Sitting on the floor and using my hands shouldn't be so therapeutic

Reflecting on art practice and life before the internet

Dearest reader, dearest friend

The other day I was telling my ten year old that when I was their age we still didn’t have the internet. What did I do? I told them that when I wasn’t riding my bike around the neighborhood looking for friends to make kool-aid with on a back porch or getting my whole leg stuck in mud by the pond I would sit on the floor and make stuff with my hands.

One time when I was that age I made a fully functional multi-section wallet out of a pink striped Victoria’s Secret shopping bag and clear tape complete with a snap button and slots and two compartments, which took approximately 4-5 hours because what else was there to do. I never used the wallet, it wasn’t the point. I made colored pencil paper dolls, duct tape cardboard box contraptions, and acrylic paintings I thought were bad and I glued a bunch of CDs together shiny-side-out to decorate my bedroom. I was always decorating my bedroom? (Your basic millennial tween).

I sat on the floor a lot and superglued rhinestones to every and any object, and painted hot pink checkers on everything else. I cried over the smeared puffy paint, pretended I didn’t see the glitter glue oozing onto the carpet, laid on my stomach and drew on my skin with gelly roll pens. There were pony bead garlands, magazine cut outs, the resurrection of dried out glue sticks by cutting them like a stick of butter, the smell of scotch tape and how it did a terrible job at sticking to the soft fibers of construction paper.

It’s not like we had no media. In between all that I watched the recorded VHS tapes of Ferngully and Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and while those are entertaining it was nothing like the captivation of the internet now, so I went back to making stuff.

Everything was sensorially rich, complicated, uncomfortable, imperfect, colorful, sparkly, gritty.

More than that, it was primary. This isn’t something we did when “the screen time was up” or something we did when we were “trying to balance out our internet time with real life stuff". It was just what we did.

It’s not that these beautiful things don’t exist now and that my kiddo doesn’t make stuff. Construction paper and glitter can still be easily acquired and strewn about the floor thankfully (let me tell you) and board games are a staple in our house. It’s just that I see my child, and other children, and adults too, and even myself, not choosing first to roll around on the floor and make stuff with our hands. It doesn’t seem to be our default anymore, it’s secondary, and that kind of bums me out. As I sit on my computer typing.

I was reflecting on how one day I’m going to be the last living generation that really has a childhood memory of what life experience felt like before the internet because I remember elementary school completely without it, and it the early dial-up days were in late middle school. The memory of the no-internet time now feels like a utopia of texture where boredom was being corrected not by watching endless videos but by going on bike rides and peeling tree bark off of the trunk and seeing what it tasted like, catching caterpillars dangling from trees in old smelly Folger’s coffee tins and crafting homes for them and then forgetting about them in the grass so they crawled back out, drawing with sidewalk chalk in the rain and watching it turn into vibrantly colored mud. And, sitting on the floor and using my hands.

Back to that.

My field of concentration in college was graphic design. Now I have a printed goods business that utilizes graphic design in so many ways. I love it! But the side of me that has to make things with my hands oversteps and takes over everywhere. I always gravitated toward hand made design: lettering by hand, cutting shapes out of paper, drawing. But running a handmade business is still a lot of computer work.

After spending a disproportionate amount of time doing business admin and design work on a computer, my painting practice took shape almost on its own. It just had to happen.

Recently I became more conscious about the context of how therapeutic I feel my art practice is for me, not just mentally but for my body. The other day, I really noticed this. I stopped working on my computer, moved into my small painting studio, sat on the floor and began grinding a mineral pigment in a large, heavy stone mortar and pestle. I immediately felt grounded, embodied, connected, material, conscious, in motion, in relationship.

It is not like I haven’t done this before, but on this day I was really aware of my body and how much of a contrast it was. I went from feeling kind of headachey, wired, and disconnected to feeling more calm and centered very quickly. I could feel my entire nervous system shifting just from sitting on the floor and using my hands.

Creating with my hands is not just creating with my hands, it’s being rooted in my entire body. My experience becomes both solid and centrally energized by the act of using my hands, my spine, my legs and arms. It’s a full experience. This I know is not just something I did because I was bored when I was a kid, this is a chosen and purposeful way to be, and my favorite way to be: sitting on the floor, using my hands.

There are so many ways to sit on the floor and use my hands. Sit bones heavy and attention on my body, I could be glueing rhinestones or grinding earth stones, it is all the same.

The very sad thing is that sitting on the floor and using our hands is one of the most natural, primitive things, but I am here experiencing it as a therapy - a treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder.

What is the disorder? Honestly, it would have to be the internet. But I don’t want it to go away, because it’s a viable tool for communication. I love email, I love writing, I love reading, I love learning. But it’s disorderly because it takes me away from what I know to be my basic disposition (sitting on the floor and using my hands) to a point where that basic disposition now feels like a therapy instead of a normal thing.

As much as I want to advocate in this post to simply “make more time for making things with your hands!!!” I feel this is about something bigger, and while I have the smaller solution, I don’t have the bigger one, and maybe there isn’t a solution more than there is just a type of awareness and context we should keep in mind.

So I think my call to action is to simply reflect on a larger time scale. Reflect on the last 25 years. How has your life developed with the evolution of the internet? What really feels like relationship to you? What feels easeful and what feels stressful? What feels creative and connected? What does your body feel like right now as you read this on the internet? What are your memories of before the internet?

It is interesting to remember that this all happened so fast and the internet is so young compared to all of human and animal existence. When things happen so fast like this in real time, it’s hard to process the bigger picture.

A new card from my Inquire Within Reflection Deck

This probably ties in with my decision to retire from social media too and how it just didn’t feel right in my mind or body to spend my energy on something that doesn’t give it back. Social media to me now feels more inauthentic and disembodied than ever, especially being away from it. I realize that the people I admire and connect to most happen to be the least online-famous, and that really makes me think.

How is it that the experiences that have touched me the deepest are the most invisible to public? How is it that the people I trust the most, in my body, have nothing to do with the internet? How is it that sitting on the floor and using my hands is when I feel the most integrated, connected, and calm?

It’s because we were born to be in relationship with our immediate surroundings, and what we need to survive and be well is actually so, so, so basic.

Find it, we always will.

♡ - Kristen