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April 14, 2008

I am a school-master. I know some things about woodworking and I educate it to any and all interested students. It is what feels straight for me. It feels beneficial too. I take satisfaction from this job. It also has allowed me after 25 years of construction furniture to keep my seat, keep my machines, keep the jigs and patterns, tools and wood-land, keep these things shut up at hand, in readiness at hand. I can endure to work, I can be durable to build, when there’s duration. It is a great joy. I perceive lucky to have chosen a avowal 34 years ago that is now acroatic enough to be slightly in exact.

It is an odd profession when considered in the medium of vision of today’s universe. It is a profession in separate opposition to the creation’s view that the next new being is the next best being. It entails skills that have no capable of absolute proof use to most people in the cosmos today. You cannot body with woodworking tools, you cannot bring into being a phone call with our machines, you cannot frolic games with our intelligence. There is little cash to be made in mastering the art of it.

But once upon a duration, woodworking was not just valued; it was highly important. Primal perhaps. But certainly indispensable for life on the landed estate where 90% of us lived. Then the cosmos industrialized, we sped up our lives, we erudite to grow super crops and no one put a stopple in population expansion. So here we are.

And yet I find this woodworking stuff to be more than an historic dance. I find that it is something different from being an Abe Lincoln impersonator, however useful you may find one to be. It is also more than helping to man the workbench at a historic re-enacting see the verb. It somehow taps into something more precious in myself than can be fully explained. It is an insensible result, it is certainly unplanned. But something happens at the form that informs my vitality on many different levels. Unfairly it’s that I get to make things. Part of it is the step. Some of it comes from having to apprehend so many different things. And acquisition of knowledge to think my way out of problems. It is also the arise of being responsible for what happens at the seat. For not being able to censure anyone but myself for the results.

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