SPIRIT MATERIALS

When I find the envelope in the mailbox, its soft heft differs from a paper letter. Sweet arrival, another tra­peze leap caught. For three years now, Amy and I have written to each other in embroidery. Our conversa­tion explores faith: her Jewish origins, my Muslim and Christian ones, and how we hold them in the present. We were students when we met. We postered the campus with lyrical protests, brewed herbal rem­edies, and read on her apartment’s fire escape until dusk. As urgently as spring meltwater, in elated and troubled bursts, we were releasing what we had been told, and examining what was left. Since then, we’ve lived provinces apart while cultivating our creative practices in parallel, Amy as a visual artist. When we last saw each other, we were both considering the mystical traditions of our inherited, half-discarded faiths. Amy had worked in embroidery before, and I was reading poems of questions and answers. So, we merged where we’d been and what we wanted to find out into a mutual undertaking.

Amy started with one embroidered question for me: when someone asks your religion, what happens inter­nally? It came as the leaves were falling. I stitched an an­swer and another question, and sent them to her. And so it goes. Her thread is red and mine is blue. We work on strips of near-white cloth, approximately as tall as a pen, often wider than the span of our arms—mine are torn from an old bedsheet, boiled in tea to take out the harsh glare—and then we mail them between Nova Scotia and Ontario by affordable, unregistered mail; a gesture of faith embedded in the process. Someday, we’ll sew the fragments together and the conversation will be longer than a skein of geese.

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A line of geese in flight resembles a row of running stitches. If it were, there would also be a goose in every gap, but on the reverse side of the sky’s fabric. The bird thread moves; its lagging end isn’t knot­ted, and the leading one follows an invisible needle that darts in and out of the cloth. Skilled stitches are evenly spaced, and of the same tension as the back­ing material. Is that how a migrating goose feels, at one with the weave of the air?

Our words are done in backstitch, a strong stitch that moves two lengths forward, one length back. This choreography requires more hours and thread than the running one, but it makes an unbroken line, thin and smooth on the front of the fabric, more ragged on the back where each stitch is dou­bled. The script is cursive, so both the thread and letters form lines that return in looped increments to where they’ve been and then continue forward. When I write, my mind moves like that—rereading the last sentence, pulling ahead into a new one.

On the fabric, I first write my phrases in pale blue ink, and then follow the line with the needle. Is that sure path what makes me feel so held and set­tled when I stitch? Or maybe it’s the slowing down, the pliant and tactile words that surface outside the rapids of speech or texting or typing or writing by hand. Initially, whatever mood I’m in persists, subtly evident in the length and tension of the stitches, the tiny, tell-tale holes left when my aim is untrue. But then there’s a shift. I am doing this with my fingers, with elementary technologies, the lightly rhythmic repetition of uncomplicated motions, and I start to admire the dark blue line that forms in their wake. It is steady. It has a good shape. The feeling is praise. I am quietly praising the line’s unfolding existence to myself, and then the sensation circles outward, to the room, to the constellations of what surrounds me.

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The lines of our embroidery are at rest, but contain an elapsed movement. A line has time in it, painter David Hockney has said. An opening, a closure—we locate them in our lives, and then find the ends of the thread are frayed: When did I begin this em­broidering? In answering Amy’s stitched question, or twenty-five years earlier at our first hello, or in florals across the knees of my grade ten jeans, or on a stiff white plastic grid, with clumsy and deliber­ate kindergarten hands? Perhaps it was longer ago, a gesture that could germinate again in my body be­cause my grandmothers had made it, as had theirs, and theirs—by the light of a flame, chewing a scrap of tobacco.

Sadiqa de Meijer is a poet and essayist and the current poet laureate of Katarokwi/Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of two collections of poetry, the Governor General’s Awards–nominated Leaving Howe Island and The Outer Wards. Her first collection of essays, alfabet/alphabet, won the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.

Excerpted from In the Field by Sadiqa de Meijer. Copyright © 2025 by Sadiqa de Meijer. Published by Anstruther Books, an imprint of Palimpsest Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

“Spirit Materials” was first published in the anthology Sharp Notions: Essays on the Stitching Life, edited by Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023).

In the Field publishes on Oct. 15.