Dharma, by Cristie Newhart

Girl at a Sewing Machine, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1921

Dharma  

You’ll often find me alone, inside these orange walls,
Alone with my work and the silence the walls contain.
Every day I sit in front of my machine and this high reaching window
And feel time move around me.

Some days, I’m Rapunzel, yearning to unravel my hair and be rescued.
Some days, I’m the Miller’s daughter, willing to bargain away my solitude.
And yet, I relinquish. I breathe deeply, position myself, lift foot against pedal,
And let the rise and fall of the slender needle call me back.  

I disappear into my craft. 
Some days, like today, the high reaching window fills with light
And illuminates me.  Focus fills me and I rest in the knowing
That my silent doing matters.

A loyal servant, this machine knows only a woman’s touch.
It had been my mother’s, brand new and filled with possibility.
Now it’s mine, slightly tarnished but not diminished
In prospect or expectation.

I mend the fabric of necessity and comfort.
Stitch by stitch beauty emerges.
Thread by thread the pattern takes form.
Our legacy is shaped in the cloth.

Cristie Newhart
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Cristie Newhart is the Dean of the Kripalu School of Yoga, and has been a faculty member at Kripalu for 20 years.  She exudes equal parts warmth and wisdom as she makes some of yoga’s deeper philosophical aspects engaging and accessible to modern-day practitioners. Cristie is a writer, writing for Kripalu and herself in blogs and articles.  She is a deep lover of poetry, art, nature and all forms of expression.  Cristie lives in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.