I’ve never been a believer in cosmic plans. I make my own plans, which puts me firmly in control — until I hit a chaotic patch, as I did a couple of weeks ago. Too many bad things going on in the world. My son in the ER for what turned out to be a minor problem (relief cubed). The gas company jackhammering in front of our house, exposing a network of veins hastily patched over each night.
So, I traveled cross-country to Portland, Oregon, to see longtime friends and to escape the noise. I worked for a few blessedly quiet mornings. I visited little cafes and the rhododendron garden by Reed College. Then I slammed into Covid.
This is not a plea for sympathy. Portland is a beautiful place in May, even if all you see is one garden through a fever haze. My friends were wonderful, and I would have been far more depressed without them. They fed me salmon and kale. They provided a bedroom for me to isolate, and for a writer, such isolation is an unexpected gift.
I’d love to say I’ve triumphed over adversity, sticking to my master plan. But this latest round of illness has me confronting something else: my fear of uncertainty.
I imagine a succession of hills to climb, like rolls of fabric. Climbing each roll makes me less nervous, although I’m afraid to look down. At my most feverish a couple of weekends ago, I woke up with brocaded strips of cloth fluttering through my mind, wondering how I should stitch them together, if there’s a pattern I don’t understand.
I’m wired to be watchful. I like to know what will happen next, to plan out alternate scenarios, to know. Except, of course, I don’t know. That’s where the tension comes in whenever I begin a creative project or travel somewhere new. I love it and I hate it, and for once, I had plenty of time to wonder why I cling so hard to my plans.
Do I hurtle forward without thinking?
In the winter of 2021, during the pandemic lockdown, I began a project I called free-form cross stitch as part of a virtual instructional design course I was taking. The assignment was to create a “Visual Representation of YOU as a Learner.”
Here were the instructions, in part:
“Work with your hands and create a physical, visual representation of how learning works for you. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ visual to represent this process — you can create an assemblage, collage, drawing, sculpture . . . . We only ask that you give your digital tools a rest and work with your hands.”1
I’d done embroidery projects before, going back to high school with patches on my jeans. A few decades on, I stitched samplers with quotes from Emily Dickinson or other writers, combining ornamental letters and flowers from template books to create my designs. With needlepoint, you usually follow a pattern, and cross stitch — a design created with rows of small X’s — constrains the pattern even more.
While I had always done a detailed sketch before starting other needlepoint projects, I decided this one should be unstructured. I saw myself hurtling into new self-territory, as if I were a comic-book hero hacking at every linear idea with a machete. That’s what I remember anyway: I thought I began this project with no pattern.
But when I found the photos I snapped for the assignment, they included an initial pattern I had sketched on a pad:
Obviously, I’d had a starting point in mind. I couldn’t leap in with nothing planned. Instead, I’d stretched cross-stitch fabric in a large embroidery hoop, threading a needle with dark-blue floss, and started at the top of the pattern — with the word word, followed by a period.
Not exactly nonlinear, but the design evolved over time. I quickly scrapped the pattern sketch, just stitching whatever came to me in the moment. I added a capital “I” in pink, then curving rows that looked like a wing. At its best, it felt like a mindfulness practice, with me shifting between the precision of threading sharp needles and tugging them free of stiff cloth.
It can be relaxing, deciding to edge that square of sage green with a row or two of gold. I wanted it to be transformative. Yet wanting transformation too much is another kind of problem. I got tired of the fussiness, the dexterity required to tie knots. I had a jaggedy feeling in my shoulders, as if an impatient gnome were perched there, telling me to be productive, to stop wasting time.
Once the semester was over, I kept thinking I’d return to this project, and I have a few times while on vacation. But it remains a challenge — just as roaring off with no plan for words on a screen is a challenge.
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How far can I go outside the lines?
My mother was an artist. She treads my memories with a palette in one hand and a brush clotted with viridian green acrylic in the other, although I know this never really happened. She was never a paint flinger like Jackson Pollock (she didn’t like Jackson Pollock). She did sit on our kitchen floor with a canvas leaning up against the cupboard under the sink, licking her brush.
I turn her gestures wild in my mind, as emotionally over the top as my mother often was. Her busy hand, circling with the brush —or her canting forward to rub a line into less precision — or feinting with the tip of a smaller brush, scattering little points of yellow ochre or alizarin crimson.
My mother was not easy to grow up with, but from this distance, I think I was fortunate. I saw a working artist in action most days of my childhood. Her desire to get back to the paints or her drawing pencils, to keep sketching, felt normal, and words became an equivalent obsession for me. My bohemian parents — my mother the favorite of my friends, with her youthful clothing and wacky jokes — encouraged me to be obsessed, to search for my own patterns, to find what I needed.
I haven’t found that, though. I doubt it’s possible for a creative person. Why would you want to find everything you needed or assume your needs never change — that the world never changes? Because, oh yes, the world changes as surely as our bodies do.
Later, my mother liked to blame all those painting sessions on the floor for her bad back, for the spinal operations that left her disabled. Even then, until her brain started to go, she’d sit in a wheelchair on their patio, putting together tiles and shards of glass as table mosaics. Tropical birds and flowers. I recall a parrot with an oversized beak. There must have been plenty of stillness and contemplation involved, all those hours she spent, many unwatched by anyone but her inner roving self.
I wish she were here so I could ask how much she followed a pattern. Her later work was surreal, with heavy lines and glitter or beach glass glued over sections. While I remember her sketching onto canvases before painting them, I know she often smudged outside the lines, changing facial expressions or shadows as she went.
She never considered her under-drawings to be paint-by-numbers. She’d sniff dismissively if a relative sent me such kits for my birthday. I recall at least one stitch-by-numbers I liked of orange yarn poppies. I kept it hidden in my bedroom. She hated prettiness for the sake of prettiness, but then I think of the embroidery designs I’ve created, how much I took in from her or other artists I’ve loved.
One recent morning, I woke up with the sensation of plummeting through clouds, as if I were a bird diving thousands of feet. Above, there were masses of white and gray and blue, endless evolving forms, creative conversations that began long before I was born. Yet I landed on my own branch, where I kept stitching, pulling threads and words with my beak to continue a pattern I entered in the middle of.
Does the universe give me a choice?
In Portland, down with Covid, I wished I’d brought my free-form cross stitch, because the haze I was in lent itself to creative wandering. It was like my mother’s paintings, the lines and blocks of color. I’m recovered now, after flying straight to New York City for my son’s college graduation, then back home. You could say my plans are back on track, my version of a mosaic. But I wonder.
It’s not clear what happens to a young man after college with his own jaggedy feeling in his shoulders and parents who want to hold him close. My son would say he needs to know, that he’s frustrated the universe hasn’t figured him out yet.
Still, he painted three beautiful watercolor postcards of birds for me for Mother’s Day — a blue jay, a lorikeet, and an oriole — all representing different times in our lives. I’m amazed at what flows down the generations, even though my son is adopted and didn’t know my mother well. But he does remember her. He perceives a pattern. On the back of one postcard, he wrote, “I like to think I inherited these painting skills from you and Grandma Nichols through the (unscientific) power of love, we’ll say!”
I have an affection for traditional samplers, the kind made by girls and women learning and practicing their needlework. When I asked Google for more information on “cross-stitch samplers a history,” the AI-generated summary at the top, based on Wikipedia, led with: “Samplers were mainly school exercises during the 18th and 19th centuries, and were almost entirely worked in cross stitch.”
Samplers (from exemplum in Latin or “example”) go back much farther than that, however, as the full Wikipedia entry and other sources will tell you.2 The Victoria & Albert Museum, in “Embroidery — a History of Needlework Samplers,” dates the oldest in their collection to circa-1400 Egypt. As the V&A describes their usefulness:
“Before the introduction of printed designs, embroiderers and lacemakers needed a way to record and reference different designs, stitches and effects. The answer was to create a sampler — a personal reference work featuring patterns and elements that the owner may have learned or copied from others, to recreate again in new pieces.”
The idea of recreating from known patterns resonates with me. In this telling, needlepoint is part of an artistic craft tradition as well as feminine homemaking. You could express yourself within these constraints, I’ve always thought. Except creativity can conflict with conventional patterns or roles. There may not be as many choices as I assumed, the universe closing off paths behind women as they age.
Maybe my free-form cross stitch is more like what generative AI does. It anchors in one place, then moves on from there, trying to create something pleasing to the eye, effortlessly creative but reliant on underlying patterns.
Maybe that’s why this free-form stitching project doesn’t call to me. Yes, it’s good practice for not worrying about the endpoint. In some ways, it represents how I learn, following all sorts of branching paths. In other ways, though, it misses the mark, because to learn, something needs to be at stake.
I think of little girls in their pinafores who just wanted to race through the May fields, spinning under the sky or picking flowers, forced to sit inside with a sampler on their lap among all the other ladies. They were told to stitch in the alphabet or a tedious homily, told what they had to do. Maybe they learned the wrong thing.
Intention, desire, a hand that can be pricked on a needle, blood spots marring the cloth, part of the outcome — it’s all about intention and desire. I don’t want to be here. I do want to. I need it to mean something, to go somewhere. I want to arrive.
So, I start with wanting — not a plan, but an acknowledgment, a pattern of feeling. It blossoms organically, pushing its head through soil like a sprout seeking light. I want meaning, but there’s work in that wanting beyond mindless stitching. The stitches matter when I care about the colors, when I choose what comes next, until I make something that shivers away on its own, a gilded snake.
Thanks to Stacie Cassat Green for providing the instructions for this assignment in her course at Harvard Extension.
The Smithsonian notes of their “American Samplers” collection that “[b]y the 1700s, samplers depicting alphabets and numerals were worked by young women to learn the basic needlework skills needed to operate the family household. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, schools or academies for well-to-do young women flourished, and more elaborate pieces with decorative motifs such as verses, flowers, houses, religious, pastoral, and/or mourning scenes were being stitched.”
woa. " That your mother urged you "to search for my own patterns, to find what I needed". I think it is about wanting and a pattern? Hmmm. When I embroidered lizards and snakes on my clothes I absolutely knew what I wanted. Usually I made a line drawing, but it was never detailed. Here are the first few sentences of a bit to try to describe what my memoir is "about": Even before my mother gave birth to me when she was 15 years old, she knew that she wanted to be an artist. From her, I learned the importance of a primal passion. Mine is lizards. When I was seven years old and my mother moved us from rural Indiana to New York City, I found iguanas in pet shops who got me through a fraught adolescence and the grittiness of lower Manhattan. I made silver lizard earrings and embroidered lizards and snakes all over my jeans and jackets to show my identity.
Thank you for this wonderful piece, Martha. There's much more in it that resonates with me.
You went to Portland for a break and came down with Covid, which put you into isolation, and reminded you of the isolation of a couple of years ago. Back then you picked up a project to create something physical representing "How you Learn".
I am supposing that such project suggestions were meant to help people get through restrictions on their habitual movement. Your habitual movement might have been at a keyboard, as a writer. So the project was a break from writing. Maybe it could be used as a break from "writer's-block". I don't say that was the case, but if you were hot on the trail of finishing off that last chapter, I don't think it would be time to take a break.
I also take breaks from writing. I guess you can call them projects, if not on how I learn, then maybe on what I am capable of. Our property is next to a wooded area. For years I used to keep the growth cut down, in maybe 4 days every six months. (A patch about 25 meters by 50 meters). Now I have let it go for several years and the far trees are up to 5 or 6 meters in height. It would take me 40 days to clear it out now, (all by hand, but it is not needle point.)
So two months ago I went in and started cutting out a band, maybe 10 - 15 meters from our wall. I did about 1/3 of it. It is a perfect project, because I can only handle it a couple of hours in the morning, and then back to writing in the afternoon. It means something because I intend to arrive with the bushes and trees farther away from my property, (I don't really know why, mosquitos and such?)
I have to cross an agricultural drainage canal to get to the woods. I threw a log across it. At a certain point I registered it was full of leaves. That won't help the water flow, so let's get them out of there. Then I noticed in the absence of rain the canal was dry, but full of dirt, I could walk on it. I drove my shovel into it and it was about 14 inches of dirt, probably a 10 year accumulation and pretty hard. Now the project shifted; I want that dirt out of there. It is not my canal, but our village dumps its rainwater into it, further down. Only now it is a race, at the first rain the project is finished. I have 25 meters to clear out, but I have to work at full capacity, (wow, I got tired.) I could do about 2 and a half meters each morning. Still I could write, and keep up my substacks in the afternoon.
On the day that I was approaching the last bit, and then I had to rest. I had only 2 more meters to go, so I had to go back in that afternoon. Whoopee, I finished, (a pattern of feeling), survey the result, looks good. TWO HOURS after I put up my shovel, the RAINS HIT. The canal had a foot of water in it. Lucky guy huh? I got my result. I arrived.
My body was too wrecked to go back to tree cutting.
But then the next project was forced. Over the years we rescue dogs and cats, now we are up to 4 of each. Eight years ago with our first kitten, I put plastic netting on all of our open fencing, the sliding gates and such. I didn't want him to go wandering. Of course in very few months he could jump onto the wall, up and over. Point being that plastic kept our dogs in all last year. Now that they are bigger, they have taken to ripping the plastic off of the gates. They can wiggle through the openings.
That's an emergency in that one of our gates leads out to the entrance of our village, and our dogs have ZERO training on playing in traffic. So I had to swing into fence building. I could only find a metal mesh too fine, so I had to put a double layer. So far it has held.
This comment is pure Deborah Tannen. I assumed your piece is not about needle point, but about side projects from writing, (when you are tired of staring into that screen). I have other side projects too, in that I painted full time for 5 years and have some technical ability, and I can site-read classical music and often play every day, many hundreds of pieces. I could also talk about Covid as we experienced it. But I am not writing my life story.
This is just an exercise in connection, taken from Tannen. You have side projects, and so do I, with a different tilt. Actually I think I wouldn't post such on WhyNotThink. So thanks for the opportunity. Is that my male Communication Style? Well, WNT has a bit of a different philosophy on what to consider. Usually I don't tell stories (unless they are relevant), and say very little about myself. There is no "I" that is the subject there. That is said without any ulterior motive.
HOW DID IT WORK? ARE WE MORE CONNECTED?
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