Love in The Workshop

It’s About How You Do It

Tantric Craftsmanship

True craftsmanship lies in treating the material like a lover.
It’s the way you hold the tool, a conversation between maker and material. Wood speaks in how the cut sounds, the quality of shavings that pour from the tool’s edge. Happy shavings dance off the tool, soft and curly. When you truly treat the work with loving care you cannot fail to notice the divine shining through.

Tantra is an ancient Indian “Way of Enlightenment.” A Way by which the senses are tuned to relate to the forces of beauty within everything, within the Goddess, Nature. The tendency of the human being simply to take from nature was countered by a conscious development of loving care in every interaction with the sense world, nature. Our daily actions as farmer, craftsman, householder were predicated on a need to treat the sense world like a lover and not like a servant. All that remains of this ancient way for most people is the idea of better sex. In truth this is about your life making love to the world in every moment.

Truly tantric craftsmanship is rare.

In this workshop we treat the wood like a lover, one ingredient of why Sounding Bowls sing with such joy.
Today few people are trained or even allowed to work in ways that care. There is no job satisfaction if we are not allowed to care. Loneliness must always follow if we do not reach out in a giving connection to whatever/whoever we work with. On loneliness follows depression. Both are endemic.

Anything that is truly made with love becomes a reservoir of caring, carrying an atmosphere of loving care wherever it goes. The transfer of this to the player is one of the fundamental healing powers in the Sounding Bowl.

Sounding Bowls re-establish connections. – Player to their own feelings, – player to music itself.

Finding the note, the rhythm, the song in your heart on a Sounding Bowl reconnects you to the source of your own beauty. What could be more divine than that?

A deep ecology of making shows the true effect of caring. It changes everything.

See also: A Workmanship of Risk

Chainsaw Therapy

“I’m Building my website right now but I’m going to need some chainsaw therapy soon so I’ll meet you in the yard at 5.30” says Dan’s voice.

There’s Birch logs in that yard bigger than anything I’ve seen before so I agree.

Birch rarely grows big enough to make Sounding Bowls but when it does the quality of the sound it makes is very special. Long related to Venus-Aphrodite this elegant tree touches the childhood longings in many people like no other wood. Not even Cherry.

“Trailing clouds of glory” is Wordsworth’s description of how even young children seem to have a nostalgia for something lost. Perhaps like the Ancient Greeks harking back to their lost Golden Age.

Strolling out into Dan’s yard is pure glory. I watch a large dog-fox sniffing around a bank 100 yards off as though I had little right to be in his woods, and a rare black pheasant grudgingly moves from the path 3 feet in front of me. These are animals at peace with our presence, bringing peace to me in return.

Chainsaw therapy at Dan’s consists of slicing into the smooth, creamy birch, checking its willingness to become Sounding Bowls. Under the bark we discover great willingness.

Best of all, I know Dan’s strong will to preserve the health of the woodlands. His primary work is woodland care. Selling wood follows on.

I came home with the promise of two large Birch logs. Some pieces remain in the Settling Room, awaiting orders.

Mary Leishman was an inspiring individual and the foundation established in her name is doing wonderful work.
The 10 string Melody Bowl they have funded will be used in a music therapy setting within NHS Borders region as well as privately to assist young people and adults with complex support needs to express themselves through music.
If your work with a Sounding Bowl could ‘ease distress and encourage potential’ the foundation is open to receiving applications.