Yearning for a purpose

When I wrote Designer & Client this is what I saw:So much of what we do is… required of us.……no one is forcing us to have a pleasure boat. No practical purpose is fulfilled by owning one… A boat is an opportunity to create a dream and act on it. Most such dreams are modest:Continue

Finding Passage

Where do we start?Where we are is broken. Lies in tatters. Corrupt. We’re mired in toxic imitations of vitality.So many things are broken. Things we’ve forgotten what they were for.We are broken. Caught between our past and our loss of connection. Stuck in the ways we learned how to behave. Traumas endured and perpetrated. WeContinue

Schooner Boat: deeper, fuller hull

This design has reached its next iteration. The major changes are a deeper draft, 4′ – 9″, and a more burdensome hull.   When you move away from the assumptions behind a boat meant only to carry its crew and be made from petroleum and prioritize speed to windward the hull forms of the NineteenthContinue

Craft Untethered

The last post broached the subject of the complicity of our boating heritage.It shouldn’t come as much of a shock, but it does.This disillusion strikes close to home.It resides in the silence of guilt and taboo, where our discomfort is unmoored from its cause – deemed too painful, intractable to any possibility of address –Continue

Whaleboats, Craft looking for Purpose

The WoodenBoat Show held at Mystic Seaport at the end of June saw the first stage in the celebration of craft that culminated at the end of July with the re-launching of the Charles W. Morgan. What strikes me with great poignancy is the way this state of affairs illustrates a wider predicament. Our survivingContinue

Disentangling Craft from Technology

I’m drawn to articulate a distinction between craft and technology. It is an enormous topic. That is part of the trouble with it, where to begin, or, if we’re past the beginning, where to continue…. It does seem that what is required is a process of disentanglement. Technology is a term that appears to coverContinue