Left my body by the sea

on grit and quilt-naming

I finished a quilt piece this weekend at the beach with my mom.

A wall hanging maybe, or perhaps a table runner thing or an altar cloth.

I love naming quilts like they are pieces of art because we know they are.

I prematurely named it Swimming in the Adriatic on account of its oceany palette and because I was thinking a lot about the time Caroline and I swam in the Adriatic Sea when I first started sewing it. Two broke girls in our twenties backpacking through France and Croatia, eating nothing but baguettes and sardines, ripe with visions and hope and promise and big electric dreams.

Now I’m sitting on a different beach, finishing this quilt collage, in the wake of Roe v Wade’s dismantling. I think about the heavy things that eclipse the big electric visions that youth promises, stretched out like a fresh canvas.

I think about the tenacity and grit and courage that’s required to hold onto our center when faced with so many circumstances that grind us the hell down. I think of the ocean and her prerogative to weather and grind her contents down to mere flecks of sand. Grit is required to live in these trying time. To grit we shall return. 

The contents of me are jostled into a new inner order down by the seashore. 

I let the sea have her way with me. I practice floating on my back. When my ears go under, I am dazzled and unnerved that I can hear the entirety of the ocean’s underworld. I imagine I’m hearing the sound of the world’s heart breaking. Salt water laps at the gaping wound. 

I wonder about the fissures in my own heart right now. Gotta have grit to be here. To grit I shall return. 

Now that the quilt is finished, I decide it needs a different name.

It’s how I imagine naming a baby. You come up with all your favorites, you think you know, but can you really know until they come out? Show their face to the sun? At least that’s how I suppose it goes.

A Grief As Big As The Ocean’s Mouth

I Left My Body By The Sea

The Sea Sees Me Seize Me

I Walked My Grief Down to the Water’s Edge

I think it’s the last one.

My mom and I talk about abortion. Her abortions. Once by choice. Three times by medical intervention for miscarriages.

I pull a card from the Mermaids and Dolphins oracle deck I found at the Airbnb. 

‘Mother Healing’ printed on the top. A picture of a mama mermaid playing with her baby mermaids on a beach. 

The description is something about giving the wounds from your mother back to heaven. 

We eat fish and drink red stripe. I bring a Byron Katie book to the beach but don’t read it. Instead, I stare off into the middle distance, a striated sandwich of aqua aqua aqua.  Cowgirl in the Sand plays on the stereo on the car ride home. I stare off into the middle distance. 

Aqua aqua aqua 

Back in Atlanta, I am occupied with the task of moving out of my studio. My expansive creative haven, my secret den of messing around, mess-making, and intuitive thread following.

I like myself more when I’m in my art studio. I’m impressed with myself. But not so much me Melissa but more me the conduit that’s channeling electric impulses from who knows where—god, the underworld, the inner cave of wonders. I’m the child playing away from the watchful eyes of adults. This studio gave me that. Cave of wonders.

Letting it go is a grief ritual.

It’s been one of those transitions that feels like it chose me more than I chose it. It was just…time. It’s the feeling of being on a moving sidewalk at the airport, or on the wheel track at the gas station car wash. Or the ocean tide pulled mysteriously towards land by the unseen tether of the moon.

Here we go now, time to crash to shore. Time to be pulled away. Time to let go.

Or maybe I’m the one being let go of.

---

GRIEF THREADS cohort number two begins next week.

The creative grief container for tender sweethearts experimenting with cloth and thread and stories and transformation.

I love this space so much. I’ve said it once I’ll say it plenty more, it’s the people who show up who make this experience so meaningful. It feels like we’re remaking the web of connection that’s absent for so many of us. We’re practicing how to repair the village, so we can be held by one another when the pit of grief and despair is too too much.

We need spaces to practice being messy and un-put-together with each other, imho.

We need rituals for listening to one another’s mess. And listening to our own.

To disrupt the cultural disposition to numb the fuck out and repress our pain.

We need many hands to help lift it to the light. Sort through it so it may be transmuted into something useful and life-giving.

If that sounds cool and interesting and maybe scary and awful but you feel yourself drawn like an angelic little moth to the flame of possibilities, follow the pull. There’s a seat for you. 🖤

xo M