Crafting
Trace’s prompt for this week:
I want you to write about spiritwork being done while crafting something tangible. Weaving or sculpting or carving or any number of other craft projects. I want to hear about things you’ve done like this, and I want to hear about the principle behind it, what you’re doing to make it beside the things you do with your paws.
This is a great follow-up to last week’s post on Tine-Maps, since they’re a good example of my approach to doing something with my paws for my spiritwork. It’s something I really love to do, and find really valuable, and probably don’t do as much as I should.
I’ve always been drawn toward making my own physical objects to express my sense of the spiritual or magical. I still have something I made in college when I was first exploring the ideas of Spark, Stone, and Smoke that became the core of my cosmology; it’s a little metal disc I cast as part of jewelry-making class, which I engraved those three symbols on. I couldn’t even tell you at the time why I did it, but it really meant something to have a tangible representation of something I’d so-far only done as pixels on a screen.
Now that I think about it, it seems like that started a pattern of a notable physical crafting task being a big part of every time I’ve explored a large new area of spiritwork. For instance, when I was learning Ogham, I made my first set by carving antler tips, and of course did the same thing with the Antler-Tines years later. (The Ogham work turned out to be very good practice; meant I got to start with simple straight lines before having to deal with all the curvy little complicated Antler-Tine symbols that I made for myself. A smaller example I remember is when I started with the Pack Tradition, where the first thing I did to understand it was to physically draw and revise some diagrams of the energy system involved in that work. It helped me get a good feeling for it and inspired a lot more exploration.
The literal biggest example of a craft as the beginning of a larger spiritwork exploration was related to a time when I dedicated myself to Lugh, seeking to bring some discipline and focus to my spiritwork. As part of that, I made an actual whole spear. I bought the spearhead and the shaft and the endcap, but there was a lot of work of polishing and finishing the head, carving down the shaft and fitting the metal parts on it, then finishing the whole thing with Ogham engravings, a wrapped leather grip, shellac… It was a great testament to the sorts of things I could do with a bit of focus (and help from a skilled god!)
I may have mentioned before my morning devotional habit of putting on my set of pendants. All of those were crafted at least in part by me, whether just stringing the leather and making the clasp, or in one case, designing a shape to be 3D printed in metal. That may have been more pixels than tools on my part, but it still ended up as a physical object, so it feels much more like a “thing I crafted” than just doing diagrams on the computer.
One sort of craft that I come back to again and again is prayer beads. I have two sets that I use right now, but there are others I’ve used in the past, and even the ones I have now I’ve restrung more than once, both for repairs and to revise them. I love to make complicated bead sequences with lots of distinct beads; I must look very strange to the folks at the bead store going up there with several dozen individual different beads! In a way, even using the beads feels like a craft in itself, since it’s a focus of my paws and my mind together.
I think that’s what I get out of crafting-as-spiritwork, and why I should do it more. It’s a multi-sensory experience, a literally tangible one, brining my thoughts into reality, and having a thing in the world that reminds me of a dimension of it that’s not always perceptible to my usual senses. Making something real reminds me that the magic and spirits themselves are real, and can make changes in the world, if only through the work of my paws. It’s a great experience, and just thinking about it that way makes me want to do it much much more.