To Make

Something there is, that needs to grow, needs to make, needs to birth. I grew up making things, Construct, Lego, toys out of wood and sewing things. These were my playthings. The question was always “if I could make….” I remember the moment when I said, “You know it would be a lot faster if I would buy ___x___.”

Catharsis. I’m not sure how I arrived there but I got there none the less. Modern life is often so sterile. I work 8:30-6ish, go out for lunch and often out for dinner. I am a consumer, a wage earner, a cog in a machine and it gives me a great deal of angst because much that I am surrounded with goes counter to many of my values.

We’re surrounded with the message of BUY, BUY, BUY. The propaganda we’re fed and the mentality we swallow is that we must buy things to survive. The corporate world has this at it’s very core. It starts innocently enough, that if we come together we can make something greater than we can make individually. But at bottom of that precipice is the fallacy that individually we can do nothing. Our important decisions become which, of an entire isle of toothpaste. We have lost our individuality and our lives are the more hollow for it. We’re surrounded with death, so to make something, to call into being, gives us a bit of hope against the decay. We need to make, in the image of the creator we also must recreate, must birth.

Revolution. My last semester of college I took a pottery class, it was such a marked contrast to what I was doing in my engineering studies that everything that was said screamed. Here was simplicity, that I could make something start to finish with my own hands, to discover the wonderful nuances in meeting the basic need of implements to eat food. It felt very healthy when contrasted to my sustention of the corporate machine.

Life didn’t work out exactly as I thought it would immediately following college. I ended up working for a corporation, I still want to make things, but it’s when I start to think that I get overwhelmed and start pondering buying,
the time required…
the scale…
how much money it would cost…
the tools it would require…
if I could do it as good…

Hope. My current project is the pottery studio in my basement. Ironically, I’ve had to buy a lot of tools to make my studio. I’m a little nervous about it because I’ve invested a lot in this hobby and don’t have much to show for it yet. I’ve thrown a couple bowls, a few mugs, and skills I’ve learned are coming back. I haven’t fired anything yet, but I’m looking forward to the day when I can unload newly glazed pottery from my kiln.