Joe Barry sent me the following note in reference to our concerns about passing along the knowledge, interest and tools to new generations.

Doug:

The lack of young craftspeople has been on both our minds for a couple of years. With no children between either of us, Dee and I wrestled with this issue when we did our wills a couple of years ago. We both have as our largest assests our craft libraries and equipment - weaving in her case, woodworking in mine. We both belong to organizations in which most of the members are "of a certain age', ie: white haired. Our nieces and nephews aren't interested and at least one sister-in-law fears I will leave my tools to her son and warp his path away from white collar success.

I got most of my equipment when a friend's father passed away and none of her family members had any interest in his tools. Fortunately, his widow was willing to let me pay her over time for the tools because I valued them and would use them. I have hoped to encounter a young woodworker just starting out that wanted a mentoring relationship to whom I could pass on my collection intact. I'm only 54 (this week) so I expect to get 20+ more years of use out of this equipment so I'm in no hurry. I just see guys coming out of North Bennet Street School and needing $20,000 worth of equipment to get started and I would like to at least share the wealth.

There is a guy near here that has made a very good living buying up old school shops. When he has learned of a shuttered shop he approaches the Superintendent and offers to buy all the shop equipment and "take it off their hands". Administrators have a vague idea it is worth something and are only too glad to accept his offer of "$4,000 and I'll haul it all away myself" He used to make that back after reconditioning the 24" Rockwell/Delta planer most shops had. The rest was gravy. Interestingly, these days he has trouble moving the equipment out of his barn. I guess we old fart woodworkers aren't buying much and the young woodworkers aren't out there.

I don't have any great ideas for this problem. I hope that maybe at some point there can be a network to connect the young craftsmen with the the older ones so that there is some continuity of the tradition and knowledge.

Joe

Here in Arkansas, we have an Artists in Schools program sponsored by the Arkansas Arts Council that pays artists $125.00 per day for short term teaching engagements in schools. It is a wonderful program, but the pay should be much higher to enable more artists to participate. If school administrators in the US realized the great wealth they had in their local artists, they would be bent over backwards to make use of artists like Joe and Dee, offering significant financial benefit to artists willing to teach and share their understanding of tools, processes and materials with young people.

Recently, a friend of mine, Doug Powell, volunteered to teach glass bead making at Clear Spring School and then in our local high school. He was named citizen of the week in our local paper last week in recognition of his contribution. My daughter Lucy came home thrilled with the beads she had made. But we are paddling against a strong current.

On the other hand, your sister-in-law has great cause for worry. Exposure to the crafts can have earth shaking consequences for some. A friend of mine, Cecil Persons, walked by a potter demonstrating at a mall. He was captivated and decided on the spot to become a professional potter. That led him to a fascination with glazes which led to his master's degree in ceramic engineering. He is just now getting back to pottery, but with his retirement plan in place.

Another acquaintance, Bill Strickland walked by a classroom where a teacher was throwing a pot. Bill stopped and watched. The teacher invited him to try. Bill attributes that moment to the beginning of his transformation from a juvenile delinquent to a professional craftsman to a major player in turning thousands of children's lives around. Bill was given a MacArthur Foundation award for his work with inner-city youth.

What I've seen in the woodshop is that work with the hands has the power to engage the heart in learning. Take the hands away, and you open the door to boredom and disengagement. Boredom and disengagement lead to drop-outs and failure, but the hands of artists, Joe, yours, Dee's, and mine do have the power to transform education.

The photo above is a quick snap-shot of the Shopsmith my father gave me for my 14th birthday. It is still in use as you can see.

I received a wonderful package from UPS yesterday containing a basket by Leon Niehues. It was a piece I was able to commission last fall when we were together at a show. It is woodwork, or at least a form of woodworking in that it is made from thin strips of white oak, each piece rived by hand from solid wood. No piece of work could be more symbolic of the Wisdom of the Hands than basketry by Leon Niehues. He is one of my fellow Arkansas artists and one who's work I have admired for many years. My wife and I are incredibly pleased to add his work to our very small collection.

There is a particular matter of concern for myself and many of the other makers I've met in various shows. We look around, and wonder where all the young artists are. We wonder what it will take to encourage others to take our places when we fade from the scene. Will what we have studied and worked hard to develop end without being passed along to new generations?

To attain the high level of workmanship and artistic merit that you find in the piece shown above, or in the work shown on Leon's website requires a lifetime investment in vision and skill. If we don't encourage our children to find joy in creating with their hands, guess what?

I may be very slow in contributing to the blog at times. If so, please feel free to use the search box above. It is a valuable tool for digging into the recesses of over 6 months of blogging. One suggested search term that you might enjoy is "sloyd." Or type in "Sweden" and you can follow my travels to the home of sloyd. Also, the links at right will carry you into the archives. Pick a month, any month. It's all about the hands in education.

The photos at left are from today in the Clear Spring woodshop. Rachel is assembling her foot stool and planning the woven seat. Gab, our exchange student from Thailand turned a mug from curly maple and applied the finish. Travis has worked out a method for turning hardwood rings on the lathe. He adds one to his collection nearly every day.

What do you think Moses Brown School, Providence, RI, Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School, Cambridge, MA, the George School, Philadelphia, PA, Pinkerton Academy, Derry, NH, Putney School, Putney, VT and Belmont Hill, Boston, MA have in common? Other than being strong private schools known for long traditions of excellence in education, they all have woodshops. Does it make you wonder if the elite of east coast urban America might know something that few remember in the heartlands? Does it make you wonder whether woodworking might be something more than a program to turn children into future carpenters?

Paul Ruhlman, director of the wood program at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, MA says the following about his program:

"Here... the woodworking program goes back over 100 years. Woodworking education has been considered part of the Fine Arts Department. Design and mehanical problem solving are emphasized in the wood courses. The courses are not about learning a trade but looking for ways to sense and explore the physical world with one's hands. A good word fo this is 'haptic' from the Greek haptikos which means to lay one's hands upon. It is the sense of the world one gets from one's hands."

Paul teaches in the "Sloyd" building, a name that ties his program to the near forgotten Sloyd system of woodworking education. The photo above is of Paul (at blackboard) with a class of box makers in the fall of 2001. The Sloyd building shown below on the BBNS campus is designed with the same floor plan as suggested by Gustaf Larsson in his 1907 book, Sloyd for the Three Upper Grammar Grades.

Today at Clear Spring School the 5th and 6th graders spent one more day on paper sloyd. I expected them to get tired of it long before now, but when I asked them what they wanted to do next week, guess what? So I told them as long as they want to keep doing it and as long as it doesn't interfere with other necessary projects, we'll keep it up.

There are some very specific reasons why their teacher Andrea and I believe that Paper Sloyd is important right now. The first is that it provides a great lesson on the importance of following written instructions. Some of our students really don't like that part very much, but they tolerate it because they enjoy the results.

Guess where students will need to be able to read and follow written instructions? Yes, of course, they will need this skill when they put together their first barbeque grills, but I mean in school... Math and science. Algebra, trigonometry and chemistry are extremely difficult if you are unable to follow written instructions to the letter. So, as you can see, we are preparing our students for some very important growth, even though they are having more fun than even I expected.

The second thing that 5th and 6th graders can learn from paper sloyd is to self-assess their own work. So often in school, children feel like their teachers are grading their work arbitrarily or by some unfathomable formula. In paper sloyd, it is either cut square and on the line or it isn't. It is either folded crisply, at the right place, and on the line, or it isn't. A project either comes out looking like the model in the book, or it doesn't. The teacher may need to point these things out one time, but most often, one time is enough.

Believe me, it is a great thing for teachers when students begin to self-assess the quality of their work. It is the start of what some psychologists call "effectancy," or "self-efficacy." Students see the results of their work, take pride in it, and then feel motivated to repeat the the actions to continuously lay claim to the feelings they provide. Effectancy is what leads a craftsman to spend years developing skill in the woodshop or leads a teacher to spend years in the classroom, or leads a small child to grow into an adult with goals and ambitions that serve self, family and community. The photo above is of Killian (left) and Jacob (right) with paper sloyd models made last week. I was too busy today to take any new photos.

I have a responsibility to inform you of other great things happening in Arkansas. A+ Schools is one. A+ stands for arts, not the grade. But as in the Wisdom of the Hands program at Clear Spring, A+ schools recognize that academic excellence is fostered by involvement in the arts. To become an A+ School, the entire staff from janitorial, through secretarial, administrative and teaching go through a summer training program to build an understanding of the role of the arts in education. Getting all the school personnel on the same page is an extremely important consideration in making the arts a serious part of the school culture. At the present time, A+ programs exist in North Carolina, Arkansas and Oklahoma, and the link above will help you get connected.The A+ Schools program presents an opportunity for public schools to make a shift toward better utilization of the arts in education.

Another important thing that happened here in the last couple years, was that Arkansas Governor Huckabee, as chairman of the Education Commission of the States Governor's Task Force made support of the arts in schools a statewide mandate, and started a national initiative for the arts. It's no revolution, but it did force some school districts in Arkansas to hire new art teachers. For a Republican governor to step out in support of the arts shows that things can change and people can break barriers and boundaries when their hands call them to that change. Governor Huckabee plays the guitar, and attributes his success in life to his high school success in playing a musical instrument. It will be interesting to see whether his position in favor of the arts will continue as a Presidential candidate.

In the meantime, the photo above is from last week of Ike Doss finishing his beautiful curly maple bowl, and the one at left, also from last week is of 3rd and 4th grade students with their teacher Michelle and their finished boxes.

They say that things have to get worse before they get better. But of course that depends. If you are looking at a big thing, like an ocean liner, it can be hard to turn the thing around. You may have to go through the whole chain of command to get the attention of the captain, and he may believe the large object looming ahead to be merely a fog bank, and not the world's largest iceberg. If we are talking about education in America, we are talking about thousands of individual ocean liners with thousands of captains, each convinced he or she is god of the ship whose word is law. Then, even if the captain got the idea, the crew of American education has no idea how to make the turn, where the levers are located or "how do we stop this thing?!!!" Very sadly, many of the best teachers, seeing the problems and the difficulties involved in making the turn, jump ship for more lucrative and rewarding careers.

You maybe have noticed, if you pay attention to such things, that the first thing to get cut from the school budget when things go from bad to worst is the arts... the visual and performing arts. "We've got to have the three R's," they say..."Read'n, right'n and Rithmatic." I would suggest that it works the other way. The arts lead the heart to the engagement in learning. If kids are bored and disengaged in schools, it shouldn't take much of a brain to understand why.

You may not be able to turn the ocean liner of education in your community, but you can take time to inform the captain of what looms ahead. Then, please take time to engage your children and grandchildren in making things with their hands. They, of all the students in schools, will be better prepared to swim.

Today in the woodshop, the 3rd and 4th graders did Paper Sloyd. The first and second grade students finished their Friendship boxes, from pine with leather hinges.

Also, today, the Spring issue of Independent School arrived. I've had a number of articles about the Wisdom of the Hands program in various magazines, but there has never been such excitement at Clear Spring School about my writing as today. Independent School is the journal of the National Association of Independent Schools, the parent body of the association of independent schools that provides the Clear Spring School its accreditation. Publication of materials about the Wisdom of the Hands program in educational journals means that our leadership in education is beginning to be recognized outside our own community. The photo above is of two students helping each other to nail boxes. The photo below is of students with their finished boxes.

I find it endlessly fascinating and disturbing to watch the flow of ideas in our culture. My town of Eureka Springs is a microcosm. I watch ideas emerge to the surface, and the first question people have doesn't concern the merits of the idea, but the constant query, "who thought it up?" or "whose idea is that, anyway?" I find it tragic that my own home town can be so polarized that we would waste-can great ideas without really even exploring their merits. It hurts here, it hurts on the national scene, and it hurts internationally. The opportunties lost by the death of great ideas has profound effect on us all.

In this morning's post, I mentioned the difficulties in marketing sloyd to the world due to the complexity of its ideas. There were other issues afoot, and one that I can't let pass without some mention.

One of the things of note about Educational Sloyd was that it was envisioned, developed and promoted by a Jew. You can perhaps imagine the days before World Wars I and II, and the hostility within society for Jews and for ideas developed and promoted by Jews. It was a problem faced by Otto Salomon, and by his uncle August Abrahamson who built the school at Nääs and paid for thousands of people from around the world to attend. Open hostility toward Jews led to the concerted effort by Nazis in Germany to exterminate the Jews from all occupied territories in WWII. A German friend of mine, Hans Jaochim Reincke, has written an interesting paper after extensive research documenting the effects of anti-Semitism on the distribution of Educational Sloyd, even here in the United States. While I don't want to dwell on that part of the past, I think it is important to understand human dynamics, whether we are looking at the microcosm of Eureka Springs, or the history of Educational Sloyd.

In the presentation of educational ideas, the question will always arise, "whose idea is that?" If I were one who grew out from the Ivy hallowed halls of Yale or Harvard, you know people would be 1000 times more likely to take my ideas as having merit. That's OK, however. I'm young and in good health. Anyone who takes time to observe and give attention to his or her own hands will know greater truth than you will find in those halls built as they are upon the separation of the hand from the heart.

The photo above is of Otto Salomon in about 1905

Here's what happened to Sloyd...As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the Theory of Educational Sloyd was a complex one, outlining the many benefits of working with the hands. It is always difficult to explain complex theories and relationships, and if things can be reduced to simple buzz words or phrases, you have a easier time selling them to a broad audience.

The Russian System of Manual Training, unlike Sloyd, could be reduced and expressed as a single word. Jobs. It didn't promise greater intelligence in our children. It didn't promise to shape and mold them into caring human beings. It didn't attempt to foster a lifelong love of learning. It just said to parents, "give us your children and we will train them for work." It said to industry, "give us your support and we will bypass the control of the unions in the education of your workers, and we will make certain you have the bodies to keep the products flowing." Simple concepts, right?

But the consequences have been tragic. We divided our schools into academic and technical, isolating the hands from their role in shaping academic thought. We drew a line in the sand, with white collar on one side and blue on the other. We created an academic elite with little sense of the value that creativity, capability and confidence in their own hands would impart to their lives. And we created a system in which the joys of creativity and academic exploration were stripped from the work of millions.

Now, in these times, it is hard to sell woodworking programs in schools. The manufacturing opportunities for skilled workers has dropped...there aren't as many jobs, and besides, parents say, "I want my Susie to be a brain surgeon. We don't need a woodshop." If they only knew...

I'm not sure how many people heard the NPR series on college last week. One young man told of his mother's pressures on him to become a doctor. He told the interviewer, "I want to work on cars." Many parents don't want technical skills programs offered in schools. They see them as a threat to their aspirations for their children. "What if my child took woodshop and wanted to be a (gasp) woodworker." Well, what if your child wanted to be fully, hand, body, heart, intellect and spirit engaged in learning and life? It comes through the wisdom of the hands. It may be a tough sell, but if enough of us talk about it and share the joy we find in learning and making through our own hands, hearts, and intellect, some will understand. It may be enough to make a difference.

Call to Hands- A Hand Maker's Manifesto...At some point you run out of things to say. That hasn't happened yet with this blog, and yet, I know that at some point very soon, I may start repeating myself without getting any clearer or more concise in what I say. You may have noticed in American politics that if you want to get votes, you have to oversimplify the issues, reduce them to the inane, and state them in sound bites that get played over and over in the media to knock down and make foolish anyone whose greater insight or intelligence might show some promise to the American people.

There were very clear problems in selling Educational Sloyd to the world community. The benefits of woodworking for general education were far too numerous to reduce to the inane. You can read the works of Otto Salomon, or Gustaf Larsson, or Friedrich Froebel, and discover that there is too much going on to reduce it to the kinds of soundbites required to sell the ideas to the general public who are far too lazy or inexperienced, or cowed down by the intelligentsia to understand.

The challenges I have in this blog in explaining the role of the hands in learning and in the selling of hands-on education to the educational community at large are made huge by the depth of involvement of the hands in every facet of human engagement. If we talk about mental health, the hands have an important role to play. If we talk about learning, the same. If we talk about character development, which was one of the important issues in the early days of sloyd, the hands were essential. If we talk engagement in life, we know that there is no deeper engagement than to touch or create with our own hands. If we talk about human history, we see that it was a story told through every object ever crafted by man and then held by the hands of another generation. So, it is hard to get a handle on things from which a simple sound bite can be created and sold to the American public.

There is an important concept from the Theory of Educational Sloyd, the movement of learning from the concrete to the abstract. That simple concept tells that our own understanding of the broad, complex and abstract role of the hands in learning has to come through the concrete reality of our own hands. We can talk here of abstractions, but the wisdom of the hands will only be fully revealed to you when you hold a tool to a piece of wood and cut. You can only reveal it to others by placing a tool in the hands of a child or friend and provide the opportunity for learning and engagement. If you've not done it you won't get it. It's what Lance Lee and others have called "experiential learning." And experience means, put down the mouse, walk away from the monitor, pick up a tool and go to work, either in your own hands or as a teacher for others.

Abraham Maslow: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

If the only tool you have is a computer, every problem is virtual and has no solution.

It is time to take all the tools in our own hands and start a revolution.

The photo at left...more pinwheels and other paper sloyd things by Maggie and teacher Andrea.

I want to introduce Mario Nunez. He has been a friend for many years, is a regular reader of the blog, has been my teaching assistant at Arrowmont, is the father of grown boys (one coming home from Afghanistan), and teaches at a community college in Buffalo. In addition to his teaching computers for ESL students, he's reopened the woodshop for classes!

Mario left a comment on the blog this morning, but also sent the following by email:

"Your comments on students wanting to skip ahead to the "more fun" projects in paper Sloyd are right on the money. I expected that from the students in my shop class, but I also see it among my computer students. They either skip instructions that seem boring or they skip them because they can't figure them out. In both classes, skipping instructions causes all sorts of trouble."

I had a conversation with our elementary school teachers on Friday. They are all very interested in paper sloyd because of the difficulties they have with students listening and following directions. My mother was a kindergarten teacher during the creation of "educational television" and she noted that before Sesame Street, she could stand at the head of the classroom and have all eyes glued upon her and all ears alert for her every word. She said that the rapid pace of Sesame Street and other children's programming was not something that the teacher in the classroom could keep up with and it became increasingly difficult to hold students' attention. Sorry, Mom...you were boring, but then every teacher is boring when compared to TV!

I think the computer is also changing the way we try to learn. We can just keep frantically poking keys until we get what we want, but it is extremely inefficient and possibly destructive. Some internal mapping of sequences is taking place, which allows us to replicate actions that work. But how about things that actually happen on purpose and by intent?

I don't like reading instructions either. I'm the one who would put the barbeque grill together and then get out the instructions at the end to see where the left over parts were supposed to go. But, knowing how to read and follow instructions can make the difference between being an independent learner or a dependent learner.

In wood shop, I have students who don't listen, and then ask for or demand my help when they need it. When we are on a particularly challenging project, I'll hear my name called at the same time from every corner of the room. It is great to be needed and wanted, but I would like my students to listen in the first place and then work quietly and confidently on their own. It is a tough change to make, but one that was laid out in sloyd where the projects were arranged by order of difficulty and each project prepared the student for success in the next.

Paper sloyd presents an interesting experiment. I'll let you know how it comes out. Now the 5th and 6th grade students are trying to make written plans of their own for a woodworking project. The plans are to have a drawing of the finished object, a cutting list of the parts, and step-by-step instructions. We'll go over them on Wednesday as they do the next set of projects from the paper sloyd book. If they manage to make coherent plans, we'll make something.

Tonight I want to share a couple photos of an early piece of my work. This elm and walnut chest of drawers was my first piece to be made with hand-cut dovetails. The walnut frame was held together with through-wedged mortise and tenon joints, and the doors, back and sides were made with floating panels held in bridle jointed frames. At the time, I was busy in my woodworking exploring the use of various traditional woodworking joints. In this design, there are two additional drawers and a shelf hidden behind the doors.

I had promised to do this piece for a customer, but we had no agreed delivery date. He showed up at my shop one day to inform me that he was moving from Arkansas to Prescott, Arizona in one week and he wanted me to get it finished ASAP. Fortunately it was far enough along that I was able to get it done in time for him to take it with him on his move, but I had reservations about sending my work to Arizona with the dry conditions I had heard could wreck havoc on hardwood furniture.

One night, months later, my customer called to tell me that in the middle of the night he awakened to what sounded like a gunshot in his bedroom. "Don't worry," he assured me. "It wasn't your piece." He had commissioned another chest of drawers from another craftsman. The solid wood sides were rigidly glued to the drawer guides, and in the dry conditions had exploded with one half inch wide cracks on each side.

My elm and walnut chest of drawers survived its time in Prescott, came back to Eureka Springs for a season or two, spent two winters in Colorado, and is now in places unknown. As far as I know it still survives, not as a testament to my craftsmanship, but to the kinds of traditional techniques that are being ignored and forgotten.

This is a note from Joe Barry that I will share with you. Joe, I hope this is OK....

Doug:

With my last couple of notes to you I was inspired to return to a favorite book: The Way of the Carpenter by William Coaldrake.

"Skills of a more advanced nature were absorbed by imitation of the master by the apprentice, a process known universally throughout the arts and crafts of Japan as nusumi-geiko, "stolen lessons". In traditional practice, therefore, the bases of learning were total immersion in a workshop environment and inner motivation, both occurring at an age of extreme sensitivity and adaptability. The manual skills and creative outlook of the apprentice were formed as the very person was maturing. The essence of carpenter education was to mold the person and the professional at the same time, before "the bones hardened." Having been exposed to the subtle psychology of this system, I know that its techniques establish a progression defined not by formal curriculum but by behavioral initiation, and that the whole being is permeated with special attitudes toward collaborative process while the techniques of tool use and building construction are being mastered."

One of Coaldrake's observations was a report by an older carpenter on how kids used to hang around the worksite and absorb what was going on. With the advent of power tools thay had to chase the kids away for their safety. No more exposure to the tools and meterials to inspire them!

One of the most profound influences on my development was Lance Lee and The Apprenticeshop. In 1975 Lance wrote a monograph entitled "Apprenticing Revived" It opens with this paragraph: "East of Bath, perhaps a hundred miles, on a salt-water cove in Passamaquoddy Bay, in 1972, a small boy named Christian began to grow up. His father was a boatbuilder. For his second birthday he had been given a fine German wooden-soled smoothing plane. After the first two days he stopped aimlessly banging away. Christian began to copy his father's sideways motions. Play? Rite of passage?"

Both the Japanese and Lance believe that tool use must be taught at an early age and that those that come to it later will never have the instinctive mastery of those that started young while their brains were still developing.

Joe

The photo below is of a smoothing plane made by my friends here in Eureka Springs, Bill Clark and Larry Williams

Centering. I began my crafts career as a studio potter, and spent many long hours learning the craft and developing my skill. I totally enjoyed what I was doing, and I have often felt that I could return to my former life as a potter without loss of stride. I know that is illusion, however. Throwing pots on the wheel really requires practice and lots of it. It is interesting that we "turn" wood on the lathe, but we describe what we do on the potter's wheel as "throwing." One is an extractive process, cutting away, and the other is a process of shaping a dense mass of plastic, near fluid material into larger shape and form.

While the processes are completely different, there are internal requirements for the artist that are the same, and throwing a pot is a great example of how we first shape the quality of our attention before shaping the material. This is related to the attention required to engage the working surface as described in the last post and can actually be applied to nearly every human activity.

The potter first carefully wedges the clay in a process similar to kneading dough. The purpose is to make certain that the clay is uniform in texture and even in moisture content and density throughout and also to make certain that there are no air bubbles that could appear later in the process to weaken the walls of the pot as they arise from the wheel. Wedging is a very physical process requiring strength and attention.

Next the potter places the clay firmly at the center of the wheel and presses or pats it down to adhere. A bit of water on the wheel prior to patting the clay in place will help it to stick. Some potters throw the clay down at the center of the wheel.

After starting the wheel in motion, the potter braces his or her arms in closely to the body to form a rigid structure, allowing the strength of the hands to "center" the clay. This process, called centering, creates a perfectly uniform hump of clay on the wheel that is essential to all that happens next.

When the hump of clay is perfectly uniform the potter uses his or her fingers to make a hole in the center of the hump and begins to squeeze the clay between the fingers, slightly pulling the clay outward and up to begin shaping the pot.

While only one part of the process is actually called "centering the clay," every part of the process can be called "centering the potter." If the potter's mind should move away from the intense requirement for attention to the working surface, the clay revolts. If the potter's mind moves away from centering on the working surface, the clay moves off center as well. Let the mind wander...the pot wanders. Wander for more than a moment and the pot fails.

While the lathe is a different tool, the centering is the same. If the mind wanders, the tool slips, often damaging the surface and forcing the craftsman to adopt unplanned changes in the shape of the object. Intense concentration is required to get good results. While many materials are less demanding than wood or clay, centering is the same. In working with many materials, the off-centeredness of the maker may not be as clearly visible as the failure of a pot. But being centered, in control of attention and its placement on the working surface can be a tool that adds significance and meaning to everything we do. Talking with a friend... writing or reading a blog.

Are you able to recognize when you are on or off center? Working with your hands in making beautiful objects is a means to find your center and develop your powers of attention, and what you learn can be broadly applied to nearly every situation in life... Just one more reason why we need to be teaching woodworking in schools.

The mug in the photo above is one of the few pieces remaining from my former life as a potter. It was made in 1976.

I want to talk just for a few moments about what a friend of mine calls "the working surface." It can be best understood as the point of engagement between the individual and the material of intended transformation. It is easy to understand this principle in woodworking. Take a piece of sandpaper in your hand and pass it along a piece of wood. You will feel the movement of texture beneath the paper as it cuts the surface and you will feel the change in surface quality as it moves from coarse to smooth. You will hear the sounds of the grit engaging in the fibers of the wood. The scent of the wood arises with each stroke. You will see the motion of your hands and paper along the wood. You will see the effects of your work on the wood and the accumulation of sanding dust that results. Each of these senses: touch, hearing, sense of smell and sight are means through which you are empowered to pay attention to the working surface. All these, in combination provide the means to focus your attention on the moment of work, and through your attention, material is consciously transformed.

We can do lots and lots of things in an unconscious state. We can amaze ourselves by driving hundreds of miles, deeply immersed in thought, only to awaken and remember we're driving when someone cuts too closely in front.

We are quite capable of living our whole lives in a near unconscious state. We can space out in our imaginations, or travel away into the screens of our televisions and computers.

But those are not the places from which great arts arise. Great arts emerge from the conscious application of attention to the working surface, whether in wood, clay, bread dough, the strings of a guitar, or the conversation with a friend or spouse.

Great arts arise when we are fully present to the moment, fully alive as human beings in service to higher principles. Want to try it? The opportunity exists in every direction. The photo below is of a hand carved ivory reliquary in the Cloisters, New York City. The photo above is my own version of a reliquary. Instead of the bones of a saint, my simple reliquary holds turned samples of 25 Arkansas hardwoods.

I Walk in Beauty

In beauty I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
Everything around me, in beauty I walk
In beauty I walk
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again

—Navajo Prayer

There is a Navajo ceremony, "the Beauty Way," which notes the importance of beauty in their lives. Is beauty something inherent in the distant view, or in the object at hand, or is it something that exists only in the "eye of the beholder?" Good questions with a simple answer. Beauty describes the state of relationship between the observer and the observed, just as love describes the relationship between the lover and the beloved. The Beauty Way ceremony of the Navajo attempts to restore the sense of beauty and harmony between the observer and the observed. At some point in your life you may have felt overwhelmed by a sunset, or stood within the walls of a cathedral or amongst the redwoods or in a quiet forest and felt somehow changed and at peace. If so, you know the kinds of feelings involved, and the sense of well-being that ensues. Those are the feelings expressed in the Navajo poem, "I Walk in Beauty," and to live with that constant sense of beauty would be my wish for myself and all those who might stumble onto this blog.

I get those feelings of beauty and harmony at museums when I am in the presence of objects crafted by the energies of the human hand and heart. There are objects in museums that I visit like old friends. The pleasure I take in them is a reflection of something within me. I see their beauty from the vantage point of my own efforts to create beauty. My own work with my hands is the foundation. Knowing the effort involved, my face pressed to the glass, I stand in awe.

And what happens to generations of children who haven't had the chance to create objects of usefulness and beauty with their own hands? Will they discover beauty in the objects crafted by the human hand if they have no relationship with their own creativity? Our children's faces and our own are pressed to the glass of monitors where virtual life is displayed. But, how about the glass in museums behind which the highest attainments of human virtue are preserved? Will we find our children standing in awe? We'll find out. The image above was taken of a woodcarving at the Cloisters in New York City.

Earlier today, I mentioned the saying, "Think Globally, and act locally," and I wonder how many have any idea of how to put such a thing into practice. A friend of mine, years ago, introduced me to a concept he called "dual awareness." The idea is that you put your full attention into what you are doing, but hold the slightest vantage point in consciousness to observe your own application of attention. You could say the principle is to "do it while seeing yourself doing it." It seems too simple to have effect, but the overwhelming tendency is to forget... to allow your activities to become unconscious and your attention to wander from the task at hand. You will have to work at it.

There are all kinds of mysterious things about the universe. There are many, many things which we don't understand. We observe coincidental ocurrances that seem too much to be mere coincidence. We take leaps of conjecture and faith from those observations to create belief systems which become formalized as religions.

But the Wisdom of the Hands isn't about getting spooky spiritual. There is no need for that. When our attention is placed fully on the actions of our hands and we hold a simultaneous awareness of higher principle by putting quality workmanship and attention to detail as our primary motives, our work takes higher form. Others see that quality and feel things in the work that they may not fully understand or be able to explain, but will interpret as beauty or even love. When you have used your hands to express your highest human qualities in the making of an object, do you believe that others will feel and understand your work and respond?

I'm just silly enough to believe that when these qualities are placed within work, they have the power to touch others through the boundaries of time and space. Have you ever walked into a museum and been moved by a work done hundreds of years before? If so, you may know what I'm talking about.

The statue in the photo above was hand carved in China over 600 years ago and is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. Curators found a secret compartment with a scroll which held the signatures of the carvers. Do craftsmen have the power to touch hearts through time and space? Visit the Nelson-Atkins Museum and see for yourself.

Joe Barry, my "brother in sloyd" and I each kind of rediscovered sloyd on our own. I published my article in Woodwork magazine and beat Joe by a couple months on his article published in the Journal of the American Society of Period Furniture Makers. Joe is a former wood shop teacher and sent me the following comments worth a good read:

I just finished reading a book entitled; "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service - and how it hurts our country". It made a point relevant to our discussion in that children -especially children of privilege- are raised in a risk adversive cocoon by their parents. Their parents try to provide a world in which they will never face failure or disapointment. Conversely, they never face significant challenges either.

My sister-in-law is a good case in point. Both she and her husband had degrees and careers in advertising and engineering respectively and decided to go to medical school. They both work as family practice doctors here in Randolph. Their 3 teenagers have lived a life of some privilege here. We don't have a country club or society as such, but they have never been denied anything they wanted. A trip to Japan, a year in France as an exchange student, individual laptops and cell phones? Not a problem. Now my sister-in-law is bemoaning the fact that none of her children seem to have any fire in their belly. They have all said they don't want to go into medicine because their parents work too hard. They all have no direction and seem to believe that the good life can continue without any effort on their part. As for Aunt Deedy and Uncle Joe, well, lets just say that we're neanderthals because we have our crafts and limited disposable incomes.

I have had some lengthy discussions with school leaders over what they considered to be my politically incorrect teaching methods because I believed that failure (safe failue) is an important teaching tool. They failed to understand how recovery from that failure is a valid and important lesson. I was always amused when I had a discussion with a kid about how he planned to build his project and I'd ask "Do you think that's a good idea? Maybe you better ask Ashley how she did that." As I walked away I'd hear the other kids talking to him saying that he'd better reconsider how he planned to go about doing it. Plus, it empowered and validated the kid that was consulted. I admit I'm a sneaky bastard when it comes to teaching.

The Oriental belief in "stealing" technique in a craft or martial art was always a good approach. Rather than ramming it down their throats I would pique their curiosity. I always had my own workbench in the shop with a project in process. I wouldn't tell the kids about it but, they would see me working and how I worked. Their curiosity would always bring them around with questions about what and how.

I'm very sorry to inform you that Joe no longer teaches. I know he was a good one.

They may sa-a-a-y I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one...

With 30 million watching American Idol, and few taking time to explore the creative potentials of their hands except through the manipulation of keyboards to engage in their "virtual realities," I know I'm way out of pop culture, unless we redefine the term to refer to curmudgeons old enough to be called "pops".

There are interesting things that happen when you engage the real world through your hands. Test this for yourself. Take a pocket knife and a stick. Whittle. Pay attention as the knife moves down the length of wood. It grabs your attention, narrowing your field. You find yourself and your sharp edge engaged in following grain. A pile of thin shavings builds at your feet. Not at first, however, you must practice. To become good at this requires that you steel your attention and hone your steel. After a time, you begin to see your success measured in such a small thing: a perfect curl of thin wood whispers from the blade. The world of the large, the distant, and the distracted passes by to little effect. You no longer need the SUV or the MacMansion; the trappings of fools that take tremendous toll. You've made the cut, and it is for the virutous, the living, the real.

From wikipedia.org: The phrase "Think Globally, Act Locally was reportedly coined by David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, as the slogan for FOE when it was founded in 1969."

Acting locally is best defined in one's own hands, in the most sensitive shaping of the human environment. A knife and a stick. Get much beyond the most local in your actions and you run dangers of egotism, pretense, and the American Idol.

Will you join me in the Wisdom of the Hands? We'll call each other "Pops." We'll start a "pops culture" with values that sustain the health of our little blue planet.

When John met Yoko...It is interesting how two words can sound so much alike, have the same Latin root, virtus, and have so little in common in their actual meanings. The once commonly used word virtue, meaning morally good or righteous, and the overused word virtual meaning "sort of but not really," could be thrown into my earlier discussion of real wood vs. manufactured wood-like materials aka. partical board.

Particle board at its best can be made to look like wood. In an examination at a microscopic level, wood fibers can be found. But to call particle board virtuous rather than virtual would be a tremendous stretch of both the language and the imagination. It seems like imagination is abundant (for some things), and that can be a good. John Lennon imagined a world without war. I'll go for that.

Telling how John Lennon met Yoko Ono is an obvious ploy to increase readership of this blog. Please forgive me for pandering to pop culture. At some point, I hope that concern about the hands will become pop culture, but it will take a tremendous growth in readership for that to happen.

John Lennon attended an opening of artist Yoko Ono's work "where he climbed a ladder to the ceiling to see one of Ono's installations: a placard with a tiny word on it--"Yes." She gave him a card reading "Breathe;" and requested five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail into the wall. His famous retort: an imaginary five shillings to hammer the imaginary nail. The connection was instantaneous."

So here we have it. A virtual hammer, virtual nails, what I must assume was a real ladder and wall. But, here I am, a relic of the past, a craftsman for God's sake, looking for virtue in it. I would prefer a real hammer, maybe a Vaughan, some coated framing nails (we call them cc sinkers), some real wood, maybe oak so the hammering would require strength and some nails would bend. Regardless, I am imagining a world at peace.

Now why can't hammers all be real and war be virtual? I suspect that if all children were empowered to create things of usefulness and beauty...things for real... war would fade from the horrors of human imagination. Do you think I'm stretching things a bit? You'll never know unless you give me a hand. Take a few moments and introduce your friends to the Wisdom of the Hands. We may start a movement....for real.