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When I started graduate school in 2012, a friend of mine who was getting his PhD in Philosophy gave me some advice on how to stay sane through my studies. The advice was threefold:

1.Find a way to stay mentally stimulated outside of your area of study.

2. Find a way to stay physically active.

3. Find a way to work with your hands.

If you’ve been checking out this blog for more than a day, you’ve mostly likely noticed that I love to read (mental stimulation) and I’m a tad obsessed with rugby (physical activity). Unfortunately, turning pages and stiff arming big men trying to tackle you doesn’t quite count as “working with your hands.”

Growing up, my Dad was always making furniture or knick knacks in his woodshop and, when high school came, he began helping me build skateboard ramps together for my friends and I. Begrudgingly, I endured the woodworking process so I could skate rather than out of a love of the art, but through it all, my Dad sneakily passed on the basics of the craft. So when I was given the grad school advice, this was the art I turned to. My first project was to build a skateboard, but after that, the ideas kept flowing. I took a break while I was over in Zambia as I had to leave all my tools behind, but I’m back in the States and back at it!

Below is the first project I’ve completed since I’ve been back which was sprung on me by my little sister. She had found a downed section of fence and a planter, gave them to me, and said “make me a coffee table for my apartment.” She may have said it nicer than that, but oh well. So here we have it. A fencer & planter coffee table with a trap door compartment!

I’ll be posting completed projects here on the [ The Way I See It ] from time to time, but I’ve also thrown together a facebook page under the pseudonym Woodlum Co. with the pipe dream that maybe someone might enjoy something I make so much that they’ll give me money for it someday.

We will see.

“For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.8

“The idea was that when faced with abundance one should consume abundantly – an idea that has survived to become the basis of our present economy. It is neither natural nor civilized, and even from a “practical” point of view it is to the last degree brutalizing and stupid.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.11

“A year ago, almost in this same place where I found his beer can, I found a possum that he had shot dead and left lying, in celebration of his manhood. He is the true American pioneer, perfectly at rest in his assumption that he is the first and the last whose inheritance and fate this place will ever be. Going forth, as he may think, to sow, he only broadcasts his effects.”

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | A Native Hill p.20