Wondering...

The past few days have seen me pulling out old projects to work on, and rediscovering my love of quilting and cross-stitching (as I've already mentioned.) I have no trouble understanding why I love needlework and most fiberarts (except felting--no sparks for that.) I don't even wonder why I love them, I just do. Kinda like why most men love football and most women love shoes. It it what it is.

What stumps me, though, is why I feel the need to make every darn thing I admire. Why can't I oooh and ahhh over a beautiful quilt or two (or twenty) without wanting to make it or them? Even if I were wealthy, I can't imagine buying a quilt that I loved and being satisfied with that. Oh, don't get me wrong. I'd be buying antique quilts by the dozens, but I'd be spending an equal amount of money on fabric to reproduce them all. Why must I buy yarn to weave dishtowels when (yeah, you know what's coming) I can buy them for a buck at Walmart? Or take those gorgeous Navajo rugs I saw in a trading post in Arizona a few years back. The proprietor kindly let me take pictures, since I didn't have the $10,000 readily available to buy one of them, but it's not enough to look at the photos and sigh over their beauty. I want to make one. Or two, or a dozen.

The same thing is true of music. It's not enough to listen to Itzhak Perlman's recording of the Bach Violin Partitas & Sonatas. I want to play them. In fact, I bought the music for them just a month or two after beginning violin lessons--an exercise in complete and total self-delusion, because those pieces are the summit of virtuoso violin playing. Let me say now that I know in my heart that I will never in my natural lifetime be able to play any of them, but that doesn't keep me from dreaming about it. And I've taken only a few months of piano lessons, but I still long to learn to play Debussy's "Claire de Lune." Or what about the fabulous virtuoso guitar riffs of Stevie Ray Vaughn in "Little Wing." Listening is just not enough.

I guess I shouldn't complain, and I'm not. I'll never be bored, just mildly frustrated. What I'm really wondering, though, is why I don't have that same longing to cook fantastic meals after I've eaten one in a nice restaurant. But then again, I don't really love shoes either.