Working with wood using basic tools and manual labor brings on a sense of accomplishment and inner wellbeing. Society today is controlled and under the thumb of the gadgets that are in use all over the world. High tech machinery and technology has greatly increased production levels and brought the cost down so that many people can afford to have a greater amount of things. The mentality is to manufacture items as cheap as possible and when the product breaks it is to be tossed aside and thrown on the garbage heap. The use of plastics and other inexpensive raw materials are filling the landfills to the brim and overwhelming our planet with waste.
The photo included with this article displays a traditional artesian man in Peru shaving wood by hand. Look at the joy on his face while he is building a product from scratch with simple tools and his bare hands. The wood smell is highly aromatic! The wood is organic coming directly from being grown as a tree in the earth. It can be carved and formed into a variety of different products. The man, the wood, the tools are all acting as one. There is something spiritual in what the woodworker envisions as his end result and the wood being the medium which evolves into his creation. Handmade woodworking is rapidly being replaced by machinery because of the global appetite for inexpensive characterless products.
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