Monday, November 15, 2010

My bearings are changing. After years of stitching product to sell, I have begun to give fabric away. Collected, treasured, never used, each piece has potential. When it leaves my studio, oxygen pours in: room to breathe. 

So, a reminder:

On Becoming the Poet You Were Meant to Become

Many poets are not poets
for the same reason that
many religious men are not saints:
they never succeed in being themselves.
They never get around to being the particular poet
or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.
They never become the man or the artist who is called
for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.

They waste their years in vain efforts
to be some other poet, some other saint…

They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor
to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

There is intense egoism in following everybody else.
People are in a hurry to magnify themselves
by imitating what is popular—
too lazy to think of anything better.

~Thomas Merton

Thanks to Leslie Avon Miller for sharing this.

1 comment:

mimi k said...

I feel the same way when I let stuff go. Although just putting it in the trash comes loaded with a pile of guilt so that doesn't help. I need to find it a "home" :-)
Miss you. We should have coffee some time.