Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
This poem excerpt really drives my living. For me it’s about the mindful and beneficial use of time and energy, with awareness of our shared condition of mortality.
But sometimes it takes hearing something differently for the message to sink in. So amidst a year of examining what matters to me and what doesn’t, the lovely poem was morphed for me into this shorthand mantra that phrases it in the negative:
I love how each of us has a different mental picture of what this refers to. And it doesn’t matter, because we can all relate to the need to get our priorities straight and clear out what no longer serves us. Once an acquaintance who I hadn’t seen in months gave me a knowing look and said she was “getting away from all the bullshit.” I realize now that I had no idea what she was specifically referring to, but at the same time I totally understood her in that moment. As long as we don’t disclose how we define “that shit”, it’s something we can all agree on!
I dyed the cloth in the dye bath of a larger project (it was originally a bland ecru, and it’s more vivid in person), and played with a bunch of stitches. I ripped out many more along the way. I realized near the completion that the whites don’t match up, but as the stitching says…Life (and more specifically, my ability to discern shades of white) is passing too quickly to be concerned about it. 
