The Importance of Working With Your Hands

Great advice from Mary Oliver...

“Building my house, or anything else, I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery. Building my house, I was joyous all day long.” — Mary Oliver, from Upstream

Here the poet Mary Oliver is writing about a small one room shelter she built in her backyard. But she could have been talking about any practice involving the hands: sketching, gardening, woodworking, playing an instrument, modeling clay, and the like. Our hands hold in them a kind of kinetic intelligence that when set loose quiets the mind, and invites the soul to play. 

I remember as a boy spending hours in the vine-filled backwoods of the Big Thicket in southeast Texas building forts out of whatever wild material was at hand. It was buggy and humid and oppressively hot, but I hardly noticed, engrossed as I was in that joyful industry. I followed my hands, and so long as I did, I had neither a thought nor a care in the world.

This latent genius in our hands is a tonic for the heart, and we all need its medicine to restore our soul’s alignment with itself and steady our course through the ever increasingly complicated world we inhabit.

This is even more imperative for the writer, whose words are meant to act as a light that pierces the thick darkness of the universe, to help guide our way through it. But a writer cannot find those words so long as they themselves are caught up in the froth and bustle of the mad human race. Our hands, nimble with ambitions of their own, are a door to another world where our souls may find rest, and the eyes of our heart may for a time observe the full breadth of our life in quiet repose, as if from a high place where nothing can disturb.

If you have no practice devoted to your hands, find one. We all need a secret place of shelter outside the world, like Oliver’s tiny house tucked away in her garden, where we can find rest, and see things for a time as they actually are.