Stitching the valley - Part 3
All week I’ve wanted to stitch. I’ve sought quiet, and the simple tools of needle, thread and cloth. I’ve been comforted by the sound of the cotton drawn through linen, regular and known, like the hush of waves on the shore.
When I stitch, I know what I am doing. I know where the lines are going. There is a map, and I’m following it. There haven’t been enough lines to embroider this week to carry me, and now the map is almost done. I wanted the river to last longer. I wished for it twist back on itself, to take its time before it flowed out of the top right corner of the cloth. I was tempted to unpick some in order to do it again.
There is still work to do. Roads. The train line. I toyed with the idea of leaving them off, but this is where so much pain stems from—separation. I can’t separate the human from the land’s natural features.
I stitched the creek that runs by our house last of all. I wanted it to feel reverent. I wanted to feel something, and I did. I felt small.
In the end, it only took six blue stitches. Before I had time to think about it, the creek had flowed on past me, joining the Mangaroa River running north. From there it joins Te Awakairangi/Hutt River, on some larger, as yet unwrought, map and makes its way to the sea.
There is no escaping our smallness. I occupy a tiny section of this cloth—one quarter of a centimetre. Inside that tiny space, I am invisible to the eye. The map is an atom, and I am part of its empty space.
There is still work to do. Roads. The train line. I toyed with the idea of leaving them off, but this is where so much pain stems from—separation. I can’t separate the human from the land’s natural features.
We do wrong all the time. We do things which can’t be undone.
We do wrong all the time. We do things which can’t be undone. We do things and look back, or our children look back, and we wonder together at our lack of foresight, our small-mindedness, our mistakes.
This is the sad but full truth of who we are. We are the hard straight lines over nature’s curves. We seek answers and order, arguing with the indivisible to get it, slicing the round edges, rigid and demanding. Our maps include our attempts to own it, and even if it didn’t, we know this about ourselves. So I will stitch the straight lines we imposed here, and I will thank the land that allowed it.
* * *
On 15 March 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand, a terrorist opened fire during Friday Prayer at the Al Noor Mosque, and the Linwood Islamic Centre . Fifty-one people lost their lives.