Still reading on Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness by Ingrid Fetell Lee. I'm only about halfway through, but every night it gives me a little hit of joy to read about what experts in various fields have done to find joy--along with studies that support what we may already know intuitively about the big subject of joy.
In chapter 4, on Harmony, she introduced me to the quilters mentioned in the last post--all members of a long standing all-Black community of quilters whose quilts were originally sort of thrown together to keep their families warm, but it's the very randomness of the patterns that makes them surprisingly harmonious.
After visiting the community near Selma, Alabama, and after studying their intricate quilts, Lee writes:
"If I'm honest, I'll admit that I hoped to find sone secret underlying pattern in these quilts, a bit like the fractals embedded in Pollock's paint splotches. Perhaps an intrepid mathematician with a penchant for folk art will find one. But what I left Gee's Bend with is a reminder that harmony lies not just in the perfect, but also in the perfectly imperfect."
"One quilter...described her quilts as 'get togethers,' because they were made from whatever pieces she cold get together. The women worked with what they had and sought to pull beauty out of it."
Carlene and I plan to stop by Gee's Bend on our way back to Texas and see some of these beautiful quilts together and meet the quilters.
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