The Craft Cabinet
The Barney bag & my mom’s craft cabinet taught me to create.
As a child, you could often find me on the floor in the back room of our tiny house, elbow deep in finger paint, glitter, scrap paper and pipe cleaners. My mom kept a cabinet back there full of supplies for this and leftovers from that. The big sis and I basically had free reign of it, and I adored it.
Eventually we moved and the craft cabinet morphed into various other forms and shapes, but it’s always been around: an entity collecting the pieces that held the potential for a masterpiece (or a piece of… something). At some point I grew up enough to stock it myself — salvaging remnants here and there or impulse buying beads and other bits. Even now I could produce 48992437 projects without having to go more than 15 feet from my laptop (True story).
The thing about creating is that it takes supernatural vision — it requires the ability to see what isn’t but could yet be. That’s what all my time in front of the craft cabinet taught me: to see.
But it’s more than just the physical possibilities. The way that colorful paper, sequins, scissors, glue, paper towel tubes, paste, paint, buttons and fabric filled the shelves of that cabinet – that very same way – the memories, ideas, experiences and people I encounter fill me up, and you too. We all carry cabinets so full of life the doors won’t close. We can either leave it in there to yellow and fade, or we can use the life we’ve stored up for more: create.
Create: Connections. Dreams. Hope. A Home. Love. Trust. Healing. Safe havens. Stories. More.
Just for kicks:
SadPotatoes 
❤ this
Josue, yay! Thanks.