Most of my day job requires sitting at a desk and working on a computer. It’s all good, and I enjoy it except when I get tired of being in an office by myself, when I go trotting up and down the halls looking for someone to talk with.

When I get home in the evenings, I want to avoid the computer. I want to do something with my hands, something tactile and less flat than paper and a monitor. Recently, that compulsion became very intense. I felt a deep, driving need to make a big layer cake. I’d never made a caramel nut cake, but I found a recipe on Pinterest, and simply had to make it. It was going to be a big, fancy cake, and I was going to take it to the fellowship dinner at church. Because whenever I make a lot of food, it becomes a small problem when my housemate and I can’t or shouldn’t eat all of it.

I bought the nuts one evening. The next evening, I made the caramel sauce for the icing and toasted the nuts in butter. The next evening, I made the four cake layers. That took me to Saturday, when I made the icing and put the layers together. I used to make small layer cakes to sell, and it was fun to find that my fingers still knew the motions.The steps of making it aren’t important here but they demonstrate how it was something to do with my creative, nervous energy every night and that I had to strategize how to manage the project. People who think single women have lots of time to do stuff don’t think about how all hosting and cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping and appointments has to happen outside long work day hours. But I digress. This was about baking a cake.

The icing was complicated and didn’t turn out like the recipe promised, so I improvised and evolved an icing that tasted like the moon and the stars but will be impossible ever to replicate. The cake didn’t look like I’d imagined, but when I drizzled caramel all over it just before serving it, it looked mostly like the ooey-gooey, fancy, whopping cake I’d wanted to make.

Never mind that when I cut it into slices,  a quarter of the pieces toppled over onto the table. It was still a yummy, scrummy, rich, delectable cake that people picked off the table and licked off their fingers.

The point here is that I HAD to make a cake–a big, crunchy, meaty, caramelly, mile-high cake. I wasn’t going to be satisfied until I made it. It didn’t look like I intended to, and it actually tasted better than I’d imagined, but the point was making it.

I’m a process person. I often like getting to a place almost more than arriving. Those nights, after intense days at the office, all I needed was to work with my hands and handle butter and nuts and hot, soapy water. It unified all the layers of my self, and relaxed me, maybe because it was something I could DO.

Several years ago, in another intense season, I felt the same kind of urging but with a different medium. As that day progressed, I knew that I had to go home and paint a pineapple with chalk pastels. It was going to be a big, colorful pineapple. That’s all I knew. I’d never painted a pineapple before, but now was the time.

When I was ready to start, I discovered I didn’t have the size paper I needed to make the pineapple as big as I needed to make it. So I went on a search. Newspaper would do the job very well. I took the paper and my pastels and some Google images to the picnic table and started sketching. This is what happened.

There was pink in the pineapple, because I intended it to be an expressive, whimsical pineapple. It turned out to be a lumpy, textured, prickly pineapple, larger than life, which is just what I wanted. My favorite feature, apart from the pink, is the defining black strokes here and there.

I’m sure any art teacher would criticize how the darks are on the wrong sides of some leaves, but I don’t care. In that moment, I was using my fingers to create colors and texture that soothed my soul. I can’t bring myself to throw away that yellowing paper hanging in our kitchen because it always takes me back to that sweet, fun, surprising evening.

I’m learning to pay attention to the times when I feel my face scrunched and puckered into a tense lines, as well as the moments when I breathe deep and slow. Those are the moments when peace and rest seep into the cracks of my heart and make me feel newly-made.

Some of my friends feel their tension melt away when they work with soil and green things, or walk their dog, or ad lib at the piano, or watch the stars, or knit complicated patterns, or clean windows (which will never happen to me). What I love about doing things with my fingers is that it unifies the physical and emotional layers in me, focuses me on the project at hand, and I lose myself in it. For a little while, nothing else matters. This is not about escape. Neither is it about perfection, mastery, or being Instagram-worthy. It’s about being self-aware and entering into the ways we function best.

I wonder how God felt when He made things with His fingers. I wonder if it’s anything like I feel when I make stuff with my hands.

It’s not the same thing for everyone, but I think everyone should find the thing that makes their soul sing, and make time for it at least once a week. Only, I won’t make a huge cake every week.

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