Hidden Tapestries.

"Often I speculate as to other peoples patterns. Given the same material, each of us would weave a different design.One housewife from her cleaning, cooking, mending, will fashion something drab and commonplace. another from the same routine will spin a gay design out of  her pleasure in the craft of homemaking. One man will make a dingy pattern from his daily walk to work, while his neighbour weaves into it little sparkling fragments from that same walk, made of his delight in shape of clouds and shadows, the sound of raindrops chuckling in the gutter, the fanlight of a Georgian doorway. Old Mrs A. spins into her pattern ugly shapes and livid hues made of her spite against the neighbours, while next door Mrs. B. is fashioning a mellow tapestry from gardening and books and kindly thoughts.

Each of us shows the world some part of the pattern we are weaving, but most of it we hide away in secret, either because we cherish privacy or because we cannot help ourselves. So we may never see our neighbours finished patchwork; we can only guess at the non-entity or brave design. It may be that many an apparently conventional pattern is quixotically blazoned with strange fantasies of the imagination, and that a dim design flashes into unsuspected loveliness when illuminated by the glory of the hidden spirit. How we should exclaim in admiration, or delight, or horror, at the revelation of those hidden tapestries!…and yet, to speculate is usually more entaining than to know."

Leonora Starr, To Please Myself Again, 1952.