quilt comfort

on what it means to be held... and a writing prompt to explore your desires for 2025

Maybe it’s the inauguration and all that comes with it. Or the cold front dumping snow from New Orleans to Savannah. Early darkness and gray skies, silent birdsong, bare branches. Between three snow day cancellations and my trip to Key West, the semester began with such a stop-start rhythm that it’s hard to propel myself. I can’t find the pulse of things.

I joke that I’m a seventh-generation southerner whose bones are not made for this weather, but neither is my drafty house or my wardrobe, so I mean it when I say I do not tolerate cold very well. I feel chilled to the bone. I’m doing all the tricks I know to do – space heaters, hot tea, thick socks, soup, and stacks of blankets on the couch. I added an extra quilt on my bed a few days ago, layered between my thermal blanket and comforter.

There’s a linen closet full of old blankets and quilts I could have used, but I specifically reached for the one my grandfather gave me a few years ago. He found a box of old quilt tops in his basement when my grandmother died. They were pieced together by her mother, some of them decades before I was ever born, but only the tops were complete, so he had someone finish the quilts and then gifted each grandchild with one. It’s one of the most incredible gifts I’ve ever been given. There’s a square in the corner that says “Made by Mae,” my namesake. It holds me in more ways than one.

There is something about the weight of it. The way a quilt holds you in place, tucks you in. Now stores sell weighted blankets, and there’s research to support that action as a way to soothe the nervous system, but this is something many of us have known for a long time without the research to tell us so. Tucked away as a core memory in the files of my imagination, I can feel the comfort of a pallet as my grandmother called it. Stacks of blankets on the floor with few more on top, a pile of cousins next to me, the safest I ever felt then or now.

We could all use a grandmother’s pallet these days, someone to open the door, make a pot of soup, cover us with quilts, and tuck us in. What does it mean to be held? That’s my guiding question right now. I’m only giving my time to people and places that allow me to feel truly held, and I’m thinking about what it means to hold others. I’ve already written, in the days following the election, about how this time will be different for me. I am not responding in panic and fear; instead I am finding a way to live my life as I want to live it– even here, even in this place in time. That approach takes a combination of boundaries and something else that feels like a fist that can finally relax and unfurl. The challenge is to hold those two opposite postures at the same time, to protect my peace where I can so that I can soften inside and let the good things in without fear.

This beautiful Jack Gilbert poem found its way to me last week. I’ve read it before, but it’s worth revisiting. Or maybe worth printing and hanging on my bathroom mirror so that I can bathe myself in it every morning. If we deny our own happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. The list of ways I have denied my own happiness, handed it over to the systems that rule our world, is a long one. I have been captivated by news cycles that present every off-hand stupid comment as an emergency; I have turned myself inside out to try and serve a broken system in the classroom and beaten myself up when I don’t reach the impossible mark; I’ve listened to countless lies about some outside thing I needed to procure to finally feel satisfaction and happiness. All of that is deprivation. It’s shielding my eyes from seeing what’s in front of me, which is agency over small daily choices that can feed me. Morning pages and writing the truth to myself and to others, books to read, simple pleasures, people who love me, kids who need guidance and modeling on how to live a fulfilling life in a broken system.

We were home for the inauguration since it fell on MLK day, and icy weather had us home again the two days afterwards for what could have been an endless loop of unsettling news. Instead I read a daily email or two and left the rest alone. My metaphor-seeking mind keeps giving me the image of a snowglobe. My little life inside of it, beautiful and shining and inaccessible to whatever is outside of that glass. I understand this implies a barrier that I have through some sense of privilege, and I’m not denying that. But I would argue that maybe we all need to find a way to build a glass wall, not as a method to ignore the larger world but as a stubborn insistence to hold agency over our lives. I can sometimes look outward to all the things happening and try to move the needle in the right direction of that long arc as MLK called it. But we all need to step inside our own world and protect its beauty somehow, give it to ourselves because the world we live in is not going to give it to us.

Joy itself is an act of resistance. We can find ways to build a deeply rooted life that cannot be shaken by whatever tantrums rage outside of it. We can build a wall so strong that our own desires can grow here and our own sense of worthiness will not be moved. In the years ahead, there will be people who will need us to open that door and lay a pallet on the floor for them. And my life can only hold others in that way if I protect my own center.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Another poem I’ve been revisiting is Saeed Jones’ “My Project 2025.” I read it a couple of months ago, and again and again since. Such beautiful stubborn joy. There is a posture somewhere between offense and surrender that Saeed captures so beautifully, and that is where I want to be. I am pulling up the drawbridge as that poem says. Drawing a circle around me and mine. I am evicting America from my body, wow that line.

What I’m focusing on now, in these first months of the year and the first months of a new presidential term, is exactly how I can build my snowglobe. Actionable steps that will make this not an idea but a reality, a daily lived experience. It makes me think about my grandmother’s home again, not the quilts this time, but the way she’d say it was comin’ up a cloud when a bad storm was moving in, and she’d call us all inside or hurry my grandad in from the garden. We’d wait it out where it’s safe and dry, where we were fed and content and side-by-side with people who loved us.

The news I’ve gathered from the last week feels like storm clouds rolling in, but I’m remembering there’s another way to do this. We have a home we can retreat to. It is our own lives and our own bodies, and as Jack Gilbert says in that poem, the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. I want to be held, and I want to hold others. I want to wake up everyday remembering that small daily choices shape my world, and those choices are mine to make. If I don’t let everything become tainted by the ugliness, there is so much beauty to see, and it’s ours for the taking.