The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary precision and extraordinary passion, may have taken less time had she not needed to supplement her paltry elementary schoolteacher income by tilling potato fields and pruning plum trees in rural Bulgaria. Born in the final years of the sovereign monarchy Bulgaria briefly enjoyed after five centuries of Ottoman occupation, she had worked on her embroidery in the middle of the Communist dictatorship that had begun when she was five and would last until I was five. Denied university admission on account of her family’s opposition to the regime, my grandmother never strained a single synapse on higher mathematics, yet her embroidery exudes the elegant simplicity of a great theorem — a living affirmation of trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell’s insistence on the needle as an instrument of the mind.

She had learned the technique from her own grandmother, who had in turn learned it from her grandmother before that — generations of women using thread and needle to pattern a world of chaos and peril into something sensical, something resinous with feeling and time, defying the banality of mere survival with a quiet, methodical insistence of beauty.

The year the Communist dictatorship curled its fist around Bulgaria, the English writer Rebecca West (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983) — one of the finest, subtlest, most passionate and precise minds I have ever read — traveled to the Balkans and recounted her encounter with those ancient cultures in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (public library), at the heart of which is a reckoning with the relationship between art and aliveness, between storytelling and resilience, between the things we make and the world we make.

In village after village, West saw elderly women bent over their embroideries, saw in what they did a way of “examining life as they lived it and inquiring into their destiny as it overtook them” — a philosophy for living in the shape of a craft, passed down the generations to make life more livable. She writes:

The old women [are] not fully conscious of the part their embroideries play in the preservation of their ancient culture: when an Englishwoman plays a sonata by Purcell she is not likely to feel that she is maintaining English musical tradition. Yet these women are certainly aware that they are about some special business when they sew. I am told by an Englishwoman who has collected such embroideries for twenty years and knows their makers well that it is an esoteric craft, those who are expert in it do not give away their mystery. Many of the themes which often reappear in the designs have names and symbolic meanings which are not confided to strangers, and a woman will sometimes refuse to discuss the embroidery she has worked on a garment made for her own use. When they marry they make caps for their bridegrooms and about these they are always resolutely reserved. Here is, indeed, another proof of the impossibility of history. There cannot be taken an inventory of time’s contents when some among the most precious are locked away in inaccessible parts and lose their essence when they are moved to any place where they are likely to be examined carefully, when their owners are ignorant of parts of their nature and keep secret such knowledge of them as they have.

In this West sees a scale model of all we call tradition:

A tradition is not a material entity that can survive apart from any human agency. It can live only by a people’s power to grasp its structure, and to answer to the warmth of its fires.

I look at my grandmother’s embroidery, aflame with her life, prayerful as an Islamic mosaic, perfect as a Euclidean proof, and West’s closing words resound like a bell in the cathedral of time:

If during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe. We shall discover what work we have been called to do.

In my early forties, living through a rupture of overwhelming complexity and no small measure of heartache, I took up embroidery — untrained, unpatterned, not following any tradition, more like jazz improvisation to my grandmother’s Bach cantatas. I did it daily, obsessively, not understanding what it was doing for me but trusting that it was doing something, shifting something. It did. It was a way of learning, not with the mind but with the hands, that you have to make a hole to make a stitch.