This morning, at the Creativity Conference which precedes the Open House, Maria above,  was explaining the Gee’s Bend way of making quilts – follow your feelings, not a plan, to Sandy Van Dyk. She taught a two-hour class in intuitive creativity, intuitive potholder making.

It was a sweet sight, everyone sitting around their machines putting their potholders together, a preview of what Maria will be teaching to victims of sex trafficking in Calcutta in February. Maria is a natural teacher, warm, open and enthusiastic.

And she is perhaps among the world’s foremost authorities in intuitive potholder-making, she may have invented the genre. As with writing, many of the students were initially tense, but they loosened and later, Maria and I realized we were, in many ways, teaching the same thing.

We believe in encouragement and intuition in all things creative, we need to look inward for our answers, not outward. It doesn’t matter what other people think, it matters what we think and feel. The morning was beautiful for us, and meaningful as well. I hope it was the same for the students.