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The Family Business News
  • Making Inner Knowing
  • Kelley Shields
  • child developmentcreativityhand madeparenting
Making Inner Knowing


Watching work being done by hand always brings me back to my childhood. Both my parents were 'makers' although that term was not one that was thrown around in their time as a qualifier of the merit it carries now.

Today the phrase maker economy has worked its way well into the lexicon. The swell to celebrate and recognize the life-supporting and enhancing collateral of this trend is a good indication that the transformation of our economy away from outsourced, mass produced goods is not just a trend but in fact a viable, thriving shift that has taken root. Tim Bajarin of Time online discusses the development of the maker economy in his post Why The Maker Movement is Important to America's Future.

And this movement is in fact very important to the recovery of our economy. As a child the 'making' my parents did inspired me to adopt the life path I did and to feel comfortable in my choice of an artist for my life partner.

I watched my father rebuild our house room-by-room from the gaping emptiness of spaces stripped back to the beams, construct the family boat from raw materials, resurrect shells of cars for us from junkyards, building them better engines than they had at their issue capping his metamorphoses with paint jobs in the color of our choice.

I witnessed a self-taught seamstress build a sewing school and special occasion wear business so strong she had to turn work away. Every room in our home was touched by her decorative eye; she made the bedroom sets, curtains and pillow shams. She designed and created every birthday, graduation, prom and wedding dress any of us wanted. I have spent every year of my life refining the sewing skills she taught me at age five. To this day sewing remains one of my greatest pleasures and most developed creative strengths. 

Our lives literally came into being in large part through their creativity, providing the wondrous multi-layered benefit of not only imbuing our lives with great beauty and affording us contact with the mystical act of creating but instilling in each of us an inner knowing that more often than not whatever is needed lies within ourselves to produce, and not just on the physical level.

Without question one of the greatest gifts we have given our girls is front row seats to the show of bringing something into form where nothing existed beyond the idea that it could. Like all parents, Brian and I have not always known what the solution to a particular challenge was or what the rising above it would ultimately look like but we always felt it was important that by example they would come to know that they have within them all that they require to shape and transform their lives.
  • Kelley Shields
  • child developmentcreativityhand madeparenting

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