Adapted from a video and performance piece from the next generation of natural builders at the 2021 Natural Building Alliance Conference in Moab, Utah on the conference theme of “All Hands In.”
I’ve been spending time the past couple weeks capturing video of builders around Moab holding the tools and materials of the building process. I wanted to show the hands of folks who are involved with building, the labor of these hands perhaps the most valuable building ingredient in the recipe of making a house.
But it’s hard to know where to stop in this circle of builders.
Of course there are the framers, the cabinet makers, the electricians and painters.
But there are also the parents watching children,
the child watchers,
who allow others to do the framing.
The food pickers who feed the ones who plumb.
The builders in the office with stacks of paperwork structurally sound,
Who write and read contracts,
hands on copy machines,
hands on keyboards,
hands texting the subcontractors.
There are the hands that sell the lumber and the screws
and drive delivery trucks
and handle the waste.
All hands means this circle is wide.
So wide that sometimes it feels like there is not one person who is not a part of it.
It takes a village to build a village.
What do hands do?
They hold, hold space
For the people on the land before us
And the people who will be on it long after we are gone
Poor hands that can’t afford the time it takes to sift the soil and the clay,
Because even mud isn’t free.
Lines on fingerprints like the ridges and valleys of a watershed
Change trickling
Change flooding and crashing
If a lady’s hands reveal her habits then I am in the habit of splinters
In the habit of hangnails and calluses
Hopefully not in the habit of almost losing a fingertip
because that’s a lesson this lady would like to learn only once.
I dream about holding a tool as an extension of my body,
Knowing it so well that it is just a part of self.
Nerve endings growing out towards the tip of the trowel,
the hammer,
the saw.
I told my college boyfriend,
also a carpenter,
that the feeling of sinking a screw with an impact driver
was as satisfying as kissing someone you find really attractive.
He did not agree.
We are no longer kissing, but I am still building worlds with that gun.
There is a moment in every build when the outside becomes inside.
When the structure, though not complete, begins to contain.
To hold us after all the holding we have done of it.
The handfuls, the bucketfuls, the wheelbarrows, the truckloads of materials
held and then holding.
As a climber to me it is the same moment that the rock climbing begins.
First only hands meeting the wall, feet resting lightly on the ground
and with some shift of force they leave it.
The foot leaves the ground, the outside becomes inside.
All hands in means all bodies in.
Do you breathe the air?
All lungs in.
Do you hear the sound of the UTVS? Do you hear the sound of the birds?
All ears in.
Do you speak the language of the land?
All tongues in.
Were you born of parents who were born of parents before them?
All histories in.
Do you walk the earth or feel it under your soles?
All feet in.
Do you hurt for the world as it is?
All hearts in.
Do you hope for the world as it could be?
All dreams in.
Do you wonder, what can be done?
All ideas in.
All abilities, all cultures, all genders, all stories.
We are the wave that will hold it all.
Show me a person who hasn’t had time to become cynical yet
and I’ll show you the same person in ten years,
practicing self care and surviving late stage capitalism
with mutual aid and a good therapist.
We can build the homes vertically
But organize horizontally
And give everyone the credit.
Like a rhizome reaching across and around
beyond and behind
to the future
to the past
We’ll show not tell
Hands held in solidarity and not in sympathy
Hands held, but not held back
You’ve heard of the render rainbow, yes?
But have you heard of the natural building spectrum?
Because we are ready to forget about the binaries
Natural and artificial.
Straw and sand and spray foam coexisting
On the way from one world to another
From a thousand old worlds to a thousand new worlds
Hybrids like the humans we are
eating organic homemade food
and taking a picture of it with an iPhone 13
Baby steps and tidal waves.
All hands means holding those we disagree with too
With nuance and complexity
Sadness for the burning ponderosas
Gratitude for the firefighters
Love for the gardeners
Distaste for the herbicides
Respect for elders
Accountability for mismanagement
Grace for those who are new to justice
Justice for those who need it to be restored
These hands can hold them all.
When I was little, I watched my single mother change the water heater element
in our single wide mobile home.
I watched her boil icicles on the gas stove to make water
when the power was out and the pipes were frozen.
I watched her recaulk the bathtub.
Now here I am, covered in 13 years of fat deposits from a pipe that needed fixing, and secretly loving it.
It was my father who told me that some people don’t believe rocks have a consciousness.
And he would know best, having suffered the granite kiss more times than he could count.
He used to give me a tape measure every year for my birthday,
Like some ruler marking time…
I never thought I’d be a carpenter.
Never thought I’d spend my evenings picking slivers of wood out of fingertips.
Laying on the floor nursing an aching back the way he used to do.
I wore ballet flats to my first woodshop job
and my boss, the woman who taught me first the ways of wood,
made me go home to change
I cried and she knew.
I painted my nails once and my coworker, he said that my nails were too pretty for a carpenter.
Another man’s hand over my own as I tried to jigsaw out the letters of the Hollywood sign,
and me trying not to cut both of our hands off.
Hands can heal. Hands can harm.
It is beautiful to me that the size of human buildings is not just to the scale of human occupants,
but to the scale of human builders.
A 4 by 8 foot sheet of plywood because 4 feet is as wide as one of us could comfortably carry.
One brick made to fit the hand of one bricklayer.
Build me a windowsill for a lifetime of cats
Wide and sunny and filled with plants to knock over
Terra cotta pots broken onto the adobe floor.
Dirt back to dirt
I want the house to age with me looking in the mirror
Body covered in lines as the grain of the timbers.
Read lines on my palms like the layout plan of my house
The bevels of my face curved and angled
Lines around my eyes from smiles and sun
Did you know that the word line and the word linseed are related?
That the flaxen oils used to cure our plasters were the fibers used to make straight lines before?
Linea is where it comes from, like lineage- the builders who have taught us and whom we’ll teach.
Linea like linen, the flaxen shirt that breathes with my body as I work.
Linea like linear, some description of a path we’re on without knowing where it will end.
Have you thought about how plasters are coverings for walls but also band-aids for limbs?
A plaster is for healing.
The word building is both an object and an action,
Home is both a feeling and a place.
I want the owners of my house in 70 years to look at each other over steaming mugs of tea and say,
“Yes the builder of this house chose the colors
based on two earrings she bought at a yard sale
for one dollar the week she moved to Moab.”
“Yes, the builder of this house fed the soil with compost from her own hair and nails.”
“Yes, the builder of this house buried her most precious secrets in the foundation,
so she’d always know where they were.”
Let’s build a house that will survive the rain.
Let’s build a house that will help me survive when it never rains again.
And what to name her?
Patience- for I have none?
Hope- a reminder that there is some?
Name her Grief, because sometimes that’s all there is left.
How many rooms in the house for children who won’t remember what it was like before the fires?
How many shelves in the kitchen for food that can still grow in drought?
Should I build a smaller bathtub?
Or one twice as large so that we all may be in it together?
The same tub, the same boat, held by porcelain curves.
I don’t get those tape measures from my father anymore,
Nothing to mark the time which slips away like hands cupping water.
Every day it gets a little harder to keep the hope alive when you zoom out too far.
But when you zoom in, beauty and joy are abundant.
a basket of peaches dropped off to the site by a neighbor
someone new learning to churn the mixer for the first time
the sunlight through a not-yet-installed window
a lunch nap
a worksite dog
a beautiful color freshly wet and alive on the wall
rescuing materials from the landfill
the footprints of a tiny mouse in the reject sand
the first time the lights turn on.
the tears in the homeowner’s eyes when she finally gets her C of O
the squelching of clay slip between fingers (or toes)
working on the shady side in the summer.
working on the sunny side in the winter.
a perfectly executed truth window
the view from the peak of the roof
a thrift store straw hat
a homeowner’s child remembering your name
just the right playlist for just the right afternoon
the unexpected beauty of the grain of wood in a 2 by 4
a campfire made from scraps of last year’s build
an invite to a barbecue after the homeowner moves in
And my four-year-old niece taking me by the hand to say,
“I want to be a builder when I grow up.”
Special thanks to the builders who put their hands in for these photos: João Continentino, Rikki Epperson, Roslynn and River McCann, Herman Herrera, Jon Dwight, Victoria Hoang, Jayleen McKenna, Nik Robalino, Ron Allred, Doni Kiffmeyer, Olivia Mendonça, Johnson Benally, Jenna Whetzel, Henry Barker, Amelia Patterson, Dylan Grey, Kaki Hunter, Khiara Cezair, Broden Jensen, and Alex Burbridge
