Approach & Practice
Reclaiming Connection through Craft
What it means and why it matters
It is hard living in today’s world. It is a moment where our attention is pulled towards virtual environments designed to maximize our engagement - and this has real consequences for us. It is causing an erosion of our baseline understanding and awareness of ourselves as living beings in a material world.
Our attention has been adopted, coopted, and assimilated into the culture and cult of the digital. Our sense of connectivity is mediated via devices rather than direct experience. We are not our full human selves anymore.
Instead, we have become massively deskilled and unable to access our innate sense of kinship with other beings. And this loss has led to our misunderstanding of humans as separate from nature. It is not the case.
We are distanced from the material world, from our own bodies, and from each other.
In this context, it is understandable and even inevitable that our sense of interdependence with the earth is profoundly diminished leaving us feeling isolated, anxious, and detached. In this kind of world, the forward march towards climate crisis is unavoidable.
To create a meaningful shift, fear will not work; we’ve tried that. Instead, we need to find a way to rebuild our baseline competency for reconnection.
Making things with our hands from the world around us is a way to reconstitute the severed circuitry of interconnection and reshape our awareness of our entangled interdependence. It is a joyful way to reclaim our human being-ness.
Craft is be a (re)membering intervention. It is a pathway towards a physical and spiritual mending of the nature-culture binary, and a practice leading us into renewed and joyful relationship with the sensuous present.
“A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present.”
— David Abram
Our Root Practices for Reconnection
Mindfulness & Meditation
By practicing present-moment awareness, we can intentionally retrain our bodies and minds to be where our feet are right now. We draw inspiration, approach, and teaching from the Plum Village tradition of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.
Craft (making things)
We use our hands to weave, tie, sculpt, and create things using natural materials from the world around us. Crafting not only enlivens our creative spirit, it also brings us into direct relationship with our natural world.
Interdependence
Our practices are grounded in the what Thich Nhat Hanh describes as interbeing - the awareness of our profound interconnectedness and the responsibilities and care that awareness awakens in us, in our decisions, and in our actions.
What Making Does
Reattunes us to true earth time (present moment)
Reawakens our tactile wisdom (the power of touch)
Removes barriers to our understanding (why things are)
Reframes us as perpetual makers (of our lives, our experience)
Reminds us of the power of delight (and joy)
Taking an Indigenous Stance
Taking an indigenous stance means acknowledging the history and colonial lineage of white persons of European descent while also acknowledging a longing for an expression of life and culture that supports a desire to live in sacred relation to the earth and a history rooted in reciprocity, interdependence, old wisdom, and everyday magic. It means accepting our inability to control our ancestral inheritance, while taking responsibility for the agency we do have to transform our present and future impact by making a different choice about how we choose to live our lives. Dr. Robin Will Kimmerer suggests the possibility of becoming “indigenous to place” or “living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives both material and spiritual depended on it”. We embrace this invitation and use the practice of craft as a form of retraining our being into one that is in alignment with who and what we believe ourselves capable to be.
The Interwoven Institute also explicitly acknowledges that interdependence, reciprocity, and the blending of spiritual and making practices are not original ideas. They owe a debt to of respect to the diverse indigenous cultures that have been living and practicing in this way for thousands of years.
