It’s dirty here, in the soil, in amongst it all

Clay from the streambed started to bake on our palms. If we waited a little bit longer, we’d be able to pick it off in flakes and crumble it back to dust. But we probably wouldn’t wait though, because today we were busy.

We were building muffin ovens - tiny clay things, with only enough space inside to cook a single cake, but big enough to teach us everything we needed to know. He told us that he had never made an oven before and that we were all following advice from a book he’d left on the kitchen tabletop at home: read as much as you need, but just do get started. He had made a rough sketch, but this was really something we’d be doing hand in hand, side by side. Anyway, there was a functional simplicity and logic to the design which was easy enough for each of us to hold in our heads: stable base, firebrick hearth, damp sand hemisphere (for the negative space) and then the clay layer. We were all looking forward to the bit where we built the small fire to bake the clay from the inside.

And we couldn’t stop talking as we loosed off a million questions each. Like flares they went up, peaked and then dropped, fizzling down through twisting trails of smoke. Maybe we hoped that someone would pick up the signal and come to our assistance, or maybe we didn’t actually care, and that everything important was in the asking. In most instances, I think we found the answers for ourselves in the digging and the mixing and the kneading; in the balling and the pressing. Either way, the questions we had must have been answered because we never once stopped working.

Homo faber

As we inched our way forward, he shared a new name for us. Instead of homo sapiens (which two of us knew to mean ‘wise man’ or ‘man the knower’) he said that homo faber would be more accurate: ‘man the maker’. We loved this and agreed the name change unanimously and with immediate effect. We started using this as a prefix to our names - Homo faber Pete, homo faber Jack and so on. And we totally got that everything we were doing here connected us back across continents, back through time, back through the soil and stream to a point which fascinated us all; a time when knowing things about stuff and how things worked didn’t come from reading or googling or maybe even from asking others - because we made nouns before we had nouns - but from having a need and then not stopping until it was met; a natural process that takes us from being in the unknown, just wondering, to planning and doing and failing our way into the known.

and we let things be, a little bit messy

None of this was anything like what we’d experienced in school. Which was probably why we all hated school. There, there was loads of writing and almost no talking. We could put our hands up if we wanted to say something - usually to answer a question from the teacher or to ask permission to go to the toilet - but talking to explore and investigate and find out stuff and to properly help each other, well it felt like that kind of talk was actually banned. Here it was the opposite - we never stopped talking. There, the teacher wanted everything to be neat and tidy and organised and lashed down. Here, we let things be; let everything be just a little bit messy.