Doing the Work of My Heart

When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts,
the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our
souls fly open, and love steps forth to heal everything in sight.
~ Michael Bridge ~

When we sew with love, we bind the work of our hands with the healing love of our hearts to create joy for others. Instead of drudgery, and the simple finishing of projects, it becomes the creative expression of who we see ourselves as being and what we see ourselves as giving and doing in this world and this lifetime.

I am sewing with love and with purpose and with intent this morning. I am working with the softest pastel colors of the heart and creating quilts for babies in Mozambique, Africa with AIDS. I am awash with not only my pinks and blues and aquas, but a sea of emotions as I imagine tiny babies and big eyed toddlers ..so, I must take that flow of emotion and work with it and transmute it into something positive and tangible.

I worked all weekend piecing small pieces from my scrap bags and put together piles and piles of strips and strings, squares and rectangles, little leftover corners and triangles and am rearranging them into tiny comfort cloths to wrap up some little one in love. This one, just finished yesterday, is a mix of pastel cottons and bits of flannel. It is soft in all ways. It is soft in spirit, in color, in intent and in purpose. It is meant for the tiniest, the most fragile and the most needy of the little ones.

Monetarily, these little bits cost me nothing. Like their recipients, they are the scrappy little leftovers that others threw or gave away. Bits and pieces that others did not have room for, or did not feel a need to keep or to care for, but ones that still have value and meaning for me. They will be united in some kind of harmony and they will be pulled together to create something that will then have visible rather than invisible value to the world.

As I do the work of my heart, I feel pain. There is a palpable heartache from the suffering I know that exists in this world. But I also know that I must use that pain, that sorrow, that empathetic connection, to connect with the cloth, into the threads that bind us and then through the little quilt to fly across the miles and bridge my love and my caring with their own little lives.
Today, I am doing the work of my heart. I am sewing with love.