A Very Happy New Year Everyone!

Becoming a Lifestyle Artisan Is Up To You!

In a few hours a new year will unfold its minutes to become hours and days into an unknown future and we will each step into its chasms and onto its mountains to overcome the obstacles we call simply ‘Life'. I don’t tend to look back into the past purposely as some type of nostalgic but sometimes catch myself drifting into Texas canyons filled with mesquites, live oaks and native pecan trees growing wildly beneath flailing branches. Remember here that I come from a metroplex of five million and my playground as a child was the city dump one block from my house. As I sit at some base or other watching the ants traversing their section of the globe I can’t help but say Texas was some of the best years of my life. I could have stayed here in the UK and most likely would have owned one of its over-priced homes and become a slave to even owing two or three, but I am so glad I didn’t. I wouldn’t trade the twenty Texas’ years for anything.

The Stepping Stones in Life

Drifting further back to 1965 I remember making tea for ten men many decades my senior and discovering that two teaspoons of tea in one man’s cupped palm was different in another’s and that ten men each said “two teaspoonfuls.”, but every one of them looked very different amounts to me. You see these cupped hands gave me differing amounts of tea for each individual pint mug and  the same hands gave me different methods of working to do the same job. I emulated pushing and pulling saws, planes and chisels when no explanation could tell me how the things worked but actions did and the techniques were personalised, customised developed to be fit for purpose as I grew.

Don’t Despise the Days of Small Beginnings

Hands serving me then became my hands today and I look into a new year filled with hope that wherever possible all of the knowledge I have gained will pass to you as they passed to my own sons over the past two decades and also to my many apprentices through the past four decades.

We Never Know Who’s Lives We Will Transform

Over two decades we have trained over 5,000 individuals around my bench here in the UK and throughout the USA. When I started teaching I never knew that would or even could happen. That was pretty expansive I think. Above that I have trained hundreds of children aged 5 - 16 years and many apprentices 16 and up. By the end of this year and the time you read this we’ll be closing in on five million YouTube visitors to our training videos and my blog currently stands at well over five million views too. It’s all making a huge difference and we’ve kept it all free from sponsorship and the invasion of advertising too. Coupled with these successes we have proven how well online training is through video training and I am glad to have been able to contribute to this at my time of life even if it’s only to counter the negative influences from the power-machine world.

A New Day Dawning

So, it’s a new year and our quest to train new woodworkers is not to clone any individual but to set free new concepts from fresh new individuals who so want to become the new generation of lifestyle woodworkers. Cultivating craft work as a lifestyle occupation means standing your ground in the face of false expectations others feel the right to somehow demand of you because of some external control. I have faced this several times over the years and have continually faced breaking away. Education is only the means by which a society enables you to communicate within a common culture. It has no rights of demand or compulsion beyond that. What you contribute to any society you live in is entirely freely given and entirely up to you. The more we invest into our society and beyond even that the more we recover the warmth and care and love it takes to make change a reality for everyone. No matter your age, gender, ethnicity or circumstance, it still lies within your scope to define who you will become this coming year. First you must determine exactly what the scope is and the parameters that you want to set to work within. Then you must develop a plan of sequential steps to arrive at your goal considering time and goals.

My conclusion For 2014?

Make lifestyle happen in 2015. Share your life as much as you can by involving others with your thoughts and feelings, your hopes and aspirations. Start right away with some paper and a pen. Who is it that you want to be and how are you going to become a lifestyle artisan that makes change happen?