The denim wasn’t happening. I tried working with it, but it didn’t have the feeling I was wanted. So I started circling my studio looking for the fabric that would work between the linens with the Victorian Women on them.
I settled on using the reverse of flour sack fabric, then the reverse of some early American fabric, then some too cute kittens from the 70s. And each time I though it was right, the longer I looked at the less I knew.
This new quilt I’m working on called, Not Going Back, swings back and forth between my personal life and today’s politics. It feels like the embodiment of the feminist idea from the 60s, that the personal is political.
For some reason in my circling I pulled out my book, The Goddess in Older Women, Becoming the Juicy Crone by Jean Shinoda Bolen. I opened to one of the pages I had dog eared when I first read it six years ago. And there was this quote by feminist Carolyn G. Heilbrun…
“In the end, the changed life for women will be marked, I feel certain, by laughter. It is the unfailing key to the new kind of life…. It is the laughter of women together that is the revealing sign, the spontaneous recognition of insight and love and freedom.”
As I read what Heilbrun wrote so many years ago, I saw Kamala Harris’s smiling face. And I thought of how her campaign for president is known for its “Joy.”
It was just last night that I read Vinson Cunninghams article The Kamala Show. In it he writes about the relationship between Kamala and her sister Maya. How they share laughter…
“Then loosening a bit around the eyes letting her face bloom into a joke: “Big Sister General.” (the punchline) Both women lose it-their eyes go skyward, and their heads lurch forward. Their laughs synchronize: a fluttering cackle, quick and light and precise as a birds heartbeat. It’s the kind of burst-out, stomach-hurt, jaw-sore mutual guffaw….”
Shinoda Bolen goes on to write about Baubo, the servant in Greek Mythology who shocked Demiter out of her grief by making her laugh. She says there are three things a woman need to be able to embrace to be internally free.
They are Transformative Wrath, (Hindu goddess Kali), mirth and bawdy humor (Baubo) and compassion (Mother Mary).
I don’t know if all three goddesses will make it into my quilt. Although I think I already have a place for Baubo. But I do see all of these traits in Harris.
I’m good at compassion, but I think I need to work on my transformative wrath and bawdy humor. I could use some of both right now.
At the end of the day I did find an old quit top that I did some drawing on with a permanent marker a couple of years ago. I think it will be just right to work into the quilt as the fabric between and behind the linens.
