I had intended to write about something else today, but this week had other plans. This piece has overtaken my every waking minute — in fact I’ve had a hard time tearing myself away from it long enough to be able to write this.
During the last 18+ months, in an attempt to help myself navigate life, I began a sort of journaling; something I haven’t done before. My attempts were not direct accounts of my day, but varied widely: sometimes I made notes on emotional states, sometimes I listed experiences or interactions, sometimes I wrote directives, mantras, or affirmations – depending on what I felt I needed at the time. On Aug 21 of last year, during a particularly difficult span of weeks, I wrote directives to myself about how to move through grief. One of my bullet points said: “When possible, force yourself to make art even though you can find no joy in making art. When not possible, be kind to yourself about it. Art will return.”
This week, to my immense relief, I feel that art has returned to me. I understand that this may be temporary. I know, through the brutality of experience, that everything is a cycle – grief, healing, times of rest, times of work. But this week, I am leaning into the embrace of my work with immense relief.
This past Saturday I made the back for one of the quilt tops I wrote about last week, a project I’m thinking of as a turning point. On Sunday I moved all the furniture in my living room, swept the floors and crawled around on my knees for a few hours with pins and my hera marker. Before I ate lunch, I put my first stitches in. Today, my fingers are sore from hours and hours of quilting. I cannot tear myself away from it.
But perhaps the most relieving part of all this is that my attention is, in fact, divided. Because as called as I am to be here, under this quilt with a needle in my hand, there is somewhere else I’m itching to be – and that place is in my studio, reacquainting myself with a project I started in September. After a significant material commitment for a new series of works last fall, my ability to sit with those ideas abandoned me, and I could not bring myself to touch them. There was even a window of time where I worried if I had made an enormous mistake, and would not be able to continue with the project at all. But here, suddenly and without explanation, one piece in particular of that imagined series – and honestly perhaps the piece I was most intimidated by – is holding all of my attention. I am rearranging the pieces, the colors, the components, over and over in my mind all day. I am excited about both the historical choices I’ve made for it and the new ones that are coming to me through the ether now. And I am beyond eager to physically get to work. To split all of my time between this piece, coming now to the end of the process, and that one, just emerging.
I am trying to say out loud to myself – and here now, to you – that I recognize that this bought of creative energy, this return to myself, may be temporary. I say that in the hopes that if the muse leaves me, that I will not feel so abandoned by her. These days, holding low expectations feels like one of the most loving acts I can do towards myself, and so I try to take that responsibility seriously.
But at this moment, all I want to do is work; and with that, I shall return to it.