Thursday, January 18, 2018

Mending as Meditation





A friend of mine gave me this blanket before moving back to New York City. The tag says it was made in India. The colors brighten my room, and the fabric is wonderfully soft. Over the last couple of months I've been noticing holes appearing in the blanket. I think a combination of age and the love of my cat (the lump under the blanket) have started to take their toll.

A few months ago I listened to a Ted Talk by the German monk and scholar David Steindl-Rast. His subject is gratitude, and his message is that it is the grateful people who are happy, not the happy people who are grateful. He encourages us to be truly grateful for even the little blessings of life. Grateful people live out of a sense of abundance, rather than scarcity, he argues.



I am a big fan of Marie Kondo's books on "tidying up." If you haven't heard of them, or if you have only heard negative things about them, Marie Kondo's books are essentially about our relationship with our stuff. In one of the books, she explains that in Japanese culture objects have three spirits: the spirit of the original materials, the spirit of the makers, and the spirit of those who have owned and used the object.



And so I am mending the blanket. Sitting with my needle and thread, I live in a moment of abundance, enjoying and extending the life of this blanket. In mending it, I express my gratitude to the cotton, the people in India who sewed the blanket, and the friend who gave it to me, and I stitch into it my own meditations on the teachings of an old German monk and a young Japanese author.


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