The root word for joinery is ‘harmos’; from whence we get the word many strive for in life but rarely find, harmony. Harmony isn’t merely reduced to a superficial aesthetic; something that perhaps looks or sounds merely pleasing. It can and often is something that ensures a depth of meaning beyond vision and sound into realms whereby we feel a harmony we cannot always describe yet know it conveys a complex arrangement seldom seen or known today. This harmony type I speak of is something that ensures longevity, integrity, support, inner strength, flexibility and thereby resolute pleasure to those that see or hear and see and feel an inner depth and breadth and width we can only describe as harmony. People often describe things as being in perfect harmony, but there is no perfect if harmony isn’t wholly complete in itself. You can’t get near harmony—harmony is.
The joint effort (no pun) of many men working together revolved around a key man who masterminded the work at hand. This is tradition. It’s solid. He laid out the joints, cut most parts of them and oversaw the work. He listened to others working alongside him as the work continued and when the structural assembly came he listened further.
We all listened, we listened for instruction, his instruction and answers brought the long line of the frame to conclusion. Post after stood post became anchored at the base and each would wait as the man, Nick, thought. He looked, held the beam, twisted the method of connectivity in his mind, stopped and then spoke. Guiding each one with a few brief words and a twist of his arm and hand, the lineage of beams and posts interlocked remarkably to create the symmetry I would call harmony. Each joint came to closure by the care Nick placed with each pencil line and subsequent knife cut. The shoulderlines were perfect and the trunnels, from ‘tree-nails’, (some call pegs) drew the mortise and tenons permanently tight.
Work like this doesn’t happen overnight. The process of learning to work in harmony is indeed a process of change. It’s also proactive. No one part can simply sit and wait for the other to change. In an age of excessive and unrestrained personalities I find the kind of rugged individualism portrayed through films and television admired as a quality trait to be emulated by men and women yet this cannot create anything of which I speak. Teams are often teams in name only where many team players simply strive for the same objective but all want to be the one individual that scores. In most cases this often defies the very meaning of ‘team’ for they are not mere team players but finely tuned individuals contributing to an end product by which they are recognised as the one who actually scored. On the other hand, I am talking of finely tuned individuals who sacrifice recognition for the common good of a greater whole.
I search my mind for the right word but find none that describes a series of people with different personalities that lay down what they want for something bigger than themselves.
People, men, rarely experience something like I describe in opening this passage. We live all too often in a functionally dyslexic society. Listening one to the other, feeling the pulse of another’s input, responding to questions and answers without fear of rejection or rebuttal and then hugging the beam or post or brace to twist one to the other’s gain of one eighth of an inch of lost space is now rare. If it does happen, when it does, the wood somehow flexes on each part, bends and yields and opens for a split second and the parts to each distinct joint suddenly unite. So too one man flexes his will in response to another beside him. A harmony of effort energises many aspects of intent and harmony rests over everything. Closure comes at the conclusion of another day’s work.
