I also learned that you didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose—paid but good. It is now your turn

They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.

This was very disloyal to my family, for me to no longer play along with the family plan, but all the ways of pretending that I’d been taught were crippling, life-threatening. They had turned me from a delicious dough of flour, yeast, sugar and salt into a desperately self-conscious pretzel. I’ve

We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance.

They are observations that in troubled times help me find my way once again to what T. S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.”

Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.

Little kids think all colors or patterns of shirt go with all patterns and colors of pants, and it takes us elders a minute to see that they in fact do.

That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

Sewing is a finger-and-heart equivalent of putting one foot in front of the other.