Re-ligament
In June of 2019, I was a writer-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, having applied with the writing of my thesis work. I was tentative and unsure.
The title of my thesis was Love Hours, borrowed from the artist Mike Kelley, by way of a good friend. Love Hours was a collection of short essay-memoirs, an elegy to my father, who had died the autumn before the completion of my thesis the following spring. The diagnosis of his brain tumor, sickness, and death coincided with the beginning and end of my three-year graduate program.
At the residency I had the opportunity to share pieces of my writing with Chigozie Obioma, the author of the books The Fisherman and An Orchestra of Minorities. Oddly enough, my brother had gifted me the book The Fisherman for Christmas the year before. I took it as a sign and sent Chigozie excerpts of Love Hours in advance of our meeting.
He said, “the prose is good” but that the writing “needs ligaments”. I’ve thought often of that conversation and that word, ligament, that thing that attaches sinew, bone, and muscle, allowing a body to move. The word ligament is so closely tied to the body, deeply corporeal, of the flesh, alive.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes “The essential function of religion is to radically connect us with everything. (Re-ligio = to re-ligament or reconnect.) It is to help us see the world and ourselves in wholeness, and not just in parts.”
I have recently completed a new series of quilts for an exhibition I have titled Re-ligament. For the last two years I’ve made patchwork quilts inspired by stained glass windows and their practical, innate geometry. More recently, I have conceived of the black lines of lead running between the shapes of glass as ligaments, holding fragments together.
In these quilts, for the first time in a while, I have allowed personal, quiet details of my life to meander onto the quilts, appearing in small, embroidered stitches or shapes of colorful appliqué. Much of my summer was slow days indoors and walks outside through the neighborhood with Charlie. In the same way that my eyes drift up to stained glass in church on Sunday mornings, my eyes often drifted to the framing of green leaves through the living room window or fallen purple flower buds lacing the sidewalks.
In Ezekiel 37, the prophet Ezekiel receives a vision of an immense valley covered in dry bones. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones. With a loud “rattling”, sinew fuses to bone, muscle is covered with skin, and finally, breath breathes spirit. Word becomes flesh, incarnate.
I wake up in the mornings with a full bodied aching tiredness. Before walking into my classroom to teach, I hurriedly rub at the breastmilk that has spilled onto my pants. My husband and I laugh together when he says “paag saneer” instead of “saag paneer”. In my son’s dark brown eyes, I see a limitlessness that I cannot comprehend.
There is a woman down the block who tends to wildflowers growing from the cracks of the stone foot path leading up to her house. One morning, I noticed an elegant green shoot with an oval bud at the end, the stem a graceful downward arc like the neck of a swan nestled to its breast. The bud was framed from below with large vibrant, jagged leaves. Two days later I passed the house to see that the bud had bloomed, brilliantly, in a small firework of hot, translucent pink, turning its face to the sun.
Sources:
Rohr, Richard., Mclaren, Brian D. The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. United States: Crown Publishing Group, 2019, 6.
Ezekiel 37:1-14, ESV