The word of the day is PATINA. I love the textures that the tools in my studio take on with use, the stories that the layers tell of what they have seen and where they have been. Part of what draws me toward the Benedictine path is its reverence for the tools used in the course of daily life, the items that help us move more smoothly through our work. In his Rule, Saint Benedict writes of how the cellarer—the monk responsible for the care and distribution of goods in the monastic community—is to “regard all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar, aware that nothing is to be neglected” (Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 31). What we do at the altar is not separate from what we do in the rest of our daily life; the things we use in spaces that are clearly sacred invite us to recognize the presence of the sacred in the things we use elsewhere.

What stories do your possessions tell?

Each year, I travel across the country to the Grünewald Guild, a wondrous retreat center and art-and-faith community in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. For some years I taught a class there called Soul of the Book, in which folks created books that evoked something of the sacred text of their own lives.

I don’t always make something when I’m in the midst of teaching a class, but one year, I began to create a wee book as the week unfolded. Envelopes from our cups of tea became its pages; its text, words that emerged in our conversations around the table, scribbled down on scraps of paper and tucked into the envelopes.

Tonight I open the tea-book again, leaf through its pages, pull out the sacred scraps of text that I gathered at that shared table.

As I settle into time and space and art,
there’s part of me that’s feeling rescued
said one class member as she fashioned her book.

I’m really on a binge about being happy
said an eightysomething woman who also told us,
I’m going to make my mistakes into a masterpiece
and who asked us one day,
What do you see when you close your eyes?

Books are my parallel life.

Watching the silt settle until clarity comes around.

If someone were to say something nice about me,
I would hope it would be, “She lived in the mystery.”

If you were to create a book made from the ordinary objects of your everyday life, what would it look like? If you were to compose its text from the conversations you share in, what words would appear on its pages?