Imagine that you inherited a large box full of fabric scraps. One of those plastic boxes with the flaps that fold together to make the lid.
The box spends years sitting in a corner while you try to ignore it but it will not be ignored so, one day, you open it.
After the dust clears and the sneezing stops, you begin to pick out some pieces.
Soon you have three stacks of scraps.
Pretty. Ugly. And, I can’t decide.
You continue to explore and sort. Perhaps for a long time.
The more you sort, the harder it gets.
Some of the Ugly scraps look better next to some of the Pretty ones than they did on their own. Some of the Pretty ones are nice individually but don’t get along too well in the stack by themselves. And the I can’t decide stack gets larger.
My week has been a lot like that.
Except, I’ve been sorting stories.
Intentional Creativity homework.
The more I sorted, the harder it got.
Write said the teacher. Listen. Paint. Imagine. (Also, eat and sleep!)
I got stuck. More than once.
Then the spider started whispering to me.
Mostly, she seemed to have questions.
What if, she asked, we put this one next to that one?
What if that one came before this and after that?
What if we use more rather than less?
Suddenly, sorting stories got easier. And the stories began to become one story woven together by the unseen spider who had been weaving my story since that first summer at camp when I began to see that we are all connected. All part of the one story.
I got a job that summer. I was in charge of remembering all the words to all the songs until we gathered around the campfire again the next year.
I still remember.
And the spider still whispers while she weaves.