Is Chaos Creative?

...or am I just incredibly messy?

Hard to tell.  Both, I think.  I'm at the beginning of a new rug (one reason I haven't been posting drawings much is that I've been so busy doing punchneedle embroidery, finishing off my last traditionally hooked rug, and now starting a new traditionally hooked rug). 

Here's what my studio floor looked like last night and still today.

Collection of possible background colors.

Collection of possible motif and accent colors.

I guess I know myself well enough to know that I need to throw stuff all over the floor and leave it while I look at it for a few days.  This mess with its stumble-inducing health hazards--you take your life in your hands trying to walk across the floor--will in fact result in much trial and error but eventually I'll be able to work out a color plan.

Many rug makers I know can pull a few wools from their neat shelves, roll them together for testing purposes, decide on an initial plan, start working, tweak a bit and then boom!  They are on their way.  Not me.  My mother would probably ask me if I was raised by wolves in Lower Slobbovia, but in fact, this is how I need to work.  Yes, for me, it's all about creating chaos and allowing things to arise out of the mess.

Pretty much like the way our minds work in meditation.  Until we learn to let things to arise out of the mess and begin to sort through them, allowing them to pass on their way, we just have the mess on our hands.  But eventually we're able to sort through it and clear the space.  Or perhaps it's just that life unfolds as it will, and things get sorted on their own.

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
Bharati Mukherjee