When I wrote this essay for the journal of psychology, The Folio, I was thinking of all the times people looked at me funny and asked where the design ideas came from. But more importantly, I wanted to challenge the pervading notion that working with your hands is a “working class,” practical thing separate from your intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual life. In fact, I came to feel that craft offered a unique paradigm for being in the world with more creativity, but less modern desperation - and a unique, flexible logic for dissolving (rather than fixing) many problems, conflicts, and disconnects. The so called Focusing work of Eugene Gendlin (celebrated in The Folio) gave me a philosophical & psychological language for getting into this hidden layer of craft and art.

The essay can be read without explanation, but occasionally I refer to a Gendlin idea you may not be familiar with. So if you are interested, I direct you to his little book, titled simply Focusing. Let me just say two things about Gendlin’s work. It is easy to dismiss at first glance - it has little to do with ordinary focusing. It comes to us primarily in the form of a self-help book written almost 50 years ago. This little, influential book is widely considered a classic for both practical and analytical reasons. You can think of Focusing as a kind of inner fluid attention grounded in your body - grounded in your intricate felt sense, as he calls it.

Secondly, while Gendlin’s basic idea is brilliantly reframed for us moderns, it is not really new. It is a rediscovery of a very old way of knowing yourself often lost in the unconscious dualisms shared by religion, science, and technology alike. What I have learned (some 15 years after I wrote this) is that Gendlin was doing psychology within the broad, radically holistic framework that philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described quite systematically in the first half of the 20th Century. I am pleased to note that Whitehead’s process thought is continuing to gain steam today within multiple fields (as is Gendlin’s embodied psychology). Gendlin opened up a particular aspect of Whitehead’s system given little attention (even by Whitehead - other than mostly acknowledging that it is there grounding us) … and that is the role of our vague awareness of everything grounded in the vast, real, but vague, unconscious inheritance of our infinite past and how it continually transforms itself within experience (Whitehead called it prehension or concresence or simply feeling depending on the context - Gendlin called it the felt sense).