A Man Caught in a Cultural Shift ( how I now see my father's life and death)

 

In the early 1960s, my father was an adopter of two things that would later become mainstream and then commodified: marijuana and crafts. He made handmade leather goods to sell. Items like jackets, bags, belts, and one small item in particular stand out in my memory: a leather pouch he called a pot stash. Bushcraft people today would recognize it as a kind of possibles bag, but his was made for weed, not flint and steel.

He was a deeply curious and active thinker. His shelves held books on Hinduism, Daoism, shelter building, and design. He was immersed in graphic design and interior design, always thinking visually, structurally, philosophically. Craft for him was not just making things. It was his worldview, identity, and resistance all rolled into one package.

During the hippie era, handmade goods were a reaction against the industrial machine of the United States. Making something with your hands was a statement of integrity. It said, "I am not just a consumer. I belong to a lineage older than factories."

But cultures shift.

When John Lennon was killed, something changed. When yuppie culture emerged, money, status, and ambition were polished into a uniform; my father cut his hair and tried to follow along. He began chasing financial success instead of craftsmanship. He leased a Mercedes-Benz. He opened a business in Manhattan that combined antiques with modern design. His heart was not fully in it, and he did not truly understand the game he was playing.

The business failed. He lost our family home. That collapse sent me down a difficult path of my own.

After that, he drank hard. He smoked heavily. Somewhere along the way, he lost his center.

For a long time, I carried resentment toward him. But now I see his life differently. I see him as someone crushed by a cultural transition he could not metabolize.

I think about early human stone tool makers that had mastered flint knapping and who understood the language of stone. Then copper arrives. Some adapt. Some do not. Some love the stone too much. They do not disappear because they lack skill. They disappear because the world moves on without caring what they were good at.

My father lived through a similar shift. Handmade leather goods were once a countercultural strength. Later, it became nostalgia, and then fashion. Then mass-produced again. Some people rode those waves successfully. Others never recovered.

He had three kids. And maybe handmade leather jackets were not the safest way to support a family under that kind of pressure. I understand that now. I have compassion where I once had judgment.

What is tragic is that not long after, handmade leather jackets came back into fashion. And even today, the bushcraft and mountain man movements never really disappeared. There has always been a quiet current of people who value hand skills, wood, steel, fire, and shelter. He could have found a way to stay rooted in his strengths. He almost did. But he did not trust them enough to endure the lean years.

That is the part that still hurts.

When I graduated high school, I wanted to be a famous painter more than anything. If there had been a devil offering a deal, I would have signed it. Instead, I took a different risk. I hitchhiked across the United States and found Taos. That changed everything.

Taos gave me space to keep my hands busy and my spirit intact. I found wood carving. I found bushcraft. I found Tai Chi. Those practices became ways of staying honest. Ways of keeping my soul tethered to something real. I still carve wood today. I am not successful as a seller. But I am still carving away. Ironically, when I arrived in Taos, I found a strong culture of sheepskin and leather goods makers. 

My father didn't have the vision or faith to look elsewhere. That is where I feel the lineage split and also where it reconnects.

My father lost his way because he could not identify what truly mattered to him as a human being. He believed money would restore meaning. It did not. He died early as a result of his drinking and smoking.

I do not tell this story to judge him. I tell it because I understand him now. He was not weak. He was displaced.

And maybe what I am doing, carving wood, practicing tai chi, and walking instead of running, is my way of staying on the narrow ridge he fell from. Not chasing success at the expense of integrity. Not abandoning craft when culture devalues it. Learning, slowly, to measure life not by applause or profit, but by whether I can still recognize myself in the work of my hands.

Humans Need Something to Do With Their Hands

 

Depression and anxiety are often talked about as personal failures or chemical imbalances that need to be corrected. But I think there’s another layer that rarely gets enough attention. For nearly all of human history, people were occupied for most of their waking hours with physical, tangible work. We grew food. We hunted. We built shelters. We made tools. We repaired what broke. Our survival depended on daily engagement with the physical world.

That reality has changed radically in a very short span of time. In the last fifty years, large portions of the population no longer need to do much with their bodies or their hands to survive. Yet paradoxically, we are more mentally overstimulated and stressed than ever.

I notice this very clearly in my own life. When I am the most anxious or depressed, it is almost always when I am sitting still, mentally spinning. My mind starts running endless scenarios, what-ifs, regrets, and imagined futures. None of it is productive. None of it is grounded. It’s just noise.

The moment I pick up a craft, something changes.

When I start carving wood, cooking, fixing something, or engaging in physical movement, the mental clutter quiets down. My attention narrows. The hands take over. The mind no longer has the bandwidth to spiral. It isn’t forced into silence; it is occupied.

Occupation as Regulation

This isn’t about productivity or hustle. It’s about regulation. Humans evolved to regulate their nervous systems through physical engagement with the world. Making, moving, lifting, shaping, walking, tending. These activities give the mind a place to rest because attention has somewhere to go.

I often think about autoimmune disease as a loose metaphor here. In overly sterile environments, the immune system sometimes loses its appropriate targets and begins attacking the body itself. I am not saying all autoimmune disease works this way, or that everyone with autoimmune illness is idle. But I do think the pervasiveness of sterile, low-engagement environments has consequences for biological systems that evolved in a very different context.

The mind may not be that different.

When it has nothing meaningful to do, it often turns inward and begins attacking itself. Rumination, self-criticism, catastrophic thinking. Not because the person is weak, but because the system is under-used in the way it evolved to function.

A World That Doesn’t Need You, But Still Stresses You

We now live in a strange contradiction. The world does not require much from our bodies, yet it demands constant mental vigilance. Emails. Deadlines. News cycles. Financial anxiety. Abstract stress with no physical outlet.

Unless you have Zen-level mental discipline, this is a brutal setup.

I wish my mind were strong enough to simply will its way through this. I do believe that kind of training is possible, and I work toward it. But I also think it’s important to be honest about what humans actually need. For most of history, we didn’t meditate our way out of stress. We worked it out through physical engagement.

We whittled. We cooked. We built. We repaired. I honestly don’t know if there has ever been a time when humans weren’t doing this, until now.

Keeping Your Head Together

This isn’t about the root cause of depression. It isn’t about dismissing therapy, medication, or deeper psychological work. It’s about something much more basic.

Keeping yourself occupied in a tangible way is a form of mental hygiene.

Using your hands calms the mind. Moving the body organizes attention. Making something creates feedback, satisfaction, and a sense of completion that abstract tasks rarely provide. Sometimes that turns into gifts. Sometimes it turns into skills. Occasionally, it even turns into a career. But that’s not the point.

The point is simpler.

Staying human in a world that increasingly asks you to be disembodied requires intention. Craft and physical activity are not hobbies in that context. They are stabilizers. They are ways of staying sane. They are ways of keeping your head together.

And for a species that evolved by doing, there might not be a better way to stay grounded.

Carving a Spoon and the Importance of Listening

Spoon carving has taught me a lot about balance—specifically, the balance between direction and intent.

When you decide to carve a spoon, certain things are non-negotiable. It needs a cavity. It has to fit comfortably in the mouth. It has to feel good in the hand. It needs to be light enough to use, not clunky or awkward. In that sense, form really does follow function. There are clear outcomes that have to be met.

But within those constraints, there’s another force at work: the wood itself.

Most of the time, I don’t get to choose the “ideal” carving wood. I work with what I have access to. Right now, that’s Russian elm, a beautiful but stubborn wood that doesn’t shave easily and doesn’t forgive mistakes. It doesn’t like symmetry. It doesn’t like being forced. Because of that, I have to compromise my original vision. I have to let go of perfection. The grain, the knots, the tension in the fibers all start to dictate the direction.

The wood tells you how it wants to be carved, if you’re willing to listen.

That’s one reason I don’t always connect with highly detailed carvings made from very soft, cooperative woods. They can be impressive, even technically masterful, but when the material is so malleable that you can impose anything onto it, something gets lost. My preference is to work in collaboration with the material, not domination over it. I like hearing what the wood has to say.

What’s interesting is how closely this mirrors the way I like working with people—especially kids.

I don’t believe in dictating outcomes or forcing people into a shape that fits my idea of success. I prefer guidance over control. Structure with flexibility. Listening over imposing. This feels especially important to me as a non-Native person working with Native American children, given the history of boarding schools and the horrific attempts to erase culture by making children “malleable.” That history matters. It demands a different approach.

There are still goals. There are still outcomes. But they come second to agency. The kids guide the process more than we often allow in institutional settings. Just like the wood, they aren’t raw material to be shaped; they’re active participants in becoming.

Spoon carving reinforces that lesson every time I pick up a knife.

I love carving spoons because they’re functional. They aren’t abstract objects. They have a purpose and a set of criteria they must meet. And yet, within those limits, there’s infinite variation. A handmade eating spoon carries character. You feel it while carving: the feedback between your hands, the blade, and the grain. Every small decision matters.

That’s very different from a mass-produced spoon. Whether it’s metal or wood, machine-made utensils are dictated, repeatable, and anonymous. They work, but they don’t speak.

As we move deeper into an era of AI, CNC machines, and automated design, that distinction matters to me. Spoon carving is a moment-to-moment conversation. It requires attention, humility, and responsiveness. You adjust constantly. You listen. You make thousands of tiny decisions based on feel, resistance, and feedback.

At least for now, that kind of listening still belongs to human hands.

And maybe that’s the deeper wisdom of spoon carving, not just making something useful, but practicing how to pay attention, how to compromise without giving up purpose, and how to work with the world instead of trying to overwrite it.