Hand Work as a Way to Joy

A little boy's picture of a ladybug on the refrigerator door, the rough carving of a boat, a clay soap-dispenser, an exercise in Japanese flower arrangement, a bar of lavender soap crisply wrapped in brown paper, these are all proof: that whatever is done or made by hand, however imperfectly, has a natural dignity to it, and carries the signature of meaning. And that meaning is generally more intensely felt the closer the hands are to being your own hands or the hands of someone you deeply love. The bread you eat has more meaning to you if you baked it yourself or if someone you loved baked it. The music you hear has more meaning to you if you're playing it yourself with your own two hands, or if someone you love is making it. We can debate why all this is true--there are certainly many reasons for it--but there is I think almost no question that it is true. 

The fact that handwork feels so meaningful, has to be one of the biggest reasons why so many who adopt a lifestyle low on consumption and high in do-it-yourself activity find their lives more satisfying after they've shifted them that direction. Joy depends on meaning and since (to say it a different way) human meaning depends in a remarkable way on the sensed presence of human hand, then cultivating the domestic arts--cooking, gardening, carpentry, flower arrangement etc.--are an obvious place to start investing in that market of joy. Decorating our homes with things that we ourselves have made and designed may be one of the most straightforward ways of making ourselves feel at home. Again it's not so much a question of how perfect the work in question is; it's more a question of the source, of whose fingers shaped, assembled, or produced it. I have access to any number of recordings of the finest musicians in the world playing the finest work of the finest composers. But I would always prefer to hear my son improvise on his violin or my wife sing in her beautiful pure voice a simple folk tune at the piano. How could it be otherwise? Loved and live always beats even the best of what a recording can supply me with. 

Of course, it's only fair to admit that taking up the task of learning hand-skills guarantees some heartache and trouble as well and joy and satisfaction. What bakes can also burn. What's grown in the garden can also wither and die. What's smoothed by hand can also be gouged. And it's hard to get used to this truth, because of course every failure in handwork gestures embarrassingly toward our larger human fallibility, and makes us feel embarrassed and inadequate. My mother was a good cook, but I suppose some of my most painful memories as a child involve scenes at the dinner table, in which the family simply wasn't able to be polite about her more exceptional failures. In part this was our fault--we could be unforgivably frank--but in part it also had to do with her inability to let a disaster be a disaster, and just give up on the dish and throw it out. "It looks odd, but it tastes fine," she would assert, when in fact, it looked odd and tasted pretty odd as well! But you see, the thought of waste was so distasteful to her, and her wish for the dish to be perfect was so overwhelming, that on occasion she was just unable to admit defeat. So where our gustatory skepticism collided with her unwillingness to consign the dish to the compost--there at the intersection of six o'clock and the dinner table--we got these almost ecstatically tearful episodes. It was absolute misery. 

To say it again, it takes time and practice to acquire domestic skills. And this is one reason why my wife and I often say to ourselves that, as much as we might want to change our lives quickly (to live within the limits of ecological reality, and also more in solidarity with the poor) we still say to ourselves: "one big step at a time." That is, don't set your sights too low--really work toward change. But at the same time remember that the attempt to do so all at once will likely bring the whole project of change to a shuddering halt. Better to be strategically ambitious, tackling one difficult project at a time, and integrating each new skill in with the others as time goes on. So for instance this past year we made the digging of a substantially larger garden our biggest project, and combined that with learning to preserve several new items of food. In 2014 we'll work hard on improving the garden soil; also I intend to to build a cold frame (to provide us with early greens and seedlings) as well as a solar oven to expand our food-preservation options. Also, because I want badly to find a way to serve the community with my own hand-work, and most particularly with my theater work, I plan to make my newest play "Myles to Go" into an engine for community fundraising. My troop will perform at as many venues as possible in the Valparaiso area, in order to raise funds for a low income housing project.

All of which brings up something more about hands: they can grasp one another. They can work together. It is not possible to do everything ourselves, nor should we ever try to make that a goal. No, the best place to live and be, as a human being, is where skilled hands meet skilled hands in community, exchanging one skill for another, and finding joy in the sharing. So. Out with business as usual in this anonymous economy-at-large, where stranger provides service to stranger, and products are manufactured at a distance to fill our (often imaginary) needs, and natural limits are continually transgressed, and speculation is the most profitable enterprise, and the poor (who do not know how to speculate except in lottery tickets) are left to their own devices. Truly a different world is possible, one in which we put our own beautiful flexible hands to collective work until the earth becomes a garden and a holy wilderness, instead of moving, as it is moving, so inexorably, so mechanically, toward a vision of emptiness, smog, and infinite loss.

HB

Until Saturday the 21st!