the timboucher experience

Operative Carpentry

I’ve been doing a lot of work as a carpenter lately for a local theatre company. I’ve found that carpentry is an excellent bridge for me between the physical and the mental, and that working in it is making me feel very balanced and capable. It demands a high degree of mental precision, first off, and then the physical intelligence to carry that through into the real world. I was writing for a while about “intent-action harmony” and carpentry is simply a fantastic way of teaching that, and of learning how to use your mind and body as a bridge for ideas to become actual reality.

Parallel to my practical experiences in the field and working as part of a crew (in which you automatically learn ten times more than you would on your own), I’ve also been researching the history of the guild system in medieval Europe. From what I can tell, the guild system naturally grew out of the fact that each trade has certain skills and knowledge which are totally unique to it. The best way to learn those skills and knowledge is through working as an apprentice or helper to people who learned the same way, developing and honing their experiences over many years. Working really closely with the same crew of people and learning from them over time brings with it necessarily a high level of camaraderie. You bond as you learn. You come to learn to trust the people you work with, and pass the time with jokes and songs and stories.

Though I’m not nor have I ever been a Freemason, it strikes me that this must be the origin of the lodge system, the traditional method of organization utilized by Masonry. Though its actual historical origins are murky at best, people say that modern Masonry developed out of the guild system, with the comacines: itinerant workers who built the cathedrals and castles in medieval times. That history may go even further back - the Masons themselves tracing it to Hiram Abiff, a builder at Solomon’s Temple. But we need not reach into the distant past to learn the purpose and point of what it means as a man to work in concert with other men, your peers and fellows, towards the completion of some grand project.

When you can’t lift something on your own, you ask your mate for help. You return the favor. Over time, this constant donation of assistance, of favors, builds up the strong reciprocal bonds upon which a community is formed. What’s more, the tools of the trade - whether it be of the mason or the carpenter (many overlap) - give you practical symbols to concentrate on. You learn to trust your tools like you trust your coworkers. You learn what they’re for, how they work, and you learn how to use them carefully so they don’t hurt you. In Freemasonry, they talk about operative and speculative levels. The operative level is the actual use of masonic tools to build something out of stone. Speculative relates more to utilizing those tools as symbols, as focal points for organizing the self and its interactions with the world at large. The square becomes a symbol of rightness, of correctness, and so on.

When you learn to filter reality through the eyes of a builder, you re-organize how you look at everyday problems. If something is broken, you look at how it works and can simply sit down and fix it by working in accord with the principles upon which it is built. You learn how to make things that are strong, lasting and that people can make fruitful use of. You learn about the importance of precision and accuracy. And you learn how to apply those skills and that vision to your very self and to everything you do as a physical being within this world. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

• Myths of Masonry, Part 1
• Volume of Sacred Lore
• Myths of Masonry, Part 5
• Myths of Masonry, Part 6
• A Freemason Loose in San Francisco