The Therapy of Making Things

It’s important to learn to make things with your hands especially if most of your time is spent working with your mind.  Whether a doctor or engineer, a teacher or lawyer, and especially for those who spend long solitary hours at a computer building words in long chains that hopefully express complete thoughts.  Something entirely divergent from what you are accustomed like sculpturing or painting or perhaps building model airplanes or even making knives.  Let’s not forget things like crocheting or knitting.  I knew a stock broker who went home after work and weaved her own cloth.  Regardless, the activity must be something far removed from your regular work.  If you’re a metal fabricator, for example, and then you go home and make knives then that doesn’t count.  Perhaps you should try to learn computer programming or maybe baking.  It’s like learning to work your computer’s mouse with your left hand if you are right handed.  The object is to expand who you are and build upon it.  I see too many people who are wedded to the idea of purchasing.  I scan bushcraft forums where it’s nothing more than “I want this” and “I want that.”  It seems very few people know how to make things anymore.  Instead, they just want to buy.  This seems particularly problematic with younger folks who have grown up in a world of obsessive consumption.  But making things can be a form of therapy: A time to immerse one’s self in creating objects far removed from one’s daily life.

Here are a couple of new knives.

 

These are the last of this type of Woods Roamer's knives.  Now it's time to make other designs.  I've made dozens of crooked and hook knives and now a number of Woods Roamer designs including a few large full tang choppers.  I know what I want to make next and as time permits I'll build some entirely new designs. I did have a few visitors watching me as I finished these last two knives.

Some people say these monitos are made by an old lady who lives back amongst a stand of pine trees out of place in this desert.  The locals call it, “El Montecito” which means the little woods.  The old lady lives in an adobe hut thatched with reeds.  No one ever sees her because she’s always making monitos.  I think she favors pink and yellow but I’ve seen others roaming the woods in blue and red and once I saw two purple monitos.   As the story goes there lives a screech owl in an old mesquite that for some strange reason grows amongst the pines.  People say it’s a magical screech owl because it breathes life into the little monitos and allows them to wander through the woods.  I was busy working at my little shop finishing the two Woods Roamer knives pictured above when I spied this group of monitos watching me.  I had a camera and I approached them slowly and even as they saw me they did not move.  I snapped the photo then heard a mockingbird chirping loudly behind me.  I turned to look at the mockingbird and when I glanced again at where the monitos had been they were gone.