I’ve been a creator for as long as I can remember.
From the time I was very young, I made things. I drew and painted, wrote poetry, sewed, and used my hands to bring into form whatever was moving through me. I never thought of these as separate ways of creating. They were simply how I moved through the world and stayed connected to myself.
That’s still true today.
LISTENING FOR THE THREADS
As I grew older, creating became a way of understanding my own life.
Things often appeared in a painting or in my writing before I understood why they were there.
I learned to pay attention.
Over time, I began to recognize the threads running through all of it—the experiences I was living, the memories I carried, and the parts of myself that kept finding their way into the work.
THE BODY REMEMBERS
During my recovery from cancer, I found myself reaching for cloth again in a way I hadn’t for decades. I knew instinctively that I needed the feeling of fabric in my hands and the familiar rhythm of making something stitch by stitch.Â
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I began with a shawl made from fabric I designed from one of my paintings, The Depths of Heaven. Over the course of my treatment, I spent thirty-two hours stitching and beading it by hand.
There was something deeply familiar in the work. Running the needle through the cloth, choosing the beads and placing them one by one brought back a part of me I hadn’t touched in a very long time.
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My hands remembered.
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There was an older memory there too.
My baby blanket is the one thing I remember from childhood that felt like love to me.
It wasn’t simply that it was soft. I needed that particular blanket—the smooth satin binding beneath my fingers, its familiar smell, the texture of the fabric against my skin. I knew every part of it.
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When I wrapped myself in it, I felt something I didn’t find anywhere else.
Comfort. Safety. A way of being held when I didn’t feel held by the people around me.
I didn’t have words for any of that as a child. I only knew I needed my blanket.
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It felt like love in the only way I knew love.
Years later, when my sister was going through a difficult time and I was too far away to be with her, I made her a pillow. I wanted her to feel my love in it when she pulled it close, as if my arms were around her.
That pillow became the beginning of the Bubbe Pillow. It was years before I realized that in making it for my sister, I was giving her the same kind of physical experience of love that my blanket had given me as a child.
I see that thread running through all of the textiles I create now. It’s there in the shawls that wrap around your body, in the pillows we pull close, in the softness and weight of the cloth itself.
They come from something very basic in me, something I know in my own body.
The need to feel loved, safe, and held.
SOUL WOVENÂ
Soul Woven is the name I give to the way I live my life. My life and my work aren't separate. My writing, my painting, my work with cloth, the experiences that change me, the questions I live with—they're all part of one tapestry, with the same thread running through them.
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Remembering Myself grew from looking back across my life and gathering the pieces of myself I had lost or left behind along the way. The Fire and The Thread came from the years that followed, when remembering who I was became the beginning rather than the end. I had to live it, in my body and in the ordinary reality of my life.
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Now, at seventy-three, the tapestry is changing again. This past year has taken me places I never expected to be. My body has brought much of my life to a standstill. Work that once filled my days has fallen away, along with plans I thought I was moving toward. I’m left with more open space than I’m accustomed to and no clear picture of the life that will grow from it.
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There was a time when I would have rushed to fill that space. I would have made a plan, found the next project, decided where I was going and started moving. I’m not doing that now. I’m writing when there are words. I’m making when my hands want to make. I’m noticing the small places where interest and curiosity begin to return, and I’m giving them room without asking them to become anything.
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My life is the tapestry.
My work is one of the ways it becomes visible.