In ancient Wales if you were a young man and you gave a woman a spoon you were proposing to her. We have all held spoons. Their design is so elegant and so simple. What could be easier than a spoon? I have tried to carve spoons from a block of wood. It isn’t easy.…

One strand of the story of Jews is of worn down wandering boot heels. A story of the road. They have heard ‘you should probably get going’ (or worse) often enough that you almost have to wonder how people such as these learned such hospitality. Jews have been in the nation we call Belarus for…

Dear Culture Makers and Primal Dermers, Not all of you know what I look like over in my corner of the world. Well take a gander. . What a bunch of people have asked me is, “Hey, what’s with those beads?” Well it’s a good story and you can hear all about it and some…

I’m reading a great book called “Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community” by Kathryn Linn-Geurts. In the Western world there is ‘consensus’ that we have five senses and if we have a sixth sense that somehow it is associated with some kind of mystical intuition about the supernatural world…

Before I was born my mother spent some time in South Dakota living and working with the Lakota Sioux on a reservation. When I was a kid I always admired and was glad to hold the small cache of beaded jewelry that she had. I couldn’t speak to the stories or meanings of any of…

I’m pretty lucky that you lot of people who are willing and excited to put grass fed tallow on your skin and are interested in reclaiming some of these old cultural roots are all here. If you have used Primal Derma I would venture to guess that there is a strong chance that you are…

In the excellent book ‘On Trails: An Exploration’ by Robert Moor he wonders aloud about the paths beneath our feet. How do they form? Why do some get used more than others while others fade? He investigates ants and highways and long-lost Cherokee trails in the rural South. But on page 97 and 98 he…

As I have mentioned before culture making and maintenance is what Primal Derma is very much about. Walking that thin tightrope of making meaning in our days while in remembrance of what it takes to make something come to pass. When it goes too fast we lose the chance for accountability or responsibility. Aleppo is…

Primal Derma has been a small venture from the start and this undertaking of chance is in no way guaranteed to achieve any measure of ‘success’ in any conventional sense despite our scrappy charms and bigger story to tell and share. But here we are – alive and lucky for it. Here is a sign…

One of the reasons I started Primal Derma was as a way of remembering that the way things used to be done have great relevance to our modern lives that often go for immediacy over patience and cost over value.  Primal Derma is unapologetic in trying to reclaim a thin trail that was walked by…