My life as a Quilt

About 7 years ago I thought I should start a journal, in a now-battered old exercise book, to express ideas, memories etc that came from the counselling I was getting then. I thought that for an autobiography title, mine should be My Life as a Quilt as I was working on a commemorative quilt of my in-law's 40th wedding anniversary and that was prominent in my mind - it's still a work-in-progress. Anyway, skip forward to now... As you may have gathered, I'm doing a year-long Art Journal course/project through a digital scrapbooking website and the verb for Week 3 of the project is "mend". This will be a challenging thought, as I have a fractured relationship with my father, but I'm not ready to mend that one. However, this came to me this morning as I was sitting in bed. The quilt is imaginary but a good metaphor for my ability to remember everything and to add to it, embellishing the bad things so that they stood out. But now I'm letting go and forgeting some of the negatives, mending the memories and re-framing them with new more positive things. The finished art journal page is on my other blog http://ajeweljournallingthrough.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-life-as-quilt-scrapbooked.html



My Life as a Quilt

For years I had a negative "quilt"
A Remembrance quilt of kind
And each year I'd add a square
Mentally in my mind.
Each hateful word said of me
Each failure or deed unkind
Was lovingly added and
Embellished on, in my mind.

But this year my "quilt" will be positive
Unpicking the critic so unkind:
No "stupid"s or "useless" here
Just words both true and kind.
Each old square will be dismantled
Forgotten, forgiven, unloved
No longer used as weapons
To twist my thoughts. Enough!

I'll take away the inner critic
Stop listening to his words
For critics aren't paid to be nice
It's meanness that's their worth.
My journey may be long to mend
To unwrite the past so wrong
But I've got fellow travellers
And together we'll raise a happier song.