Last-day intensity and nine days later

I like the early morning and sitting on the benches overlooking the see, cattle grazing in the fields and the mass of rock called Penrhyn Castle. The leaves are starting to change colour and so winter will bring restfulness and peace to plan a new future.

The class is full of hope as I sit and wait. I look at my hands and see the craggy muscles flex as I think of the skinny boy I was in 1965 when I had none. I was full of hope then and still have hope now for a new generation of woodworkers evolving in an unsettled world fractured and uncertain. Beyond economy and polity I find a sanity in handwork few can understand. I don’t get this sanity from my computer, struggling with software and typing up the words for my blog. As I enter the workshop before class I feel sanity settle and take over. The students are no longer strangers to me or one another but friends who want to benefit one another and share in the successes of none days. They are no longer isolated from one another by unknowns but share space and time with one another as they talk about their work. their working and a non-competing result of something borne from their handwork. No, they are not content to be hobbyist. It’s somehow more serious than that. Wood and its working is not a pastime, it’s deeper than that. They are verging on the future they are carving themselves into. They will one day plumb the depths and fathom why wood works so masterfully when the hands coordinate what the eye sees and the mind is flowing with energy no flat screen can produce. This process we call woodworking leads to a harmony few people can ever really experience today. It revolves three dimensionally, captures imagination and the essence of solidity in a multidimensional world. I’m still in awe that a simple tree can supply my limited ability working with my hands can produce such joy.