a nervous week...

I spent most of this week visiting my sister in Phoenix who is in hospice care. It is very difficult to see someone who has been a part of your whole life passing through such circumstances.

In the meantime, our hearing in Little Rock over the SWEPCO high voltage powerline expansion will begin on Monday, and I'm preparing myself as one of the witnesses against it. Please wish me luck.

A week away from the wood shop just at the time when I should be preparing for classes at Clear Spring School will be a test for me. Woodworking is not only my passion, it is also my therapy, which grounds me in the moment and assists in framing my mental state. Some have called woodworking "sawdust therapy," and that's not far from the truth for many of us who participate in the woodworking art. There is a shift of mind and presence of being that happens when a person is engaged in creative work.

Early manual arts advocates believed that common folk, and those of the upper classes, would each become morally bankrupt without the opportunity to be creatively engaged through the making of useful beauty with their own hands. More recently, Matti Bergström described a syndrome he called "finger blindness" concerning those who've become "values damaged" through lack of creative engagement of their hands.

I ask my readers to look around and see if this is the world we would most like to have created for ourselves? If not, then the wisdom of the hands, and our own creative engagement in the service of others through the making of useful beauty offers some high ground.

Seeing my sister in her current state was a clear reminder of my own mortality. We each are given our days to share what we can. I am lucky to have been given the opportunity to share the joy I find in my own creative work with others through my books, my work, my teaching, and with readers of this blog. In the wood shop, I'm assembling parts of my box towers, as you can see in the photo above. Next, I'll make lids and bases, sand the outsides and install the rare earth magnets that will hold the components together.

Make, fix and create...