I lost a friend in these waters.

But they sure are beautiful, aren’t they? Another dear friend of mine, a wonderful childhood friend, the friend who welcomed me when I moved at nine years old, when I had no other friends, his ashes are scattered in these waters that surround Nantucket.

Even before Nantucket was complicated for me, it was complicated for me.

Now it is a place reserved for those who think you “cannot be too rich or too thin.” A place so monied, it is hard to find oneself reflected in the high end shops and $50 a plate restaurants.

Thankfully, you don’t need to look at shops when you are surrounded by natural beauty. Here is the Madaket sunset. I was there for that moment. It was a wonderful moment.

And also, a busy one, with kids refusing to smile for a sunset picture, and a few of us needing to catch a bus back to town, and a few of us tired and irritable.

What Nantucket has always been to me is not a place of romance, luxury and the substance of dreams.

It has always been soundly real. Riddled with imperfections. Hard to get to (when I was a girl our only choice was a 2.5 hour ferry), and hard to live on (I learned the language of Alcoholics Anonymous as a tween because every family I babysat for had struggled with alcoholism).

Lonely there or loving it or longing for it, as I do sometimes now, anticipating our time there in the summer, full of rich people or full of drunk people, all history or all mystery, what has never faltered or altered, is the tremendous richness and depth of the natural beauty.

I do not want to weave that beauty.

I want to weave something more. I want to weave the realness, the totality, the vivid experience of the island.

This true life, and the animate wildness of the island. Here is the Nantucket Blues tapestry, one of my favorite pieces as it was woven with more than a dozen different shades of blue. It is a piece best experienced in person, for it as tactile and varied and reaching out with fibers, shells and a sense of presence.

In so many ways, Nantucket has become monochromatic. So much sameness in style, in the housing renovations, in the tastes of the super rich who dominate the summer. But there is nothing monchromatic in nature. Even “green” is a hundred hues. And the ocean? It isn’t blue. It’s a hundred other colors.

“You are so lucky to have lived there,” some say of my experience. And they are not wrong. Yet, as I know you know, life is not a one-note song. We gather the joy and the sorrow, the beauty and the mess, we hold so tenderly the precious shells and they break any way. And even then, the pieces are treasures, are lovely.

This is so much the fullness and aliveness and completeness of what I seek to express in my Nantucket weaving. Not a fantastical magical world–but one that is magical in its realness. In the beauty and majesty of the sea, which seemed to swallow up my friend whole, but in whose waters I now delightedly play with my children.

My piece Nantucket Ferry Wake is made from rope, plastic bags, repurposed fabric and yarn. It is available for purchase as is the Nantucket Blues tapestry. And both express what we all really need. Not beauty without depth or the shallow, superficial play of summer lived only on the surface. But a breadth of loveliness that holds. It. All. Your hurts. My hurts. The good. The not so good. The loss. The possibility. The hope.

Honestly, my heart has broken more than once and I know yours has too. The beauty of the sea is the same beauty you and I reflect. The exact opposite of the monochromatic. Instead a wonderful interplay of light and shadow and color and movement. It’s this that I weave, the blend of repurposed and new, of on purpose and accidental, which articulates with fiber and cloth, the dynamic improvisation of life itself. Ever so simple. Ever so complicated.

If you have an interest in Nantucket Ferry Wake, please reach out via email to sam@thesamanthawilde.com. You can find the Nantucket Blues tapestry in the shop.