“I learn by going where I have to go.” — Theodore Roethke

In June, I had the second-of-two-foot-surgeries in one year. For the first week afterward, I had to keep my foot elevated for 23 hours a day. Things got better from there. But healing is slow, at least that’s how it feels. And as readers familiar with this column know, I’m a person who finds stillness in movement, who is most at ease in the instant that one foot lifts up, before it touches the ground ahead. It’s not perpetual motion that I’m after, I’m happy on the couch with a good book, but being immobile day after day, hour upon hour is unpleasantly raucous. Alarm bells blaring in my head begin and my heart goes into an erratic frenzy — every cell within me shouting, “This body is meant to be in motion!”.

Before this surgery, a friend said, “You know, last summer, post-surgery, you were wildly productive. You completed several paper and stitched collages.” I couldn’t remember a thing about that time except that for too many months, I’d been unable to walk on the trails I love so much. I didn’t refute her, but even if a blast of creativity had happened once, I was certain it wouldn’t happen again. Though I’m a particularly optimistic person, needing a second surgery since scar tissue — a result of the first surgery — had wrapped around and was impinging a nerve, and a doctor I trusted told me that if the nerve wasn’t released, I’d lose function of my foot, was depressing.

One of the things I love best about the imagination and creative process is that I don’t completely understand it — its workings are mysterious. But I do wholly bow down to its call. (Funny how similar it is to the body’s workings — I often don’t understand them either but I do have to respond even when I don’t like it.) The older I get, the stronger that creativity call is and the easier it is to respond. Brian Edwards and Kim Smith of the Monterey Public Library invited me to teach a class in July, two weeks post-surgery. They wanted some kind of visual art project that was connected to books and reading. I suggested we make altered books.

Many people have a deeply ingrained — and understandable — aversion to marring books, so you might think it counter-intuitive that a library would welcome such an activity. But did you know that books are frequently found in landfills and not because some nitwit is banning them either but because they’re old, in disrepair, or are simply no longer being enjoyed? In fact, nearly 320 million books end up there every year! Giving a book no longer appreciated for its content a second life is a perfect example of upcycling.

I was thrilled the library liked my idea which meant, of course, I had to make an altered book so I could provide them with an image to use in promoting the class. From my stack of old books, I pulled out a small bird book that I bought at a yard sale years ago — “Audubon Bird Guide: Eastern Land Birds,” published in 1949. Into it I cut three windows, at various depths, and into those windows I put some birds. On the facing copyright page, I glued a compass. Birds come with internal compasses, but mine can be a bit wonky. A few days before surgery, the book was complete so I emailed a couple of photos to the library.Visual art invites a person to engage ways of knowing that aren’t based in the familiar language of words that we use daily for both the mundane and the sublime. Sometimes, even word-woman that I am, I need to be wordless, to discover the relationship between image, color, form, and memory, dream, and questions. But it’s more than that. To make a picture fires parts of the brain that writing doesn’t, causing connections to be made that can’t be made in any other way. Doing so gives me a more expansive, less linear way to process, respond to and integrate experience. Studies show that activities such as drawing and painting can stimulate the brain and increase its overall function. So, making and viewing art makes us happy because it makes the brain happy! After making the altered book, I felt more settled, less afraid, willing to close my eyes and give control over to the anesthesiologist and the surgeon.

Less than a week after surgery, I felt my imagination like a train driving through me, impatiently directing me, and like every other time this has happened, I had to hold onto my hat and accept the wind blowing through my hair ,though I was flat on my back with my wrapped-up foot and its 3-plus-inch incision resting aloft. Apparently, my friend had been right, after all.

Using a rather dull Exacto knife, I cut out the center of another book. Among my pile of photos of long-dead relatives — people unfamiliar to me and the long-dead relatives of friends, was a sepia photo of a young Italian woman who caught my eye so I cut her away from the background in which she had been standing for many decades. When making a collage I get to put people and objects in new settings and I get to adjust proportions. Things aren’t always as they appear to be, and sometimes the way we experience them emotionally is actually the greater truth. I put the woman where I wished I could be, walking in nature, amidst flowers, birds and bees, dwarfed by her surroundings. The act of imagining and putting myself in the picture, as if I were that woman, allowed me to feel closer to the places I wished I could be and by doing so I was reminded of nature’s vastness.

The inspiration for the next book I altered came from one of my favorite artists — the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. His figures have particularly deep-set eyes. If you go to Arezzo or San Sepolcro in the region of Umbria in Central Italy, you can see women who look like they just walked out of one of his paintings. I began with a portion of della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, one of the few extant paintings of the Virgin Mary pregnant. You too can go to Monterchi to see her in the Civic Museum whose holdings include this painting alone like my husband and I did on our first Italian holiday in 1999. That was back when the painting was unprotected; we could have touched her. Some years later, when we returned, we had to view the Madonna through plexiglass, something della Francesca could have never imagined. I love how she touches her belly, how the gussets of the dress part to make room for her growing baby.

Carefully, I cut the Madonna out of the rest of the picture, added a bit of delicate lace to the collar of her dress, beads and sequins to its bodice, put a red crown atop her head. The book I cut the center out of to hold her was one my mother had given me, an old edition of Dante’s “Paradiso.” Into the window I’d made, I slipped the embellished figure, added more decoration to the book’s perimeter including a little sign that reads, “Seek.”

This process of making — whether the form is words or images — I call “Finding My Story.” Doing so liberated me from thoughts about my foot and my frustration at being unable to walk. Making a picture is also a kind of movement, and not just metaphoric, but one of progression, and transformation. The maker starts in one place and ends up somewhere else. For me, that is always a place I’ve never been before. Since my thinking wasn’t clear enough to write, I satisfied my needs for creativity and movement by altering more books. I’m grateful to the Monterey Library for their invitation that gave me the much-needed direction.

The last book I “rewrote” is — no surprise — called “Flight.” It too began with an old birding book. I painted watercolor washes on the pages and stamped some trees to provide the birds with a beautiful place to fly. Someone — I’m not sure who — is looking out from beyond the trees, past the birds and staring directly at me.

A few weeks ago, I received the go-ahead to slowly begin walking again. The doctor assured me I couldn’t mess up my foot; it would just be a matter of managing the swelling and the pain. The most I can say at the moment is that’s what I’m doing — managing — and I’m back to writing. Hopefully by late autumn, I’ll be writing to you from somewhere out on the trail, even if I’m not yet able to walk far. And hopefully, you’ll also find yourself beyond where you could have predicted going.

Vecchione’s next class for the Monterey Public Library, a writing workshop in which we’ll take inspiration from and be inspired by banned books, will be on Oct. 3, from 10:30 a.m. to noon. Check out the library website for details and to enroll: montereylibrary.org.