I am the bird in the cage plucking out my feathers

The importance of meaningful work with our hands

For as long as I can remember I’ve twisted or braided my hair obsessively when still. I say obsessively because at times I’ve wanted to stop and it’s actually felt painful (and impossible) to stop. In moments I would get so upset about it that I’d be Googling looking for an answer to why I would do this and how to make it stop. At its worst I’ve actually made myself go slightly bald in places.

I don’t do this when I’m immersed in the soothing sensory experience of the natural world, our natural home. I know this is a symptom of our collective human domestication and captivity. I am the bird in the cage plucking out my feathers. But there’s something deeper going on here too and it all fell into place for me when I took up knitting.

Through wildlife studies of various species of captive animals, it was found that no matter how lovingly their zoo plazas are constructed, no matter how much their human keepers love them, as indeed they do, the creatures often become unable to breed, their appetites for food and rest become skewed, their vital behaviors dwindle to lethargy, sullenness, or untoward aggressiveness. Zoologists call this behavior in captives “animal depression.” Any time a creature is caged, its natural cycles of sleep, mate selection, estrus, grooming, parenting, and so forth deteriorate. As the natural cycles are lost, emptiness follows. The emptiness is not full, like the Buddhist concept of sacred void, but rather empty like being inside a sealed box with no windows. - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

One of my oldest bestest friends has always role modelled beautifully to me the benefits of busy hands but I had never found my thing. My creative outlets did not produce tangible products. Music and writing are deeply fulfilling and a vinyl or book feels like a wonderful achievement but it’s not the same as making something with your hands and I’ve always yearned for that but never thought it ‘my thing’.

Knitting channelled my deeply natural and primal urge to create with my hands into something productive and deeply soothing. I notice that my thoughts are lighter when I have my knitting in my hands. It allows me to be comfortably quiet and still. It is another reminder of the importance of connecting to ancestral traditions and ways of being in order to restore our physical, emotional and mental health. Another reminder of how important it is not to pathologise ourselves when our beings are simply trying to guide us back home to our selves. My body had been crying out for meaningful hand work and when I found it the obsessive impulse subsided. There was nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with any of us. My body was simply seeking meaning and purpose in a culture which is often devoid of either.

Becoming an alpaca shepherdess only deepened this feeling. My days became filled with meaningful physical work, something that hugely benefits me and my daughter. We both need intense physical labour, community, lots of fresh air and animals to feel our best.

A slow, simple and sustainable life is supremely important to me, not because I’m a slow and simple creature, quite the opposite. I am fast and quick and easily whipped into a frenzy. Slowness is my medicine and I’ve spent a decade now trying to become slower and I am for the most part but it requires continuous attention. Given half a chance I will still try to clean my teeth and do the washing up and brush my daughter’s hair at the same time. I will still open 20 tabs and half do something on each of them. Slowness is a lifetime practice in a culture hell-bent on speed.

So as the rest of the world is trying to speed up every moment I am trying to slow it all down. As many are readily inviting digital and AI and instant hot water taps and robot typed messages and automatic everything, I am inviting analogue and using my brain and waiting for the kettle to boil and letters and manual everything.

I have bought a watch and a digital camera (I’m not quite ready for painting my moments yet but who knows what the future holds!) and deleted Whatsapp and social media and I’ve told my friends that they can knock for me or send me a letter or call me if they must. I have dreams of a horse and cart and an off-grid cabin with candles and log burners. I long for a mangle and enough time to hand wash my clothes. I want life to take up all of my living. I want to make my blankets clothes from the fibre I’ve hand shorn off of my own alpacas. These are my visions and dreams and step by step I am walking towards them. Slowly.

Starting with finally carving out time to learn how to work with the alpacas’ fleeces.

Alpacas were domesticated around 6,000 years ago by the Inca for the purpose of spinning yarn and making products from the fleece. Today it’s too easy to pop to the shops (even that’s a bit old fashioned I realise as I type!) so handmade home-spun clothes are very rare. It saddens me that sheep wool and alpaca fibre is worth so little in comparison to what it was once worth. I can’t believe that people burn their fleeces or compost them because there’s no time, no market. So we’re throwing away our natural fibres and making our clothes out of plastic.

I say that as I’m sat here in some jogging bottoms from Tesco. I’m not a saint. Far from it. But I have dreams and hopes and ambitions.

So it’s begun. I chose Morgana’s fleece (she’s one of our most beautiful chocolate brown female alpacas and her fleeces are magnificent - soft and crimpy with a long staple length) and I headed to our local spinners and weavers guild with my daughter in tow and we started the process of learning an ancient skill...

Continues on my Substack for free here.

Carly x