The Hands, Auguste Rodin

Sometimes inspiration doesn’t arrive with fanfare—it returns quietly, inviting us to notice what we’ve set aside or forgotten. Lately, I’ve found myself returning to familiar ideas, projects, and long-loved practices. 

“I invent nothing, I rediscover.” – Auguste Rodin

I am in a period of discovery and rediscovery. I like to think that I approach life with wide-eyed wonder, though I know this isn’t exactly true. I am a wizened adult who has her fair share of ideas that are cemented in place- ideas not easily dislodged. And yet I also love learning new things and discovering old things anew. 

I have spent a good deal of my life using my hands to create things. I cook, bake, sew, cross-stitch, smock, draw, dream and write- not at the same time. My hands are the vehicles I use to bring ideas to life. I look at things and wonder how I can make them and what I will do that is the same- or different- than the version I first discovered. I don’t invent, I rediscover, moving pieces around, using different colors, or patterns. Often, the piece I’m working on ends up quite differently than originally planned. But it is always a riff on the work that inspired it. 

Inspiration doesn’t vanish; it waits. Every time I pick something up again—an old craft project, a half-formed idea, a forgotten curiosity—I find that my hands remember. Rediscovery becomes its own form of creation, a soft unfolding of what was always there.