I have been making book bags. Not because I think this is a product that the world needs. The world doesn’t need any more products. We have enough. I’ve been making book bags because I’ve been coming back into relationship with reading. And beginning to notice what a critical skill it is for my mental health.
Those two words, mental health were not something I grew up with. Its taken me many many years to allow them to hold any validity for me. I would hear those words and think of the younger generation as frail, soft, unable to have an innate sense of resilience. But the longer I have sat with it, the more I am coming to realise that this new generation are asking for something else. They are demanding more than just shutting up and putting up. And in asking, they are giving permission to those of us who were not raised with any or at least very little awareness of mental health to begin prioritising it.
What my generation (kids of the 80s) did get was a world without the internet. We had screens. My Popa would lament at the hours I would sit glued to cartoons, so I can’t say we didn’t have screens. But we didn’t have the internet and we had the generation of adults like my grandparents who knew the value of sitting around a table and sharing stories.
For 20 years now I have made and sold creations and art and I am constantly questioning why. What is it for? Who is it for? How do we liberate ourselves from a capitalist society when we are so entirely emmersied in it? How do we create and make and celebrate and ritualise our culture for connection and not simply competition. Where is the balance?
At the end of the day, it is for me. Making things keeps me sane – to create, to use my hands, to see an idea come into a form.
Two things have been constant companions for restoring my mental health these past couple of years since the massive transition that we all faced in the Summer of 2019/20 and are continuing to move through – cooking and reading.
Cooking and reading became my meditation.
The Book Bag is a celebration of that connection.
Watch this space for a new character in the story to emerge soon.
Sending love
Sarah
Soil to Stars 