Get your table ready
You need wax and sticks. Not much.
Our sticks are 5, 8, 13 and 21 cm long. Anything straight works. Skewers, toothpicks, small twigs.
Our wax is called Beenius, because bees make what it is made of.
With other people: everyone needs their own wax and their own sticks. Even a little is enough. If two people share one build, one of them is only watching.
Make it stand up
Roll three small balls of wax. Take three sticks. Join them into a triangle.
Hold it in both hands. Push the corners. Pull them. Twist it. What do you see?
Now put one stick on each corner. Lift them up and join all three in one new ball at the top.
Let go. It stands.
Turn it over. No top, no bottom, no ball more important than the others. Each one holds all the rest.
Find out what it holds on to
Press a small ball of wax onto five different things.
Pull each one off again.
Some it holds. Some it drops. We cannot tell you which, because it is different in every room.
Take what you built and stick it somewhere. On the wall. Under a shelf. On a window, so the light comes through it.
One more thing to try. Push a single stick into a ball on the table, at an angle, and let go.
It stays up with nothing under it. The joint holds the angle by itself.
Keep going
Do not start again. Build onto what is already standing.
Add balls, add sticks, go sideways, go up.
Then look around you and bring in what is lying there. A cap. A leaf. A clip. A straw. You know now what the wax holds on to and what it drops.
Pick the build up while you work. Turn it around. Look at it from below. Every few sticks, put it down and walk around it. From this side it is a tower. From that side it is a bridge.
Nothing here is finished, and nothing is wrong. Keep going until you stop on your own.
Turn it into something else
Do not take it apart. Do not add anything.
Move the sticks you already have. Pull one out and put it somewhere it was not. Then another. Then five more.
Work fast and keep going. The thing will stop making sense for a while. Let it.
Somewhere in there it becomes something you did not plan.
Same wax, same sticks, same joints. Nothing left, nothing came in. Only the relations between them changed, and that changed everything.
Let it go
Take a photo first, if you want one.
Then take it apart. All of it. Pull the sticks out and roll the wax back into balls.
Nothing is lost. The wax lost nothing, the sticks lost nothing, and neither did you. What you found out stays in your hands, and the next thing you build starts from there.
The build was never the point. It was one step, and you are already past it.
If something in it does a job for you, keep that one part and leave it where the job is. Let the rest go.
The permaculture in this
Nothing on your table did anything on its own. One stick was weak, a bottle cap was rubbish, a ball of wax was a ball of wax. What carried the weight was the way you put them in relation, and you could keep changing those relations because the material never ran out on you. That is the permaculture in it: you spent an hour reading a system by working it, and now you can build one, take it apart, and build the next from the same handful of parts. A garden works the same way, and so does a Hub. Whatever you make next starts with what stayed in your hands here.
Good to know
Living with the wax
It melts in the sun. Keep it cool and out of the light. It leaves marks, so test it before you press it on something you care about. It picks up dirt. It is made of beeswax, but it is not food.
When it will not hold
If a stick slips out, your ball is too small. Use more wax and push the stick deeper in. If a build leans, look at the shape, not the wax.
