Almost definitely it was precipitating. Maybe snow, maybe rain. But you’re wearing weather-appropriate shoes, a good coat with a hood you pull over your head, or an umbrella. An accurately mooded backdrop, as you still think about grief constantly, about daily losses and how we shape our words, postures, tones, towards maybe recovery, maybe reintegration, maybe nothing but fully new moving forward. You still aren’t much for podcasts – though you love the conversations, you spend so much of your time listening. And you want to be a good listener, to take all those words and voices putting them into the air. So you are precious with what you put in your ears, what with all the sounds and all the luxuries of well-played silence while walking in a city of many people doing midsized-city things on any given after-dark.
But there is a brief moment in your years when you dedicate a good two hours to walk across the isthmus, to and from one of the few cafes open after 5p, to sit with other clubbers in the Do Hard Things Club. Sometimes the walking is the entire hard thing you do.
One of these walks has the voices of Zak Foster and Sherri Lynn Wood accompanying you and you make a full stop when you hear practice is practice. When you hear the conversation around grief and expanding the space around it so that grief can live with the creativity, joy, hunger you also let in. After ten years of modest quilting in solitude, you are new to the flushness of so many quilters blooming nearby, and the idea that stitching and fabrics can be a growing vocabulary, can be a conversation you practice.
So a colleague sends you the call for proposals. Then another.
As a practice, you outline a series of workshops centered around fabrics as tools to tell sections of our stories, centered around co-learning, community healing, improvisational stitching.
As a practice, you outline needed materials to the dollar, budget facilitation, room rental fees, scissors and threads.
As a practice, you complete the form.
As a practice, you press send.