A. TRUTH

Taken from A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living by Louise Silk

Available as an ebook: A Patchwork Life: The Hands-On Guide To Living 

…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.

 Pema Chödrön

I am the descendent of a particularly action-oriented mother and a singularly open-hearted father, neither of whom expressed their feelings. I wrote a three-volume set, Threads, about their lives to help me resolve life-long unexpressed emotions that had affected my physical well-being. It worked. I created a written legacy for my children and resolved a host of inherited family difficulties that had heretofore harmfully impacted my life. The process helped me to accept my life as it is, with much less judgement.

Writing A Patchwork Life is the next step to acknowledge and appreciate the emotional and spiritual underpinnings that have driven my life-long passionate participation in an art quilt movement.

Over the years, I have produced a mountain range of patchwork quilts. Creating patchwork requires such skills as discernment, vision, organization, determination, practice, patience, and compromise.

Using patchwork as a metaphor for the piecing together of other aspects of life: making dinner, organizing a ritual, having a conversation, writing a blog, making a book, requires the identical skills of combining seemingly disparate things into an aesthetic meaningful whole. My quilt experiences culminate here as a display of my particular capacity to piece together just about anything.