Follow the Threads

I keep thinking about threads in my life. Threads, as in, the hint of something that’s always been there, and then just keeps showing up in new and stronger ways, as if there was always some kind of plan I couldn’t see.

By eight, I was working with clay and pastels in the art room of the middle school, where my mom was a principal. Every day I would ride the bus from my school to hers, and while she finished up her duties, wander into the art room to figure out what I could make.

By sixth grade, I was becoming fashion-obsessed. In a small rural town in North Carolina, where, let’s just say, the trends weren’t exactly up to speed, I was opting for bell bottoms while everyone else tight-rolled their jeans. I vividly remember standing in the cafeteria line in elementary school while girls whispered and pointed. I didn’t care then, and (much to my husband’s chagrin), I don’t care now. Also, a thread…

In the ninth grade, my mom tells the story of how she went to a book store to buy books I’d asked for for Christmas that year. She rattled off the list to the employee helping her, “Edgar Allen Poe. The Greatest Conspiracy Theories of All Time, Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” “Your daughter sounds…interesting,” he replied euphemistically.

Art and fashion and curiosity, threads that have always been there, whose fibers grow stronger and brighter as the years pass.

In college, I started dabbling with photography, recovering old dressers, and making stationery sets in my apartment. In the summers, I started going to New York City, sometimes with friends, but eventually alone more often than not, simply to explore. And as much as I love a museum or show, it was and is always the window displays that take my breath away. Literally, as in a gasp. The creativity in a designer’s floor layout and fixtures and colors and branding and packaging blows my mind time and time again, and after certain such experiences, I am no less than giddy.

More threads.

There are others, less related to my vocation, but you get the point. And the point is that there are threads in all of our lives—small whispers about who we are and what we were made to be. The key is to hear and follow, allowing them to weave their way through our lives. Then perhaps to relax a little more, worry a little less, about “what I’m supposed to do,” and all the times we anxiously ask ourselves that question.

Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr says that all humans are born with a divine blueprint, a kind of DNA/soul-level wiring of who we are to be in the world. (He also, unfortunately, is adamant that it is often failure and suffering that help us most discover it.) But it’s been there from the beginning. Detailed plans as intricate and intentional as we can imagine, already hardwired into our very being. He says it’s simply our job to discover the blueprint and become the fullest possible expression of what was intended. To keep asking and listening. To keep…following the threads.