Spirit

I'm working on a very unique table right now. It's different because the wood actually came from a tree that was beloved by the family I'm making it for. It was a sprawling ancient maple, rooted for decades in the lush front lawn of their Wisconsin farm house. The tree had to be removed, and -- unwilling to say goodbye to this friend -- they had it carefully milled into lumber for the very purpose I’m now putting it to. I don’t feel much like an artist/craftsman this time. I feel more like a shaman, like I’m escorting a beautiful soul from one noble life to the next.

A tree is a life, it has a spirit (a breath) within it, it breathes when it’s alive and it goes on breathing, in a different way, even after it’s dead. Every craftsman knows that wood always moves, it swells and shrinks and swells again, it shifts and twists and bends and sometimes even breaks. We who make wood into structures can never really pin it down, the best we can do is to fence it in, give it borders in which to move freely. And to do this we first have to know the wood, we have to learn from it and listen to it, we have to know what it will and won’t do over time. Like a good animal trainer we respect the life that has been put in our hands, we let it teach us how to handle it. We do not dominate the wood, we never attempt to break its spirit. Instead we work with it.

I always feel this way as I make something, but never more than right now. I can’t even bring myself to burn the scraps of this tree in my woodstove, although the temperature in my shop is hovering around 25 degrees every morning I go out there. Instead I put them aside, in a box, to be presented to the family as a folded flag would be to a grieving widow, and I bundle up for the short walk to the old log pile.

It is good for me to think about this tree while I’m working. I must admit that normally when I work wood I’m not conscious of the actual tree that yielded it to me. I saw a pig slaughtered once. I saw it taken from its pen and shot twice in the head, strung from a tree and lowered into a boiling barrel of water to remove its hair. It was then gutted, sliced in half lengthways, then into quarters and smaller fractions, and finally tossed into several different ice chests as chops, bacon, ham, loin, and whatever else was deemed edible by the indifferent man holding the bloody knife. I didn’t know how to feel about it as I watched, and I still don’t. I remember standing at the coolers, looking at the steaming flesh and wondering, At what moment did that pig stop being a pig and start being meat? When it was shot? At the moment it was cut in half? There used to be a pig here, and now there’s not a pig here. There are just pig parts. Where did the pig go? Anyone arriving on the scene right now wouldn’t see a pig, just parts. But because I had seen a pig, I still saw a pig. And that’s why I didn’t take the cooler that was offered. I didn’t want to eat it because I didn’t want to see a pig in every bite.

It is a great burden when you are forced to regard the creature who gave its life to make yours better, or just more pleasurable. It can ruin a meal. In the same way, it’s easier to work wood when it comes to you as ready lumber, when you don’t have to imagine the tree that yielded it, when you don’t have to think about how tall and strong and beautiful it must have once been, how persistently and patiently it stood all those years in a single place (years which are now storied in those rings, should you choose to listen), how quietly resistant it was to harsh winters and scorching summers, yet how gracious it remained to all the creatures who depended upon it for life and happiness.

Or to put it another way, how much a tree is what we want to be.

(to be continued...)

Perfect

“In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care, Each minute and unseen part; For the gods see everywhere.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Why am I down here on the floor, Mark?”

Because it was you who taught me that everything on a piece of furniture matters. You were the one who had me sand the bottoms of drawers and table tops to perfection, who always said that the back of a piece has to be just as good as the front, who always made me lift things to move them across the shop so that the bottoms of the feet would not be scratched.

“Because I want you to see that joint, Michael. The one at the very bottom, the one that’s angled in such a way that nobody will ever see it unless they are lying on the floor on their back, looking up, with a flashlight. Like you are now.”

You are the reason I spent two solid days of work getting the curved shoulders on that mortise and tenon joint to fit just right. The shoulders that nobody else will ever see. And now you will see that they are absolutely perfect.

“Oh yes OK. Wow, nice work!”

The six years I spent apprenticing under you are the reason my furniture is as good as it is now. And after all these years away from you, I can still hear your voice saying ‘It’s not quite right yet, keep working on it.’ It is the greatest gift you gave me. And the greatest curse.

It was the part of woodworking I had to learn. I am not, by nature, a perfectionist. As a trained minister I don’t expect flawlessness in things or in people. I was taught, and I have taught others, that perfection is impossible this side of heaven. It doesn’t bother me that the bottom of my grandparent’s old desk, the one at which I’m now sitting to write, is not perfectly finished, or that the painting on the wall next to me is listing slightly to the left. I can live with these things.

When I started working wood 16 years ago it was the idea of imagining and crafting something of my own that pulled me in. It was the draw of the wood, the honesty and integrity of the work, that made me want to do this. It was not, it was never, the drive toward perfection.

Perhaps this is why, according to Someone’s great plan for me, I landed an apprenticeship with a perfectionist. (My dad always said that God never gets enough credit for his rich sense of humor.) Fresh out of seminary, greener than a fresh piece of poplar, I found myself one morning with a piece of 400 grit sandpaper in one hand thinking, “Did I hear him right? He wants me to sand the bottoms of the table’s feet?” In the weeks to come I became more vocal with this type of question. But then as weeks added up to months, I stopped asking them. Because the answer was always, Yes. Always.

What I came to realize, quietly and painfully, was that the question of whether the client would ever actually see a cut corner was irrelevant, not even worth the breath to ask. It didn’t matter at all that the customer would never notice how perfectly finished the bottom was. Because we weren’t making this furniture for the client, we were making it for…whom? That was always the question, the question I eventually learned to keep to myself.

The closest I ever got to an answer was the time I pleaded, “But if I cut this corner we will save time, and honestly, who will know?” His reply, “You will know.”

And that is the answer. I will know. I will know that I didn’t make it as good as I could have made it. I will know that I gave up a career to pursue woodworking because it is honest and true, and yet even I have begun hiding things in my work. I will know that the image of the lone craftsman working carefully in his small shop to rescue this gasping art from the churning metal claws of cheap and quick industrialization has become nothing more than a romantic lie, a marketing gimmick, a retouched photo.

And if I know this, and if I begin to accept these things, how long will it be before the compromises crawl like vines from the bottom, around the sides, and up to the top?

Peers

When you're an artist it's really hard not to compare your talent to that of your peers. Even though most of us know that the proper reaction to the brilliant work of others is to be happy for them, to admire them for what they've achieved, to appreciate the work itself because after all you're a fan of the genre or you wouldn't be doing this right? -- even though we know what a mature reaction would look like, it's sometimes really hard to pull it off. There's a very unique emotion -- perhaps terror is the closest relative to it -- when an artist looks upon the masterful work of a peer and a little voice inside says, 'You couldn't do that, even if you tried.'

Here's how I know. Last week I went to the furniture show in Kerrville. (Not so much a "show" really, none of the furniture danced or sang or played the keytar. Just sort of sat there quiet and looked pretty. But it did that really well.) The show features the work of the best and brightest furniture designer/craftspeople from all over the state. And we really do have some good ones here. One more thing to be proud of.

But oh, there were moments of pure terror. A few of the pieces amazed me to my quivering bowels, made my head hurt as I dizzily tried to figure how they were made. Brilliant ideas I never could have conceived, incarnated in precise and delicate and painstaking detail that I never could have nurtured. You couldn't do that, even if you tried.

So how does an artist answer that voice? Because you have to respond somehow, or you can't go on doing what you do, right? You have to believe that what you do has a legitimate place in a world where that guy's stuff exists too.

When I was younger and punker, I countered by listing all the things I am good at that that guy probably isn't, I convinced myself I didn't really care that his stuff was so good, or better still, I picked it over looking for little things to criticize.

I'm older now, calmer, less threatened. Don't know why, maybe that's just one of the advantages of gray hair. Or so I'm told, I don't really have any myself yet. In Kerrville this time, unlike shows I went to in my youth, I had a really good time. I studied each piece carefully, as though it were a person deserving my utmost respect, stood back reverently and took in the design, moved up closely and marveled at the crafting of it, and yes if there were things I didn't like I was honest about that too. But I was able to walk away from each piece feeling proud of the person who made it, feeling their angst as they conceived it and puzzled over how to make it and finished it and held it out for the world to see and trembled wondering whether anyone would actually like it. I've done all those things myself many times, so I know how hard this is. Unlike before, I left the gallery glowing, remembering anew why I love doing what I do, wishing I could meet each craftsperson and talk to them for hours about their piece.

While I was in Kerrville my phone rang. It was an inquiry from someone wanting a dining table. I went home that night, filled with the inspiration from dozens of my peers, and designed a really beautiful and unusual piece. I'm really proud of it, and I can't wait to build it, and I could not be more thankful to my fellow Texas designer/craftspeople for reminding me how fulfilling this calling can be.

So I guess my answer to "You couldn't do that, even if you tried" is now, "Perhaps not, but seeing that reminds me of how amazing wood furniture can be, and it makes me want to get even better. And that's more than enough."

Landing

Today I finished this king bed. It’s made of cherry wood and and a wood some people call tiger maple, or curly maple, or fiddleback maple. I call it amazing.

The best moments in woodworking are the very beginning of a project and the very end. Like a pilot, I live for the takeoffs and the landings.

In the beginning my heart races as I pull wood from the rack and try to imagine which part I will make out of which piece. I get positively chirpy as my mind reaches wide to wrap around the days and weeks ahead of me, all the fun I’m about to have.

And at the end, like earlier today, there is always a moment when I push the last drawer into place, or lock the last bedrail in, or wipe the table top off with a rag, and I suddenly realize that there is no more work to be done on this piece. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I set the piece in the middle of the shop facing my workbench. I turn away from it and walk over to the bench, hoist myself up to sit, turn back to the piece, open my eyes, and take it in. Sometimes I’ll sit there for half an hour, most of that time saying only three words to myself: I made that.

Simple

Whenever I meet someone for the first time and they find out what I do for a living, invariably the next question they ask is, “What kind of furniture do you make?” I always answer the same way, “Wood furniture.” Then they say, “But what style?” I hoped they wouldn’t ask, because my answer always disappoints.

They want to hear Shaker, or Mission, or Colonial American, or Modern, or something they’ve heard of. They’ve got stories and opinions about these styles, they’ve got specimens in their own homes, and all they need is a nod from me to begin talking about them.

But my answer usually goes something like this: “Simple furniture. I don’t like ornamentation and I don’t like fitting into a style, I just draw until it looks right to me, then I build it. I used to try and mimic other styles, now I just do what looks right. And I like simple things, so, most of my furniture looks pretty simple.” Blank look. “I’m sorry. You can go now if you want.” Usually they take me up on the offer.

So I need a better elevator speech.

But I also need to find a way to help people see what I see in simplicity. I think simple furniture, done well, is anything but boring. In fact I think it’s revolutionary, because it fights against our worst instincts. It calls us away from the busy-ness that fractures our souls. It reveals the phony-ness of gaudy over-ornamentation. It shames the poorly designed and cheaply constructed objects that most of us unthinkingly fill our houses with. It stands up for what’s right about the world, what’s good in people. It makes us feel more peaceful, more confident, more whole. It speaks to the honesty and humility that is buried deep within us and calls it to the surface, centering our attention on the qualities we know to be right and true.

In the history of furniture design there have been other paths to simplicity. The Shakers pared down their designs in furniture, as in everything else, in an effort to clear their hearts of all worldly treasures so as to focus on heavenly ones. They believed they should be seeking beauty in God alone, and that any attempt to adorn themselves and their environments would be distracting and ultimately fatal to their spiritual quest.

The heroes of the Arts and Crafts movement found simplicity to be the highest expression of human dignity. Furniture that looked honest and simple, with joinery that could be seen and seen as beautiful, celebrated the quiet and persistent dignity of the worker. Furniture that was gratuitously adorned and over decorated smelled decidedly bourgeois to these thinkers, and the attempt to hide structural elements under gilded layers of bling represented nothing less than contempt for the craftsman himself. These philosophers, whose influence reached across just about every genre of craft in the 19th century, sought to bring work of the craftsman to the front, to make it visible, and thus to celebrate simple things done well. A well cut dovetail joint, a precisely crafted through tenon, was said to be infinitely more beautiful than the most jewel-encrusted rosette that has ever been pasted onto an aristocrat’s chair.

I love these paths to simplicity, and I buy into them wholeheartedly. But I also think our present society, this post-modern pond in which we all now swim, offers yet another angle, another argument for keeping things basic, spare, clean, clear. To put it simply, life has become incredibly complicated. The number of things we carry in our pockets and purses and cars, the number of dates and times we now have to remember, the number of bills we now have to pay (not to mention the amount of those bills), the number of sounds and sights and products that compete for our attention, the number of objects in our homes that now seem like necessities rather than luxuries, these things seem to have increased geometrically just in my lifetime. And this increase shows no sign of slowing down.

I think it’s making us sick. I think it’s fracturing our souls and dividing our attention into ever smaller bits at the frantic rate of a nuclear reaction. I think if we don’t find a way to make it stop we will eventually explode and dissolve into nothingness. We can’t keep splitting the atoms of our selves for ever, eventually we will run out of self to divide. This is our crisis, I think. It’s not that we can’t find purpose, but that even if we were to find purpose we’d have so little left of ourselves to commit to it that it would not even be worth trying. We’re tired. We’re overstimulated, overinvolved, overdivided, overextended, overentertained. We don’t know who we are any more, where our ‘self’ is located amongst the many fragments of our daily schedules.

I am naïve. But I actually think I can make a difference in the way I design furniture. I do believe, as Winston Churchill is credited as having said, that “We shape our dwellings, and thereafter they shape us.” I believe that a person takes an important step toward wellness by simplifying his or her environment, by deciding to own fewer things, and only things that are simply envisioned, carefully crafted, and extremely solid. Broad horizontal lines seep into the subconscious as calm open sees or quiet rolling prairies. Stark slabs of wood create a feeling of stability, strength, and perfect balance. Exposed joinery puts the unconscious mind at ease; for in seeing it, it knows a thing to be well put-together and reliable.

As we nourish our instinct toward simplicity, our frantic urge to complicate things will eventually starve. I believe it. Simple things make for simple lives. I could design complicated things, but it wouldn’t feel right. Not now.

Temporary

When I was 26 I rented a little gray house in a very old south Austin neighborhood. Before I even signed the lease I decided that the overgrown patch of ground adjacent to the quiet street would become my new vegetable garden. So the last trip on moving day was interrupted by a stop at the hardware store to buy a shovel. Something every man should have unless, like me, he’d lived in downtown seminary housing until about 20 minutes ago.

It would be my very first actual garden and I was happy. Looking back now I’m not even sure I had unloaded the last few boxes from the truck before I and my spade were hard at work redeeming the wretched lot.

New to this sort of thing, I didn’t really know what to expect, or else I’d say that what happened about ten minutes into the job was unexpected. After a few successful tills my luck suddenly changed, and I hit something hard and mean. An awful ‘ping’ that played my shovel like a tuning fork. It was only about three inches down, whatever it was. I guessed a rock, so I moved over a few inches and stabbed again…Ping! Move again...Ping! Over more...Ping! Ok way over there…Ping! Whatever it was it was big.

There was a gritty sound as I angled the handle almost flat to scrape off the soil, expecting to be disheartened by a garden-disabling slab of bone-gray limestone. But what crumbled up through the soil wasn’t gray, but red. Dark red. A few more shovelings and a garden hose finally revealed what I was standing on: a carefully laid mosaic brick walkway. Perfectly flat, tightly assembled, imaginatively envisioned, and now covered in dirt and weeds from years of neglect. I uncovered its breadth and length, about four feet by fifteen, and dutifully washed it clean. Stunning. Functional but more than, this four foot wide via was a dance of square and triangulated bricks, arranged in sunny, randomly place arrays. Happy, beautiful, whimsical. I looked up and down the empty street for someone to show but nobody appeared. I was alone with my discovery.

Looking back down I suddenly felt sad for the maker of this sidewalk (most likely the first resident of my house when it was built back in the 1920s) who by my calculations was now enjoying a similar but much deeper fate than his work. I was sad not for his passing but at the realization that the world, of which I was a part, had allowed this beautiful piece to become quietly buried under the conscienceless refuse of time. I was a young artist myself, a woodworker’s apprentice, and I wanted to believe that when a person puts his heart and sweat into something solid and extraordinary it will be loved, or at the very least seen, forever. I had removed the vicar’s collar for a reason; I craved a legacy beyond the fickle spiritual peaks and valleys of my parishioners.

Nobody in my 150 year old congregation could remember a single pastor who worked there before about 1970. They were just names in a book now (and no one even knew where that book was). There is a Psalm, “As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” While the young minister in me blindly accepted this as wisdom, the awakening artist in me took it as a challenge. Make something so extraordinary that the world will never let it go, that time will never bury it, that future generations will never forget it. Make your mark, and make it last.

I’ve now been doing this professionally for fifteen years, and I’ve never made a piece I didn’t think would last forever. As I work in my studio I am precise, careful, and I use amazingly strong joints, and thus I fully expect my work to be immortal. I believe my designs to be both pleasing and interesting, and so I think future generations will always find a place for them in their homes. So I can no more easily wrap my head around the failure, destruction, or marginalization of one of my pieces than I can fathom my own death and non-existence. What’s more, I fear that if I ever did grasp these things, it might be at the expense of my will to get up every morning and do what I’ve told myself is important. I believe, because I have to, that my art will last forever.

And yet they will not. Rare is the piece of wood furniture over, say, 200 years old that is still around and still usable. Wood shifts, warps, contracts, expands, and rots. Joints quietly loosen and fail and wobble. Styles change and young couples look for ways to rid themselves of that ugly dresser that grandma loved so much. My work will not last. There will come a day when nobody remembers me or the things I’ve made.

As I ponder this I imagine my new mason friend sitting in a pew the Sunday after finishing his sidewalk. He would have been a churchgoer. As the pastor reads the Psalm he smiles in gentle defiance, believing his new brick edifice to be a rare exception to the skeptical wisdom of impermanence. Three blocks away at just that moment, outside his empty house, the wind loosens a waxy leaf from the live oak that spreads above his pristine path. It twirls and juts in the breeze and finally rests heavily on one of the bricks.

Dust

I sanded all day today. My hands are dry, raw, sensitive. I can feel the texture of these computer keys more than most nights, which makes me wonder if at least some of the dust that’s now covering the floor beneath my workbench was once the calloused skin of my now aching fingers. Sandpaper is relentless. Which is the point, I suppose.

Wood dust fascinates me. Each tool in the shop creates its own unique brand. I will often pause for a beat after using a tool to run my fingers through the byproduct, feel the texture and weight of it. I’ve learned that the table saw creates light fluffy particles, the lathe sprays off thick curly chips, and the router (no matter what bit I’m using) spits heavy, scratchy grains that get in between my sock and shoe and annoy me the rest of the day.

But what sandpaper pulls from wood is the best by far. Ghost-fine and elusive as chalk, I can hardly take a pinch before it scatters in the tiny wind created by my thumb and forefinger. This dust is wood, I remind myself, in its most particulated form. It feels it could pass at any moment from solid to gas and vanish into the warm air that fills my shop.

Because there is not much else to think about while I’m sanding, the smallness of this dust occasionally stirs my imagination. Quantum physics, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, and other philosophies urge us to meditate on the smallest, the least, the nearly invisible, the simple, as doors to The Truth. It is not in the large things that we come to know ourselves, but in the small ones.

As I silently sand, not only do the wood particles grow smaller, but my conscious thoughts as well. Hours go by, my arm numbly repeats its back and forth row over the wood, and my mind slowly opens to the simple quiet. At the end of such a day, there are few words worth saying aloud.

The dust and I now understand each other.