I said to the star, 'Consume me'.
I said to the star, 'Consume me'.
Today’s email is a bit of a wild ride, I’m not going to lie to you. We’ll be tumbling from Virginia Woolf's consuming star to Lucy Pettway's observant quilting, from the humble bee and insect kingdom…to the vast expanse of space.
Recap: what you can expect here? A weekly-ish email featuring: 🐝 narrative non-fiction about/from beekeeping 🐝reflections on art witchcraft 🐝wildlife gardening and how to find yourself. Learn more and compare the different tiers.
Have you ever looked for something, like your glasses, and they’re right over there on the table in front of you but you couldn’t consciously see them? Hold onto that sleepwalking through the world feeling.
Let’s wake up to all the creatures and plants and life around us. How can we start noticing the small things that have always been there, waiting for our attention.
How can we find our bloody glasses?
Let’s start with exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen: Simon Barnes and his book Rewild Yourself: Making Nature More Visible in our Lives.
Honestly, this book was the main inspiration for me to even start this newsletter (along with the trippy 2001: A Space Odyssey beekeeping moment I had, which I’ll get to in a second), and there are so many parts that have stuck with me ever since I first read it.
Including this:
"How absurd it is: a miracle of colour that regularly comes into back gardens and parks, not to mention railway lines and carparks, and I hadn't seen it at all. I had looked at it many times but I hadn't seen it."
My personal back garden Overview Effect
Astronauts speak of the "Overview Effect". Even William Shatner aka James Tiberius Kirk felt it when he went up into space in 2021.
This effect is described like a profound shift in perspective that can happen when we view the Earth from orbit …and feel the overwhelming awareness of our planet’s fragility.
“There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.” Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution
But you don't need to leave the planet to experience this. For me, it happened in my own garden, watching bees.
It was like a sudden split moment realisation, like that bit in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
My inner horizons opened up. I talked about it a bit before, in Learning to see the world, thanks to insects:
“Learning about bees and watching them go about their business was my own private Overview Effect. They're there tumbling over each other, in the dark a lot of the time, just like us. And we're all connected: us, them, everything, all darknesses, all tumblings, all risings into the sunlight, all of it. It opened up a silent space in me that I didn't know I could grow."
Once I had this feeling, I couldn’t get it back in its box anymore. YOU CAN’T UNSEE THIS. Life is everywhere, and everything was connecting in strange, beautiful ways.
In another book, the totally batshit & utterly magnificent novel The Waves (Virginia Woolf), I find echoes of this yearning for connection and understanding:
“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
I feel the inner supernova of transformation in wanting to be joined with stars: and realising we actually already are.
From seeing to being: Lucy Pettway's observant quilting
So what are we meant to actually do with all of this enlightenment? Like, for real?
I suggest using our in-the-flesh experiences of this wonderful, terrifying, beautiful world in our own acts of creation. Making things with your hands really brings people into their own bodies, so why not echo nature back to itself through your living being?
That sounds like a big noble task, ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no thanks.
Where are you even meant to start? How about with, like, functional art.
Drift from Virginia Woolf’s imagery to an isolated, rural hamlet in Alabama USA. We find a very special community of quilters, and one woman in particular: Lucy Pettway ‘Luncky’.
She made quilts for seven decades (!!!!!), and rarely repeated a pattern. She had a restless curiosity, and her quilts, born from her daily observations, were transubstantiated into extraordinary works of art, designed to be used every day.
Her quilts fully embody this practice of noticing and being. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the quilt up above:
[Pettway] carried paper and pencil as she walked to and from her work in the fields each day and jotted down things that caught her eye, later using them as inspiration for her quilt designs. This extraordinary work is the only Gee’s Bend quilt in the collection that seems to be intentionally pictorial. Using the favored Housetop and Bricklayer pattern blocks, Pettway created an imaginary aerial view of the old Pettway plantation, with the large owner’s house at the top and four slave cabins below. The small printed calicos to the left of the houses represent the fields, while on the right, the blue Alabama River flows between red banks.
I would never have even seen or engaged with this if it wasn’t for the work of printmaker, book artist and educator Sarah Matthews. She has a printmaking project in Wanderlust 2024, which draws on Lusy Pettways’s work.
Waking Up to Wonder
From Woolf's consuming star to Pettway's observant quilting, from the humble bee to the vast expanse of space. We’ve been everywhere today, opening ourselves to a richer, more connected experience of life. When we start noticing the small things - the intricate dance of bees, the play of light on leaves, the patterns in our daily surroundings.
This week, I double dog dare you to root out your own moment of seeing. What small wonder in your everyday world have you been overlooking? Share your experiences in the comments - I'd love to hear about your own moments of "waking up" to the world around you.
Thanks for reading
See you next week! I always love to hear from you in a comment, with a ❤️, or even a restack to Substack Notes. 🐝
Jessica
Loved this! Thought provoking.