I have not been able to find the way in, the way to that place where you know you can heal your heart if you just have the right tools. I have needed to get out of my head and into my hands, but I have been lost. Writing is one way for me to be in the world, but I learned a long time ago that when I got out of my head and into my hands something happened that words couldn’t touch. I used to always keep a fiber art project on my writing table and when I would get stuck in my writing or when my brain got screwed up too tight I turned away from writing and into my fiber art. Freeform knitting and crochet, weaving, handspinning art yarns, these were all my go-to fiber pursuits but before them there was something deeper and more sustaining.

After I left my marriage in 1999 I lived in a tiny place, the original Dragonfly Cottage. I started going to yardsales and buying fabric and sewing supplies, mind, I knew nothing about sewing, but I wanted to make something and somehow the fabric, needle, and thread called to me like a siren in the sea. I started making one of a kind handmade dolls. They were very simple, much like featureless Amish dolls but these dolls had one or two features and in the features they possessed there was a story that told who they were. I stuffed the dolls with bits and bobs, herbs from the garden, crystals, essential oils, they were magical, and everyone that I made one for — I wasn’t selling them, I was making them to heal a broken heart, I made them for people I loved, or people who needed a healing of their own — loved them.

As time went along I started buying fabric cheaply on eBay. It had begun to get harder and harder for me to leave the house and the material I wanted wasn’t easily found at yardsales. I wanted vintage fabrics, especially vintage velvet — the dolls were made of velvet — but also old silks and satins and brocades and all manner of vintage material. I also started collecting vintage buttons. It was my heaven. Everywhere I moved I carried my fabric and buttons and notions around with me. I have always wanted to get back to making handmade dolls, something I thought I could make and sell, but they were always so personal to me. And then came the fire in 2014. I lost all of my precious fabric. Some buttons survived, but the fabric I had collected for years and years is all gone. Tons of embroidery threads, all manner of things, all gone. It broke my heart.

I have tried, for some time, to knit or crochet or even to spin yarn, but I quickly fall away, my heart isn’t there. And I don’t have the money to replace all that I lost. It seemed far too daunting, no way to begin again. And since Delilah died I have been hurting so much, I have been so lost, I haven’t known what to do with myself. But this morning something happened that jolted me awake, a shock of recognition.

I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across something my friend Zann had posted. It is a simple stitching project she is working on for something called 13 Moons. Here is her piece. In that moment something in me came alive. I don’t need a closet full of gorgeous vintage fabrics, I just need a few sewing supplies and simple fabrics to start, I just need to be stitching, I need to be making something.

I spent the day online figuring out how I would start and I bought a few simple, inexpensive supplies for embroidery, a little cloth, just a handful of things. I am making no grand plans. I am simply going to sit here and begin. I am self taught in all that I do. I couldn’t use a sewing machine to save my life, I can’t do anything grand or complicated, and I don’t need to. I spent a good chunk of the day connecting to what my soul calls out for and one of the things that delighted me the most and which I am now following on Instagram is #slowstitching. There is magic in a piece of cloth, a needle, and thread. With these few simple things I will begin to stitch together the pieces of my lost heart. I will find my way.

I have tried to draw and paint but I have never been comfortable doing it. And my recent attempt to draw Anna was so filled with pictures of the little pug that was my Delilah (Pugsley was there too but before Anna there was Tallulah and Georgia clearly based on Delilah and I.) that my heart just won’t go there. I need to do something else, something slow, and simple. I need to let my hands find the way. I need to heal myself. I have, God willing, a lot of life left to live. I intend to do just that.

Slowly I am finding my way, one day, one moment at a time. And now I will stitch together the bits and parts and pieces of myself that have broken apart, and I will see who I am now, pieced back together, not quite the same, but all of a piece, eventually. I don’t know what I will find, but I need to find my way. I am ready to begin.