Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Picture Yourself as a Quilt

Illustrated by Benjamin Fisher

This piece is part of the "World in a Grain of Sand" project, which invites people to envision an object from various points of view––scientific, artistic, technological, historical, philosophical––and to show the many associations and interconnections that can be glimpsed in any particular object. One of the objects the project invites people to consider are “grains”––or any of the "units" that make up our world, from grains of sand to cells to atoms to sub-atomic particles to planets to galaxies and others, including perhaps "the unit" of the individual, the family, a society. 

We all begin as mere particles.

Two particles, to be precise. Each with different but equal potential. You begin, as a Biblical image suggests, as stitches that God has knitted inside your mother’s womb. Before you have become conscious of what your world is, what life is, what a breeze is, what philosophy is, you are already growing; with each passing week, month, year, more stitches, more swatches are added to the vast blanket of your life. As you grow, you add to your tapestry: taste, smell, music, friendship, love, pain. There is no restriction to what life’s quilt can include. Some pieces may be silky and lavender, while others are ugly and itchy and you’d prefer to keep them hidden. It is all added to our eclectic array of pieces of fabric to culminate into something unlike anyone else’s quilt. Without the smallest pieces, the seemingly most insignificant moments, you lose all of the stitching, the element that keeps our quilt the whole which it is. Your own eyes, ears, mouths, and hands that God has knit to see, hear, speak, taste, and touch so many different things in so many different ways.

Your quilt is unique. It is special. It is yours.