What the Farm Teaches Me About Quilting
I used to be a pretty proficient writer when I was younger, or at least I think I was. I got mostly straight A's on every paper I wrote in every class, from theology to 17th-century literature to creative writing. But fast forward 30-plus years and, though I've been an avid journal writer (sometimes pages and pages), I'm feeling a bit rusty.
Life has a way of taking turns and adjusting your path as you walk along it. Now, at 50, with life at an uncomfortable crossroads of both "this is what I wanted" and "is this what I want," I feel it might be time to dust off the writing skill and see what's still in that box. I'm a bit intimidated by the growing proficiency of AI in this area. I wrote a 54-page story one afternoon through prompts, which, though it needs to be fleshed out a bit more, had some good bones to it. And for the most part, it was my story, with a little assistance from an artificial ghostwriter. I tend to be long-winded in my prompts and have no issues correcting my AI collaborator when I think it's drifting in a direction I don't intend. Still, I am uneasy about the ethics of it, though we act as though creative works must start from ground zero to be actual "art," and I'm fairly sure that's a myth we like to tell ourselves. The world around us and those who went before us serve as inspiration and imitation, and advance our creativity far more than starting from nothing ever could.
I don't claim to be an artist in any sense. I dabble in the arts and enjoy what I produce, but I'm often bewildered by what makes it into the galleries and what is simply everyday beauty. My tendency is to favour nature's art. I notice things like the striking coral peony outside the public library (I must find out the variety so I can plant one), or the intricate lines on a single leaf, how each one varies ever so slightly, and how together they form a colony of cohesive harmony that makes the trees beautiful from a distance and the leaf beautiful up close. I certainly don't fit the personality of an artist. But in the process of making things, usually with some utilitarian purpose, I can't help but try to make them beautiful. And when it comes to human-made art, I tend to favour the artist who finds something considered waste or junk and remoulds it into something useful and lovely.
My tension now lies between my day job, which by most measures is a good job with good people I enjoy working with, and this urgency to do something meaningful in the world and add some beauty to it. Time is a precious commodity, and who knows how much of it we have left? I lost a dear sister-in-law in February, not much older than myself, and every such loss is a reminder that our time here is not eternal, so we must evaluate how we spend it carefully. We could fret about the future or dwell on what we've inevitably lost or will lose, but I can't quite justify that as a life well lived. My tendency is to fill my days to exhaustion, and I'm working on myself to pause and enjoy this moment as much as I can, for it may be the only one I get. Watching my granddaughter has reminded me of that. Her delight in everything from bubbles to ducks to splashing in a puddle reminds me that perhaps some of the things we focus on aren't quite as important as we make them out to be. And the things that really matter are more quiet, simple, and transformative.
