to go before I can genuinely laugh at myself. Perhaps when I can, I’ll be able to write in an entertaining and matter-of-fact way describing what it was all about.

And then I received an email update from Susan’s Blog – Good Disruptive change – which I would highly recommend to anyone – and she had blogged a post called HOW TO BE YOUR OWN TRUTHTELLER where she says (among lots of other interesting things):

“When Peter Drucker observed that “no one has ever failed to find the facts he is looking for,” he was talking about confirmation bias, known as the most dependable of all delusions. What is confirmation bias? It’s when we pay attention to information that confirms what we want to believe, and ignore information that challenges it”.

So I sewed round in circles some more adding some reflection on confirmation bias into the mix.

And in the end I felt a lot wiser but not much happier and I had pretty much run out space for any more stitching and I realized the flag was finished.

But I’d noticed the other flags tend to have names and words on them and I had been naming it the ‘Heart of Sorrow’, which doesn’t seem quite right for a wish for all beings to be ‘uplifted and a little happier’. And I did think it looked quite bright and cheerful and I like the idea that from the heart of sorrow something hopeful and happy and beautiful could emerge but I still didn’t feel hopeful and happy and beautiful and I was concerned that it might just be sending out vibes of sadness and unstraight lines so I didn’t feel comfortable with embroidering those words on.

Apparently hanging prayer flags on a sunny windy day is auspicious!