A Mason's Work

The Fellow Craft represents the craftsman at work — no longer a beginner, yet still learning through practice. In this episode, we explore the practical level of the Fellow Craft’s path: how skills, habits, and understandings begin to interlock into coherent work. Integration is the bridge between repetition and mastery, where learning becomes deliberate and coordinated.

🔑 Key Takeaways
  • The Fellow Craft mindset connects skill, understanding, and purpose into unified action.
  • Integration requires patience — the space where practice becomes intuition.
  • Work becomes mastery when effort is shaped by awareness, not just repetition.
💬 Featured Quotes
  • 0:00:15 — “When we talk about the practical level of the Fellow Craft’s work, we’re really talking about how different skills and activities start to fit together.”
  • 0:00:38 — “A lot of it is about understanding the relationships between things.”
  • 0:00:50 — “When we look at the work itself, it’s about understanding, for example, how one part supports another.”
  • 0:01:10 — “Integration is the foundation of the craftsman’s growth — it’s where practice meets awareness.”

Creators and Guests

Host
Brian Mattocks
Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

At the telegraph masons level, we're going to explore the different workings as well, just

like we did with the interim pranis masons over the past week, from both a practical perspective,

a sort of relational perspective and then a philosophical perspective.

When we talk about the practical level, the practical interpretation of the telegraph

masons work, what we're really talking about is learning how the different skills and activities

that you're pursuing start to fit together.

And you'll see this a lot throughout the telegraph masons kind of toolkit.

A lot of it is about understanding the relationships between things.

When we look at the work itself, it's about understanding, for example, what, if you

imagine an operative capacity, how the tools are used in conjunction with each other to

help create an outcome.

As opposed to the interter pranis masons approach, which is very much more kind of a big heavy

lifting stuff, moving rough objects and concepts around.

At a telegraph level, you're starting to understand more of the interrelationships between

these concepts, how they fit together and how they work.

This is the beginning of the phase of learning where you start to take a meaningful control

over the learning process.

You start proactively seeking feedback.

You start trying to understand, really, again, how the pieces of the work fit together,

as well as maybe the beginning of the understanding of where your strengths lie, where your weaknesses

lie.

And that, beginning that feedback cycle, using other people's expertise, not just as a

guide, but reflecting with your own experience, which has started to kind of nurture and develop

to create a feedback loop that you can use to really understand what's going on.

This sort of behavioral perspective of the fellow craft means that you're going to start

to get an understanding of, again, as well, where your skills lie on a spectrum of skills

related to what you're trying to learn.

So if you're trying to learn, say, music as a rough example, there are tons and tons

and tons of different musical skills that are all related in the music acquisition process.

So there are skills specific to the instrument you're learning, for example, there are skills

relative to training your ear, training your manual dexterity.

There are skills relative to training your ability to read music and then turn that into

the correct motion of your hands or your breath or things like that.

There are tons of subskills as well that kind of all play together.

And as a fellow craft, you really start to get an understanding of what those subskills

are and how they fit together, again, to create that larger moving piece.

You'll know you've hit that fellow craft kind of space in your sort of practical development

when you begin to realize how big the sort of space is of any one of the domains you're

trying to learn in.

You don't really have a sense of scale and scope as an enter apprentice because you don't

have that kind of relationship mindset or perspective.

As a fellow craft, you definitely get a sense that like these skills are big, there's

lots to learn, the pieces all fit together just a little bit differently.

And you begin to surface what your kind of interests and strengths are in that space.

So you're taking this sort of relational feedback not only from the experts around you in the

field, but as well as your own internal lived experience.

So that's kind of the behavioral practical function in the fellow craft nasons degree.