Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Day two of box making

We completed day two of box making and most students have at least two boxes in the works and some have more. I was reminded of attending Kindergarten in a private school in Memphis where they had an inside playground complete with slide and merry-go-round. Marc Adams School of wood working is just like that kindergarten but it's for grown up wood workers attempting to get back to their creative roots.

A reader, Jeff, suggested an interesting article about the hands with the attached note:
"
I'm a long-time reader of your blog Wisdom of the Hands, via the UUpdates Unitarian Universalist blogs aggregator. I'm editing a collection of essays by the major 20th century Japanese Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki. One short essay from 1953 always reminds me of your blog, so I thought I'd pass it along to you. I'm attaching the essay in pdf form.

I'm not certain what the copyright laws are on this piece (it is 60 years old, the magazine is long defunct, and the author has been dead nearly 50 years), so while you could quote from it, you shouldn't actually post the whole thing online, just to be on the safe side. The citation is D.T. Suzuki, "The Hands," Gentry, vol. 6 (1953): 44-47."
I really don't need to quote the whole thing. If you don't get the whole message from the following you probably don't do woodworking or take part in any other creative craft. Suzuki states:
"The illness of modern man comes mostly from his forgetting the loving, and inspiring and creative use of the hands." –– Daisetz Tataro Suzuki
The whole of this article cannot be found online, and perhaps it should be. The content is beautifully expressed. Thanks, Jeff, for sharing it with me.

The photo above is of my demo box and one more finger jointed box in the works behind.

Make, fix and create...

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