Can work solve your problems? Do communities always oppress individuals? Can you love objects and not be a materialist?

The Carpenters Boat Shop in Pemaquid, Maine has been training apprentices to build wooden boats for more than 30 years. While most of the apprentices I met there yesterday looked pretty young, the program accepts people of any age and status – the main commonality seemed to be a focus on people in transition.

Have a look at www.carpentersboatshop.org for clear explanations and beautiful pictures; I'm not going to repeat what the Boat Shop says about itself, eloquently.

Yes, I think work can solve a lot – if it's meaningful work, disciplined work, and work in the context of a community. That is, work with values. Apprentices at the Boat Shop are held to high standards of quality; nothing is dumbed down for them. But they are taught with kindness and an appreciation of our differences. Each apprentice starts out making her or his toolbox. Individual differences are visible, but each toolbox reflects the organization’s high standards and demands more than it does the individuality of the craftspeople. Eventually, they move on to building wooden boats:

Many years ago during the Vietnam War I was in a negotiation session in Hanoi. My hosts told me they wanted to have a "criticism – self-criticism" session. I knew from past experience this meant I would be critiqued and then we'd run out of time before my turn to voice my complaints. As we sat in the circle, my minders and hosts were uncharacteristically brief. They said, "You suffer from excessive individualism." Because I was young and foolish, I said, "Thank you."

Years later I realized the truth of their criticism and the absurdity of my answer. We are overboard, as a culture, in protecting the details of individualism at  great cost to our culture, our social contract, and our future.

The Carpenters Boat Shop seems to have found a balance between the needs of individuals and the enclosure of us all (whether we like it or not), in layers of community. I've been in enough intentional communities to be a bit prickly about my autonomy being crushed by the demands of the whole. In fact, my experience has often been that people who are skilled manipulators can wield the heavy club of community to advance their own agendas. Just ask those comrades in Hanoi. I'm not sure that communities themselves can be oppressive, but I know that they can be used by oppressors as a tool.

Part of what the Boat Shop provides for the apprentices, in our age of virtual life, is an immediate and personal connection to something solid and material. Results are manifest immediately in the real world, for all to see. There is no undo button. Participants exist at the intersection of their own standards and values, and the standards and values of their instructor and their community. In other words, individualism becomes subordinate, rather than reining as a tyrant king or queen.

I think a great deal of what's bothering US society has to do with this excess of individualism. The boats, canoes, tables, cradles and other objects made down there in Pemaquid connect the individuals with something larger than themselves – and most important – more powerful than themselves. I think this is the key to the redirecting and maybe even healing that occurs for Boat Shop apprentices. While the Boat Shop is not overtly religious that I could see, key leaders are liberal clergy, and there's a chapel on the Boat Shop’s extensive (and beautiful) campus, albeit a chapel with two boats in it. Work can be a spiritual practice.

So my responses to the questions about the healing power of work and the security of the individual within a community are strongly affirmative. As for materialism, the Boat Shop’s products reflect a value set apparently similar to that of the Shakers, and in fact you can see Shaker design in some of their objects like the small tables and boxes. It isn't the objects themselves that are revered, but rather their manifestation of greater beauty and even love. This is the inevitable consequence of real work.

The Boat Shop earns an income selling what is made, and from repairing local wooden boats. Participants are not charged money for their apprenticeship, nor are they paid for what they make. I think an important feature of the Carpenters Boat Shop is its financial neutrality, for participants. What they earn is not enough, and I'm sending them a contribution – perhaps you will also.

In closing I want to mention the cradle to grave nature of the Boat Shop's products. In addition to boats and tables, the apprentices make cradles in the form of boats that are indistinguishable from the big ones, except in size. Once the little tyke outgrows her or his cradle, she can paddle it. 

At the other end of life, the Boat Shop will make simple wooden coffins, or if you choose cremation, small Shaker boxes that can hold ashes. Here's one bent around a mandrel, ready to receive its top and bottom.

If you come up to Midcoast Maine, a Carpenter’s Boat Shop visit is not just educational, it's thrilling. They have an open coffee hour at 10AM on Thursdays. If you can, buy a beautiful wooden boat or table, sign up for a summer course, or if all else fails – send a check and get on the mailing list. The recovery of our society from its plunge into the weakness of abstracted, excessive individualism lies in modest and well thought out programs like the apprenticeships at the Carpenters Boat Shop.