Be an Adventurer

September 15, 2022 in orange desk

I have never been so lost in a learning environment in my life. It was as if I had been dropped into a class being taught in Ancient Greek or Latin. From the first moment, I was lost. It sure wasn’t a beginning weaving class, which is what I needed and what it was described as being.

I didn’t even know the parts of the loom—what a “reed” or “dent” or “epi” or “sett” was—or even how weaving worked. I just knew I had always wanted to weave, a trajectory my cousin made more clear when she reminded me of my beloved Granddaddy, Lemuel Enos Ramsey, taking it upon himself in his 60s to learn to weave as his own self-rehabilitation after a massive stroke paralyzed the left side of his body.

After every class, I was deeply exhausted, and more lost. I had no idea what the next step of the process would entail—no big picture—so I struggled with not knowing the “why” of what I was being told to do. Every week, I went, and every week, I was lost. The teacher would say, “read the instructions,” but the written instructions also seemed to be in Greek.

This past Wednesday was our final class. Thank god. But because I was so behind, and unsure of what I was doing, I dreaded it, thinking I would have nothing to come off the loom at the end of it. I decided to just experiment rather than try to read the confusing directions. I put my notebook away, and just started stepping on treadles to see what would happen. I just wove. Or what I thought was weaving.

At one point, the teacher’s aide stopped by and asked where my pattern was. “What pattern,” I asked honestly. I had no idea there was a pattern we were supposed to follow. “Well, you won’t learn anything without the pattern,” the aide admonished, yanking out the wooden support that was supposed to hold the pattern. “Oh, but I will and I am,” I said as she walked away, perhaps to report me to the teacher.

The teacher dropped by my Schacht Baby Wolf loom. “You should have your pattern in front of you,” she said. I responded, “Honestly, until a few moments ago, I had no idea I had a pattern to follow. So I am just making shit up here, watching to see what will happen.” “But how will you learn to twill?,” she asked. “I’m just trying to survive here,” I responded. “Ain’t nobody got time for twill at this point.” She smiled, and walked away. I will likely go down in history as her worst student of all time. I’m okay with that.

For several hours, I experimented. And I did finally ask her the treadling for the twill she was so enamored of, so you will see some twill in the photo of my sampler above. I felt like a five-year-old when I saw CLOTH start to appear on my loom. And I learned more in that few hours than in the rest of the class combined—about my need for experimentation, about how making things feels, about my lack of interest in the straight and narrow and symmetrical.

This week, artist and author Austin Kleon wrote about weaving in his weekly newsletter, which—of course—resonated with me in a different way now. In it, he quotes from Annie Albers’ book, On Weaving:

For anyone who is making something that previously did not exist in this form is, at that point, of necessity an amateur. How can he know how this thing is done that never has been done before? Every designer, every artist, every inventor or discoverer of something new is in that sense an amateur. And to explore the untried, he must be an adventurer. For he finds himself alone on new ground. He is left to his own devices and must have imagination and daring. All decisions here are his own, and only he is responsible. But though it is he who is in charge, he feels himself to be only an intermediary who is trying to help the not-yet-existent turn into reality. Standing between the actual and that which may be, the conscientious designer, as I see it, seeks to forego his own identity in order to be able more impartially to interpret the potential.

Be an adventurer.

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.