This morning, I reached into the pocket of my coat and found a tiny pinecone.
I'd picked it up on a walk a couple of days ago, apparently deciding it was worth bringing home. Then I'd forgotten all about it. There it was, nestled in the corner of my pocket, a little souvenir of an ordinary afternoon.
I turned it over in my hand, admiring its perfect little scales, and wondered what had caught my attention about this particular pinecone. There must have been dozens scattered along the path. Why this one?
I don't remember.
But I do remember the walk. The bright sunshine, the cool air, the sound of leaves underfoot, the particular pleasure of being outside with nowhere I urgently needed to be.
And now, thanks to a tiny pinecone, I have a little piece of that morning to keep.
This is how collecting begins, I think. Not with a plan or a purpose, necessarily. Sometimes it's simply the impulse to pick something up, slip it into a pocket, and carry it home.
A small act of noticing.
I've been thinking lately about how this practice of noticing, collecting, and keeping follows us wherever we go.
It begins in the most familiar places. At the kitchen table. In the garden. On the morning walk. In the grocery store, where the colors of the produce might catch our eye, or a handwritten sign might make us smile.
We gather little bits of our days without always realizing we're doing it. Receipts tucked into books. Photographs on our phones. A sentence overheard in a café. A feather on the windowsill. The ticket from an afternoon at the museum.
Evidence of a life being lived.
And sometimes, when we take the time to arrange these fragments on a page, tuck them into a handmade book, or simply pause long enough to remember why we kept them, something rather wonderful happens.
The ordinary becomes visible.
Not because we've made it extraordinary, but because we've paid attention.
And here's what I love about this practice: it travels with us.
We can take it across town to a neighborhood we've never explored, or to a little village halfway around the world. The scenery changes. The language changes. The things that catch our attention may be entirely unfamiliar.
But the practice remains the same.
We notice. We collect. We keep.
I've had the great pleasure of teaching art workshops in beautiful places far from home. And while I love the excitement of arriving somewhere new, I've come to realize that what stays with me afterward isn't always the grand or remarkable thing.
It's often the smallest detail.
A scrap of fabric found at a market. The faded paint color of a shutter against an old stone wall. The sound of cups being stacked in a café. A handwritten price tag. The way the morning light falls across a table.
The little things that tell us what it felt like to be there.
And isn't that what we're really trying to keep?
Not simply a record of where we've been, but a little evidence of how we experienced it.
The beautiful thing is that we don't have to travel anywhere at all to begin.
We can practice right here, in the places we know by heart. We can become curious about our own neighborhoods, our own routines, our own ordinary days. We can learn to look at familiar things as though we're seeing them for the first time.
And then, when we do find ourselves somewhere new, we already know how to pay attention.
We don't need to go somewhere extraordinary to collect a meaningful life.
But when we do go somewhere extraordinary, we know how to notice it.
I think that's what I've been discovering through all these years of making art from the bits and pieces of my days. The practice isn't really about the things we gather. It's about the relationship we develop with the world around us.
The willingness to be curious. To linger. To recognize that something small might be worth remembering.
And perhaps, to trust that our own experiences are worthy of being kept.
The tiny pinecone is sitting on my worktable now, alongside a few scraps of paper and other things that have found their way home with me.
I don't know yet what I'll do with it. Maybe it will become part of a little collection. Maybe I'll draw it. Maybe it will simply sit there for a while, reminding me of an ordinary afternoon in November.
That's enough.
After all, the practice travels with us.
And sometimes, it comes home in our pockets.
