THE AMERICAN CRAFTSMAN INITIATIVE
A Wisdom of Hands


They work as if this were the natural thing to do; they create as if this were the natural thing to do; they give birth to beauty as if this were the natural thing to do. They have entered the way of salvation through unknowing faith. It is a path open to all. And once they have entered this path, the creation of plain, natural beauty becomes a thing of ease, a matter of course. This natural, unforced beauty is the result of a kind of unknowing grace. This grace is a special privilege of craftsmen and leads them to a realm of blessed unknowingness.

Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman


A Keystone Initiative of Cultural Reclamation and Renewal
At the Heart of the American Founding Experience


The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Jacob Bronowski


The American Craftsman Initiative is a cultural first branching of our work at the Innermost House Foundation, sheltering one half the whole of our cultural Old Growth ecosystem. It has its rooting in the parent tree from which all our projects of Nature and Craft, Thought and Spirit, Society and Solitude emerge as fruit, the unitive seed into which all converge again. In the natural succession of forest trees, it is the material expression of a more-than-material spirit. It is the elder and the offspring of our existence.

Our Wisdom of Hands Project is a pilot research and teaching curriculum of the Innermost House Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization based in California and Virginia, in cooperation with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and the Mason School of Business at William & Mary, drawing upon the unique resources of Virginia’s Historic Triangle, including Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown, the National Park Service and Preservation Virginia.

The Project exists to put the questions and speculations of academic material culture studies under the lens of experimental archaeology and living history. It seeks a wisdom at once thoroughly cosmopolitan and distinctly American. It persistently asks what the American Craft tradition is, how it is different, how it came to be and how it passed away, and what role it has now to play in the reconstitution of a truly American Wisdom Tradition.

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The Initiative exists to triangulate America’s composite founding culture between the indigenous craft traditions of Native America and the ancient craft traditions of Africa and Eurasia, thus to reclaim to individual possibility the promise and aid of a universal human archetype: the genius of Elderhood, a perennial autumn wisdom equal to the unseasonable challenges of the modern world.

 

What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life? Let him renounce everything which is not true to him, and put all his practices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason. If there are inconveniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we have so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious recesses of life. ​Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Man the Reformer"

 
 
 

THE AMERICAN CRAFTSMAN
A WISDOM OF HANDS 

The Archetypes of American Craft

The hands are the cutting edge of the mind.
Jacob Bronowski

The Wisdom of Hands Project is an educational initiative of the Innermost House Foundation in cooperation with the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Trades program and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at William & Mary. The Project exists to draw upon a nationally unique representation of traditional craft knowledge at Colonial Williamsburg to bring adult students back into contact with the foundations of wisdom that are laid in the work of hands.

Innermost House honors hand craft in the manner of American beginnings, where Wilderness and Enlightenment met as equals, and the art of less was truly more. We believe in craft as a perennial agent of reform, a tool of self-reliance, and a way to wisdom. We seek in the individual hand of craft a living conversation between the body of land and ideals of the mind.

We believe in the ideal of the American Craftsman, in whom the archetype of “Man Making” is compounded of the stewardship of wild nature, practical engagement with the world, and hands at work at the edge of the mind. We believe that a unified circle of beautiful craft-forms holds a key to harmonize nature and thought, to marry in material conversation high civilization with the heart of wilderness. We are Artists of the Beautiful dedicated to the ideal of Hand-Making.

 
 

And the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener,
is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit
to wide neighbourhoods of men.

 
 

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
There I feel that nothing can befall me in life. . .
which nature cannot repair.




The Individual is the World

 


And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. . . Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, — there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

 

Else would this stone be standing maimed and short
Beneath the shoulder's low translucent plunge
Nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey
Nor breaking out of all its contours
Like a star: for there is no place
That does not see you.

You must change your life.

 
 
 
 

“The only gift is a portion of thyself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

 
 
 
 

Please visit the American Wisdom Project, a pilot research and teaching curriculum of the Innermost House Foundation at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of the College of William & Mary. The Project exists to bring an American Wisdom Tradition of “plain living and high thinking” into focus, through which to illuminate the great wisdom traditions of the larger world.

 


The American Wisdom Project: Suggested General Readings

The present impulse to simplicity, small houses, and sustainability may appear new, says David E. Shi, President Emeritus of Furman University, but the underlying ideal has been with us for centuries. From Puritans and Quakers to Boy Scouts and environmentalists, our quest for the simple life is an enduring, complex tradition in American culture. Looking across more than three centuries of want and prosperity, war and peace, Shi introduces a rich cast of practitioners and proponents of the simple life, among them Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Scott and Helen Nearing.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, awarded both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft prizes, has become a classic of American historical literature. Hailed at its first appearance as “the most brilliant study of the meaning of the Revolution to appear in a generation,” it was enlarged in a second edition to include the nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, hence exploring not only the Founders’ initial hopes and aspirations but also their struggle to implement their ideas in constructing the national government. An essential work on the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution.

Historians have always had problems explaining the revolutionary character of the American Revolution: its lack of class conflict and civil violence make it seem positively sedate. In this beautifully written and persuasively argued book, Gordon S. Wood restores the radicalism to what he terms "one of the greatest revolutions the world has ever known." It was a revolution of the mind, in which concepts of equality, democracy, and private interest transformed a national culture nearly overnight. Bold, exciting, controversial and compelling, this book has become a classic of American history.

American Transcendentalism is often seen as a literary movement—a flowering of works written by New England intellectuals who retreated from society and lived in nature. In Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul, Barry M. Andrews focuses on a neglected aspect of this well-known group, showing how American Transcendentalists developed rich spiritual practices to nurture their souls and discover the divine. The practices are simple and nearly universal to the world’s monastic traditions—among them, contemplation, walking, reading, simple living, and conversation.

In The Transcendentalists and Their World, Bancroft Prize winning historian Robert Gross takes us deep into the life of a small American community to study the writers and thinkers who would make America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence” and change our world. It shows us familiar figures in American literature, centered upon Emerson and Thoreau, and reveals how the common life of Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the central figure in the history of American thought, spirituality, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us nearly a century and a half after his death. Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson presents us with a thrilling intellectual biography as the portrait of a complete man.

Examining California's formative years, this powerful and evocative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but on the rest of the country. What is the California Dream? How may we understand that dream as both the culmination of the American Dream and as its contradiction, its reduction to unsupportability? In this first volume of Kevin Starr’s seven-volume masterpiece, California comes to life as an idea, an ideal, and a sometimes fallen reality.

This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically different society has emerged in its place," writes Starr. The central theme of his work remains in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation.