The Charm of Making

I am enthralled by the charm of making. Not the words of Merlin and Morgana: "Anall nathrach, utha bhais bethad, ud doxje djenve. Serpents breath, charm of life and death, thy omen of making" but by the real human ability to fashion things with our hands.

In the 1970's I lived on communes, hung around with artists, musicians and a variety of crafty people. I loved the crafts-people best because they were always unpretentious. I found my talent in food, for most of my life I worked as a chef.

Most everything we buy is not made but engineered and manufactured. Even the food on the grocer's shelf is largely processed. The artisanal process is slower and more expensive than the tainted plastic crap that flies off a Chinese assembly line. As object's man made become more robotic and the process of making more machine like the resultant product becomes deficient. Toyota fought hard to make us think that its problems were mechanical when in fact the automobile's artificial intelligence is faulty. Things overly engineered and digitalized can give rise to fatal glitches. Simplicity dictates that form follow function. Man tends to make things both useful and beautiful.

Because we are many it is falsely assumed that our myriad possessions must be produced en masse. Quality is given little consideration. Our expectations are lowered. Our lives become cheap, disposable and inconsequential. When the distinction between wants and needs becomes blurred we lose sight of life. We become big children with endlessly trivial wish lists. We lack the tools to live well. Our life of things has lost the charm of making and we become unhappy and lost.

Grow food, hunt meat, catch a fish, clean it and cook it. Make something, fix a thing that is broken and teach a child how to do. Pick an apple rather than stand in line at the Apple store waiting to buy the latest Ithing.

Goodness needn't be as complicated and corrupt as our politicians would lead us to believe. Washington exists in a bubble, the politicians see us pointing our fingers and shaking our fists but do not hear. They do not see themselves as the problem, so they continue with business as usual, collecting contributions, dining with lobbyists and doing none of the peoples business. Doing the right thing becomes twisted and corrupted by the accepted convolution called legislature.

If only Merlin were here to invoke the spirit and bring forth the mist that leads to clarity and change. This is the charm of making.