Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God

Chapter 7 “One More Stitch” :Relational Productivity and Creative Energy

106 c h a p t e r 7 “One More Stitch”: Relational Productivity and Creative Energy Donna Bowman One more stitch . . . one more row . . . Ah! It’s dawn. tata and tatao The first warning sign for many Americans of the current recession and its associated crises was the 2008 spike in oil prices. Suddenly everyone was talking about four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. The prospect of the increasing cost of fuel raising the price of nearly everything—from food, to travel, to labor—frightened many people, who saw shortages, inflation, and a return to the dark days of the 1970s on the horizon. Gasoline prices subsided, but the larger problems facing the American economy were only beginning to become visible: uncollectable debt, failing financial institutions, lack of credit availability, bankrupt businesses, unemployment. Consumer spending declined as people began to worry about their personal safety nets, trying to hoard their cash for the rainy days on the horizon. In times of economic hardship, Americans have always turned to handcrafts . Making useful or decorative items by hand makes sense under these conditions as a money-saving measure, of course, but also as an attempt to insulate ourselves from the volatile marketplace with gestures toward selfsuf ficiency. The Depression saw the growth of the sewing pattern industry. During America’s two world wars, magazines and newspapers were filled with tips on do-it-yourself projects, and people “knit their bit” for the de- “One More Stitch”: Relational Productivity and Creative Energy 107 fense effort. The fifties pulled both ways at the crafting movement; women were supposed to be freed from sufficiency concerns by labor-saving devices and increased leisure time, but the decade also saw a backlash against convenience products and a desire on the part of consumers to be involved in traditional domestic arts, even if only to the extent of adding an egg to a cake mix. With the rise of the counterculture in the sixties came an interest in natural, communal, self-sufficient living and personal expression, which gave rise to an explosion in crafting. Inflation and the energy crisis in the seventies built on that movement as millions of middle-class families supported a burgeoning hobbies and crafts industry, from macramé, to woodworking, to crochet. It is not surprising that people’s habits change in times of insecurity. What is interesting about the production of items by hand—intended for personal use, for sharing and gift giving, or as a cottage industry—is its relationship to energy both in terms of large-scale issues of fuel and infrastructure and in terms of small-scale issues of individual habits and networking. In this essay I argue that the unique conditions of the early twenty-first-century crafting movement suggest insights about energy that have theological and philosophical consequences. In particular, the opportunities afforded by informational infrastructure combined with the creative potential of individuals can demonstrate a middle way between the thoroughly industrialized future envisioned in the fifties and the postapocalyptic , postindustrial future imagined by many at this time of emergency. Instead, process thought offers resources for understanding the contribution of personal energy inputs into a technological nexus that results in a sustainable transformation of the material world. When the World Wide Web was in its infancy in the 1990s, many forecasters felt that, for better or for worse, humanity was moving away from existing primarily in the material world and closer to existing primarily in a world of information. In such a world, the disembodied mind would be as well equipped—or even better equipped—to navigate, perceive, decide, and act. Some, like Ray Kurzweil, looked forward to a future in which the mind is plugged directly into the network, experiencing virtually far more than could be experienced materially.1 Others warned of a Matrixlike outcome in which we can become satisfied with virtual inputs, leading to neglect of the body and lack of care for our physical surroundings.2 Theologians and sustainability advocates alike have made efforts in the last few decades to call us back to an appreciation of the role of embodiment in human experience and to our physical connectedness to the ecosystem. These movements seem to be threatened by the growing complexity and 108 Donna Bowman availability of virtual interaction. On the other hand, process theology has long worked within a model of mutual and essential interrelatedness in...