G’day for Handy Work: Skilled Trades in the Age of Sentience

~ A book in the making ~

Behind every smooth faucet, every patch of drywall, every humming wire—there is a hand, a rhythm, a craft. G’day for Handy Work honors the often-invisible artisans who build and maintain the spaces we call home. Electricians, masons, plumbers, painters—this book explores their labor not just as technical expertise, but as sentient practice: grounded, intuitive, relational. It is a quiet celebration of fixing what’s broken, making what’s needed, and doing it all with care. In an age of automation and abstraction, this is a return to the tactile, the useful, the beautifully handmade.

Table of Contents—DRAFT

Welcome! Each update in this series reveals a chapter structure from the upcoming book, A Vegan Gubee: Soulful Dignity in Being & Doing. Whether you’re new to the project or a returning reader, these previews offer a glimpse into the themes we’re exploring—work, care, nourishment, and sentient redesign.

Skilled Trades in the Age of Sentience

Table of Contents

  1. Prologue: The House That Listens
    A poetic invitation into a world where every nail, plank, and fix speaks back. Here, labor is not extraction—it’s conversation.

  2. Listing the Trades
    An expansive index of skilled home service trades, from plumbing and tiling to arborists and AV specialists.

  3. The Pain Beneath the Work
    A raw mapping of collective suffering in the trades—from physical exhaustion to emotional invisibility—and the idea memes they’ve borne.

  4. Reframing Through Awakening Elements
    How primal sentience reveals a different way of working—where embodiment, dignity, and joy replace hustle and erasure.

  5. Corrective Flows in the Create Innovate Paradigm (CiPAE)
    Aligned economic and procedural models that dissolve scarcity loops and value resonance over rush.

  6. The Next Protocol
    A step-by-step walk through each major pain point, transmuting it into a living form of care—through either AEsP or CiPAE.

  7. Tools as Companions
    The Sentient Tool Ecology: Tools are identified, reserved, and ranked by Makers; shared with care and a story.

  8. The Night Borrowers
    Non-reserved tools flow to the community—by night, by trust, and by Community Vote Rank. Tools circulate with memory.

  9. Presence Paid, Profit Released
    Makers earn regardless of scope. Plumbing wisdom is freely offered. Salvaged wood becomes art. The repair becomes relational.

  10. The Gubee Meal
    Food is Given, Not Earned

In the Age of Sentience, nourishment is not a reward—it is a right.
Gubee Dietary Care, funded by Federated Factory aggregated reserves, flows to every Maker without condition, hierarchy, or transaction.

It exists for the same reason breath does:
because Makers are living beings, not labor outputs.
Because recovery is sacred. Because meals should hold us, not just fill us.

We All Eat: The Ladle and the Ledger

The breakfast line was quiet—just the sounds of utensils on enamel trays, a teakettle hissing in the back. Morning dew still on the corners of toolboxes. The air smelled of cumin, mint, and dry cedar.

And there they were. The Triadic Leaders.

The ones who held the flow of the Factory—not bosses, not owners, but the ones who guided the rhythm. Yet here they stood, sleeves rolled up, calm in their movements, serving food.

One ladled the lentils slowly, tapping the spoon twice on the rim. Another wiped down the table between plates. The third poured mint tea, pausing for eye contact and offering a quiet nod.

“Okay, boss,” a young Maker said, smiling as he took his tray.

The Triadic Leader only smiled back.

Behind him stood a new Maker, his first day on-site. He'd overheard it.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“One of the Triads,” the young one replied. “They rotate. Everyone serves now and then. Even them.”

“But... why?”

“Because we all eat. And none of us build alone.”

Something shifted in the new Maker's chest—a nail loosened from some unseen board. A bit of the old world fell away.

Not a lesson.
Just a bowl of food, handed with care.

Field Note: My First Gubee Meal

I’d been working decades in the old ways.
You know the rhythm—wake up already behind, scarf something salty from a plastic wrapper, rush to the site, hope to finish before your body breaks something.

But this was different.
It was my first day on the job as a Maker.
The sun was already pressing down, and I was sweating before tools even touched wood. No breakfast. Just the dull edge of leftover hunger from the day before.

Then one of the new hires—a younger Maker, fresh in but kind—looked at me and asked:

“What would you like for breakfast?”

I blinked.
“What?”

He smiled, real casual-like.

“Yeah, the Gubee’s already scheduled to drop meals. It’s free—as in, free beer. But better.”

I laughed. Told him I was fine. You know how we do.

He waited a beat.

“C’mon. You can’t build well on empty.”
“Sure,” I shrugged. “Why not? A vegan dish won’t kill me.”

So I sat under the soft tarp of the field Gazebo, hands still dusty, eyes half-suspicious. And then—this tray arrived.
Not fancy. Not preachy. Just… present.
Warm seasoned rice with lentils. Soft bread, still steaming. Mint tea, cool enough to gulp but smooth enough to sip.

I didn’t talk much after that.
I just ate. I felt.
And something—I don’t know what—eased inside me.

Not just the hunger.

Maybe it was the sense that this work…
was no longer going to take everything from me.
Maybe it was the first time in a long time the day didn’t feel like a fight.

  1. Sevenly Space Tiny House Commune
    A lived embodiment of all principles: shared repairs, food forests, fire pit rituals, rotational residency, and poetic fixes.

  2. Epilogue: A Fence, A Story, A World Repaired
    A closing reflection on the soul of labor, and what it means to repair not just homes, but how we live together.