Carrie LeAnne

“when we stop knowing how to use our hands to meet our most basic needs—we become estranged from nature, from the value and meaning of things, and from the empathy that we need to care for one another and our world.”
― Melanie Falick, Making a Life: Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live

“In the workshop, wishing won't make it so. The craftsman is forced to come to terms with the physical properties of materials, the mechanical properties of tools, and the real capacity and limits of his own dexterity, discipline and imagination. In this way, craft's materiality imposes cooperation on the sometimes discordant factions of the mind. By necessity, it reconciles the desire to interpret the world in ways that are emotionally gratifying with the countervailing need for accurate information to facilitate effective decisions. Thus the holistic quality of craft lies not only in engaging the whole person but also in harmonising his understanding of himself in the world.”
― Peter Korn, Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman

“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” —GEORGE ELIOT”
― Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward