My First Patch - my first patch - mai centre

I think I "officially" started my own patchwork quilt when I started running at age 13... 

I had injured my knee playing soccer, and started running to recover for soccer, but I so loved running that I never went back to soccer... 

Anyone who has participated in running races knows the joy of receiving a special race-event t-shirt.  I think the first one I received was for the Aerobics First running series in 1983...Since that time, I have kept every race event t-shirt I ever received (plus, later in life, the commemorative shirts for each of our family events...).  As my husband can attest, this baggage of shirts quickly piles up and I have evolved various strategies through the years for storing and triaging the essential components of the related event patches (i.e., cutting the square of the event from the rest of the t-shirt so it takes up a lot less room)...

Having been so long in the works, the planned centre of my quilt / mai quilt has taken many theoretical shapes & forms... I still have all those patches from he different running races I've completed, plus a few from the triathlons in which I participated and I may eventually use them somehow, but for right now, my own patchwork quilt - maiquilt - the quilting project of me - is finally evolving to represent some of the different thematic components of my life in a more symbolic & abstract way, without the specifics of actual event patches - those patches might be  incorporated in another quilt or another way someday...  For my life - mailife - right here in this place, right now in these moments we share together, my quilt - mai quilt is helping me learn much needed patience for being with what is, taking gentle care of me & my family in the nest we share by gently caring for one small patch at a time... Take gentle care, Sue 8)

Important post script - I now cannot remember if I have properly explained the significance & connection of the two terms I now use frequently in my writing - the complementary juxtaposition of "my & mai"... 

MY is the well-known first person singular posessive of the English language (thank-you Geoffrey Chaucer...) 

MAI is a word /word part with connections in many languages ranging in meaning from Mother, to the month of May, to water, to rice, the list continues... However, my connection to the word is from the ancient Indian Sanskrit word which I first heard orally and thought was spelled "mytree" - which is exactly how it sounds - when I learned the actual spelling is considered "maitri" - my three - maitree...I still can't help but smile at the connections that are obvious and important to me - the connection to tree, the connections to threes (my favourite number and the number of sides of the strong three sided triangle - & trinities - my tree, maitree & my three are the trinities of me :)  A mouthful, as usual from Sue the Scribe - also known by many in the Apprenticeship Division and the Community College system as "Hurricane Sue" ... It is now time for Hurricane Sue to leave the building, so to speak...