capital W wealth
the kind felt in your bones
100,000 tulips are blooming at 53rd & Prairie in Chicago. They’re part of an installation called Redefining Redlining by the artist Amanda Williams. The tulips stand where 21 homes used to.
A couple weeks ago, I visited this spot with my parents and partner. As we walked the site my mom said something along the lines of “wouldn’t it be better if the money spent on this project had just been given to the community?”
I winced at her inquiry. Mostly because I have had that thought too, on one of my darker days, my most perfectionist days. When my mind tries to convince me that art doesn’t matter.
Minutes after my mom posed her question, a neighbor yelled “Isn’t it wonderful?! I don’t know who did this, but it’s beautiful!” while heading back into his house. Ah, like a clap back from the universe. 100,000 blooming tulips. an invitation to imagine a new world together.
That is wealth.
This week I worked on two quilt blocks for the Greenwood Quilt Memorial, a project to collaboratively create 18 quilts representing the 18,000 quilts destroyed in the Tulsa Race Massacre. People from outside of Oklahoma were invited to send in quilt blocks.
I had never thought about generational wealth in terms of quilts. Only of assets like the homes that once occupied those tulip-filled lots. I didn’t really understand quilts until I made one.
this feels like capital W wealth.
not the kind of wealth we are taught to desire.
a wealth that is felt in the bones.
a sturdiness that will hold when there may be no financial net.
slow. steady. rooted.
I wrote this the night after I finished my first quilt. I think it was the sturdiness that jarred me the most. It was just so heavy. I immediately felt the value of it, its utility. I had brought a thing to life that could outlast me.
I can’t fathom the loss of 18,000 quilts. The value of those textiles alone and then to unpack the human loss - history, smell, remnants of relatives passed, the hands that labored for them. the physical & spiritual warmth.
I thought about this as I made these quilt blocks. I also thought about trees and portals and trees as witnesses to our human history; what memories they might store. I think the practice of quilt making is giving me some sort of rootedness I lacked before, maybe an ancestral through line. It’s getting me closer to the ground and I am grateful.