Probably the Orange-Haired One

I was half-listening to a podcast in the studio the other day. Two women talking about kids and phones, how schools are banning them, and how kids don’t quite know what to do with their hands, or with the silence at lunch anymore. Somebody suggested playing cards. Somebody else said, just get them outside, let them feel grass, let them touch something that isn’t a screen.

I was nodding along. And also not really listening, because in front of me I had a row of funny little clay faces and half-made papier-mâché angels. I was trying faces onto bodies to see who each one wanted to be. Some were sweet. Some were skeptical. Some looked like they had no intention of behaving, ever.

That’s the part of making I love most. Not the finished piece, but the moment the right face lands and suddenly there’s a story, where a minute ago there was only paste and paper, or a blob of clay. It’s that moment when things click, and somehow I meet the thing I’m making.

But there, in my studio, somewhere between the podcast and the angels, this thought landed: we need this kind of creative play in our lives now more than most of us realize.

So much of life these days hands us the answer before we’ve done the wondering. We Google things without ever asking ourselves what we already know. We ask a tool to organize our thoughts before we’ve sat in the mess of having them ourselves.

None of this is a judgment, just a thought. Hey, I use the tools too, and plenty of them are genuinely useful. But I can feel what it costs me when I let something else do too much of the thinking for me. The wondering.

Making things by hand doesn’t let you skip that part.

Take my funny, little angels I’ve been making. When I start, I don’t know who they’ll be. So I try this face, then the other. I grab a basket of yarn to find the right color and texture for hair. Halfway through painting, I realize she needs a stone in her pocket because that suddenly makes her feel fully realized somehow.

Nobody can hand you those answers. You have to go find them with your fingers.

That not-knowing is where the other thing lives — call it intuition, call it inner listening, whatever you want to call the part of you that knows this face needs a crooked smile before your brain has caught up to why. I think we lose the thread to that part when we’re only ever consuming, asking, receiving.

So maybe it’s a small thing, a papier-mâché angel with an attitude problem. But I don’t think the small things are actually small. I think they’re one of the ways we stay in relationship with our own imagination, instead of becoming customers of it.

Anyway. I went into the studio to make angels and came out with an essay. I’m not sure which one of them whispered all this into my ear. Probably the orange-haired one.

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P.S. If you want to make one of these funny little angels with me, I’ve got a live online workshop coming up. It’s called Funny Little Angels, and yes, the attitudes are included. Here’s the link for details.

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