As one year ends and another starts, I feel the urge to talk about inspiration. Many of us start each year with resolutions (not me), big plans for the new year (sometimes me!), or in search of the next exciting project (always me!).
We all want it, we seek it out, we despair if we can’t find it. What, exactly, is inspiration?
I love that the definition includes breathing! Because that it where inspiration starts, our daily lives. What do you love? What makes your skip a beat? What makes you draw a quick breath? A visit to the fabric shop? A walk on a beach, a blooming garden, a bright cloudless day in the countryside, a quilt show, perhaps? Almost anything we enjoy can inspire us. And inspiration makes us happy quilters.
My annual inspiration for the past 33 years is the Zoolights display at the Point Defiance Park Zoo and Aquarium where I live. I moved to western Washington in 1989 and in 1990 attended my first Zoolights event.
For those who have never heard of Zoolights, it is a holiday lights display on zoo grounds, often involving animal depictions. Our Zoolights runs between Nov 25 and Jan 2 each year.
I am sad when people say, like the bagger at the grocery yesterday, that they haven’t been in years and years. That they used to take their kids, but no, they haven’t been been lately, that “after all”, it is the same old lights each year.
How do we tire of beauty?
And no, its not the same! Three decades have brought some changes. Gone are the old glass bulbs and now there are over 800,000 LEDs which take so much less power and provide a wide variety of dazzling displays. And we change, bit by bit, and our perspectives change.
There have been challenges…A huge windstorm in 1990 brought down massive tress in the park, and tangled the carefully strung lights into a jumble. A massive, icy snow storm in 2017 covered the entirty of western Washington, causing the show and life as we knew it, to come to a screeching halt. But Zoolights has persevered, and I have too.
My favorite display is a simple one, a now iconic one, the Flame Tree which is simply a tree decorated with green lights on the trunk and purple lights on the branches. Many local residents decorate their yard with such a tree and most of us refer to it as The Purple Tree. There is a bench in front of the tree where countless families have lined up to take a photo. I have three decades of such photos! And each year, we repeat the exercise, with the cast changing as life changes occur.
The colors, the lights, the fun new displays and beloved old, the energy of the displays and people who come to see them alway lift my spirit.
Several years ago, I make a quilted Purple Tree, which I hang every year in my home.
Need inspiration? Think about what you love in your life, what you dream about, what brings you joy and what you consider to be beautiful. Inspiration is just a thought, a heart beat away. Sometimes is something complete new to you and other times, the beloved familiar can provide the spark.
Happy New Year and happy quilting to all!
Lennea
Handmade by Lennea 
Until you began posting about it, I’d never heard of Zoo Lights. The Botanical Gardens in NYC have displays, and Bethel Woods (original Woodstock site) does now too. According to a good friend, paper piecing is going to be big in 2024, so maybe I’ll get my tree made.
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