What does this have to do with my free inquiry project, which was embroidery? Embroidery brought me face to face with the mysteries of the universe.

What? Huh? How? Alysha, that sounds ridiculous! 

It may sound ridiculous, but it’s true. This free inquiry project has brought me to a lot of places I wasn’t expecting to go. When I initially set out to learn how to embroider, I thought I would learn how to embroider, maybe work on my hand-eye coordination and my spatial planning skills. Well — I am still pretty heckin novice with the embroidery stuff and I don’t think either of those other two things have gotten better. And I absolutely could not care less.

Embroidery became less the object of exploration and more the medium of exploration. It allowed me to dig deeper into myself. It allowed me to think about my past by connecting a craft with my family history. It allowed me to be able to relax and enjoy myself during a crazy time. It allowed me to think about the things I do and why I do them.

Ok but that still doesn’t say anything about how embroidery brought you face to face with the mysteries of the universe. 

Ok ok ok, I’m getting there. The ability to explore a new hobby and to have time to myself really facilitated me thinking about what else I’m interested in, what else I want to explore. And what I am interested in right now is THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That’s right — the whole maybe infinite, rapidly expanding, ginormous, confounding universe.

Many of my classmates are probably sick of hearing about how much I love listening to podcasts about space — I simply will not shut up about it. I began listening to space stuff to help me fall asleep at night earlier in the semester when I was experiencing a lot of stress. I find that contemplating my cosmic utter insignificance is very calming (I have done many informal polls with my friends and most of them also experience this, very few are neutral about it, and even fewer find their cosmic insignificance deeply unsettling).

More importantly, though, learning about the universe makes me truly feel like it is good to not know things and that not knowing something is an interesting and thought-provoking experience..if you allow it to be. Not knowing something lets us wonder.

I started off this free inquiry wanting to be able to embroidery space things. Well, that interest in embroidering space things led me to want to learn more and more and more about space. Sitting down to embroidery gave me opportunities to do so.

The title of this post — “Wondering is for Everyone” — is a quote pulled from my new favorite podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, which is hosted by Jorge Cham, the roboticist/cartoonist featured in the video at the beginning of this post, and Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist who works at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. They’ve been teaching me about black holes, white holes, wormholes, particles, the most extreme parts of the universe, what happens when galaxies collide, etc. etc. etc. I do not understand the vast majority of it, but I understand just enough to be amazed and to constantly want to know more. I think part of what makes things like particle physics and astrophysics so interesting is just how much not knowing is involved — for all the answers there are, theres many, many, many more questions to be asked. What’s more — there’s acceptance of unanswered and even unanswerable questions. It isn’t necessary to know everything, but boy, it sure is fun to try.

Back to the quote — “Wondering is for everyone.” I take this to mean that it’s not just up to “professionals” within disciplines to ask questions about whatever it is the discipline looks at. Everyone gets to ask questions. Everyone gets to contribute to answers. This, to me, is what the essence of “free inquiry” should be.

Asking questions, postulating answers, going down paths you didn’t expect — this is inquiry, this is wondering. It was only appropriate that my final embroidery project before the end of the semester was this: