I have more questions than answers and I am pretty sure that's how it's supposed to be.
Is this project done? I don't know. Maybe it needs a little something more?
What do I plan to do with this one wild precious life I have? I have some ideas but I am pretty sure they are only temporarily true.
I love this quote. I love Mary Oliver. I love the imagery from this poem of a grasshopper eating sugar from her hand with its bizarre little jaw. If you haven't read Summer Day you should. If you don't know Mary Oliver you should. I promise you she will touch your soul.
What do you when you love something? You spend time with it and play with it and let ruminate in the deepest parts of you. So I decided to stitch this little quote I love. To spend hours and hours with it. To meditate on it and let it dance around in my brain for a while. A simple sketch, a chance to play around with some new stitches and colour combos.
I think I thought that I might find some answers if I spent enough time with this question, and I did. But as is the case with anything we offer presence to it inevitably leads to more. More ideas. More answers. More uncertainty. More questions.
What is it I want to do? Well I want to love and to create. The closer I can bring those two things together the better. What does it mean to love and to create? Oh dear, there lies the rub.
Mary Oliver passed away while I was mid way through this project. It shook me. It shook me because as I meditate on her words I am faced with my own personal questions of the precarious immortality of someone I love so dearly. I am locked in anticipatory grief and I don't know what to do with it.
When I heard that Mary Oliver passed away it solidified for me one way I can bring love and creation together. To face my grief head on and to make something that confronts it. And so a plan has been hatched. The seeds have been sown and I am already working through the creation that will come next. I know it will offer me so many unexpected things because I am terrified of it. Go big or go home.
This is how it works. Inspiration is a Pandora's box sometimes. It wants you to open it so it can trick you into making more and more and more and in the process confronting more and more and more of ourselves.
And so I will hang this little grasshopper on my wall. It has started a journey for me. I will continue to reflect on how to love and create and how to bring them together more. And I will stand with my grief and hold its hand in my next creative project and trust the process.
Thank you Mary for a life or words and wisdom to move me so deeply...
-Now What? Embroidery on black cotton