In action and service.

In action and service the hands disappear as we engage in skilled manipulation of material. The man at the lathe skillfully shaping wood takes no notice of his hands. The tool and the hands holding it in well-practiced form, become an extension of his intellect as his consciousness engages directly in material and the creation of form.

Slow making

What if our new metaphor for time was craftsmanship, hours spent in caring and practiced skill?

We’ve heard of the slow food movement. The idea of making things quickly and too easily, thus providing empty calories for the creative soul, is a notion we should explore, and then avoid as unhealthy for the human spirit. Fast food or corn chips? A passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home speaks to me as a woodworker.

 

“It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of hand-mind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.”

 

One of the things that can slow a person down in woodworking is the knowledge that what one makes can last a hundred years or more. There are examples in museums of pieces that have lasted for their beauty and utility for years before our own. When an item is crafted with useful beauty in mind, it transcends not only the years it may last, but also the need one might feel to hurry in its making. What are the few extra minutes to do things right when each moment of attention is witnessed in the finished piece for such a lengthy span of time? What’s the rush in the light of generations? You may walk through the Frick Galleries in New York City and find things that took time in the making using skills that are now lost to most of us. …that may not be understood in the moment absorbed at a quick pace.

"Things men have made with wakened hands and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch and go on glowing for long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them."— D.H. Lawrence

How long did it take to make that? The potential customer asks in the hopes of equating your work with some level of comprehension related to their own salary, thinking only that hours spent are the same as money. How long did it take to learn to do what you’ve done so well? is a better question that might relate to your own life.   

We have become so impulsive, so undeliberative in our actions, that I urge you to contemplate the very slow making of things. Through applying more conscious attention, can we invest greater mind in the making of the things that fill our lives and awaken our sense of beauty? And what would the effects of such actions be?

It seems that much of our hurry is driven by the metaphor, “time is money.” But time is not money. It can be the opportunity to invest care, carefulness, attention, serving and listening to each other. What if our new metaphor for time was craftsmanship?

Make, fix and create...

 

 

After my stoke at the end of 2024, it has been made abundantly clear that contrary to misperceptions, hand skills are no booby prize for the intellectually impaired. Quite the contrary, they enable us to do for ourselves and our families and provide valuable services to others, while building toward a respect for all labor and each other.

The 800 lb. sore thumb

Originally posted August 28, 2011
One of the difficult things to talk about in the Wisdom of the Hands is the 800 lb. sore thumb in the room. There are millions of people, college graduates and the recipients of advanced degrees in higher education, who feel justified in thinking themselves the best and brightest. They were recognized by their teachers their first days in school as the smartest and best. From that firm foundation they worked hard for their degrees and invested thousands of dollars to attain a particular standing in American society. For a woodworker in Arkansas, a man holding a hammer to suggest that all those best and brightest may not be as best and bright as they have assumed themselves to be could be interpreted as an insult of the highest order. And yet, when one begins to understand the role of the hands in the creation of intelligence, one cannot help but notice the opportunity cost of decisions that were made in American education, to isolate the education of the hand from that of the mind, to separate those who have academic ambitions requiring college from those presumed ill-suited for academic pursuits destined for the trades. In our system of American education we make no allowances for late blooming. The clock is always ticking on our education, though we know learning should last for a lifetime. Too colorfully to ignore Jonathan Baldwin Turner, father of our nation's land grant colleges, wrote of the hazards of a two-tiered society in his Griggsville Address, May 1850:

"...a classical teacher who has no original, spontaneous power of thought, and knows nothing but Latin and Greek, however perfectly, is enough to stultify a whole generation of boys and make them all pedantic fools like himself. The idea of infusing mind, or creating or even materially increasing it, by the daily inculcation of unintelligible words--all this awful wringing to get blood out of a turnip--will, at any rate, never succeed except in the hands of the eminently wise and prudent, who have had long experience in the process; the plain, blunt sense of the unsophisticated will never realize cost in the operation. There are, moreover, probably, few men who do not already talk more, in proportion to what thy really know, than they ought to. This chronic diarrhea of exhortation, which the social atmosphere of the age tends to engender, tends far less to public health than many suppose."

"The most natural and effective mental discipline possible for any man arises from setting him to earnest and constant thought about things he daily does, sees and handles, and all their connected relations and interests. The final object to be attained, with the industrial class, is to make them thinking laborers; while for the professional class we should desire to make laborious thinkers; the production of goods to feed and adorn the body being the final end of one class of pursuits, and the production of thought to do the same for the mind the end of the other. But neither mind nor body can feed on the offals of preceding generations. And this constantly recurring necessity of reproduction leaves an equally honorable, though somewhat different, career of labor and duty open to both, and, it is readily admitted, should and must vary their modes of education and preparation accordingly."

Later, Mr. Charles B. Gilbert, Superintendent of the Newark, New Jersey Public Schools spoke about the danger of sacrificing our democracy on the division between academic work and skilled hand work in the 1905 meeting of the Eastern Manual Training Association:

The great function of all public schools, afterall, is not to give specific knowledge or fit for specific things, but to train democratic citizens. The attitude of the teacher toward manual training has very much to do with the democracy of the teacher. Any sort of separation of children into classes intended to go for all time through their lives is exactly antagonistic to democracy--could not be more directly antagonistic; it is the antipode of democracy... What is the great foe of democracy at all times? It is the building up of walls--permanent walls--between classes; is it not? So long as wealth disappears with a single generation or two generations there is not any great danger; but when we get into the position--condition (If we ever do)--that many of the countries of the world are in; if a child is born with the feeling that he is born in a class--that there is a great gulf or a high wall between him and his neighbor who is born in a different class; then democracy is dead."

So help me with this if you like. We know that many people learn that whatever skills and intelligence they bring to the classroom are unwelcomed and unappreciated. They learn to be still, to undervalue their own intelligence, and lose confidence as learners, lose interest in learning or in being taught. Others, gain a sense of superiority, and remaining unchallenged by the failure to attain real skills in the use of tools and real materials, do not arise to their full excitement of discovery, creativity and imagination, even while feeling themselves entitled as a part of a privileged elite.

Can you see the danger of this? It is the 800 lb. sore thumb in the room of American culture. It leaves some failing in confidence and others failing in creativity. Fortunately, the real world does capture a few of our best and brightest despite our system of education.

Superintendent Gilbert had stated in an earlier address to the Third Annual Conference of Teachers, New York City, (from the New york Times, May 30, 1897):
"The words 'manual training' do not express the meaning they were intended to convey. No satisfactory form of words brief and clear enough for general use, have yet been found to replace that now used. The idea of manual training, as understood in the schools, is to train the intellect and the hand together, each assisting in the development of all the best powers of the other."

That we have failed to understand this simple notion in modern schooling will be regarded as the greatest failing in American education.

 

6778

This is the 6778th post on the blog and I want to alert readers to the use of the search block at upper left that allows readers to find content by search term from the past 20 years. 

I find it useful, as it reminds me of earlier subjects I've written about. Want to know about Friedrich Adolph Wilhelm Diesterweg, for example? You can type that name in to find out his importance in hands-on learning.

Echoing Pestalozzzi, Diesterweg suggested that curricula move from the known to the unknown, from the easy to the more difficult, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract, describing how we all learn.

Make, fix and create...

Finished post office boxes.

I have been doing so many other things but have gradually finished my post office boxes. I found an additional two box doors in my woodshop supplies that I'll bring to completion at a later date.

I've also been going through my blog Wisdomofhands.blogsp-ot.com, started in 2006, to extract 50 quotes which I'll share also at a later time. You are welcome to look back with me, starting in Sept, 2006. https://wisdomofhands.blogspot.com/2006/09/
Use the search function at upper left if you like.

The box shown is cherry and inlaid with native hardwoods.

Make, fix and create...

Veneered boxes with legs

These have been in the works for a while. Clear Danish oil will be applied to bring out the natural colors of wood.

Make, fix and create...

Post Office box doors

In about 1977 I had been given post office box doors from my father who had purchased them at auction in Valley Nebraska when the old post office had been torn down. Planning to make post office door banks, I visited Nations Hardwoods and bought various interesting and contrasting woods. To do right by the ornate brass doors and to honor the gift from my father, I went to bed that night and "saw" the means to fabricate inlay to be used on each one. They were sold at Nelson Leather Company in Eureka Springs.

Two leftover doors found use, one as a gift to my daughter, and one as a bank for receiving contributions to the Carnegie Public Library. When the one from the library was stolen and likely destroyed, I used ebay.com to find replacement doors to make them a new inlaid box.

What you see in the photo is one currently being crafted with the two remaining doors, as I am currently trying to clear up a few projects, crafting a clean slate. The tape is to remind me of the combination.

Make, fix and create...