The Future Leaks Out

The Gift of Creative Deconstruction

I pick up the quilt and hold it. I’ve had it for years — made it during a particularly hard stretch, stitched it together out of grief and confusion and a stubbornness that gets me through difficult seasons. It’s a good quilt. It did its job.

And it’s ready to be cut up.

I know this in the way I know most things that matter: not by thinking my way to a conclusion, but by a knowing that settles in when I stop arguing with it. The quilt is done being what it was. It wants to become something else. My job is to get out of the way and let it.

I’ve been a journal quilter for twenty years. I’ve made hundreds of fiber art pieces in that time — each one beginning with a question, each one worked through color and fabric and thread until something true shows up that I didn’t know when I started.

Some years ago, I found myself with walls full of old journal quilts and a feeling I couldn’t quite name. I’d processed what those quilts needed to process. I’d sold some, given some away. And I still had thirty or so, sitting there, finished. It seemed to me that they needed to go, to move through my life to make room for something new.

So I cut them up. The first cut was hard. After that, it was liberating.  

Here is what it looks like to make a reimagined quilt.

First: choose the quilt that’s ready. This is not a logical choice. You sit with them and you wait. One of them will make itself known.

Before you cut, you write about it. What was it? What was the original question? What did it teach you? You give it its due, because it served you and your growth and learning, and needs to be honored. Sometimes you start with someone else’s quilt – a person you have never met. You sit with it, imagining the hands that made it, the joys and sorrows that went into the stitches.

Then you cut. And here is the first rule, the one that matters most: *cut more than is comfortable. *  

This is harder than it sounds. Everything in you wants to be careful, strategic, to preserve what’s good. But careful doesn’t work here. You must be willing to cut into the parts you love, to let the pieces be pieces, to lose the thing you thought you were protecting. Cut until you feel the mild panic of not knowing how it goes back together. That’s the right place to be.

Then you play. You lay pieces out, move them, leave them, come back. You put combinations together that make no sense and some that make unexpected sense. You let it be a mess. You add pieces you hate. You add pieces that don’t seem to fit. You add pieces made by someone who lived 100 years ago and knew nothing of you and your struggles. You persist through the part where it looks like nothing, because it always looks like nothing for a while, and you trust that this is part of the process, not a sign that you’ve ruined everything.

The middle of the night is particularly useful. Something about the looseness of that hour — whether the judging mind finally goes quiet or gets so loud it exhausts itself.  I’ve solved more quilts at 2am than I have at my worktable in good light.

There’s always an aha moment. A time when the combination of pieces suddenly coheres, a direction that makes itself clear. When it comes, you’ll know it. Your trust, which you’ve been tending carefully through all the uncertainty, cements. You stitch it together. You reconstruct it. Even if you don’t love it yet, because you can’t see what it is until it’s whole again.

Then you wait a little longer before deciding what is next. Maybe you deconstruct it and reconstruct it again. You play and experiment. By this point you’ve let go of it being good. You’re just listening and following.

You look at the back, which can never be seen and planned until it is put back together. Maybe the back is the front. Maybe your careful plan needs to be seen upside down.

When it’s done, you look at it until it tells you its name.

I expected that cutting up my old quilts and reassembling them would give me new versions of the same stories. If a quilt had been made to explore intimacy, the reimagined quilt would be the next chapter of intimacy. A continuation or an update.

I was wrong.

What emerged, across piece after piece — 50 pieces later — was work about climate disruption and loneliness, and the fraying of democracy and the warming oceans. The whole project turned itself toward the crisis of the living world.

Then it surprised me again. As I deconstructed and reconstructed more quilts, I now sit in the middle of a project that invites us to look at the GROUND we stand on, what IS. Both the fraying world and the possibilities that exist. Quilts about grief over what is being lost. About the fierce beauty of what remains.

Whole sections emerged about how we find our way through the storms of our lives and the world, discerning what our part is to play and how we build community to support who we are and what we do.

I didn’t decide this. I didn’t plan it and I certainly didn’t see it coming. The material had its own idea of where it needed to go, and my job —the only job I’ve ever actually been good at— was to stop arguing and follow.

This is the thing about deconstruction: you cannot control what gets reconstructed. You can have good intentions and clear goals and a very sensible plan for what the new version will be. But when you cut into something and let it come apart, the future that leaks out is not always the future you had in mind.

William Burroughs used to cut up his writing and put it back together. He said: ‘when you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”  I didn’t understand that when I first encountered it. I understand it now.

Here is what I’ve come to know about myself: I am a deconstructor and a reconstructor. This is not just what I do in the studio. It is how I move through the world.

I design courses by taking apart what I think I’m teaching until I find what actually needs to be taught. I work with collaborators by letting the relationship become what it wants to become rather than what I drafted in my head. And I work as a coach by sitting with people who are holding the pieces of something — a life, a career, a sense of self, a question they can’t quite form — and helping them resist the urge to force it back into its old shape.

A few years ago, I undertook a retrospective of my own life’s work. I intended to deconstruct my past, lay it all out, examine it carefully, and reconstruct from it a clear plan — a tidy narrative of where I’d been and a sensible direction for what came next. Very organized. Very reasonable.

My life’s work was having none of it.

The actual material — all of it together, a lifetime of making and teaching and coaching and asking questions — had its own idea of what it had become. And my job was not to plan the next thing but to see clearly what was already there, already coherent, already pointing somewhere. From the perspective of the work itself. Not from the perspective of what I thought I should do next.

I discovered that my past accomplishments, projects, ideas, wins and losses were just pieces of the new fabric being created. All of it gets stitched together to make whatever I am doing next.

I’ve been in that aha moment since. Still stitching it together. Still doing my best to trust the process.

This is what I mean when I say that the whole of any project, any life chapter, any relationship is not static. The outcome is not set in stone. We are always constructing a scenario, then deconstructing it, then reconstructing it into something we couldn’t have designed from where we started. The constructs we make up about being able to see and hold the whole — the finished version, the clear path, the person we’ve decided we are — these are all made up.

Which is not a reason to despair. It’s an invitation.

Maybe you are sitting with something that feels stuck, or finished in all the wrong ways, or like it should mean more than it currently does. Or maybe you are deep in grief, deep in the stuck place.  I want to offer you this:

Cut more than is comfortable.

Sit with the pieces. Let it look like nothing for a while. Stop trying to reassemble it into its old shape. Listen in the dark hours of nighttime. Sit in the woods. Ask the land.

The material you’re working with — the question you’re holding, the life chapter that’s run its course, the relationship or work or identity that did what it came to do — has its own idea about what it wants to become. It is not waiting for your plan. It is waiting for your willingness to not know.

I started making journal quilts to process pain, to make something beautiful out of hard things, to find my way through. That was the whole intention: take the wound, make the quilt, understand the lesson, move on.

What I didn’t know then — what I had to cut apart countless quilts to learn — is that the work was never just for me. My deconstructing and reconstructing, my willingness to be in the not-knowing, my vulnerability in letting things come apart before they come back together: this is not only personal. It belongs to all of us. There is a line I keep returning to: “there are people in every era who, amidst the chaos, choose to plant seeds for a thriving future. They don’t know what will grow. They plant anyway.” (theregenerators.org).

That’s what I think we’re doing when we cut into the present.

The future that leaks out belongs to everyone.

The quilt I cut up that hard winter is finished now. It has a new name. It is not about what I made it to be about. It is more beautiful than the original and it is asking questions I haven’t finished answering yet.