What is it like to be dormant for your whole life, in poverty, with no access to a larger life, and no hope of anything more occurring? What is it like to live like this for years and then have the world come to your door, wanting what your heart and soul created during those dormant years? What is it like to suddenly be noticed and be paid large sums of money for doing the simple things you’ve always done: keeping your kids warm and warming your own heart with the creation of colors and shape into form? What is it like to go from quilting in Gee’s Bend, Alabama to having articles written about you in The New York Times and having your quilts shown in The Whitney Museum and soon at the MFA in Boston? This journey of women, descendants of slaves, who live in a in a small town whose poverty sounds like the kind those of us brought up in a gentler world run away from was written up in The Boston Globe on Sunday. Their story is not my story, and yet it resonated with my story, or maybe the universal story of being hidden, lost, unseen and then the mythic coming visible, becoming known. What is it that allows that to happen? How do we journey from that kind of dark, insular world to one in which the world is large, bountiful, and gracious? What transformations are necessary inside in order to allow that kind of opening? Reading the story I read my heart's hope that life does allow for miraculous unfolding. But why? Why for some and not for others? What creates the space for the dynamic intersection of individual desires and global generosity? And do we have to live for generations in the dark before the world opens its doors? Or, is Kafka right when he wrote, You don't need to do anything. Remain seated at your table and listen. You don't even need to listen, just wait. You don't even need to wait, become still, quiet and solitary And the world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
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