Retrospective: Transformed by Touch

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long exploration of spirituality through making art.


Over and over when the world offers itself
to us for our awakening, all we have to do is meet it.
–Jack Kornfield


While working on The Direct Experience of God, I became enchanted with fingerprints. I pressed my inked fingers against white paper, marveling in the variation that could occur in multiple prints from the same finger because of how the ink lay differently on the finger’s surface each time. One fingerprint in particular struck me as beautiful. I used a photocopier to blow it up to 200 times its original size. The resulting print, an intriguing visual, hung in my studio for weeks.


In March, ready to begin a new piece, I come back to the fingerprint. What if it were even bigger? I take it to a copy shop and have the large print blown up even more, so that the fingerprint is now the size of my forearm from fingertip to elbow. I sense that this piece needs to remain simple because the fingerprint itself is already so complex. One fingerprint from one individual, and yet it contains multitudes. After a failed experiment with transferring the print onto a piece of wood using wintergreen oil, I decide to simply use the huge photocopy itself. I glue it to a piece of wood. A friend with power tools cuts around the perimeter of the fingerprint so that the shape of the wood becomes the shape of the print itself.


Pondering my next move, I am toying with the idea of building up the lines of the fingerprint dimensionally using the text-and-binder method from The Direct Experience of God. But it doesn’t feel right. Remembering my intention to keep it simple, I decide to enhance the dark lines of the fingerprint with black ink to heighten the contrast between fingerprint and paper. I do this work slowly, on the floor, with a bottle of ink and a fine-tipped brush. Like the stitching I have used in previous pieces, the inking process is deliberate and meditative. I become immersed in the careful process of filling in tiny dark areas with ink to make them darker. During this process it occurs to me that my fingerprint is both unique, because there is no other exactly like it in the world, and universal, because a fingerprint is an instantly recognizable image. Fingerprints manage somehow to be universal symbols of uniqueness.


My fingerprint, now startlingly large and visually bold, makes a statement about the uniqueness of every single one of the billions of individuals currently alive on this planet. We lose sight of that so easily. I remember Annie Dillard’s description of the struggle to comprehend the complexity of all of the individual lives inherent in large numbers of people. Referring to the 1991 death of 138,000 people in Bangladesh, she writes, “I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning. ‘No, it’s easy,’ she said. ‘Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.’” We cannot comprehend the specific and the abstract at the same time. But I want to attempt to convey this idea nonetheless.


During the creation of this piece, I have been collecting black walnut seeds from the grassy area outside my basement studio. I don’t know why, but I’m drawn to them. They’re huge, just the right size to fit in my palm with my fingers wrapped tightly around the seed. The pattern of lines on their outer shells reminds me of my fingerprint.


Because the fingerprint itself is so simple, I need something more to the piece, an altar of sorts to hang just beneath it. In the final exhibition, there will be a shelf, collaged with teastained text, which will hold a small pile of these walnut seeds.

Interspersed with the seeds will be strips of stained text. The text for both the shelf and the strips comes from Jack Kornfield’s book A Path with Heart, specifically from a chapter titled “Enlightenment is Intimacy with All Beings.” Kornfield proposes that “mindful awareness is itself an act of profound intimacy… [which] is both the beginning and the culmination of spiritual practice.”

It is only through intimate relationships with other humans that we can begin to comprehend the enormity of multitudes of complex human creatures co-existing on Earth. And indeed, it may only be through human relationships that we can recognize the presence of God. Pema Chodron remarks that taking the bodhisattva vow is equivalent to declaring oneself not afraid of other people. I interpret this in my own experience to mean that we must be willing to love and be loved in order to know God.

Chödrön defines the kalyanamitra, or spiritual friend, as someone who makes us see ourselves clearly and honestly, an inspiration to stay on the path. Spiritual friendship can be the primary basis for the understanding of the divine.


Ruminating on the unique and the universal, on spiritual friendship, and on the human urge to make one’s mark upon the universe, I decide to call this piece Touch.

Retrospective: Stumbling Towards Grace

Stumbling Down the Path (2006). Paper, fabric, 

and found/collected objects on plastic and wire armature.

Once upon a time, the story goes, a seeker

asked a monastic, “What do you do in a monastery?” And

the old monastic said, “Oh, we fall and we get up, and

we fall and we get up, and we fall and we get up again.”

—Sister Joan Chittister

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long exploration of spirituality through making art.

For the past year I have been collecting small found objects—seeds, feathers, leaves, coins—anything that caught my eye made its way to my studio to live on the windowsill or on my makeshift altar. And for most of my life I’ve collected interesting small objects, unique paper scraps, fabrics, and magazine clippings, some of which have made it into collages or pages in my art journals, but many of which still live in boxes and folders. I’ve been wanting to use some of these found and collected materials in a collage for this project, and I’ve talked about doing so since last fall, but it’s February and I’ve made no progress toward beginning the piece. Finally I spend a couple of hours sorting through all of these materials, looking for ones that might work together. I create piles on my work desk, by color or by type.

I’m ready to begin. But am I? When I think about buying a large piece of heavy paper to use as a support for the collage, I resist. It shouldn’t be flat. It should be sculptural, indicating strong movement. I want it to be dynamic, not static. But what does that mean? I have no clear image with which to proceed. All I really know is that I want the piece to convey that the spiritual path is difficult.

I have a Rosanne Cash song in my head: We’re falling like the velvet petals / We’re bleeding and we’re torn / But God is in the roses / and the thorns. I’m walking from my studio to a nearby parking lot, thinking about how people can be so inconsistent in their actions despite their beliefs, how no spiritual practitioner is perfect at it and many spiritual gurus have had well-known character flaws. I remember what Thich Nhat Hanh says about practicing imperfectly: “If we want to head north, we can use the North Star to guide us, but it is impossible to arrive at the North Star. Our effort is only to proceed in that direction.”

Suddenly I come across a small tree branch in the path. I pick it up and examine the way that it twists and turns, changing directions again and again. My spiritual path is like this, I think—not a clear progression from one point to another, but a stumbling path with twists and valleys. This is how the canvas for my collage should look.

So I use the twisting branch as a model for a chicken-wire armature. Two layers of papier-maché go over the chicken wire; when this dries, I carefully pry the dried paper sculpture away from the chicken wire, which I discard. Next comes two layers of plaster strips to add strength and stiffness to the piece to prevent it from breaking at the thinnest point. Finally, I add a coat of gesso to both sides. Now I have a canvas for my collage, a sculptural support that twists and turns and even rises off the wall. Now the real work begins: the collage itself.

I want the collage to look simple from a distance, a progression of colors from dark to bright and back to dark again, but also to contain intricate embellishments that can be noticed only on close inspection. The darkest areas will anchor the piece at the top and bottom, with the brightest area occurring at the point where the canvas rises off the wall. I begin choosing materials by color, laying them out in a progression alongside the canvas—fabrics, papers, buttons and seeds and fibers, all remnants of my life experience over the past five years. And then, working very slowly, I begin to place and glue each piece. At first I think I should get the basic color variation in place, to cover the canvas, and then come back and embellish with small objects.

But that isn’t how the piece unfolds once I begin working; instead, I finish each area completely before moving on to the next. Although the work is very slow, it’s satisfying. It’s as if I am ordering and assembling elements of my already-lived life, making sense of them in hindsight, seeing patterns that I could not see at the time. I am feeling very at home with this collage piece. It and I have an understanding, a cooperative spirit; we are together without pretense, just getting things in order. Once the detail work of the collage begins, I am working intuitively. My hands and my heart know what to do.

By the time the collage is nearly finished, a week later, I understand that it is the culmination of these months of spiritual searching, a kind of visual summary of what I’m trying to accomplish by spending a year making art about God. The collage presents not only a gradation of color—from light brown to orange to red and purple—but also a visual trail of small personal remnants from tip to tip. Every piece of fabric or paper, every embellishment, contains its own story. The collage process echoes the life process. I choose what to carry forward and what to discard; I choose what is important in each new moment.

Retrospective: “Now, Again, Poetry, I Grasp For You”

Now, again, poetry,

…I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your

ancient and stubborn poise

—Adrienne Rich, “The Fact of a Doorframe”

The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long exploration of spirituality through making art.

The serpentine form is haunting me. It’s been several months since I saw the documentary Rivers and Tides, in which sculptor Andy Goldsworthy creates breathtaking structures entirely from native natural materials—leaves, thorns, mud, ice, stones—only to document their literal disintegration through time and natural processes. Watching Goldsworthy work, slow and deliberate, sometimes seeing a structure unexpectedly crumble beneath his hands—it’s an otherworldly experience. “There are always these obsessive forms you cannot get rid of,” Goldsworthy admits, sounding as if he himself is haunted by the forms that repeatedly appear in his work—circles, egg-shaped cairns, stone arches, and the snake-like or river-like line that he calls “the serpentine form.”

I love all of Goldsworthy’s work, but I am particularly captivated by the serpentine form in its many versions. He draws it in a canvas of snow atop a frozen pond; he builds it into a wall of dried clay in a museum gallery; he recreates it in wet leaves atop a flat stone. It’s a little different every time, but you’d know it anywhere.

Months before initiating this journey, I created a mixed-media painting that borrowed one version of Goldsworthy’s serpentine form. In it, I used red Carolina clay (mixed with a binder) on a wood support to create the bold line of the form. The background texture was formed by torn sandpaper and found objects from nature that I had painted black. Now I feel a strong leading to work with similar materials and again to borrow Goldsworthy’s serpentine form, but this time to incorporate text. I turn to poetry, the first art form I ever loved. The text itself will create the form—poetry as media.

I find two poems that speak to me of the direct experience of God. The first, “Evening,” is a short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in which the final stanza describes the “immensity and fear” of the human experience. We search for our place in the universe and the meaning of our presence here, unable to quite grasp the idea that God is both external and within us: “now bounded, now immeasurable, / it is alternately stone in you and star.” We are flawed, stumbling, imprisoned human creatures, and yet we contain sparks of the divine Source from which we spring.

The second poem, “Matins” by Denise Levertov, explores the possibility that God is found in mundane everyday routines, in kitchens and bathrooms and dirty streets as well as in holy places. The final section of this long poem directly addresses the divine: “Marvelous Truth, confront us / at every turn, / in every guise… / Thrust close your smile / that we know you, terrible joy.” Levertov’s word choice indicates her ambivalence about the omnipresence of God. The possibility that the divine is woven into daily life, that no place exists where God is not, brings a mixed reaction that is both welcoming and fearful.

Both poems suggest that the divine is as near as we allow it to be, that the Source is somehow tangible. I see a connection to Annie Dillard’s description of the beliefs of a certain Hasidic teacher: “[A]ll we see holds holiness… This is not pantheism but pan-entheism: The one transcendent God made the universe, and his presence kindles inside every speck of it” (For the Time Being). I am drawn to these poems because they suggest that it is not possible for us to truly be anything other than awed and a little bit afraid of the nearness of God, who dwells within us whether or not we acknowledge (or enjoy) that presence.

I make multiple photocopies of each poem and soak the copies in coffee for a couple of days to dull the bright-white copier paper. Meanwhile, I gesso a pine plank and use charcoal to draw the winding form on the gessoed wood. It pleases me to again be immersed in the landscape of this curving, flowing line. Next, I fill in the background of the form with black gesso, leaving the form as unpainted negative space. I like the bold yet empty look of it, and it remains at this stage for several days.

The following week, tearing the coffee-tinted sheets of text into very small pieces—single words or parts of words—I soak the bits of text briefly in a solution of matte medium and water. I begin to layer the text onto the serpentine form.

Although I am placing the bits of text at random, the repetitive act of handling and placing each piece allows the poems to sink deeply into my awareness. Again and again I see the words “alternately stone in you and star” and “terrible joy”; I carry these words in my heart during the days of working on this piece.

I am constructing a physical form from literal pieces of poetry. The drips of wet binder integrate with the black background as I add numerous layers of text to the winding form. The serpentine form, flat against the background at first, has risen dimensionally from the support.

…A friend suggests that the serpentine form might be more striking—and more true to the influence of Andy Goldsworthy—if I incorporate gradations of color. It feels right. I decide to keep the central part of the form as the lightest tone to give it somewhat of a glow, with the darkest sections at the top and bottom of the form.

I begin painting segments of the form with coffee. It’s a slow process—I have to let each application dry overnight before adding the next. Drips from the coffee mingle with the dried matte medium drips, leaving further traces of the long process of creating this piece.

In the end, the lightest section of text is tinted only by the original soaking, while the darkest sections at the top and bottom of the piece receive up to seven separate applications of coffee. I title the finished piece Direct Experience of God. It is the most visually striking work I have done yet.

There are many images of Andy Goldsworthy’s work available on the Web. A good starting point is here. 

Retrospective: A Crack in Everything, Part Two

Hatching Out (in process), 2005. Mud/clay, plaster, and chicken wire on wood.

I tell you this

to break your heart—

by which I mean only

that it break open, and never close again,

to the rest of the world.

—Mary Oliver, “Lead”


The following is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, a year-long spiritual exploration through artmaking.

I am not a sculptor. I have no training in three-dimensional art. I remind myself of this fact when I get the first glimmers of an idea for a piece about cracking open. The surface will be red Carolina clay, which cracks organically as its moisture evaporates over a period of days. And the armature, or supporting underlayer, will be in the shape of an egg half-protruding from a flat wooden support. …This piece will test my trust in the process. The materials themselves will do most of the work, which means that I will begin the piece but not directly finish it. Once the final mud layer is applied, I will have to relinquish control and accept whatever happens. …

This visual image of an egg with a cracking-open shell springs from a recent visit by my friend Melanie Weidner, a Quaker artist. I have invited Melanie to see my studio space and my work so far on this spiritual and artistic journey. We are struck by the overlapping themes of our current work, including the use of poetic texts. Melanie tells me about a particular Rumi poem that makes reference to hatching open through prayer.

In the following days I am haunted by the image of mud cracking as it dries, and I wonder how I can use mud as a primary media in a new piece. …When I open Risking Everything to the Rumi poem, I am stunned to see the words “I am stuck in the mud of my life.” I cannot ignore such a blatant indicator of the direction I should follow…

So, non-sculptor that I am, I enlist the aid of a fellow artist to mold a half-egg armature on wood using chicken wire. I plan to cover the armature with two or three layers of papier-maché, followed by a layer of gesso, and finally a layer of red-orange mud. The piece will be called Hatching Out.

…At first I’m convinced that the physical process of this piece will be fairly uncomplicated; I just need to complete each step carefully, and the only surprise will be the manner in which the mud will crack. Alas, it is not for me to dictate the arrival of surprises… I’m nowhere near the point where I can apply mud, but cracks are happening elsewhere.

First, because I get impatient with the first papier-maché mixture and add some gesso to it in a devil-may-care moment, that lumpy layer cracks as it dries. But since it’s solidly adhering to the egg shape, I don’t try to remove it. Instead, I decide to add a layer of plaster to smooth out the lumpiness of the egg. Applying the wet plaster with a plastic palette knife is startlingly like icing a cake. My plan is to return the next day and sand down the plastered egg to a uniform smoothness.

Instead, I get sick. I spend the weekend in bed instead of in the studio. When I return, ready to sand down my egg, I find the surface cracked yet again—the semi-smooth plaster surface shows several fractures, and the plaster has entirely cracked off in two areas. Not only that, but the combined weight and moisture of the plaster and papier-maché layers have begun to warp the wood support, to the point of causing a two-inch crack in the support itself.

At this point, I know what I’ve done wrong in barging ahead with unfamiliar materials. … I have to decide whether to forge ahead with this imperfect and unstable piece as it is, or start over with new and better materials. I’m torn. I’m fond of my egg, flawed though it is. But it seems ridiculous to cling unnecessarily to something that isn’t working.

…It dawns on me that this idea of “letting the process lead” requires a more-than-intellectual willingness to embrace whatever happens. It’s not about certainty, a guarantee that the piece will work out. It’s difficult, this business of trust. Sitting down with my journal to ponder my next move, I come across a quote from Surya Das about “work that genuinely develops us as we develop it.” It’s really about the Buddhist concept of right livelihood, but at this moment it feels like an offering, a reassurance that this difficult work of making art is well worth doing. It’s a blessing to be in development. I’m not perfect, and my egg isn’t going to be perfect, either.

…I do a little first aid with wet plaster strips to make the egg’s cracked surface solid and unbroken. …Three days later I come into the studio with a bucket of red Carolina clay and a small bag of dark earth. … I had forgotten how much I like working with clay and mud. Being on my knees in the studio layering mud onto this egg structure feels primal somehow, as if I am building a world. My plan is to cover only the egg and later paint the wood background with black acrylic, but I find myself spontaneously covering the entire background with a thin layer of clay as well, and the visual effect is striking. I don’t know how the background layer will react when it dries, but I’m eager to see what will happen.

…I check on the egg every day to mark its progress. Each time I leave the studio, I know that the egg will be different when I return. It dries unevenly, the moisture slowly withdrawing from one side to the other. In this partially dried state, the egg seems like a living creature, an object imbued with transformative powers. It takes more than three days to fully dry and crack. Finally, all of the moisture is gone. Deep cracks run throughout the clay surface as well as in the dark circle. Despite the cracks, the dried mud is firmly adhered to the egg armature, but I will add a finishing layer of spray-on fixative to ensure that it remains intact.

…The piece becomes irreparably damaged in an accident soon after its completion. One in-process image is the only evidence of its existence. The forced letting-go of this piece, a struggle at every step, feels like a lesson in my ultimate lack of control over the process. Even the final product of the art process is not really final. Some of my artwork may outlast me, some of it will not, but the fact is that whatever mark I make on the world is impermanent. And yet the knowledge of that impermanence fails to persuade me to give up this business of making art. In fact, it leads me to want this divine connection not less, but more. 

Retrospective: Stitching Broken Into Whole

Portal (2006). Stitching and tea stains on paper, mounted on stretched fabric.

Ring the bells that still can ring

This is your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

—Leonard Cohen

This is an excerpt from my undergraduate senior thesis, which describes my attempt in 2005-2006 to clarify my spiritual path by making art about it.

…This piece begins with the idea of a stained glass window, one that is beautiful and simple and transcendent despite showing the scars of old wounds. But my intention is to suggest stained glass, not to try to emulate it. I struggle to find a shape that seems appropriate, something simpler and less majestic than the soaring spires of cathedral windows.

Perhaps, I eventually realize, what I want is not a window so much as a doorway, a portal. This insight brings the piece into greater clarity; now I understand more not only about the shape (I settle on an elongated oval that resembles a keyhole) but, significantly, what purpose the piece should hold for the viewer. I want it to be, rather than a beautiful object to be looked at, a beautiful opening to be looked through—an entrance to deeper knowing.

…It takes a couple of hours and a great deal of patience to tear the medium-weight drawing paper into the right shape and then to tear that shape into smaller irregularly sized pieces. Then I reassemble the portal shape by adding one piece at a time, using tiny strips of masking tape on the back to anchor the joined pieces. Next comes the slow work of stitching closed the tears I have created, using heavy quilting thread the same color as the paper, which will only be evident on close inspection.

I am thinking about what brokenness means, how breaking apart is useful to an eventual coming together. Art therapist Catherine Hyland Moon points out the many expressions that use the word “break” as a metaphor for transition and new insights: breaking new ground, having a breakthrough, breaking away. “We are made ready to nurture others through our own experiences of brokenness,” she writes.

I’m ready to begin staining the reassembled shapes. I prepare five different teas at high concentrations: an herb tea made of various red berries, an orange herb tea, green tea, lemon herb tea, and a chai black tea. I haven’t tested the resulting colors to determine how they will look when dried; I’m just playing it by ear.  With a watercolor brush, I begin to apply the various colors of tea to the paper, staying mostly within the bounds of the stitching but allowing some degree of overlap. Deliberately, I paint each shape with concentrated tea, careful to include the quilting thread as well because it will absorb the tea colors. It takes four separate tea applications, with hours between to allow the paper to dry, before I’m satisfied with the results.

 

...The portal is one simple shape, but it comprises so much turmoil—tearing and rejoining, overlapping stains in diverse colors of varying saturations. It speaks to me of wholeness that evolves from brokenness. It is our scars and the marks of our varied experiences that make us the complex and beautiful human creatures that we are.

Retrospective: Be Very Afraid. And Then Draw It Anyway.

This is a drawing I made in 2003. It is untitled. I made it with a green gel pen on 60-pound sketchbook paper.

Please take a moment to notice whatever thoughts or feelings arose in you when you first glanced at this drawing.

If your response was That's not a very good drawing. The perspective is all messed up, and it's not very realistic, and there's hardly any detail... you're absolutely right. If we approach this drawing from a sheer technical viewpoint, it gets a failing grade.

On the other hand, if your first thought was That's such a good drawing! Whoever made it was really paying attention to their environment... you, also, are absolutely correct. If we see this sketch as an attempt to interact with and remember a specific moment in time, a way to record an impression, then it succeeds.

And if your reaction sidestepped the question of quality, if you saw this drawing and wondered how and why and by whom it was drawn, if you intuitively identified with the underlying desire to somehow name and contain one little piece of an overwhelming experience... then you are the most absolutely correct of all.

I've never been very interested in debates about how to define Art, or whether a piece of artwork is Good or Not Good based on any specific parameters. What interests me is what type and degree of relationship a created object compels from me. Sometimes I can't seem to stop looking at it—I fall instantly in love. Sometimes I find a piece aesthetically displeasing but, because it elicits a strong response from me, it has succeeded in its job of creating relationship.

This is why I love seeing pages from other people's sketchbooks. In our sketchbooks, we are vulnerable. Sketchbooks are tender places where our drawings sometimes tremble or smear or are left unfinished. I began recording my world in notebooks at age 9. They were purely written journals for the first 17 years, no visual elements until about 2001. Even now my journals and notebooks and sketchbooks are a messy and cryptic mix of handwritten entries, sketches and collages, lists, color-coded schedules, and notes from a smorgasbord of whatever I'm studying lately... but always they are vulnerable and doubtful, with bravery leaking out around the edges.

So here's what I see when I look at this drawing now. I see a young woman holding a green gel pen and a cheap sketchbook, sitting on the back of a couch in an empty common room at twilight, struggling to breathe in and center herself, despite bone-deep anxiety and self-doubt. She is afraid of being caught in the act of being an artist—afraid of being told that she is not an artist and never could be—and she hurries through the drawing so as to escape unnoticed. But she so badly wants to capture the beauty of the mugs drying on a table at twilight. She draws because she can't help seeing and loving the world.

What matters here isn't the drawing itself, or the hurried and anxious way in which it was produced. What this drawing records is a moment in time that mattered, and a desire to document seeing the moment that was stronger than the artist's fear of doing it wrong.

So it is that the drawings I am least proud of are sometimes also the ones that make me feel the most proud.

Retrospective: Poetry and Process

Over & Over / Breath (Diptych). 2005.

Stitching, stains, pencil, and found objects on paper.

I cannot walk an inch

without trying to walk to God.

—Anne Sexton

This is an excerpt from my undergraduate senior thesis, which describes my attempt in 2005-2006 to clarify my spiritual path by making art about it.

…In a moment of anxiety and desire to work on a low-pressure project, I decide to make a mess, to get my hands dirty and just play. I steep several teabags in water for an hour or two and then pour and drip the dark tea onto a large sheet of heavy paper, the kind of paper that can take a lot of abuse. Later I begin smearing wet coffee grounds over the paper, in some places rubbing the grounds heavily into the surface and in others letting the wet grounds sit in clumps on top of the paper. I give it a day or so to dry thoroughly and then shake the coffee grounds into the trash. And then I don’t know what to do with this messy, cryptic piece I have begun, so I set it aside. It sits in my studio, propped against a wall, for weeks.

Then another day of anxiety occurs. I want to work on something safe, something that doesn’t matter much, some kind of action to calm my mind. Looking at the messy piece, I notice that one strong curving tea stain dominates the tangle of suggested images formed by my staining and wiping. I take out a brown colored pencil, two shades darker than the stain itself, and begin to trace one edge of the dominant stain. The sweeping line of the stain becomes a bold dimensional shape because of the contrast of the dark pencil line, which forms a kind of shadow illusion. It seems to me that this strong shape wants to be a frame or container for some important element…

A brief excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sunrise” has been ringing in my heart for several days: “What is the name / of the deep breath I would take / over and over / for all of us?” I don’t understand it, but it stays with me. It’s difficult to discern what she means by “deep breath” or why her question is how to name it. But it’s clear that it happens, or must happen, “over and over”—every day, every new moment, for the duration of a life of undetermined length. Whatever the poet meant by these words, to me it speaks of prayer, the attempt to pray despite not knowing how to do it or who might be listening. I find it striking in the context of this poem that the word “spirit” comes from the Latin root spiritus, “breath.” And it touches me that Oliver expresses this desire for an enveloping nurturing gesture in the form of a question. Like the poet herself, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but one moment at a time I continue creating whatever it is, something that I hope will be “for all of us.”

...The bold container shape, then, is there to highlight a word: “breath,” the offering to the tormented world. I write the word in pencil, drawing it reverently as if inscribing the briefest of prayers. But it isn’t enough to have placed it there in the container; it needs to be bolder than the dark line surrounding it. I thread a curved needle with yarn, a dark olive green hue, and sew “breath” onto the paper, following the pencil line. It’s a slow process, piercing the heavy paper with the needle tip and pulling the fibers through, front to back and back to front, one stitch at a time.

I have now reached an uncomfortable crossroads in this work. There is no unifying image in the piece as a whole. How can I unite the strong curving “breath” segment with the rest of the stains and smears? With some trepidation on my part—it’s scary to tear a work-in-progress in half—the piece becomes a diptych… the “breath” segment and a second one with an echoing subtle curve. To this second segment, I add text to clarify “breath”: “deep breath,” followed by “over and over.” This text undergoes the same stitching process as before, using two new colors.

…Other poems have been burning in my consciousness. I search my journals for lines that connect…With colored pencils in various shades of brown and olive, I begin to add text to the diptych. Text becomes texture as I use the words to fill in a space here, to visually extend a line there. If Mary Oliver’s key ideas are the centerpiece of this work, then Adrienne Rich provides the anchor—I carve a slice from her lines and lay it repeatedly across the shape that encloses “breath,” so that breath/spirit and words/communion are intertwined and interdependent.

…I walk around my studio space, picking up one by one natural objects that I have found on long walks—gingko leaves, stones, small metal objects. I pause when I come across a dried hydrangea blossom, the color of a tea stain but perfectly formed. I found it on a walk six months ago and have kept it in my studio ever since, not knowing why it was important. Petals from this blossom become the final addition to the diptych, waterfalling downward. Weeks later, a visitor to my studio tells me that the color of hydrangea blossoms vary, blue or pink, depending on the acidity of the soil.