The Lost Art of Livelihood: Restoring and Re-storying the Relationship between Maker, Material, and Place
I’ve realised over the past years that my hands need a lot of time re-membering what they were created to do, the purpose they’ve been largely estranged from in the modern world. Kneading dough, seeding soil, spinning thread, gathering berries, tending fire. Hands devoted faithfully to beauty’s infinite incarnations in material form and the strange ways in which the functionality of care – the everyday maintenance work of caring – in its many manifestations becomes beautiful by design (think of the art of the tea ceremony, the intricately hand-knitted scarf you were gifted, the pleasure of tasting food cooked with skill but also with love). Form and function eternally wedded. The borders artificially constructed between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ begin to dissolve. We are creatures born to make, and born to make beautifully.
How, then, do we orientate ourselves in an age in which we are bombarded with cheap, mass-produced commodities, devoid of care and skill in their making? The age of stuff. The earth creaks under the weight of it all. We collectively worship the material, but too often it has been reduced to a one-dimensional existence in our eyes, its value dictated by the abstractions of global trends and markets. We live in an era that has commodified both the labour and the products of making – whether food, textiles, furniture, tools, or treasures far beyond our basic necessities – and yet wrung this same work out of the rhythms of our daily lives under the suspiciously sleek and shiny guise of convenience. Our earthly bodies are taught to function as machines if they are to produce anything of economic value. We must conform to the standards of an industrial model of production or, worse still, become redundant entirely.
I wonder if what we’ve lost, that which has slipped away so quietly, is the art of livelihood. The simple, creative rituals of material world-making that once shaped our everyday lives with beauty and sustenance both; the vernacular language of craft familiar the world over, spoken and understood by so many, iterated and reiterated through time, and inherently valued as such. The hand-knitted jumper that’s been repaired a dozen times and still carries the heady musk of lanolin that only a particular sheep in a particular fold of lush pasture could evoke. The hand-turned fruit bowl on the dresser that still takes pride of place, stained with generations of use and gathering dust in its contours. The jars of colourful preserves that line cellar shelves, drawing out the space between summer abundance and winter dormancy. The many ‘things’ that are never just things, born from the magic of ritually tending to spaces, bodies, and relationships. The foraged and found, that which is whittled into new forms by our hands, mended with care or gifted with love in turn.
Exploring materials for fire-making, May 2024, Freyja Haddrill Selman
Gathering resources for fire-making, May 2024, Freyja Haddrill Selman
I’m not intending to romanticise the hardships and drudgery undoubtedly embedded in the livelihoods that came before ours, but I do know that something has been relentlessly stamped out in the pursuit of the ‘progress’ that has come to define our modern lives, something intimately relational that once bound us to the specific textures of our local ecosystems, our hearths and homes, and our tapestry of human and more-than-human kin. Though most of us are no longer making with our hands out of necessity, the process is still an echo of a time when our livelihoods depended upon it; we nurture a still-burning desire for this deeper and more meaningful connection to the tangible, an embodied relationship between place and material and maker that carries deep, deep time in its folds. How head, heart, and hands want to sing in unison, in service of something far beyond labour made sterile for the sake of mindless and boundless consumption alone.
Years ago I came across a copy of The Forgotten Arts & Crafts by John Seymour, a precious book detailing some of the traditional skills and trades of craftspeople across the British Isles up to the 20th Century, from coopering to thatching to lace making 1. I scanned biography after biography of the ‘last surviving’ or ‘only recorded’ keepers of their trades, who must surely have carried their wisdom to the grave, possibly never to be revived. But, importantly, rather than relegated to the realm of experts or masters alone, Seymour sketches a world in which handcrafts were at the very heart of the household and rural life more broadly, stretching across disparate geographies and times. Author Sylvia V. Linsteadt asks, “what does it mean when typically domestic, so-called domestic, crafts and activities and stories are actually seen as the center point of a culture?” 2 Despite an active silencing in written histories, this truth has always been celebrated in the legacy of thread, story, and song alike, which are, at their core, woven of the very same fibres. How ‘text’ and ‘textiles’ emerged from the same etymological root. How we spin yarns and weave stories.
My hands must have remembered this. My grandmother’s spinning wheel came into my possession and I began to twist the rich and various fibres of heritage breed wool into yarn, an activity I stumbled over repeatedly until it felt entirely intuitive, the thread becoming a natural extension of my hands as they worked. As I baked dark, honeyed rye with caraway, a process made slow by the courting of natural yeasts. As I spent hours mending clothes dear to me in the hope that they wouldn’t return to the soil just yet. As I learned to make fire with damp wood in a hollow in the valley, to cook over that fire and to warm myself by that fire with gratitude.
What began as benign intellectual curiosity, holding me at a distance, became an active conversation lived through the body over time, one which I had given myself over to without realising, even if my physical livelihood didn’t depend upon it. I let my hands morph to welcome unfamiliar materials and turned toward my local ecosystems for guidance in the process of feeding, clothing, and caring for myself. And, in doing so, I carried a sense of treading the well-worn cultural tracks of generations long before. I was reminded of my grandparents and how intelligently resourceful they were, navigating life in the post-war period before the predominance of far-flung supply chains. Most of us younger folks have never experienced a before. What we know is the convenience of stuff made instantly available, disposable to us, mined from the furthermost corners of the planet to meet the aesthetic tastes of our consumption, and at what cost?
Philosopher James R. Martin writes,
“...industrial modernity not only displaced humans from their rightful and appropriate place as full, intimate partners in relation to non-human animals and plants (and our food), but in doing so we lost a certain historical sense of the notion of livelihood, and this loss has been depriving us of the imaginative space in which we can properly respond to the polycrisis.” 3
He turns to the Old English liflad (from ‘life’ and ‘way’ or ‘course’, which evolved into livelode, referencing how one’s life was sustained, for example through resources and occupations), an entirely different concept to the “detached, displaced, disembodied, disenworlded notion of livelihood” that pervades within the constructs of modern economics. With the emergence of a distant, invisible ‘elsewhere’ as the source of the things we consume and interact with daily, he writes, “the experiential and sensuous particularity of the life of liflad disappeared”. Liflad became merely an abstract idea. Livelihood – the source of our nourishment and sustenance – was literally displaced from the places in which we live. “Places disappeared, insofar as liflad goes. Every place is any place. No place is quite home.” And with this, an earthy and embodied sense of our belonging was also uprooted, untethered from its grounding.
Stills from a short process film of spinning the fleece of a Shetland sheep, Summer 2022, Freyja Haddrill Selman
The art of livelihood seems instead to emerge from the direct, material encoding of the relationship between body and place. It’s the very essence of intentionality and care that brings an object into being by necessity, in a world which understands that so much is imbued in that object in the process – the memories, dreams and emotions of the maker married with the mystery of the enduring life force or spirit of the natural material itself, in ongoing conversation through time. Each transforms the other into an alchemy of sorts. This is an enlivened process at its core – the embodiment of creative potential in the most organic of forms – and entirely unique in its expression each time. It cannot be replicated through the standardised, factory-produced goods wrought from polluting petrochemicals nor in items untethered from their far-away cultural contexts – the “distant, invisible elsewhere” that Martin describes – just to become commodities for sale on the global market. ‘Liflad’, as it was once known here, carries the scent of damp earth, rusted metal and woodsmoke. It is carved from an old, old language, the branched limb of a grandmother yew. It is lived, felt, breathed through body and place instantaneously as it is brought into being.
There’s a shallowness to the material culture sold to us under industrial modernity, and once you notice its pervasiveness, it becomes difficult to discern what lies beneath the plasticised veneer draped across the aesthetic of so much of our lives. The hunger for authenticity remains. Not authenticity denoting ‘tradition’ as fossilised past, dredged into the contemporary world as relic alone, but the ongoing, dynamic, reciprocal relationship that grounds us in place, connects us to source, and emulates that which our ancestors knew to be essentially true: the commitment to making a life, a livelihood, right here. Neither importing it from elsewhere nor extracting it from beyond the respectful limits of earth’s offerings to us. On the surface, we might observe and denounce the violent and ugly politics of fragmented supply chains within the workings of our capitalist economy. But, on a deeper level, do we feel the absence of this intimacy and richness of embodied relationship? Maker, material, place. Storied worlds, rather than worlds made shallow and emptied of their substance. The lost art of livelihood is a poetic lament.
We may know how to make a living in order to consume – things, beings, experiences – but do we remember what it means to make a livelihood? Even just symbolically, even just a fragment?
Anthropologist Ann Armbrecht, in her book exploring the globalised supply chains of botanical products, draws on the work of philosopher Robert Pogue Harrison to describe the “lost art of seeing” in the contemporary world 4. Harrison speaks of the ‘laral’ value of an object: ‘laral’ stems from ‘lares’, the Roman word for the everyday gods guarding the hearth and home, who are said to abandon the house or community if left untended. The ‘laral’ value of a thing arises through being in direct relationship with the world behind that thing, the necessary context that moulds the very dimensions of its coming-into-being. The seeing – depth perception, perception of the whole – that takes time and intention to cultivate but becomes a wellspring of innate value and pleasure in our lives. “What we see depends on history and culture as much as it does on the structure of our eyes,” Armbrecht writes, citing Harrison, “contemporary humans are less and less able to see the plentitude of the world.” We’re less able to appreciate the beauty in that which, if we’re quiet enough to hear it, whispers to us an old knowing, a slow knowing, that which inhabits a world apart from the volumes of ‘content’ churned out across media platforms each day, demanding our attention. We’re less able to see the whole, and therefore less able to tend the whole.
To devote this precious attention and time to both cultivating something and cultivating a relationship with that something – which also means tending the web of relationships that brought it into being – remains a privileged form of currency in a world that attempts to squeeze productivity out of us in every waking moment. But, one day, it might actually prove critical for our shared future, and might become the thread that binds us to community and land for our survival as interdependent beings, when the economy as we know it literally cannot provide us with a tangible, viable livelihood. I wonder if we’re being invited to reinsert ourselves back into an unfolding narrative where livelihood resembles something much closer to ‘liflad’, deeply relational and rooted in place. To feel the lost art of livelihood is both a call to responsibility but also an initiation into a practice of rekindling beauty in our lives, however our hands and bodies so desire, however Earth seems to invite us. The beauty of being in reverent relationship with the material world and making, of crafting with our hands, of honouring the particular vernacular of the creative impulse and the particular contours of the lands we inhabit, brings a depth of awareness and devotion that we’ve become increasingly estranged from.
It’s an initiation into re-storying our material world, and our relationship to the material world, through intentionality. Everything is a repository: the food that we nourish our bodies with, the fibres that we adorn our bodies with, the matter that we carefully assemble to decorate our homes and lives both functionally and symbolically. Everything carries a story of its own. In a conversation with both the filmmaker and creator behind The Nettle Dress, a film following the painstaking process of hand-crafting a garment from wild nettles, the talented maker Allan Brown speaks of how the cloth became storied, impregnated “with a sort of magic… so different from the industrial model, where if those threads do carry stories, they’re probably aggressive stories of exploitation and loss and labour.” 5 If we look closely, the weft always reveals the details. Can we get curious about what this means for all of us, as makers? Can we choose the magic? Can we start where we are, and find our unique entry point back into the narrative bow that has held us through time, in which livelihood is something crafted beautifully, intimately, and relationally? And with this remembrance we might deepen into place, deepen into time, and deepen into the potential of our bodies as creative vessels, more fully.
1 John Seymour (1984) The Forgotten Arts & Crafts (London: Dorling Kindersley)
2 Sylvia V. Linsteadt (2024) ‘Sylvia V. Linsteadt on The Motherline’, For the Wild, 363, https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/sylvia-v-linsteadt-on-the-motherline-363
3 James R. Martin (2023) ‘Livelihood: a new and old idea’, Resilience, https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-18/livelihood-a-new-and-old-idea/
4 Ann Armbrecht (2021) The Business of Botanicals (London & Vermont: Chelsea Green, p.108) and Robert Pogue Harrison (2008) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press)
5 Allan Brown (2023) ‘#199 Making the Nettle Dress: a creative journey of attention, magic and loss with Allan Brown and Dylan Howitt’, Accidental Gods, https://accidentalgods.life/making-the-nettle-dress-a-creative-journey-of-attention-magic-and-loss-with-allan-brown-and-dylan-howitt/