Journal

Why We Gather: On Pockets Full of Treasures and Ancient Skills

Are you a gatherer? Someone who comes back from walks with pockets full of things? If so, this one’s for you.

I want to talk about why we do this – why we forage, beach comb, return from woodland walks with pockets full of acorns and seedheads and bits of bark. There’s something so compelling about it, something that makes us want to be surrounded by these small treasures. And I think it’s worth looking at what’s really going on here, because it’s more than just collecting pretty things.

The Women Who Gather

I’ve been thinking about this particularly because in the Studio right now, we’re just beginning a project based on an Irish traveler’s tale called “The Women Who Gather.” It’s this beautiful old story, and in those first few lines, you meet these old women in Ireland – and I’m imagining them in their long dark skirts, weathered hands, knowing eyes – and they’re walking the land each day, picking bits of sheep’s fleece off thorny bushes. Just these tiny wisps caught on blackthorn and gorse, things that most people would never even notice. And they gather them, and they use them to spin yarn.

That kind of walking along, looking out for things, keeping your eyes open for what wants to be found – that’s what we’re exploring in the Studio right now. We’re making felt beads. We’re looking for glimmers of wool amongst everything else. We’re sharing beauty as we go. And it’s got me thinking about this whole impulse to gather, to notice, to bring things home.

This is the work we’re doing together in The Studio right now through Threaded - learning to see like gatherers, to notice what calls to us, to transform simple materials into carriers of meaning. Not through complicated tutorials or guru-led programs, but as women working alongside each other, sharing what we find.

Come and see what we’re making together.

The Joy of Finding

One of the things we do in the Studio is these Friday live sessions. It’s just beautiful, really – we get together around five o’clock UK time, and we talk about what we’ve been seeing, what we’ve been reading, what we’re making. It’s very gentle, very conversational. People might be having a cup of tea, or still working on something with their hands while we talk.

And this past Friday, one of my members came on, and she was on holiday. She’s been staying in a camper van up in the northeast of England, at Whitby and she’d been on a beach walk that day, and she’d come back with this great pile of sea glass.

Now, if you’ve never collected sea glass, it’s broken glass that’s been in the sea for years – sometimes hundreds of years – and it’s been tumbled by the waves and the sand until it’s smooth and frosted. Almost like gemstones. These beautiful translucent pieces. And she had this collection – lots of green, lots of clear pieces, and then one bit of blue. Probably from an old medicine bottle, that particular shade. This gorgeous, glowing, dark blue.

And the joy in her voice when she was showing us this blue piece – “Look, I found this!” – it really struck me. She’d spent probably an hour or more, bent over, scanning the shoreline, sifting through pebbles, and she’d found this bit of beauty. This thing that has absolutely no monetary value whatsoever, but it stopped her in her tracks. It made her day.

There’s something really interesting going on here, when we get such deep pleasure from finding a lovely stone, an unusual bit of driftwood, an acorn with a perfect cap, a seedhead with interesting architecture, some oak leaves with particularly beautiful color. We bring them home. We put them on our windowsills, our desks, our shelves.

So I started wondering – what is this really about?

Four Threads

Ancient Connection: We’re Built for This

I think we need to go back to the idea of hunter-gatherers. You know, we go right back to prehistoric times, but actually gathering continued to be essential even well into agricultural times. There’s a lot of gathering that still went on – particularly women’s gathering.

Those Irish travelers with the fleeces – that tale would have been from the 8th, 9th century, maybe even earlier. And there they were, still walking the land, still looking for what could be found and used. These weren’t wealthy women. They were working with what the land offered freely.

And if you go back to the 18th century, for people living rurally – which was most people – up to 10% of their income came from foraging on the commons. Ten percent. That’s significant. That might be fleeces caught on thorns, like in our story. It might be food – there was gleaning, where after a crop had been gathered, you could go and take what hadn’t been collected. Whether that was corn or beet or chestnuts or apples, whatever. It could be firewood. It could be medicine.

And that’s another whole thing – lots of the plants that are used in medicines grow wild. But you need a keen eye to identify them. To look at a hedgerow full of plants and be able to spot the plantain amongst everything else. Or the yarrow. Or to see those tiny slivers of fleece on a prickly gorse bush. Or to notice the wild flax growing. Or to spot the fallen apples hiding in long grass.

These are really ancient skills. Skills that would have kept us alive. And we’ve spent thousands and thousands of years developing that part of our brain – the part that can look at a complex landscape and pick out what’s useful, what’s edible, what’s beautiful, what can heal.

So while we might be beach combing for sea glass and shells – things that to us now are decorative, or mementos, or just beautiful shapes – this comes from a culture where we were utterly reliant on these skills. We needed to be able to see what was there. Our survival depended on it.

And I think with our pockets full of shells, with our collections of interesting stones, with our jars of seedheads on the windowsill – we’re connecting back into that. There’s something in us that still responds to that. That still needs that. Even though we can just go to the shop and buy what we need, there’s something deeply satisfying about finding it ourselves. About using our eyes in that particular way.

Mindfulness and the Wandering Brain

The second thing that I think is going on is mindfulness. And I know that word gets used a lot, gets used for everything, but I mean it in quite a specific way here.

When we’re beach combing, or walking along a hedgerow looking for interesting things, we’re in this state of vague attention. We’re looking, but we’re not looking for anything specific. We’re open to what’s there. Our eyes are scanning, but softly. We’re walking, but slowly. We’re aware of what’s around us – the sound of the waves, or the birds, or the wind in the trees – but we’re not thinking about it. We’re just there.

And what happens in our brains when we’re in that state is really interesting. We’re not focused on a task. We’re not problem-solving. We’re not answering emails or thinking about our to-do list or worrying about something that might happen next week. Our brain gets to wander. To relax. To drop into a different frequency.

There’s something about that “vaguely looking” that stops us from being in our heads. We can’t check our phones while we’re bent over, scanning a beach for sea glass. We’re not on Instagram when we’re reaching into brambles for blackberries. We’re not running through our mental to-do list when we’re noticing which oak leaves have the most beautiful autumn color.

It becomes very mindful. It’s a meditation, really. But it’s an active meditation. A moving meditation. You’re not sitting cross-legged trying to empty your mind. You’re walking, looking, occasionally bending to pick something up, feeling the weight of it in your hand, the texture, deciding whether to keep it or put it back.

And I think for those of us who struggle with traditional sitting meditation – and I absolutely include myself in that – this kind of moving, looking, gathering practice can be incredibly powerful. It gives your brain something to do, but not too much. It gives your body something to do – the walking, the bending, the reaching. It engages your senses – what you’re seeing, what you’re touching, the smell of the sea or the woods or the earth.

You come back from a walk like that and you feel different. Calmer. More settled. Like you’ve touched something real.

Rebellion and the Non-Commercial

And then there’s this third thread, which I think is about rebellion. About resistance, even.

Because there’s something quite radical about cherishing items that have no commercial value whatsoever. That woman with her blue sea glass – she’s not going to sell it. She’s not thinking about its market value. She probably spent an hour finding it, which if you value your time at all, makes it “worth” far more than any amount of money you could get for it. But that’s not the point at all.

We’re not sifting for gold here. We’re not looking for things we can sell on eBay or at a car boot sale. We’re looking for things that speak to us personally. Things that have meaning that can’t be quantified. Things that matter because they matter to us, not because anyone else values them.

And I think there’s something really important about that. We’re moving ourselves out of the commercial realm entirely. We’re stepping outside of this constant pressure to monetize everything, to justify everything in terms of its financial value, to always be productive, always be hustling, always be thinking about the return on investment.

A jar of acorns on your desk has no ROI. A bowl of interesting stones contributes nothing to your bottom line. That piece of driftwood shaped like a bird doesn’t help you meet your quarterly goals.

And increasingly, I’m recognizing that the things that give the most pleasure, the most succor, the most feeling of wellbeing – these are things that can’t be connected to commerce. They can’t be bought. They can’t be sold. They can only be found, chosen, cherished.

It’s holding a stone that means something because you picked it up on a particular day, in a particular place, in a particular frame of mind. It’s collecting sea glass and arranging it somewhere beautiful just because it pleases you to see it there. It’s having a small pile of seedheads because you noticed them and thought they were lovely.

These things have no point in our striving. They’re not part of anything that will get you anywhere. They won’t improve your CV or expand your skills or build your business or make you more productive. They’re not even particularly useful.

And therefore, they’re done for love. For pleasure. For beauty. Because you want to. Because it’s a pleasant way of spending time. Because it makes you feel connected to something larger than yourself. Because it’s simply a good way to spend a life.

Beauty and the Eye That Sees It

And there’s one more thing I want to add to this, which is about beauty itself. About training our eyes to see it.

Because when you spend time gathering – when you spend time really looking – you start to see things differently. You notice more. You become attuned to color in a different way, to texture, to form, to light.

You start to see the way lichen grows in patterns on a stone. The way some shells have these perfect spirals. The way bark peels in layers. The particular angle of an interesting stick. The color variations in a single autumn leaf.

And I think this is something that women throughout history have always done. We’ve been the ones who noticed these things. Who saw the beauty in the everyday. Who picked up the interesting stone, the unusual shell, the bit of pottery worn smooth by the sea.

We’ve been the ones who arranged things – who put the special stones on the windowsill, who hung the dried flowers from the rafters, who kept the pretty buttons in a special tin. Not because we were taught to do this. Not because it was required. But because we had this eye for it. This capacity to see beauty and to want to be surrounded by it.

And I think when we’re gathering now – when we’re bringing home our pockets full of treasures – we’re continuing that tradition. We’re training that eye. We’re saying yes, beauty matters. Small things matter. The particular curve of this shell matters. The color of this stone matters. Not because anyone else will value it, but because I do.

Encircled by Found Things

You know, as I was writing this, I realized something. I looked around my workspace – the room where I’m sitting now – and I realized it’s almost encircled with thirty-two years of bringing beautiful things back from walks.

There’s a bowl of yellow shells I picked up in Brittany on our honeymoon. We walked on the beach every evening, and these particular shells were everywhere, and they were this beautiful soft yellow color, and I brought a handful home. That was 1993, and they’re still here, still in a bowl on my shelf.

There are sea-washed ceramic tiles from a beach in Barcelona. Fragments of old plates or cups or something, tumbled by the Mediterranean until they were smooth. I have no idea what they were originally. They’re just these beautiful curved pieces of blue and white pottery now.

There are bird skulls – I find them when I’m walking, and I bring them home and clean them carefully, and they sit on my shelves like small sculptures. There are nests that have blown out of trees in winter, abandoned, no longer needed. There are stones from particular places, particular walks, particular days.

I’m encircled by found things which are priceless to me. Which mark time in a way that a calendar never could. Which connect me to places I’ve been, to moments I’ve lived, to the particular quality of light on a particular morning.

They make this space feel like mine. They make my home feel like home. They’re not Instagram-worthy. They’re not styled or curated in any official sense. They’re just here. Because I wanted them here. Because they matter to me.

In Ancient Company

And I think that’s what gathering is really about, in the end. It’s about paying attention. It’s about seeing beauty. It’s about connecting to something ancient in us. It’s about stepping outside the commercial world for a moment and just noticing what’s there. What’s already there, freely given, waiting to be seen.

So yes, I’m a gatherer. I always have been. And if you are too, you’re in ancient company. You’re doing what women have always done – walking the land, keeping your eyes open, bringing beauty home.

And if you’d like to explore this with me, if this speaks to something in you, come and find me in the Studio. We’re gathering wool from thorny bushes – well, metaphorically – and we’re making felt beads, and we’re sharing what we find, and it’s gentle and slow and there’s no pressure to finish anything or make anything perfect. It’s just about the noticing. The gathering. The making. The being together.

This is where this work happens - where old stories meet making. Step into The Studio

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