Artifying

I used to be a student in Literature and Creative Writing programs decades ago, and so when I wasn’t reading voraciously for myself, I was required to do it for a grade. I read mainly novels and nonfiction memoirs. When I left academia, though, that reading slowed waaaaaaay down. When Dan and I got our son Archer, that reading nearly stopped completely. Since starting to work full-time on the farm, my reading is almost entirely of the “how to” variety learning how to master new skills, fix a kubota mower, officially start a business in the State of Ohio, carve a spoon, identify trees in summer and winter, etc. But there is one book that doesn’t entirely fit that bill that I keep taking out of the library over and over and over again: Melanie Falick’s Making a Life: Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live.

I recommend this book—a collection of interviews with makers—to every creative person I know. Now, I believe all humans are intrinsically creative and that is, in fact, one of the main arguments running through Malick’s conversations with artisans and craftspeople. But I recommend this book to anyone who is thinking about creative-making as a professional pursuit, as a career. American culture is pretty dismissive of making as a job, and if it isn’t immediately financially lucrative, it’s typically dismissed as a hobby. Making isn’t a hobby and Malick’s book addresses that thinking. Making is a fundamental requirement of properly being a human.

Malick’s very first conversation in Making a Life is with Ellen Dissanayake—a scholar and maker who has dedicated her life’s work to trying to understand why making is so important to human beings and has posited that our desire to make elevated things out of ordinary items is what actually separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Speaking of her definition of art, Dissanayake says in her interview:

. . . The idea of treating art as a behavior, something that people do, rather than as a thing or a quality or a label that museum curators give or the critics talk about. I gradually came to the conclusion that in its most simple sense, art (as a verbal noun that I now call “artifying” or “artificiation”) is the act of making ordinary things extraordinary. It is a uniquely human impulse. (Pg 20)

While I maybe don’t agree with this being a uniquely human impulse 100% (How could I after seeing the work of a bower bird?), I love the idea of art as a verb of desire rather than noun/adjective that imparts value to an object.

Dissanayake believes that there is a final product that we have been accustomed to calling “art,” but that the physical act of making that product, or artifying, is a necessary experience for humans as important to our physical and mental well-being as food, exercise, or sleep. If you are a maker, this maybe resonates with you? If you don’t think of yourself as a maker, I would love to help you experience the feeling of this idea by inviting you to a class in weaving.

I am trying to balance too many things in my life right now. I don’t have a lot of free time. Managing one faulty business while trying to jumpstart another—both of which are forms of farming that are at the mercy of the vagaries of nature trapped in climate change—while trying to keep a marriage and 9 year-old kid afloat and trying not to dwell on how quickly my parents are aging and how that aging complicates the management of the family farm. Stuck in the midst of perimenopause, I was bound to be plagued by sleepless nights. But I am lucky right now to be getting 1-2 full nights of sleep thanks to waking up at 3AM with my mind whirring and planning out next steps for everything.

However, there is a kind of fix for this—weaving. No. Really.

Because I have not been able to yet transition from Horse Barn Manager to Willow Farmer/Maker full time yet, I have to carve out time for weaving. When I am successful at doing that, I call it “Taking a Weaving Day.” Sometimes I do it because there’s obvious available time and it’s fun.

Sometimes, however, taking a weaving day is literal medicine for what ails me. If I am feeling anxious and my thoughts are racing and I’m exhausted from consecutive sleepless nights, I need to spend a day weaving. At the end of that day, I usually have a completed basket to show for my efforts. More importantly, however, I have a quiet organized mind. I sleep well that night. I feel centered and relaxed the following day. If I’m lucky, that feeling lasts 2-3 days.

Weaving willow is a full-body workout. It’s physically demanding both in that it takes hand/arm/shoulder/back strength and stamina but also control, hand-eye coordination, and sometimes octopus-like abilities to manage many more moving pieces than 1 or 2 at a time. Weaving is a complex mental project as well. Your brain isn’t just managing your physical movement but is planning ahead, thinking about form and function, what the next steps are, listening to the willow and what messages its sending about its abilities through touch and sight and sound—and hopefully, your mind is also enjoying itself with the smell of the willow, the sound of it gently clacking together, the beautiful variations of the colors of the willow bark. It’s a sensory delight.

Weaving is a thing you get lost in—like playing music or dancing or playing a sport or writing or cooking a complicated meal. You have to give yourself over to it. And, as a result, your worries fade into the background and anxiety drops away. The unhelpful spiraling motion our thoughts take, when we’re overwhelmed or worry, dissipate. These acts use up so much of our attention that they quiet the less useful functions of our brains. This is the benefit of the act that I think Dissanayake calls “artifying.”

This calming feeling is as much a reason to take a class in willow weaving with me—or a dance class or painting class with someone else—as wanting to make a basket or a diy garden support. Please try it. I promise you will have immediate benefit from it. We are meant, as human beings, to make things with our hands, to involve ourselves in the act of making and to be buoyed in confidence and self-satisfaction by successful completion of a thing.