Here are two views of a recent quilted, embroidered project. It feels like too long since I finished this piece and I’m not really working on anything new. I’m busy with some writing, and with getting the garden planted before too much more time passes. I feel unmoored when I don’t have a project to turn to, yet I feel overwhelmed when I have more than half a dozen things on the go. It’s hard to keep things balanced, and hard to settle into the quiet phases that exist between projects, between waves of energy. What can I tell myself? What do you tell yourself? If I look to nature, I can see the importance, the necessity, of dormant periods, of torpor, hibernation, estivation. Frogs shouldn’t emerge from their winter places until the time is right; seeds should stay in their tough cases until the soil warms. Will I recognize the signal from the world, from the body, that the time of waiting has ended, and the time of starting again has arrived?
