Good Life Project - How Working With Your Hands Changes You.

Episode Date: April 29, 2015

When you watch kids create something, it's like watching an artist who is given complete permission to explore, experiment, and express. There's no sense of censorship or fear of judgment...at least not until we're a bit older.Working with your hands just plain does something to you. It drops you into a place of pure creativity and consciousness. You become the process, you get lost in it. And that sensation is pure bliss.But, as we get older, we tend to go to that place less and less. We leave our artist maker side behind. And, in doing so, leave a part of us behind as well.This week's Good Life Project Riff shares a story and an invitation. To reconnect with your soul through your hands. Jonathan offers up a near-tactile story about how, with no workshop and a modest NYC apartment, he started building tables as a way to not only express his jones to "make," but also reconnect with that primal experience of pure creative consciousness.And, in case you're interested, here is one of the finished products, a little 150-pound table known as the Concrete Behemoth. If you want to read the full story (and see pictures) on Jonathan's blog, you can at http://www.jonathanfields.com/god-in-grain/Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So today I'm sharing another short and sweet good life riff. Before we dive into it, today's good life riff is actually brought to you by Camp GLP. So what is that? It's an amazing opportunity to come and hang out with me and a pretty awesome lineup of gifted teachers and our soulful community of entrepreneurs and makers and world shakers as we literally take over a gorgeous summer camp for three and a half days at the end of August, just 90 minutes out of New York City. If it sounds cool to you, you can check out a lot more information and be sure to check it out fairly quickly because our $200 early bird discount ends in just a few days on April 30th, 2015. So you can learn more at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just go ahead and click on

the link in the show notes now or after this Good Life Riff. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. So sometimes I wonder if the closest I get to the experience of God is when I'm making stuff. I was an artist and pretty much a maker as a kid. I literally paint all day long. I would draw and doodle and make what I call Franken-bikes out of spare parts from the junkyard and pretty much build anything I could imagine. That process just takes me somewhere.

It always has. It's like it opens a door to something simultaneously internal and primal, yet also expansive and universal. I find that place often in my youth. And then something happened, though. I grew up. And I think I'm not alone here. The older we get,

the more we leave making and art behind. We trade it for knowledge work, which has its own value, but it's different than the experience of making not just an idea or a story, but a thing, one that exists materially in the world, born of body and sweat and hands and tears and maybe a bunch of wood, paint, metal, or whatever canvas calls you. There's something about the smell of fresh cut wood, WD-40, and danger. So increasingly, I've been missing being in that maker mode. So I took our recent move to a new apartment as an opportunity to re-meet my maker side. So we gave away pretty much all of our furniture, and we needed a bunch of new tables, and I decided I would make them. So not the easiest thing to do in New York City,

where parking spaces sell for six figures sometimes, and sightings of Bigfoot outnumber listings for workshop space. But we're a highly adaptable people, so I figured why not. Little did I know that table one, which would come to be known as the concrete behemoth, would end up six feet long and tip the scales at about 150 pounds. So we started the hunt for parts online and my wife found these amazing handcrafted powder coated steel legs from a guy in Turkey. And we bought a pair of vibrant purple ones. They arrived at our doorstep four days later, which is pretty awesome. Without a makerspace

or a co-workshop, you know, loaded up with power tools, in New York, you need to do a bit of delegating. So I headed over to Home Depot, and I had them pre-cut sheets of pine to size and screwed and glued them together to make a subtop and then drilled and screwed the purple powder-coated table legs and so far so good. Now what to do with the top? Well, my wife and I had talked about different ideas, lacquer, oil, wax, paint, but we wanted to do something really unique. And I thought to myself, well, what about concrete? Wouldn't it be cool to give the top an artisanal troweled concrete feel? And I'd never worked with concrete before, but hey, how hard could it be, right? Famous last words.

So I went online and I searched how to make a concrete tabletop. And this led me to actually a great DIY tutorial on just that, making concrete countertops and tables. Still, it was pretty much all outwinging it, and that's also where I hit my first snag. Turns out, when you use concrete, the thing you're covering needs to be what they call a stable substrate, meaning it can't have any give or flex or expand or contract, because if it does, that movement will crack the concrete. Now here's the thing about any kind of natural wood, except for very expensive hardwoods, which I wasn't using. They flex, they expand and contract in response to humidity. So the pine top I'd coated with concrete was pretty much out the window. Pretty much a bummer, not really. One of the best parts of making is winging it. It's the making mistakes and then

having the chance to problem solve. That honestly is much more fun than just following a set of rules where you're fairly certain of the outcome, but you also end up learning less and diminishing the possibility of genuine awe and surprise. That's at the end of the process when you step back and say to yourself, holy crap, it worked. So it's a bit like creating your own recipes. I mean, you make awful, barely edible concoctions, and then something kind of clicks, and you get the mixture right, and angels start to sing. But the fact that you got so much wrong along the way is what makes the angel song so transcendent. I think that's why master makers never stop

experimenting because it's the process, it's the practice as much as what yields from the process that drops them into that playful pulse of the universe where everything is as it should be. In my case, Tunkering is like a beeline to source and surrender. So back to the concrete behemoth. What to do? Well, much as I don't like getting rid of stuff, I had to revert to particle board. It's heavy as hell. And some particle board can,

what they call off-gas volatile compounds, as can some people, by the way. And those aren't all that healthy for you. But I also knew the top would be sealed with a half inch of concrete, and I'd seal the bottom and it would be okay. So I ended up finding a one and three quarter inch thick industrial particle board slab designed for warehouse packing tables. So three days and 125 pounds later, I swapped the new top on. With steel legs, this thing now weighed in at around 140 pounds.

And that's before I poured and troweled three layers of concrete onto it. For the most part, I was really enjoying working with my hands again, you know, problem solving and seeing something physical start to emerge. Something I'd use every day, something my family and friends would gather around for years to come, something I could step back and think, yeah, I made that. So why just for the most part? Because making isn't my one thing these days. I was building in the middle of total mayhem of our move and the larger, gorgeous, yet pretty complex mosaic of being a dad, a husband, more than full-time entrepreneur, producer, and writer. My mind doesn't just drop into that special place

where the world falls away and it's just me and my craft. It takes time. So when making is your one thing, your profession, or at least something you do in a substantial way every day, you build the physical and mental space into your life that allows you to drop into the process on a different level. When you're making in the margins, though, you

don't. So your inability to just fully honor that ramping time and preparatory rituals, coupled with the likelihood that you get pulled out of the process prematurely, can be kind of frustrating. Once you're ready to go, you just want to go and you want to stay there for a while. You want to get lost in the process. You want to be there long enough to find God in the grain. It's harder to get to this place once you're a bit further into life and you've made the call to make on the side. You can fight it and I have, but reality always wins. So I found a better approach is to own your choice and all that comes with it, including the gift of having people around you who want so much for you to be a part of their experience

that they keep asking for your presence and you theirs. Love trumps stuff, even stuff you make. So you do the dance, knowing that some days you can drop deep into the maker zone and others you'll stay kind of surface level and still others you'll bounce back and forth. If there's a way, bring the people you love into the process. And there is, of course, the nuclear maker option, the one that finds you so called by your inner maker that you decide to make making your life. You turn it into your one thing. There's actually a fantastic book

about this called Shop Class as Soulcraft, about a rising star in the knowledge working field finding salvation as a vintage motorcycle mechanic. I have been tempted in this direction more than once, and honestly, I can't rule out that someday I'll end up making a similar call. So that's why I used the qualifier before, for the most part. But there's also something else. I wanted to do right by the materials and those who'd enjoy what they turned into. You probably get that last part, but what about my materials? Why would I want to do right by my wood and concrete and water?

Because there's something inside me that says on some level, every resource is worthy of respect. Even inanimate tubs of concrete. Sounds weird, I know, but that's just how I'm drawn. So back to the table. It's make or break time. My concrete mentor, aka the interwebs, tells me my ability to trowel this stuff in just the right way will make or break the whole project. And I learned the material is only workable for about 20 minutes, so I've got to move quickly. So I mix up the first batch, and it's like a thick gray mud. And I pour a long, oozing swath down the middle of the table and begin to work it out towards the side.

At a certain point, I get kind of frustrated with the trowel, so I reach down and start using my fingers to spread the stuff around. And I don't actually realize that my paw marks will be so apparent. If you actually want to see them, you can see them in the written version of this spoken word piece, which I'll link to in the show notes along with some pictures. Once the first layer dries, you see kind of funny finger streaks in there. So at first, I think it looks like a big, fat mess. It looks terrible, but I know it's just the first coat. And more important, I also feel like a part of me.

My imprint is being layered into the table with every stroke and streak and roll. So 24 hours later, I layer on the second coat. And that's when the magic begins to happen. It starts to look like concrete. And for the first time, I start thinking I can pull this off to create something people can gather around and make my girls proud. Still, I notice my trowel work continues to leave all sorts of lines and patterns that'll remain in the table. I wonder how much I should leave in and how much I should stand out. And then I think more about what I like about things that are handmade. And it's not that they look store-bought. I like it when you can see and feel the mark of the maker.

So in the third and final coat, I try and make the marks more evenly spread and multifaceted, more visually interesting rather than just a series of long streaks and lines. But I also decide to keep them all visible and tactile. You can run your hand over it and feel the areas of effort and ease. And I sand it a bit and I let it all cure for about three days. You can run your hand over it and feel the areas of effort and ease. And I sand it a bit and let it all cure for about three days and then armed with a six inch roller I layer on three coats of a special food safe sealer and then seal the whole bottom. I'm a bit bummed once the sealer goes on because I love the lighter color and the

grainy feel of the unsealed concrete and it all darkens a bit but in the end it still looks pretty cool. And if I hadn't sealed it, the porous nature of the concrete would have left it marked and stained within days. So over the next few weeks, I find myself working with my wife and daughter to modge, and resin coat another table. And as I wrote this original essay, we were prepping to make a four-foot mosaic coffee table built on a pine top set on another set of powder-coated legs from turkey. So in case you hadn't guessed it by now, this isn't really about

building tables. It's about reconnecting to self and source through the process of making. When we honor that primal desire to turn raw materials into something beautiful, when we strive not for perfection, but connection, engagement, absorption, elevation. That deeply experiential and irreverent full mind body massage that comes from breathing and thinking and sweating and toiling and working something into existence, not just with your mind, but with your hands. I need more of that. And if you've listened this far, it's a pretty safe bet. So do you.