Sat, Satya

What is truth now?

Once upon a time, my mother was a seamstress. I saw the labor of every stitch expertly delivered, and how she seemed to create from thin air time she did not have to devote to this task. It takes time to do a thing well, and to love a thing well--or a person--takes time, too. This, I learned from my mother who sewed even our Catholic school uniforms. From scratch. Like a cake.

Like the architect who has to get the math right first before ordering the materials, my mother made her calculations, considering all the angles of measurement while bent over patterns she had pulled from drawers. Meanwhile, I was pulled immediately toward the fabric, the thing that sparkled.

Eventually, I learned about patience from this time I spent observing my mother during her years as a woman who sewed. It taught me the value of slowing down, how to take one thing at a time, and how to devote oneself entirely to the task at hand. This is how she folded time or stretched it; she made of it a thing she could shape like the fabric in her hand. This, I know, is an ability you need for love. You must be present at the time of its unfolding.

Native American scouts were once taught to see what they were looking at, and by paying attention the earth revealed to them its mysteries. "Maybe just looking and listening is the real work, " says the poet Mary Oliver. "Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem."