God and Quilts

Today in Morgantown, WV was one of those few winter days I truly enjoy. We've come through enough of February now that, although the air was quite chilly, the sun was warm. I took a bit of a break late this afternoon and took the smaller dogs out and let them run around the yard.

Ceili hunted moles. Didn't catch any, though. And JD just dug holes. They weren't about anything in particular. He just likes making them. I sat in a lawn chair with my back to the sun and thoroughly enjoyed the feel of it on my shoulders. And I could turn my head and feel it on my face. It was wonderful.

I was looking up the wooded hillside. I could literally feel the earth getting ready for Spring. There is an energy buried just under last year's leaves. Almost, it said. Almost. Soon the first new shoots will start to come up. All across that hillside, the May flowers are gathering up the life force out of the ground and preparing to cover the hill in broad, dark green leaves and a single flower. At least until the morning when some signal from the plant tells the deer they are ripe and I awaken to find nothing but a hillside of foot high stalks. It always looks so silly.

But today was just about the promise of what is to come. Can you imagine what it must have been like for humans thousands of years ago on a day like today? Is it any wonder they developed a spiritual attachment to the earth? The mother goddess. What any Dan Brown fan would refer to as the divine female. Focus, for just a minute, on the word divine. And thinking these thoughts somehow released that inner bit of what is called "pagan" in me. Except that it isn't, of course.

Have you ever made something that took you a long time to make? For example, I'm working right now on a quilt. I've very nearly finished piecing the top. It's taken me a number of hours to do and will take a few more before its finished. And once the top is done, I need to do the actual quilting. Hmmm, by hand or machine? But I semi-digress.

Anyway, think about something you've made in your lifetime that has taken you a long time to do. Something that when it was done, you looked at it and knew that it was good. Did it not feel to you as if a piece of you, some part of your life, was in that thing? So I always figured God had to feel exactly the same way when the earth had cooled enough out of the hot molten mass of the universe and life had begun its inexorable journey toward producing the multitude of forms upon it today. And although I don't think of the Bible as being a literal history, I believe the author of Genesis understood this feeling all too well when he said, "And God saw that it was good."

Surely, God must have felt he had put some part of himself into the earth. Maybe just a teensy weensy bit, but a bit nonetheless. Putting it into mathematical terms, we have God=Divine; Earth=God; Therefore, Earth=Divine.

One of the reasons I've always said I knew God exists is from quilting. I always find greens to be the hardest color of all to coordinate. You might get three green fabrics that look good together, but a fourth? That's tough. One of the greens always clashes. But look across any hillside in Spring. There are literally thousands of shades of green. And do any two of them clash? NOPE. You've got to figure there's some super intelligence at work that can make that happen! Which will probably be the first question I'll ask God when I meet him. "How'd you do that?"

So the next time you're out and about, look around you. Look for the divine in the everyday. Its there, you know. You just have to be aware of it. Some other time, we'll get into the divinity within ourselves. Can you handle it? LOL.