My friend is a fabric artist. I like to piece quilts, but my quilts are pretty simple and amateurish compared to hers. Some of her wall hangings and quilts are so astounding they leave me breathless, not with jealousy, but admiration and pride in her achievements. Over the years, I’ve learned to know myself and that too much complexity takes all the fun out of the process for me. But for her, the more complex the more challenging and satisfying.. Different as we are, we still have a good time together. Occasionally, she’ll bring something over to hang on my quilting wall, and we work together on one of her projects. I’ve learned a lot that way, but I still prefer simplicity to complexity for myself.
Being a fabric artist, she has difficulty walking past an interesting piece of fabric. Over the years, she’s accumulated so much fabric that she could open her own store. Unfortunately, their house is not very big, and her sewing room is fairly small, resulting in piles of fabric stacked so high they look like the leaning tower of Pisa. Earlier this summer I told her I’d help her clean up her room so she could find the fabric she needed for her various projects without needing to go buy more simply because what she has is inaccessible.. We’re making progress. My car is currently piled high with boxes and bags of fabric, which we will eventually take to the material aid center outside of Chambersburg.
The point of all of this is that we tend to collect all kinds of ideas and emotions that can become overwhelming. That’s when we need to take a fearless moral inventory of ourselves, sorting through our anxieties, fears, resentments, information, etc. Just as we’ve been going through her fabric asking, “Are you going to really use this? What purpose does this serve?” we need to do the same with ourselves. “Why am I clinging to this resentment? What purpose does this grudge serve? Is this piece of information really true, or am I buying into some conspiracy theory?”
After we’d worked about an hour this afternoon, we retired to her front porch, which was overflowing with plants and flowers. There was a cool breeze that spoke of fall. We drank lemonade and chatted, enjoying being together. Cell phones are convenient, but working and then relaxing together beats a text any day. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I get so much more satisfaction from face-to-face interactions. And then there is the shared sense of accomplishment that comes with knowing we’ve made some difficult decisions that clear the way to future creativity and pleasure.