“Sometimes we believe the fear
I can see that ghost from here”
I can see that ghost from here”
handmade
Knifemaking: a little bit at a time and the Scout
“Ready or not
I hear a clock tock ticking away
Though I’d asked for those hands to stay in place”
Correatown- “Everything, All at Once”
I wake up most mornings and wonder how I am going to get everything done. I think about all the things I need to do, the things I want to do, and feel a little bit of shame over the things I’ve been meaning to do but haven’t done yet. There is this mental space where I run through my entire life- where I’m born, I live, and I die, all before I even get out of bed.
At the bottom of all of the mental chatter there is a gentle little voice that says to do it a little bit at a time. It also says that there is plenty of time. Sometimes it gets drowned out but I know it’s there if I listen for it. This is what gets me going.
For the past ten or so years I’ve taken walks in the woods. As things get busier I don’t get out there as often as I’d like. It’s an exercise in not trying to do everything all at once. You walk the woods a little bit at a time, and the notion of trying to do anything other than that feels rather asinine. I try to approach the things I have to do in this fashion. It doesn’t always work and I get frustrated a lot. A lot. Sometimes the feeling of there not being enough time screams at me so loudly that I have to go home and take a nap. Most times I’m not able to do that, in which case I try to take it back to the forest. In being with that feeling I find that there usually is enough time. If not, I try to remember that I am human being and not a human doing.
Attempting to do everything all at once is a sort of self-defeating behavior. This type of all-or-nothing thinking tends to overwhelm and makes the idea of quitting into a rather attractive proposition. Buying into this thinking gets you regret and remorse, but only after it has robbed you of your precious moments and there literally isn’t enough time.
This is the lesson of the Scout. To walk your forest one step at a time. It’s easy to get pulled off your path. There are a thousand things that demand our attention and can pull us off of our center. We can’t always give what we love the attention and care we would like and sometimes it’s easier to give up. Don’t give up. Do it a little bit at a time and it will all get done.
I wanted to make something that reminded me of this little area where I like to walk:
I started with O1 tool steel and bushcraft style design with a handle that winds like the stream above. I usually use 1095 because it’s cheap and I have a lot of it but I like using O1 for the Chromium in it- it polishes up nicely
Hardened:
Sanded. Not too shiny because he is built to be used:
Here is what I used for the handle- quartersawn white oak, olive drab g-10, and brass. It was a bit of an undertaking and there was some improvising because some things didn’t go as planned. One step at a time…
Cut.
Glued. This came apart soon after. I tried to keep the brass cool when cutting it but it got too hot and melted the epoxy. More steps, keep moving…
Clamped…finally
Glue is set.
Rough shaping.
Cleaned up. Now to sand…
The Scout:
A little bit at a time. Keep moving, even when it feels like everything is impossibly slow and it will never get done. Challenge that, and walk your forest. There’s plenty of time.
Knifemaking: playing your hand and The Wild Card
“Like I said, I’ve got mixed emotions about wild card games. In one sense, they tend to bring out the gamble in your opponents. They often create a carnival of excitement in which players give away a lot of money painlessly. On the other hand, it’s hard to calculate a strategy for a game the dealer has just invented.”
Doyle Brunson- According to Doyle
I think the best definition of a wild card is something that can be what you need it to be, when you need it to be. I have a friend like this- his name is Fred and I’ve written about him before. I worked with Fred at the warehouse dealing with restaurant equipment. During the tenure of our professional and personal relationship, Fred has set me on fire, twice, helped me fix my car, helped me fix my friends’ cars, helped me fix my girlfriend’s house, and showed me how to fix things I had no idea could be fixed. The man has infuriated me beyond belief and has also made me laugh till I cried. Fred is a wild card, a deus ex machina, the kind of person who can accomplish incredible things and can do it, most of the time, without having any sort of concrete plan. Which makes it that much more infuriating to work with him and can also result in being set aflame…
I’ve always had this paradoxical sense of simultaneously feeling incredibly safe and slightly on edge whenever I worked with Fred. We would go into jobs and everything that could go wrong would absolutely go wrong. Somehow Fred would figure it out. There was the time a one day job turned into three at a federal office building near downtown Washington DC. A Japanese restaurant on the floor level of a building on Glebe Rd was going out of business and they had a very short amount of time to have everything removed. The loading dock was in the basement and the bay door was two inches too short to get our tractor trailer in to load all the equipment out. The only way to get everything out was through a single door at the front of the building onto the sidewalk. We couldn’t get the truck there till two days later and we had to hot load it on the street, one of the busiest streets on the east coast. The truck would be there at 3am. In the mean time we had to dismantle everything in the restaurant, including a walk-in freezer, a walk-in cooler, fifty tables, and twenty hibachi grills. I never want to move another hibachi table ever again. Fred orchestrated the truck to get there half an hour after the door people removed the five thousand dollar custom glass door so we could get everything out of the building. The truck was late and there was maybe two hours before the police would get there and make us move, but not before they asked up why we had a semi-truck, a forklift, and a truck with a tilt deck trailer in front of a government building with no permits. Fortunately that didn’t happen and we got out of there in an hour and a half, smelling of old fish and rotten bok choy.
A lot of jobs happened this way. None of this is an exact science. On my better days I felt like a part of a black ops crack team. On my not so better days I seriously questioned my life decisions. None of it was ever boring, though. Not with Fred.
There was an Italian man who had a few restaurants around town. Crazy Frank we called him. He had just opened up a new restaurant and had an emergency with his ice machine and a pizza oven we rebuilt for him. Fred and I head over there at lunch. The kitchen is insane. I go over to the the oven and start to drill out holes on the door to put a handle on- bear in mind the oven is roaring at 600 degrees and has pizza in it. Fred is reprogramming the thermostat on the ice machine. It is the lunch rush and there are ten people running around, screaming in Italian. Fred asked me if I had a ‘big ass college word’ to describe the situation. I told him that I believed the word he was looking for was ‘asinine’.
“Right,” he says. “This shit is asinine”
The most memorable job I was on with Fred was a three day bakery extraction. Fred, myself, and our colleague and good friend Aaron were to fly to Nebraska, load an entire bakery into two tractor trailers, and then fly home. Adventures started at the airport. Fred and I are not fans of flying. At the airport bar I had forty dollar margarita with a cornucopia of liquor in it and Fred had two double shots of Jack Daniels. We got on the plane and promptly went to sleep. We arrived in Nebraska that evening, picked up a swanky rental car and went to look at the job.
The first thing I noticed was that it was cold. Like unbelievably cold. It hadn’t really hit me at the airport. This was January and I had never been anywhere that flat, windy, and cold before. The second thing I noticed was a gigantic rotating bread oven. Our client told us that it bakes 100 loaves an hour when loaded to capacity. We would spend the majority of our time dismantling that hulking behemoth. We got steaks for dinner, because that is what you do in Nebraska, and went to the hotel.
The next couple of days were stupidly cold. The forklift we rented wouldn’t start most of the mornings until the sun came out. We had to disconnect and extract the oven exhaust system, which meant going onto an icy sheet metal room. We had to take that oven apart, which had nearly a thousand 3/4″ screws holding it together. Fred was confident in his ability to get it all back together.
Everything went as it should, got loaded, and sent back to Virginia. Our travels were slightly rockier. There was an ice storm that closed the Chicago Midway Airport and we got diverted to Indianapolis where we sat on the tarmac for seven hours. Seven hours of Fred without a cigarette. Seven hours of Fred saying we should have rented a truck and driven to Nebraska. Seven hours of Fred telling anyone who would listen that no one could keep him on that plane. I was sitting next to a mother and her small child on their way to Disney World. The husband and another little one were sitting behind me with Fred. These little ones had a better grip on the situation than Fred. Finally they let us off to catch a different flight, on a plane that wasn’t covered in ice. It was all Aaron and I could do to keep Fred from using the company card to rent a truck and drive back to Virginia from Indianapolis. Two double shots of Jack got Fred back on a plane.
Left to right here is myself, Aaron, and Fred after three long, flour covered days in the cold. Happy to be finished, thank you very much.
Wild cards only work when you play them. They do what you need them to do when you need them to be done. This is Fred, and also the lesson of the Wild Card. I wanted to build something to be sent in when the job needed to be done.
I started with a big hunk of 1095 spring steel- 3/16″ thick
The blade is close to 8 inches long…
Rough grind: 
I used a clay hardening technique to create a Hamon
Hardened…
…and tempered
Sanded to about 600 grit and ready to for a dip in the acid….
Curly Maple. You can faintly see the wavy bits of curl…
Clamped.
To get the curls to burst I had to go through many cycles of sanding and staining and sanding again. With each cycle the stain becomes more stable and prominent.
I cooked up a concoction using various finishes I have…
You can start to see the curls as the grain becomes more stable. This is after maybe two cycles of sanding and staining
This is after maybe 8…
The Wild Card:
It’s always good to have a Wild Card in your hand- even when you want to kill them sometimes.
Thanks for the lessons, Fred.
Knifemaking: appearances, politics, and the Buffoon
‘Mr. Croup smiled. “You find us funny, Messire Marquis, do you not? A source of amusement. Is that not so? With our pretty clothes, and our convoluted circumlocutions—“
Mr. Vandemar murmured, “I haven’t got a circumlo . . . “
“—and our little sillinesses of manner and behavior. And perhaps we are funny.”
Mr. Croup raised one finger then, and waggled it at de Carabas. “But you must never imagine,” he continued, “that just because something is funny, Messire Marquis, it is not also dangerous.”
And Mr. Vandemar threw his knife at the marquis, hard and accurately. It hit him, hilt first, on the temple. His eyes rolled up in his head, and his knees buckled. “Circumlocution,” said Mr. Croup to Mr. Vandemar. “It’s a way of speaking around something. A digression. Verbosity.” ‘
Mssrs. Croup and Vandermar- from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere
1095 spring steel
I hardened this after grinding about 2/3rds of the way through. I planned on grinding him rather thin and didn’t want to risk warping during hardening…
Deepening the plunge…
I have this buffoonish shirt that I don’t think I’ve ever worn…
After the fiberglass resin…
The Buffoon: 1095 spring steel, homebrewed linen Micarta handle scales, Kydex spacers, and brass hardware
Be mindful of how we present ourselves to the world, and be wary of what those presentations may conceal. There could be something deadly underneath. This is the lesson of the Buffoon.
Knifemaking: surprises, overthinking, and the Persuader, Mark II
“Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out!” he exclaimed. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.”
Eugen Herrigel- Zen in the Art of Archery
(You can read about the crafting of the original Persuader here)
From the age of about ten to seventeen I went to boy scout camp every summer. It was there I learned many skills crucial to developing into a balanced and well-rounded man. Anything deemed flammable was generally set on fire. Coffee cans were made to be hammered into camp stoves. The person who showered the least won summer camp. We put crawly things in each others sleeping bags. We dealt with wolf spiders the size of small paper plates. There was a Warhammer race every year. Think of a track and field baton passing event, but substitute a baton for a 20lb ‘hammer’ built from logs by pubescent boys and humped around the five mile circumference of large lake. We had a contest to see who could go the longest without using the latrine, which was all fun and games until one of the boys went to the hospital for a bowel obstruction. Then the contest was to see who could use the latrine the most.
I learned firsthand that the boom of a sailboat mast was named so because when the wind changed direction it would swing around and boom, crack you on the head.
Then there was the summer I got dehydrated and learned that nobody is joking when they tell you to drink lots of water.
I snuck my Walkman with me. At 12 years old there isn’t a whole lot better than being on your own in the woods with nothing but you, the trees, and your Tears for Fears cassette.
I took a rifle shooting class. The counselor was one of only two women at camp. They called her ‘Books’. Or maybe it was “Boots”. All the counselors had silly nicknames and any semblance of political correctness was blatantly disregarded. Books had glasses. To be fair, there was also a counselor with non-congenital dwarfism that everyone called “Oompa”. He got fired for sneaking liquor on to camp…
So anyway, rifle shooting class with Books. Turns out Books was a zen master. For a class with a bunch of pre-hormonal boys, there weren’t many rules. The only rule I can remember is never point your gun at anything you don’t intend to completely obliterate.
We were then given rifles. Books sat us down at the rifle bench and showed us how to load and aim. She told us to find our target in our sights and then, most importantly, to relax. Inhale deeply, she said, and on the exhale squeeze the trigger. This was also very important: squeeze don’t pull. Slowly. We were told that when the shot goes off it should surprise us. If we missed our target, Books told us not to worry about it and just compensate for it on our next shot.
I wasn’t a very good shot and I haven’t shot a gun since then. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
For one I am generally not fond of surprises. I like to know what I’m going to have to do and how to best prepare for it. Even at the age of 12 I was not fond of any surprises involving a death-dealing boom stick and shooting always made me kind of nervous. As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that life can be a death-dealing boom stick, for better or worse. In trying to anticipate the shot, you are trying to control something outside of your control. This results in you getting in your own way instead of letting things be what they are.
I think Books was trying to get us to let go and trust ourselves and to let the shot fall where it may. This is the lesson of this incantation of the Persuader.
I made the original Persuader without thinking too much about it. The main grind is a sabre grind. I grind all of my blades freehand and as it turns out it is really difficult to get a uniform, symmetrical grind on a 2in wide piece of steel. But I didn’t know this the first time round- I just did it. When I tried to do it again I kept overthinking everything and ruining it. There were two or three between the first one and this one that got scrapped.
When I think about the times I have been most successful in life I realize that those were the times when I wasn’t overly attached to specific outcomes or trying to manipulate the experience or anticipate every bump or snag. In those times I was dog-ass tired or I was just enjoying myself. I squeezed rather than pulled, I was surprised, and the shot ended up where I intended it to be.
1095 spring steel
Ready for the forge:
Hardened:
Chisel grind up top
I made the handle material out of an old pair of jeans:
After a bit of time, pressure, and fiberglass resin…
At around 400 grit or so….
This stuff takes about twice as much sandpaper to polish than wood…
The Persuader, Mark II: Etched 1095 spring steel, homebrewed denim Micarta, and steel hardware
Relax. Squeeze, don’t pull. And it’s ok to be surprised.
Knifemaking: the profound in the mundane and the Snow Fox
“There’s something admirable about finding satisfaction in the simple, everyday pleasures of life, and it’s becoming harder and harder to do. We’re bombarded every day: here’s the brave soldier who saved a school bus full of kids with nothing but a crowbar and fishing line; here’s the 30-something billionaire who is going to cure aging so we can all live forever; here’s the 12-year-old who can play Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring on seven different instruments with her feet. “
Mark Manson- Being Special Isn’t So Special
A few weeks ago I was talking to a production manager for a touring symphonic show. She was telling me how she had always been a rocker chick and worked for rock bands. This was a different thing for her- the glamour and indulgence had been stripped away. But after weeks of hearing classical music the tour had really started to grow on her. She said it sounds silly and that on the outside it might sound boring and repetitive and maybe it was. But she said it didn’t feel like that.
I know this feeling. I have a gig where I’ve played with the same people in the same place for almost nine years. The music isn’t difficult, the other musicians are like my family. Still, there are waves of time when I feel like I would rather go do something else. Like any wave it passes, and I show up and do my job. I’m always glad that I did.
Because buried in these normal, routine jobs are special things, provided you are paying attention. In playing this gig I’ve ended up making very close friends, meeting lots of people, and learning about myself- mainly that I am capable of much more than I often give myself credit for. All this comes from a job that, on the outside, may look routine, tedious, and repetitive.
There are people who get up everyday and spend their lives doing their work, not making much fuss and emanating a quiet satisfaction. I know some of these people. The man who worked in retail middle management for two decades has the most wicked sense of humor and powerful observational skills. The service tech who has fixed restaurant equipment his whole life and can look at anything that is broken and immediately know what is wrong with it. All these things take time. We don’t see the work that these people have put in. There isn’t a whole lot of flash or grandeur, and it’s not packed up in a tidy, three minute clickbait video.
I fall into the millennial generation. The media likes to describe us as entitled, needy, whiny, afraid of work, and abhorrent of responsibility. Many of us were told growing up that we were special, that some things were below us, that we didn’t want to end up flipping burgers or being construction workers. You can blame baby-boomer parents for saying these things, or you can blame millennials for believing them. Regardless of where the blame may lie it falls on us to make our experience. Some of us developed self-worth issues when we found the world wasn’t as we were promised it was and that we weren’t so special. Others of us did the shit that we were going to do anyway. Once you let go of the idea that maybe you aren’t so special, it opens you up to seeing the value in the things that you are capable of, even when these things appear to be rather ordinary and mundane.
This is brings us to the Snow Fox, also called the Arctic Fox. Just another warm-blooded mammal chilling in the tundra trying to survive. To catch its dinner (which is often buried under up to three feet of snow) the snow fox makes these beautiful leaps headfirst into the earth:
Rather ordinary on the surface. But according to studies there is something deeper going on. In a study done in the Czech Republic, as researcher found that in nearly all cases of leaping, the Snow Fox does it in a north-easterly direction. That would put them leaping toward magnetic north, which is some twenty degrees off of north as a compass would point. By using the earth’s magnetic field and the sound of their prey beneath the snow, scientists believe this is how the foxes triangulate their prey’s location and compose their leap.
They aren’t always successful. Sometimes they come up with a face full of snow and no dinner.
This is the lesson of the Snow Fox. It’s knowing that beneath our silly jobs and the boring things we have to do come profound understandings and insights. There is always something special to be found in making your dinner, or raising your children, or quietly putting something beautiful into the world. There is something profound is these ordinary things. Sometimes they feel like a burden and doing them comes with a lot of resistance but no one is perfect.
This blade started out as something else. In making and fixing some mistakes early in the process, I ended up with something new.
For the handle I wanted to try out the spalted Pecan wood my Texas cousin had milled: 
Ripped down… 
Bookmatched: 
The Snow Fox: etched 1095 spring steel, spalted Texas Pecan, Kydex spacers and steel hardware. 
Remember the special things that are going on under the surface of the ordinary. It’s ok if you end up with a face full of snow.
Knifemaking: going deep and the Kingfisher
“When a needle falls into a deep well, many people will look into the well, but few will be ready to go down after it”
-African Proverb
I went to music school. I was shown many ways to teach myself to be good at things. I spent many hours in a practice room by myself, many more hours in front of a piano composing and arranging, and even more time listening. To everything. The education I got reached far beyond any classroom or practice space. Life becomes those spaces.
Learning how to listen to things was the biggest lesson I learned. When you listen, really listen, not just hear, your world opens up. You notice all the nuanced bits of wonder. As life gets busier and more complicated I still have to remind myself that it’s all still there, that it hasn’t and won’t go anywhere. That within a world that holds a good deal of pain and sorrow for everyone there are also things that move and stir the soul, but they don’t always sit on the surface of our awareness…
There was one class that really opened things up and is sort of the inspiration for this writing. It was called World Music, which is a rather vapid title for an experience that was so much more that. It was taught by a very wonderful and kind man, one of the more enlightened people I’ve ever met. Classes started off in silence and darkness, with the ringing of chimes. Sometimes ambient music was played, or Tuvan throat singing, or guitar players from West Africa with rhythms I had never heard before. There were many books to read, records to check out, and some of the most real discussions on being and the human condition that I have ever experienced.
It was during one of these discussions that something came up, and I don’t quite remember the context but it has stuck with me. In the course of the discussion, it came up that our professor’s spirit animal was a dolphin. He said that he was at the beach surfing when he was sixteen and nearly drowned and shortly thereafter found he related deeply with the dolphin. The dolphin is able to dive very deep but always returns to the surface to breathe. He told us he built his whole philosophy of teaching on that premise.
This is something that has been with me for awhile. Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and go deep. When you are exhausted, when it feels like life is more than you can handle, when you need to heal. You can handle a lot more than you think you can but the tools and nourishment you need don’t always sit at the surface. That doesn’t mean the process of finding these things doesn’t hurt like hell or isn’t terrifying at times.
Take the Kingfisher bird, for example. To get the food it needs to sustain itself, it has to dive far beneath it’s comfort zone. They sit on their perch overhanging the water and when they see their prey they dive, eyes closed, into the deep. I think about this and wonder what is going through his little bird brain before he hits the water…
This is the lesson of the Kingfisher. You close your eyes, you dive deep, and you come up with something nourishing. Repeat as necessary, adding faith and a bit of courage as required.
I wanted to make a filet knife, something to help me dive. I made her out of a thin piece of bedframe steel. She has a 6in blade.
I initially ground two of these, but one didn’t turn out. I left it soaking in the acid too long (for a deep etch) and there wasn’t much blade left….
My very dear friend James did the handle on this one. She has Mora wood scales and brass hardware.
My good friends Mike and Jen using the Kingfisher to de-bone a goose… 
Sometimes you have go below the surface of things to find what you need. This is the lesson of the Kingfisher.
Knifemaking: armor, mobility, and the Archer II
“ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary
(you can read about the crafting of the original Archer here)
We all put on armor everyday. Some of us put on more than others. Sometimes it physically manifests. Hard hats, steel toes, wingtips, neckties. Some ladies refer to their makeup as war paint, another type of armor. Other times it’s more subtle and subdued- the way we carry ourselves, our use of vernacular in particular situations, and the image of ourselves that we present to the world. All these are things we do to protect ourselves.
A few years ago I had a temp job working construction over the summer. The company I worked for had a contract to build all of the temporary structures for the Boy Scout National Jamboree. I spent almost four months driving to a military base in the middle of nowhere. I use the term base loosely. It was really just a giant campground guarded by military police, and all of the campers carried semiautomatic weapons. In four months I used a flushable toilet maybe three times. The cast of characters I worked with were a colorful lot.
My boss was a Brazilian Jui Jitsu master. He got to work before everyone else and ran five miles on base. Some people have coffee before they start work. Our mornings with him consisted of tapping out of sleeper holds, arm bars, half nelsons, and doling out mollywhops of a variety I’ve yet to experience again.
One of the other gentleman did a ten stretch for first degree murder, which nobody found out till the work contract was almost up. The base knew he had a twenty year-old felony and vetted him for a base pass. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but military bases generally don’t mess around. He did good work and kept to himself. He was married to a florist and had a house in the country.
Then there was the gentleman who had just gotten out of jail for beating the the hell out of a guy with a tire iron. He was drunk and thought the guy was stealing his car. He was there trying to pay off the lawsuit and lawyer’s fees.
Another gentleman I worked with had severe anger management issues and was there because he was dating the company owner’s daughter. He had a degree in English and was trying to get into law school.
There was Jose from El Salvador who had four children and was still madly in love with his wife. He taught me filthy things to say in Spanish.
There were two football players on break from a small conservative college. They said they were there earning beer money.
Then there was me. My car had died and I needed to buy a new one.
I spent four months with these guys, riding around in the back of a decommissioned deuce-and-a-half, building things, and hearing stories that I’m still not sure if I believe or not. In these sorts of work environments a decent amount of posturing and exaggeration is to be expected from almost everyone. Despite their checkered backgrounds, these guys were not terrible to work with. Nothing felt unsafe except for the blistering heat, the bird-size mosquitos and the morning mollywhops to which I became adept at parrying.
Just to be safe I would put on some armor everyday- a bit of bravado, a bit of flash, a bit of the grandiose. My nicknames reflected that. The Viking. Sledgehammer. Red Devil. I was lifting a lot of weights and I was not a small man. It helped enforce some social boundaries. At the end of the day I could usually take it off, or so I thought.
The type of armor a lot of these guys wore- they couldn’t take it off. This was how they lived and you could feel that they had worn this armor for a very long time, so much so that it became a part of their being. There were scuffles, gruff talking, machismo. Everything was laced with an extra scoop of testosterone.
When you wear heavy armor you are shielded from many things that can hurt you. The drawback is that you shield yourself from the things that help you as well. You block out grief but you also block out the serenity that in time comes with it. You block out pain but you are also blocking the healing that follows. You can become a shell of yourself. The armor becomes limiting. You can’t move and you become horribly stuck.
What happens when you do decide to take the armor off? When you aren’t hiding behind any sort of bravado or grandiosity or gestures or facades? There comes a point where it becomes more painful to live with the armor on than off. You take the armor off and let the world in. All of it. The world becomes overwhelming. You’ve put on a different set of armor, something that allows you to breathe and move and serves you in a much deeper capacity.
This is the lesson of the Archer. To lightly armor yourself so that you are protected, yet you can still hit your marks with a deadly precision. You can move farther and faster and feel much more deeply. You become more aware and but find that you require a different sort of care for yourself and this may feel foreign. You feel pain more acutely but the healing becomes more available to you. The things you put out into the world feel more genuine.
For this blade I wanted something long, sharp, and elegant. I designed her for the kitchen. She is ground thin and a bit more fragile- at one point I dropped her on the concrete floor and the tip blunted a bit. After a bit of grinding she was alright.
The Archer, Mark II: 1095 spring steel, Sapele handle, brass hardware
Take your time and adjust to this new armor as the world opens up to something beyond posturing and mollywhops. This is the deeper lesson of the Archer.
Knifemaking: magic, noticing, and the Conjurer
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats
With most things in the world, there are many behind-the-scenes forces that help things to happen. Take a blossoming flower. Beautiful, fragrant, and simple. But behind all of that is a team of unseen helpers going about their existences- honeybee’s to pollinate, an ecosystem of soil for roots to take hold, and a concoction of nutrients within that for nourishment. There is rain, meteorological patterns to govern the rain, and atmospheric conditions to govern those. The beautiful blossoming flower couldn’t do what it does without these things, but that doesn’t make it any less magical, or detract from it’s wonder.
Life is a microcosm of this. For everything in our lives, magical or otherwise, there is a team going about busy existences to make those things happen. It’s important to notice these things.
A few years ago I started getting calls to work big shows. Rock concerts, comedians, people of Youtube fame: acts big enough to fill coliseums and large concert halls. My job title in these instances is Production Runner, a gofer, someone who knows where to find things and can make problems go away. I’m the guy who gets someone coffee, or picks up prescription strength fungicide for professional wrestlers, or buys lumber for stage carpenters. I’ve worked for a huge number of these acts. Sarah Bareilles is very sweet, Taylor Swift’s bodyguards are terrifying, and Bill Cosby told me I was a connoisseur of elongated bullshit.
These performers are like the flower. Most of them are who they are because they do something special that resonates with people, something fragrant and colorful and moving- magical even. But like the flower there is also an army of forces working very hard so that these performers can do what they do. There are truck and bus drivers, lighting designers, electricians, sound technicians, board operators, music directors and musicians and a slew of pencil-pushers and smooth-talkers to bring the flowers to the masses. There is even magic in what all of these forces are.
One of the first shows I worked was on the set of a two day DVD filming at a local concert hall. It was for a well known ventriloquist and was to be shown on a national TV network. It was exciting. After it was all over there was a director who needed a ride to DC to visit his brother before he flew back to Los Angeles. Being ever the cash opportunist I offered to assist.
In the I-95 traffic we had deep conversations of politics, sex, and music. He was telling me about a production he was watching from backstage in LA. It was a Stevie Wonder performance being filmed live for television and there was a performance of “My Cherie Amor. He had heard this song hundreds of times before but this performance of “My Cherie Amor” moved him to tears. He couldn’t explain it. Why was that one time so moving and special?
I told him that it was probably because he hadn’t really stopped to listen before, or maybe not in a very long time. There wasn’t anything else to do at that moment and he was able to hear a legend do what made him famous, to hear this beautiful man conjure deep things through his very simple gift.
This is the lesson of the Conjurer. To see the magic in the simple things. To conjure your own magic through the simple things you do in your life, because that is where the magic really lives. The flipside is to notice that the magic is there. It’s what puts the color in this world.
She is made from a bar of 1095 spring steel
Rough grinding 
Ready for hardening
Hardened and scaly
Tempered
Brass for the liners 
The Conjurer: 1095 spring steel, Mora handles, and brass liners and hardware 
When the director gentleman and I got to DC he gave me his card. I went home and googled him. This man was responsible for many magical musical productions and television shows and his name was shown prominently on each of them. Turns out he is quite the celebrity in that world and for good reason. If I hadn’t taken the time to notice I could have missed a special experience and the simple but beautiful conjuring that this man did. He helped me to see my own conjuring and magic. This is the deeper lesson of the Conjurer.
Knifemaking: creating space and the Pas de Deux
“You want to make two knives that become one. Or perhaps one knife that becomes two.”
Igor Antonov
Over the years I’ve quite a bit of production work for the ballet company in town. Building things, running a shuttle, being part of a crew that makes something special happen. My most favorite part of the work I’ve done is a program called Lecture Demonstrations. This is a fancy name for kiddie shows; in-school performances, where the company puts on performances for the children. The company manager would line up shows at elementary schools and take care of all the administrative details. I would show up to the ballet, load up sound equipment, props, costumes, and half a dozen dancers into a minivan and go to an elementary school, chat with school administrators, set up the sound system, wire up the lead ballerina, start the show, and punch the mic and music cues. After the show everything would get torn down, packed up, and loaded into the minivan along with myself and the dancers. Then we went to the next one.
The performance was an adaptation of “Coppelia”, made easily digestible for second graders, complete with talky bits and a question and answer. The kids enjoyed it.
I feel most people who have seen any sort of ballet video or performance have seen the lady in the tutu dancing with the man in tights. This is called pas de deux- French for “step of two”. Man and lady dancing together. Very simple on the surface.
Over the course of a month and a half we did two of these a day, four days a week, plus rehearsals. After watching about 60 of these shows, I found that I really looked forward to the two sections of pas de deux in the program. I loved the balance of the masculine and the feminine. I loved the interdependence of the dance- they are both separate entities. The beauty comes when the feminine surrenders to the masculine. The masculine leaves a certain space for her to shine, for her to be what she is. In doing what she does, the feminine leaves space for the masculine to be what he is. Trust permeates throughout. They both have their own identity but together they do things that individually they could not.
I had an idea for a knife. There is a wonderful Ukrainian gentleman on the artistic staff who would come to these performances and give notes and critiques to the dancers on how the performance could be better. He also gave me critiques on the the technical side of things. After one of these critiques I told him what I do and how to work the pas de deux into it. “Ah,” he says, “You want to make two knives that become one. Or perhaps one knife that becomes two.” I had to think about that for a couple of months.
To flow seamlessly between separate and together- this is the lesson of the Pas de Deux. To leave space for things to be what they are while maintaining one’s own identity. It is in this space that intimacy exists and blossoms. To be so secure in oneself that submission requires small effort. Sometimes we hold on to things so tightly that there isn’t any space for the things we need. Sometimes there is a great amount of space and everything may seem to sprawl and lose form. Always, at the end of it all, everything ends up where it is supposed to be.
I chose to make one knife that became two.
First the feminine…
Rough grind 
Hardened
Purple Heartwood 
Here is where I had to take the handle off and put a new one on. I couldn’t quite get that little tail to bond to the tail of the tang. In the next picture you see the new handle with two little brass rivets.
Now the masculine…
Hardened
Tempered
Tulipwood for him
Now the stinky part… 
The Pas de Deux, a kitchen pair: 1095 spring steel
The feminine is Purple Heartwood with brass hardware
The masculine is Tulipwood with brass hardware
Embrace the space. You and your partner, in whatever form they may take, will both shine.
groundedinfire 