The Pace of the Soul

I've been doing a lot of hand sewing lately, as part of an effort to slow myself down, to really feel the craft between my fingers.  I had several sewing projects that needed finishing or fixing that I could have easily zipped out on the sewing machine, but I decided to have a go at hand-sewing them instead, and the process was illuminating in many ways.

When I first started sewing, as a little girl, I mostly made clothes for my Barbies, and almost all of them were sewn by hand.  They were crude, inexpertly finished, but the process of sewing them was very enjoyable to me.  My sister and I used those clothes more often than any of the clothes that came with the Barbies.  My mom bought me a pattern packet of Barbie clothes at some point, and we tried to make them on the machine, but it wasn't as fun, and the process was highly frustrating.  Most of my sewing experience until recently was just that: highly frustrating.  Things didn't go together as planned, my mom's Pfaff was difficult to use and I could never remember how to thread the machine or get the bobbin going, and I usually ended up just sewing by hand anyway.

It occurred to me, as I hand sewed a skirt over several days' time, catching up on The White Queen and the  most recent season of Scandal, or hanging out with friends, that machines get in the way of community and move against the pace of the soul.  There is no question that machines provide an economy of movement, and efficiency of scale that cannot be achieved when doing handwork, and I'm not proposing that we all give up our machines and go back to the days of the guilds, but I would like to suggest that perhaps our machines could be taken with a grain of salt.  I find that when I use a machine to complete a task, be it a computer to type on or a sewing machine, the machine stands between me and others.  Sometimes it is necessary--I don't intend to wash my family's clothes by hand at this point, and I still intend to use my sewing machine--but other times, when I have a choice, and I have the time, I think hand sewing, or knitting, or embroidery is a nice thing to do.  When my children get a bit older, I'd like to take up woodworking, and I hope I might learn some carving skills.  Handwork allows me to converse with my husband, or chat with a friend, eyes to eyes, fostering community and relationships.

Hand work also has a rhythm that is at the pace of the soul.  When I remember, I try to say the Jesus prayer while I'm doing handwork, and while I certainly can do so while using a machine, I find the pace of the machine vs. the pace of my breathing and my soul-life to be out of sync.  My husband mentioned to me recently that a law school colleague of his has gone off to join a monastery, and his parents were so upset by investing so much money in his education that he spent his first few years as a monastic litigating on the side in order to pay them back.  Now his debt is repaid and he spends all his time in prayer and carving wood.  He says that the carving is much more conducive to a life of constant prayer than litigation, and I can easily see why.  Your hands can only go as fast as your mind and soul will allow.

I also think there is something beautiful and soul-worthy about the imperfection of handwork.  This is not to say that we should be sloppy in our hand work, but rather to acknowledge that there is imperfection inherent in handwork because of the human element behind it, and that imperfection is also a reflection of our souls.  I think it is easy to forget this fact when we are constantly faced with machine-produced goods, artfully arrayed in depopulated Pinterest-worthy photographs.  The human element is missing from these photos, and humans bring mess and chaos and imperfection to everything.  Life is messy, and let's at least acknowledge that our strivings to impose order on the world are going to be less than perfect.  (Which is not to say we shouldn't try to impose order, merely to acknowledge the limits of it in a fallen world) The more I think about things, and the more I grow uncomfortable with the highly visual, highly idealized society we live in, the more I think that it is time to embrace imperfection, wear and tear, shabbiness from time (rather than artifice or affect), to love our lives as they are, rather than how some magazine editor would have us think they should be.

I wonder sometimes if the disquiet of the modern condition is in part a response to the world being out of sync with the pace of the soul.  It can't be helped--we certainly aren't going to return to a pre-industrial time any time soon, short of some apocalyptic event, but perhaps when we find ourselves ill at ease with the modern world, we can slow down, do something by hand instead of machine, and breathe in and out.

 (All monastery photographs taken from pramvir.com, and were taken at the Ivanovo Convent of the Entrance of the Theotokos)