This past Tuesday I learned how to not be scared of my sewing machine thanks to an Intro to Sewing course at Bits of Thread here in DC.
It was so momentous that I literally had the following clip from What About Bob? in my head:
I have slugged my grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine to my various apartments for over a decade now, yet been so scared of using it that I had only actually tried it out once or twice. I had literally become a Luddite, as I kept saying things like “it’s too fast” or “I can’t handle all those moving parts” whenever talk of me actually using it came up in conversation, as not only do I have it, but it sits permanently in my living room (it’s built in to a table).
So, I decided to face my crafty fear and go for it. Here are the results:
Ahoy! Now how I know how Bob felt in that clip and feel so triumphant for having mastered my fear of the moving needle!
Curious, do you have any crafty fears? And if so, have you mastered them?
Today, mine are the past (a photo of girls from my great-grandmothers’ Domestic Service class, that says “Don’t they look happy?” on the back) and the future (going forward despite trepidation or uncertainty with a quote from the epigraph of Smile at Fear: Awakening The True Heart of Bravery by Chogyam Trongpa).
As I move forward and agree to take on things I’m scared about (as we all are with new big things!) these are the reminders that I need today that everything will be okay and that the past and the future both began with the same stitch. So we continue stitching and threading and weaving our way forward, strengthened by all that has come before us.
In 1985, I got 3rd place in a school art contest with the theme “Safety.” It was a painting of a policeman stopping traffic, and to this day, I think it only won 3rd place because it marginally had something to do with safety and wasn’t off-topic. Last Sunday, twenty-four years later, I picked up a paint brush again. Although it’s not for a contest and has little to do with safety, I’m pretty happy with the preliminary results.
We watched The Visitor as I tried to retain the bounce of the brush on the canvas and stay in the lines I had drawn- while also paying attention. Although I’m not sure if it was the painting or the film, somewhere along the line I started tearing up. I’m not really sure which was the culprit, and think perhaps it was a little bit of both. The film is about the unlikely friendship that arises from an equally unlikely introduction and deals with issues of belonging, home, identity and immigration.
As I’ve done work in the past with refugees, my heart went out to the people everywhere who are in those back rooms in detention centers or airports or live in fear of being denied asylum or what have you. And since I hadn’t painted for so many years, I also felt that rush of release you get when you tackle something new and unfamiliar, that unbridled freedom of seeing where your hands may take you is always an adventure. Although canvas, paints and brushes are benevolent things, there is still a sense of escaping your safety zone as you push toward new skills.
So as Richard Jenkins’ character learned to play the drums in “The Visitor,” I picked up a paintbrush (a little easier than playing the djembe). While his lesson was tied up in a messy storyline fraught with modern problems and frustrations, mine was unfolding quietly with a dog curled up against my side. The result? A pleasant and kind reminder in the liberation and joy of letting yourself go and learning something new.
And as for me, I’m being kept busy:
*Preparing for a group show at The Scrap Exchange in Durham, Domestic Spaces (March 20-April 11)
*Excited about my first trip to Portland for the Handmade Nation West Coast premiere, April 2-6th! I will be on a panel called Craft Perspectives on Saturday, April 4th, which I’ll be posting more about later. For now, you can see more details <a href=”http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/hmn/programs.html”>here</a>!
The theme for last week’s Whiplash competition over at Whipup was “no fear.”
Looking at the entries this morning, I was reminded how often I personally feel fear and always think that it is an emotion I am going through alone. The entries were all gorgeous and striking, the antidote to anti-fear, if you will.
Browsing through them made me wonder why we feel that fear should be something we are ashamed of or bewildered by or trapped in. Because we are all scared that what we do will bring about a negative response or that we aren’t enough to some degree or that we will never reach our potential or never find love or that we are too old to become truly good at something or a million other things that we could choose from the ether.
Because knowing that I am not alone in my myriad fears makes them seem less powerful. More like shadows behind the hedge instead of monsters. Knowing that these fears are normal makes me less timid and more curious. Realizing that they are not just my own wakes me to the fact that everytime we listen to fear we are reconstructing walls born from our own fallacies about this thing called life.
Perhaps by beginning to release this well of fear within us, we will be okay with our best efforts instead of constantly doubting what could have been.
