Making Things

Over the time making things has become the most direct way for me to connect my hands to the mind to the bliss of the heart. It made me think whether there was any connection in my memory close to how I feel in my art making classes.

I was not an overly sociable child. My father was mostly away and my mother had to teach in school as well as looking after acres of fields. So lots of my childhood memory was catching cicadas and dragonflies alone in the woods in the summer, basking with other village kids by the sun-facing hay stacks in the winter, and in between helping my mother with work in the fields and watching her make things.

My mother made lots of the things we used in our everyday living, shoes, jumpers, pants, underpants, winter jackets, cushions, quilts. Thanks to her I think I knitted my first pair of gloves and jumper before I was thirteen. For a child who  had little chance of seeing the world outside the village, making was my window to the world of imagination and things like my mother’s manual sewing machine was forever a fascination for me, even before I reached the height of the machine.

So making things now and feeling the tactile materials in my hands offer me lots of bliss inside. I think we human beings are not natually made to sit in the office working and clicking away in front of a computer. While I recognise my value with my work, I have never felt that deep overflown bliss and joy at the workplace.

Maybe work is my bread and butter and making is the nutrient for my soul. In my down moments I have found making offers me that shelter. It was not an escape, it is more like a path way home. I think we all need something like that, a little nutrients for our soul. It was through which that gravity-like sense of centre comes and gives us that solid comfort and the almost unshakeable peace.