"Beauty is there to be noticed. Too often it is taken for granted because we are moving too fast to let it in and allow it to deliver its message in us. We need to pay attention. To show indifference to beauty is an insult to its Creator." (90)
Earlier in the same essay she talks about "a prairie woman in 1870 who wrote in her diary a note about her quilt-making: 'I make them warm to keep my family from freezing; I make them beautiful to keep my heart from breaking.' " (88)
Shaw continues, "God made us human beings in his image; we participate in creative intelligence, giftedness, originality. We each have the faculty of imagination deep within us, waiting, like a seed, to be watered and fertilized. Imagination gives us pictures by which to see things the way they can be, or the way they are, underneath. The prairie woman, hemmed into her sod house with her small children by months of sub-zero cold and snow, used her imagination redemptively. Around the traditional quilt patterns--double stars, wedding rings--her imagination pieced in the exuberant flowers and leaves that redeemed the long winter, that brought her soul back to life. She created beauty and richness from the ordinary stuff, even the castoffs, of her life." (90)Quilt-Maker (89)
To keep a husband and five children warm,
she quilts them covers thick as drifts against
the door. Through every fleshy square white threads
needle their almost invisible tracks; her hours
count each small suture that hold together
the raw-cut, uncolored edges of her life.
She pieces each one beautiful and summer bright
to thaw her frozen soul. Under her fingers
the scraps grow to green birds and purple
improbalble leaves; deeper than calico, her mid-winter
mind bursts into flowers. She watches them unfold
between the double stars, the wedding rings.
(from Polishing the Petoskey Stone, Shaw Books, 1990, 33)
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