I have a couple of new pillow covers. Looking at them reminds me of the things I still want to do and need to do with the house. At the moment I am still preoccupied with the garden, and sometimes frustrated by my slow progress. But, as I said earlier, it is not a race. And at times, slow as I am, it seems the garden is progressing faster than anything else. But then, that is one of the wonderful things about gardening, it takes on a life of its own.
I picked the pillow covers up in Perry, Georgia, on my way south to Sarasota and North Port. Tikka and I had stopped early, and we were wandering around downtown, which has been rather charmingly restored, when we stopped to look at a window and were beckoned inside the shop. The proprietor was Turkish; the shop sold Turkish goods, and he had been open for two weeks. I looked around and admired various objects and asked about history and culture. I admired a pillow and he brought out stacks of these covers, in myriad sizes and colors, and spread them out across the floor. I picked this one, in the middle of the photo above, originally thinking it might be a gift, but it has ended up being a gift to myself. Then I chose another. I suppose I was getting a little carried away. I could have bought more. There were many other beautiful things, pottery and rugs and beautiful lamps. But my imagination was limited to pillows.
Luckily for me, although I actually didn't realize it at the time, I had two pillows at home that were simply begging for new covers. The original covers were bright red ultrasuede, and although they were beautiful, they were the wrong shade of red for my current house. Now, I have at least two perfect pillows, and they remind me that there is much still to be done, that all the pillows are wrong or the covers are shredding from years of use. Much mending and refurbishing is required. But this photo reminds me the process of life, the once perfect orange pillow is now in tatters, awaiting transformation. The patchwork pillow is something new created from something old, but the focus is on the new, on recreation, on moving forward, on building and creating. The photo reminds me that it is the wrong shade of orange, that once seemed pretty and desirable, was but gloss, and not built for the long haul. I am working on a piece of needlepointing that I intended to use to cover this particular pillow. I've been working at it rather half heartedly though, and perhaps it is time to mend my ways. Of course I could just cover this pillow and make a new pillow with the needlepoint.
It seems I am coming back into myself, and I look forward to tackling things that for a long time just seemed to be overwhelming. I was overwhelmed for a while, overwhelmed after George died, then overwhelmed with things I had taken on, and then in an odd way overwhelmed with things that were taken away. Strange as it sounds that loss of things that I relied on to keep me busy, to soothe my mind, made it harder to do the things I was supposed to be doing. I had too much time on my hands, and I hadn't yet found the resilience I needed to pull it all together and get myself back to being the person I wanted to be, I needed to be.
I don't want to be a person who lets things fall into tatters around herself. In one ways these pillows are acting as a totem, reminding me of something important on my path to becoming the person I want to be, the person I am meant to be. These small bits of fabric, pulled together from other pieces, remnants perhaps of other objects, other uses, reminders of other lives, are more than the accumulated bits of their pasts. They have been salvaged and become something new. Perhaps it is time for me to salvage myself.
But who is it that I want to be? Or more importantly, to quote Pema Chodron, "How do I really want to be", because this is what I am really getting at -- what is the core essence of the person I want to be? Am I actually working toward achieving this goal, of becoming the person I want to be with all my being, or am I letting distractions altar my course? Am I becoming a whole person, a person whose disparate pieces, whose ups and downs, successes and failures, forms a harmonious fabric? Or am I just a pile of bits of pieces, rags, and whole cloth, that never quite comes together into a pleasingly coherent form?
Who do I want to be? I'm not thinking about a job, or whether I am crafty, or a gardener or whatever. I always thought of what I wanted to be as at least partially defined by what I did, or didn't do. But I'm wondering if that is really just a gloss on the important question, if not the wrong question altogether. I also cannot define myself by the negative, as in "I don't want to be X". I'll be 58 in a few months, and perhaps past the age when I should be deciding what I want to be when I grow up. And yet, I'm still deciding. Or perhaps the pieces are simply beginning to fall in place. I see that the fabric has to be rent asunder before the pattern can be found and something beautiful can be forged from the remnants.
