Sunday letter Nov. 22nd
Good Morning,
Yesterday I put a new rug on the frame inspired by the rugs I hooked last week, which were inspired by the rugs I had hooked a few weeks before that. Working itself is the key to inspiration. It is not fairy dust after all it seems. As long as you make, more making will follow.
When I woke up I prepared the wood fire & I thought what am I going to write about this morning? I decided to focus on the fire and just show up and write. Such good advice I give myself.
Just show up and do that thing.
Just show up do and the doing gets done.
Thinking about the doing is all well and good as long as it does not get in the way.
I know the value of pondering, of exploring, of resting. I know the value and I celebrate it.
I also know the hindrance of resistance and avoidance. I have seen myself get up to go out and buy a new notebook or journal, all the while knowing that I was doing anything I could to avoid filling the half empty ones I had on shelves. A new notebook does not a project make.
What makes a project is a step towards it. Perhaps it is this great big rug I sewed on my frame yesterday, all five by five feet of it. It will not hook itself. The nights are dark for choosing colour so this means I need the day, the light of day, to comfort and coax it into being.
What am I saying? It is me who is coaxed and comforted into being when I hook.
That's the thing to remember.
That the beautiful thing you do is soul food.
Have you been feeding yourself well?
I ask myself this sometimes.
Oh how easy it is to slip away from a project. To get to the end and let it lie there with edges unbound, or the last few pages still not written.
Yesterday I wrote outlines for two new online courses. I have three others started. What about those? Am I going to start another and leave those unfinished and incomplete? Maybe for a bit. Sometimes it is sudden whims of inspiration that take you off course and puts you on another more inspirational path for a while.
Sometimes ideas lose their charm for a little while along the way. That's okay. Come back to them and decide. I don't have to finish everything I start but I like to be the one to decide not some distraction that I am barely aware of.
Decide whether to finish, or to let go. Decide what you want. But know this, creativity feeds you. It feeds me. That big rug on my frame that now feels a bit daunting. That rug is gonna carry me through the next few weeks. It's my magic carper ride. It's my ticket to just be myself in my own home, in my "one wild and precious life."
Mary Oliver asked us that question. "Tell me", she said "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Well Mary, I plan to make rugs and books and show anyone who will listen how they can create beauty everyday. That's it, Mary, that's all I got. I am so glad you gave us what you had while you were here, and that you asked us all that question. It's a good question.
It's a question that reminds me to think about how I want to spend my time, to be deliberate with my days, each precious little one. To wake up and rejoice that the trees outside my window are still rising to the sun.
I don't want to waste them.
I don't wanna leave important things unfinished.
I want to make stuff.
Big beautiful things and small things too.
I say a little prayer that I can bring it all forth,
and that you can too.
Keep making.
Its' simple peace is needed.
Thank you for being here with me.
We all need company.
See you Thursday maybe....
- Angela Davis
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