人間クラフト

What we have lost collectively, over the past 12,000 years, in the rush to become modern, is our deepest ancestral mooring in the intelligence and vitality of the animal body, our rootedness in belonging to the earth, our experience of being at home in a universe of which we are the children. This experience of alienation, elaborated through cultural systems over millenia, has fossilized thoughtforms and ways of being that lift us out of the deepest home indwelling in the body, estrange us from our deepest aboriginal intelligence, locate our identities in ungrounded thinking, and uproot us from our sense of place. The polycrisis of modernity is a perfectly logical expression of this embodied alienation.

We have forgotten that there is a craft of being. That it is possible to apprentice in the art of becoming a real human being. This isn’t something you learn at a weekend workshop. It doesn't come in a package. You can’t get an online certificate in it. What we are talking about is real apprenticeship in ancestral ways of being. This can only happen in the presence of teachers who have dedicated their lives to mastering a craft of being. It can only happen within the context of a community of practice.

In many places in the modern west we have lost the notion of multi-generational folk craft. We have forgotten that guilds and apprenticeships unfold through time, anchored in place, at gatherings, through emergent process, and that the essence of what is being transformed as someone masters a craft is internal. The crafts towards which we orient this collective are inward: embodied, neurological, ontological. For this reason, we conceptualize these as crafts of being. Since there are not words in english resonant with these ancestral notions, we call the collective ‘Ningen Kurafuto’, (人間クラフト)the Japanese words for the human realm & folk craft. We translate this into English as ‘craft of being.’