making things

Here are a couple things I believe: 1) You are wild. 2) We are good.

We’re also creative, you and I. It is right to acknowledge and celebrate our capacity to make new things from existing resources. I’m thinking in particular of the blender I used this morning to make a smoothie. But along with gadgets and smoothies I also mean art and culture; I mean rituals and habits; holidays and ordinary days; businesses, economies, and governments; friendships, family constructs, and God concepts. Making things is integral to being human. It is not wrong to spend our lives in created worlds. There is beauty and growth in our created worlds. But it would be a shame to mistake creation for source, to conflate our capacity as the makers of worlds with the elemental stuff that shapes our lives. Art and culture rely on our inherent wildness. First comes the raw element of will, then comes creation.

When I say ‘you are wild’ I mean to touch, with my words, on the source of your capacity to make worlds. When I say ‘we are good’ I mean to touch on my faith in our collective capacity to make the world better.