please, do this one thing for me? never underestimate the power of ‘small’.
how it is able to change a landscape, and here i am talking of both the geographical one on which we place our bodies, always so hopeful, until we are not, as well as that vast, secret world that you have only just begun to explore.
that is where hope really springs from—the striking of the rock a hundred times a day.
this is why i love the seed stitch, the minute presence of one, but when stitched in community, when travelling across the fabric in cotton herds, how they become a series of waypoints leading the eyes from here to there, and all the way back to the beginning if you need to travel back to where you forgot things.
but what am i saying!
i am not here to tell you how to shape your life.
i am only here for a short while.
only this morning i had to look away from another’s life, the glimmer and success of it, my fingers still damp from the breakfast dishes, the shirt waiting to be ironed.
i don’t have an answer to so much that is nestled under my pillow, waiting for the night’s question-hours.
still, look at these stitches. the shades of blue.
the red.
how they have changed the fabric. its landscape forever altered, unless, of course, someone decides to unpick each stitch, decides that beauty needs to be undone. it happens.
i am not averse to undoing things, to unpicking.
you wouldn’t believe how much courage you have to feed yourself to start over, again and again.
look at these tiny red stitches—the smallness of their repetitions.
i did this.
if you were looking for a sign today, perhaps you might pick up a needle and thread, a pencil, the stuttering ballpoint pen at the bottom of your bag.
start with one mark.
there! you have begun a new thing and a new thing was begun by you.
it could be anything, you know.
a cup of water, or the rain.
perhaps, even a lifeboat.

© Liezel Graham 2023

{📷 seed stitches slowly inhabiting the landscape of this piece i am working on}