[ Originally posted on Facebook 24 August 2017 ]
Occasionally, just occasionally, in among the vapid ‘more-about-me’ online clamour, you come across a true gem.
One such is a YouTube channel called Mr Chickadee.
The premise is pretty simple: Josh and his Peruvian wife Maio have upped sticks and headed out into the Kentucky backwoods, in search of a simpler and more fulfilling life.
Josh sets to, building first a timber-frame workshop and then a two-storey timber-frame cabin.
So far, so ordinary.
Except that he uses only hand-tools. Not a power-tool or chainsaw to be seen or heard.
And therein lies the second marvel: While he goes about the muscle-rending processes of felling, hewing, shaping and joining, Maio films and then tightly edits, occasionally appearing herself where the task involves two.
There’s no talk, none of that tiresome ‘me-me-me’ chatter. Just the sounds of forest nature and the rasp and draw of razor-honed axe, saw and plane, as Josh with quiet assurance goes about his craftsman’s work.
The result is a video series that is therapeutic, entrancing, enriching.
There’s a nice irony in using contemporary media methods to reintroduce age-old skills. Skills we blasé moderns have lost. Yet skills which in the past built houses, villages, towns, even cities.
We can only marvel at the sense of respect, humility and joy that breathes throughout this couple’s shared life and work.
Mr. Chickadee’s work encompasses everything from the hand-hewing of trees into lumber to the smallest, most intricate woodwork.
The video I’ve chosen from the many on his channel is #23 from the “Our timber frame cabin” series: “traditional insulated windows”: