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Problem: My friend needs to carve solid blocks of oak into curved, twisting handrail sections in order to finish a staircase for a client. Ok. Here we go. After slogging through a sixty year old handbook written by a master Italian rail carver from San Francisco, making extremely accurate measurements of the staircase, studying everything I could on the internet about his system (called the tangent handrail method), brushing up on my plane and solid geometry, and drawing for four days straight, we ended up with this drawing on a full sheet of MDF (4 ft x 8 ft plus a little) which would (theoretically) accurately describe the three dimensional shape of a curved handrail if it were projected onto flat surface, like a block of wood.: So, ok, next we glued up a big ol hunk of MDF to practice our carving and test our layout on. The THM gives you a big crescent shape, called the face mold, and some accurate angles that will eventually create the twist in the section, which you can see ...
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What One Really Ought To Do

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Reflections On A Farm:     It occurs to me that  every time I scribble something in my notebook, compose these very words you are reading; every brush-stroke or burned-line I make onto a picture-plane; every lunch I have with someone I love; or walk I take in the mountains; or time I paddle-out over a rocky, kelpy, living reef, hunting a wave-ride, I am, consciously or sub-consciously, answering the question that, perhaps, is at the root of human consciousness, and which has haunted me since childhood: "What should I do with my life?" nee "What should I be when I grow up?"     As I sit watching the colors change to light over the Jerusalem Grade, in Lake County, California, in the Northern Coast Ranges, I reflect on the book "Debt: The First Five-thousand Years" that I am making my way through for the third time on audiobook during this-summer's walkabouts (driveabouts). In it, all sorts of fascinating, underlying, and often invisible truths about our ...
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The Indian Thing---Native In a Strange Land--Looking For Meaning in The Moments

So I've been going through a lot, the last 43 years or so, since my incarnation.  I move around a lot.  I feel many things.  I talk to the spirits and hear the songs of the world in the wind and water and human hum of freeway and grocery store & internet buzz. I was a poet when I was young, and when I was nineteen and a baby left my lifeline, words stopped doing justice to the heartbreak, and reaching forward into the dark bright infinity of the future with hands and crayons became the thing that made the most sense. I went and found my mom dead in her bed a fews years ago, and carried her spirit outside and released it to the sky.  She had told me that "we are forest Indians.  Before the Trail of Tears, we hunted game and sang songs to Creator in the forests of the Southern Mountains" of Turtle Island. I look white, blues eyes, blond hair, vaguely ethnic features, but, my mom?  You could see she was Indian- off-the-bat. White people in this country, we...
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