Today, I went down in to the valley and re-fenced our plot at the community garden. I tore out lots of the ugly orange fencing and put in some shiny new metal fencing. It was a great way to spend the early morning hours before the heat of midday. I had forgotten how much I like that sort of thing.
When I was a teenager, I spent hours and hours mucking around in the garage. Cutting wood, drilling things, hammering, and making stuff. My parents would get mad about the way that I mishandled their tools but they kept letting me do it. They must have known that mucking around was good for me. And, since then, I haven’t spent much time goofing around with physical tools. So much of my time is spent working with computers, or writing on paper, that I’ve forgotten how much I like working with my hands1.
The body is knowledgable beyond words. There is a general handiness, that only the body knows, and this knowing transcends language. As I was mucking in the garden this morning, my body knew when I was doing something safe or unsafe. My hands remember the feeling of a rough board slipping or the way that metal catches before it cuts. I can’t put words to any of it but there is strong feeling associated with it. My body knew a way of getting the work done through balance, posture, and improvised applications of a sledgehammer.
There was also a deep intuitive knowing of how things should fit together. This morning, I spent a lot of time in the garden just staring at where the fencing would go. My mind wasn’t actively involved in the sizing up of things or measuring. I just started until I saw how things needed to go. In Leaving the Good Life, Helen Nearing wrote about the experience of making a house intuitively. She said that everyone has a sense of architecture in them. I think she likened it to a bird’s sense of how to make a nest. This knowledge is part of everyone’s general know-how or handiness.
People who live sedentary tech-centric lives like mine don’t have many opportunities to practice this kind of know-how. Especially apartment-dwellers without the sort of garage that I had as a child, full of bits of scrap wood, tools, nails and screws. There is no obvious way to enact this primal knowledge. Unless you’re out working construction, or living on a farm, your day probably doesn’t involve lot of hands-on work. I wonder what it would be like to live more of a life centered around general handiness. Feeling all that embodied knowledge come out and express itself today was novel. Highly recommended2.
To be fair, I really like string figures, juggling, braids. These are all pretty hands-on activities but they’re not as intense as using a sledgehammer. ↩︎
Another thing that comes to mind now: Usually, when I’m working at the office or around the house, I listen to some kind of background music. While I was working in the garden, using my whole body, there was no need for background music. I was so engaged in what I was doing that there was no desire or urge for anything else. ↩︎
Published: Jun 9, 2026 @ 15:27.
Last Modified: Jun 9, 2026 @ 16:55.
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