It's not just about making stuff: the process and products of craftsmanship can be analogous to life as well. A few reading passages linking craft and life to inspire you for the week ahead:
"Once there was no divorce between art and craft: in medieval society, painters and sculptors as well as potters and weavers were members of craft guilds. A man was a carpenter, a painter, or a stonemason; his work, his way of life, was central to his identity and recognized as his means of centering and discovering himself."
- D. M. Dooling, A Way of Working
"What are most people in premodern societies? They are peasant farmers, artisans, craftsmen, housewives--and children learning these livelihoods from their parents. In more primitive societies, they are hunters, fishermen, gatherers, nomads. Now, all of this is skilled work of an indisputably useful nature. It requires careful training, a mastery of cultural lore, the constant exercise of judgment and initiative. In doing the work, one experiences one's own competence and strives toward a standard of excellence that is respected by one's fellows. There is a difference between a good farmer and a bad one, between a good hunter and a bad one--a difference the community appreciates and cares about, because the work is necessary value to all concerned. To become good at these things is an exercise of one's cunning, experience, inspiration--qualities that, in some measure, extend and define the personality.
Even under the bleakest conditions of social exploitation, working people in these societies, at least among themselves, can be a community of mutual appreciation and critical regard--not simply because they are being "nice" with one another on the job like bored office workers exchanging pleasantries and good humor, but because their work is a real measure of competence at a significant project in the world. This is an irreducible cultural and personal value, for there is, at last, such a thing in our nature as an instinct of workmanship that can tell an honest job from a fake, and cares about the difference."
- Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet
"The approach to crafts . . . is often initiated by a dissatisfaction with the "plastic" world--that is, the world which does not touch our inner life. Young people turn to pottery, to weaving, to cabinetmaking, as if the life of the craftsman were simpler, easier than the life of a businessman, and, for them, it is. And yet the realization that the objects in modern life do not touch our inner life, the wish to rediscover the connectedness between the inner and the outer through working directly on a material with the body and the best of our understanding, can lead to a shattering self-discovery. It may bring upon me the weighty knowledge that the inner life I am striving to express isn't there--that I have no access to an expressible inner life. Craftsmanship begins with disillusion.
Disillusion is an extraordinarily interesting state of being, having immediate and far-reaching effects. It is a sacred state, a state that has power. It acts at once to still the voices of mere discontent. It is an active, not a reactive state, and if the craftsman can bear to stay there, not to turn away, he begins to detect an opening in himself through which he can learn.
And of course he turns away. We turn away. We never expected to be so shaken, down to the roots. We never before understood that in a real exchange we have to give up something. We visualized the world of forces as if it were a supermarket into which we could enter and fill our shopping carts and go home again. We never thought about paying.
Disillusion, the recognition that I am not what I thought I was, that I don't know what I thought I knew, that I can't do what I wish to do, is the payment that opens us to the creative dialogue. It renders the craftsman, strains him through a very fine cloth to rid him of impurities so that he, like the material substance of his craft, can be available to be worked upon."
- Carla Needleman, The Work of Craft: An Inquiry into the Nature of Crafts and Craftsmanship
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