In 2020 an article I wrote about my journey as a maker was published by the popular magazine, “Mortise and Tenon”. In the essay I told the story of how I came to identify my motivations as a craftsperson. Looking back on the article I remember how I felt as if I had just bumped my toe on the small exposed tip of a huge stone. It had a lot more weight under the surface than I had the ability to see, but I could feel it. The reflections in that essay were important first steps.
In the article I wrote, I was searching for my own place in the world of making. I identified my own loss of connection from something that felt more expansive. I felt alienated in many ways; from myself, from community, and (sometimes) from the land I was living on. I wondered how I could connect these things. The essay ended with:
“ Ah. Yes, the Brook Trout ladle. We bring it out in the Spring when the stream is rushing. The snow melts off the hemlock and drips cold, fat drops on the back of your neck. That’s my place, that’s where I should be as a craftsperson; to make objects worthy of the brook trout. One could do no better.”
That last paragraph is one identifying a true longing. It was a deep and heartfelt wish to re-establish a connection that I felt between myself and the landscape I was born into. I had already identified meaningful symbology and started to use it in my work. Quilt patterns are a big part of identifying my ancestry/community, even if the textile industry in the US has a tragic history. It felt important to acknowledge that whether or not I like all parts of that story. In a lot of respects it made me more galvanized to use quilt piecework in my carvings. It felt truthful. But I still had a lot of questions and it was really just the beginning. I had identified what I wanted to be in that article but I didn’t know why I felt something was missing in the first place. How had that happened?
Identifying that missing piece made me ask more questions, like: Why don’t I have community wide celebrations for anything? A celebration that brings my neighbors together for anything beyond a picnic and exchanging pleasantries? Where are the rituals for renewal? How do I go about filling my life with deeper connection to myself, the land and a community? How is that accomplished? I realized I wanted to delve deeper into my own philosophy.
Now, it might seem like a silly thing, and it conjures black and white photos of professors wearing ascots and monocles, but everyone in the whole world is operating from a philosophy, it’s your storyline. What story do you operate under? Do your actions and life align with what you believe? Do you want a new story? Do you want to be free of all stories?
Those are some heady considerations, but it’s what my craft process is about. I started asking why I felt like I didn’t have a story that was connected to anything meaningful or ancient? Where were the cultural myths based in something that felt connected to my heart and the land and people in a way that superseded the shallow waters of what it means to be American? Why, as a youngster, did I sit in the woods and think, “This is what church is supposed to feel like.”
After I wrote that article for M&T, I was listening to “Gathering Moss” by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, and noted her experience at a wealthy client’s home as she looked at different artifacts being displayed in a gallery:
“… At the center of the atrium, in a discretely alarmed case, spotlights were focused on an elaborate hairpiece. It’s intricate design of bees and flowers was carved from luminous ivory. I was immediately struck by how out of place it seemed on it’s velvet platform, more like a stolen treasure than a work of art. How much more beautiful it would have been in the black oiled hair of the artists wife, and more authentic. In a display case a thing becomes only a facsimile of itself like the drum hung on the gallery wall. A drum becomes authentic when human hand meets wood and hide. Only then they fulfill its intention.”
When I first heard the quote above, it was as if I had stumbled upon a treasure, but I couldn’t tell what exactly it was that had fallen into my lap. It was like seeing a meteorite for the first time. There was something oddly familiar about it but also otherworldly: truth was locked inside, waiting to be interpreted.
After being struck by the cosmic metaphor, I scribbled some notes on the closest scrap of paper- “We’ve become facsimile humans.” Later, I would debate the word I had chosen: facsimile / Noun: an exact copy, especially of written or printed material. “That’s not quite right”, I thought. When I closed my eyes and looked more deeply, I saw a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of an original. Perhaps I meant a poor facsimile? After further reflection, I’ve realized that I was making a poetic spiral toward the term alienation. We’ve become disconnected from our context. Like a drum displayed on a gallery wall, we are not singing. This stagnancy is not a gem from the cosmos, but something different. It is an anchor that sinks to the bottom of my stomach and lodges itself there.
It’s in good company as it sits there with other weighted realizations, like when I read that a list of around 50 words describing nature were remove from Oxford’s Junior Dictionary in 2007. Words like heron, otter, ash, beech, dandelion, kingfisher, willow… among others. Every time I read this, I get a lump in my throat. How do I live in a world with no word for the animal I visit at the beaver dam below my home? I imagine the heron’s lithe body as it lifts itself into the air with it’s tremendous wingspan, then I watch as it is erased before my eyes, as if it were never there. I only see the grey clouds in the background. This stone sinks to the bottom to accompany the others.
I acknowledge the fact that perhaps Oxford is just making room for more frequently used words. Among those that recently have become recognized are; bing-watch, badassery, and YouTuber. Of course, language is not the culprit of its own change. It’s a reflection; language is something that evolves with the people who use it. It’s as much a part of culture as craft is. It moves just as fire leaps from one fuel source to another. It is alive.
The erasure of important words like otter, ash and willow is a jarring effect of a growing cultural alienation from the natural world. But the alienation from the natural world is a symptom, itself. It’s what happens when we believe we are separate. When we do not see our relationships as they are, we alienate ourselves. Whether or not you want to believe it, empire has severed the connective tissue between land, community and ourselves. It is deeply, deeply in need of repair. The trauma of feeling disconnected from true sources of knowledge perpetuate the cycles of destruction. Since we believe the lie that we are separate we have forgotten our own knowledge. It is much older than we can imagine, and more powerful.
...to be continued
Thank you for exploring and elucidating your emotions and thoughts on this poignant topic. It is a "problem" I return to time and again, with no satisfactory solution or path forward as of yet. But I continue trying, making, thinking and feeling. Ideally this conversation would be had while sitting around a fire, a meal, or a flowing stream (or surrounded by limitless other sacred places), but at least we can taste a small morsel of communion through this platform. Thank you. again.
Here we are at the center of the modern Western problem, I think. It makes me think of "Stolen" by Dougie MacLean (https://youtu.be/0Ouho3c1x5o)--a Scottish perspective on losing connection to the past.
One word that comes to mind whenever I read about these topics is "necessity." It seems like many cultural practices, crafts, holidays, and communities grew out of necessity in the past. A barn raising is a very cool communal celebration that brings people together through shared labor, and it used to be the only way to build a barn. Carving spoons is fun and calming way to produce a beautiful and useful object, and it used to be just a cheap way to get a spoon.
Modern life has given us an abundance of choice. We have so many ways to get work done on our own. Not to mention the mobility we take for granted. So the problem becomes: how do we avoid alienation when connection has become unnecessary? And of course, I don't mean it's actually not necessary. I just mean it's perceived that way. I was weeding in front of my house on Saturday when a FedEx driver dropped off a package. He told me it looked tedious and explained, in a very friendly way, all of the ways I could use herbicides or a weedwhacker to save myself some work. How could I express to him, in an idiom we would both understand, that I don't mind picking box elder seedlings out of the rocks, because it keeps me in touch with what time of year they sprout and avoids poisoning homes for ants?
I don't really know a way around this. Maybe you're heading that direction in your essays. And I don't actually mean to sound hopeless! I think there are a lot of people exploring solutions to this problem. (The Maintainers is one: https://themaintainers.org/about/. It just feels like rolling a boulder up a hill sometimes.