Making as Loving

Dear Starlight,

It’s a challenge, at first—like jumping a hurdle, throwing an avalanche, or doing a cartwheel for the first time. The mind and body don’t sync. The movement is ungraceful at best.

It’s difficult to move past the invasive, persistent hammering thought that productivity must be the driving force behind any activity.

Field Notes

I’ve been sitting with the garden flowers in the morning and drawing them. Blind contour drawings—where you don’t look at the page, you just hold your pen to paper and imagine your finger gliding along the delicate silky petals of purple flowers. I draw them to see them. Not to make a painting. Not to create something someone else might want. Just to observe. And still, I feel the tug—the subtle but strong desire to switch lanes from observation to output—to make a painting.

We live in a time where we don’t need more things. So what do we need?

I believe we need vibrant, living relationships—with ourselves, each other, and our more-than-human kin. That kind of relational aliveness isn’t satisfied by consumption. It requires attention, time, and care. It calls us into a relationship with our own minds, bodies, and spirits. Not to optimize them, but to honor them. These parts of ourselves have unique needs that pressing “buy now” on our 2.5” screens won't fulfill.

Observing a plant? That feels like beginning a relationship with it. I’m interested in this romance.

I’ve been carrying bags of yarn and wool, folding and unfolding fabric scraps, moving them from home to home, studio to studio, for over a decade. Little scraps of red plaid skirts and swirly paisley shirts my grandmother made, pieces that feel soft in my palm. I want to make something new with them.

What stops me? This story":

It will take too long.
No one needs this thing.
I can buy a quilt today for a penny of the cost of making one.

These thoughts devalue and demoralize my desire to create.

I ignore the desire. My creativity, my sensuality, and my imagination remain thirsty. My sense of aliveness, depressed.

A few weeks ago, I wandered through a fine arts museum at Harvard and I felt the feeling in my mouth that I feel when I smell a fresh peach, like the back of my tongue prickles. I almost felt my tummy turn and growl with hunger. As we walked away from Monet’s bowls of fruit and Klimt’s green and blue forests, I remarked to my husband how parched I felt. As if there was an untempered beast in my belly desperate for an elixir of Art making. It was something I had felt the year before in Dallas when I went to the Bonnard exhibit and salivated—drool dripping from lips as I gazed at fuchsia fields and women in bathtubs and flowers everywhere.

Following that exhibit I came home and made a trip to R&F paints and spent all my paycheck on brightly colored oil sticks that are still in their packages—and now packed in a box to unpack in a new studio.

So again I ask: What do we need? What do I need?

I think we need to make things.

I think we need to be in relationship with our materials, our subjects, our audiences, etc.

But how? What scale?

What about the gift?

We need gifts. We need to be appreciated, acknowledged, cared for. Gifts tie a bond of love and reciprocity between giver and receiver. Not transactions—offerings.

Perhaps one way through this tangle of productivity is to make things only to give them away.

What if I stopped buying gifts and started making them?

A jar of dried herbs.
A blind-contour drawing from the garden.
A quilt.

A small revolution.

A turning away from the dominant narrative that tells us:

Cooking is boring labor.
Gardening isn’t worth the toil.
Making a quilt is pointless.
Knitting a sweater is time wasted.
Drying herbs is unnecessary.

I want to challenge that storyline. I want to re-narrate the value of making things by hand—not as a productivity metric, but as a practice of presence. Of relationship. Of remembering. Of restoring.

I’m middle-aged. I don’t know that it matters except as a stake in the ground of my own life map. A point from which I can choose a new direction.

I want to turn my back on performative productivity, capitalistic consumerism, and the poaching of my attention.

I want more space and more time.

I believe they are patiently waiting for me—on the other side of my stuff.

I’ve been thinking about letting go.
Giving away what I don’t need and embracing what I do need:
A need to make things—not for performance or productivity, but for the fulfillment of joy, connection, and relationship.

Wouldn’t it be radical if we shared more with one another while also resisting buying more readymades for ourselves?

Wouldn’t it be radical to wear a cozy sweater made from our neighbor’s scratchy wool, dyed in goldenrod from the hill we walked in autumn—and still smell that walk when we press our nose to the sleeve?

Wouldn’t it be radical to make and share thank-you notes with sketches of the tiny things in our homes that we love—and poems about stars that we write?

PS. I’m curious…

When you’ve normalized gnawing guts, how do you know you're still hungry?

What does starvation feel like when you’ve forgotten what it feels like?

What have you been hungry for that you’ve learned to ignore?

What stories do you carry about what’s worth making—and what’s a waste of time?

What might you make—not for sale, not for show—but as an offering of love?

Why does it matter to you to be in relationship with making things?