The Art of Doing Something With Your Hands

I skipped last month’s newsletter. You see, I tend to do too many things, then get overwhelmed by all the things I am doing (or not doing). Inevitably some tasks get left behind. About two months ago I started a new hyper-fixation, sticker making, and it caused many of my previous fixations/hobbies/tasks/obligations to fall to the wayside. I’m still making stickers; it’s fun and it offers enough novelty within the repetition to keep my focus, but the hyper-fixation of it all is waning so I am back to remembering I have other interests - this newsletter for one.

One of the benefits of the previous month’s distraction was to firm up my confidence in and adoration for writing. Trying to share my art on social media and being met with a frustratingly lackluster response has only solidified my love for the writing community where so many people take the time to interact with my posts. Now, some of the reasoning behind this discrepancy in the responses to my art vs. writing might be attributed to the fact that I am a much better writer than an artist, but most of the credit needs to go to the writing community itself. The willingness to take the time to read and respond to my writing is so very much appreciated.

While I know I am an average artist at best, I am still drawn to creating with my hands. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I often write, especially pros or long-form anything, by hand. It adds a tactile element to an otherwise purely abstract exercise. I still, however, feel compelled to make art outside the written word.

I was thinking about this desire to create something tangible when I finally read one of the last essays in Mary Oliver’s Upstream, titled “Building the House”

The labor of writing poems, of working with thought and emotion in the encasement (or is it the wings?) of language, is strange to nature, for we are first of all creatures of motion. Only secondly- only oddly, and not naturally, at moments of contemplation, joy, grief, prayer, or terror-are we found, while awake, in the posture of deliberate or hapless inaction. But such is the posture of the poet, poor laborer. The dancer dances, the painter dips and lifts and lays on the oils, the composer reaches at least across the octaves. The poet sits. The architect draws and measures, and travels to the quarry to tramp among the gleaming stones. The poet sits, or, if it is a fluid moment, he scribbles some words upon the page. The body, under this pressure of nonexisting, begins to draw up like a muscle, and complain. An unsolvable disharmony of such work-the mind so hotly fired and the body so long quiescent-will come sooner or later to revolution, will demand action!

Don’t you just love the serendipity of reading or hearing something that so aptly applies to your current existence?

Anyways, I have no idea how to end this, but I’m off to do some more creating. So until next month I leave you with these writing prompts.