More Than a Map, It's Polychrome Fingers

During the latest make cycle for #clmooc, I found

myself thinking less about the general theme,

maps, and more about the bits of paper stuck to

my fingers and the relationship between the brain,

eyes, and hands.

As I worked, I was reminded of the great origami documentary, Between the Folds.

My favorite scene is when artisan/craftsman Paul Jackson is working with his colored paper.  As he busily roughs up and colors the parchment, what always grabs my attention are his hands. Covered in greens, yellows, reds, and blacks, they're the hands of a maker.  They're a badge announcing his membership in a group to which I want to belong.  They're the embodiment of a thought process and signifiers of a passion to make tangible one's idiosyncratic vision.

Those rough, thick, polychrome fingers always stir within me a determination to make.

So now, as I tore pieces of New York state and swaths of New Mexico geography into strips and shreds and re-imagined borders, rivers, and landscapes, I paid attention to my fingertips. They were blackened and covered with worn, cottony pulp.  I paid attention to the way my eyes narrowed and I naturally held my breath as I slowly ripped the paper along some imagined, but no less important, line.

As Jackson says during his own moment of deep crafting, "The process of making is the point of it."

I wasn't lost in the activity, even though that would be a great metaphor for a project about maps.  Instead, I was subsumed by the activity. The materials, the journal page: I was creating a landscape, and I had the fingers of a maker to show for it.