I'm Happy!

Occasionally I take a short break from blogging because it gives me time to renew myself. I love to blog, don't get me wrong. What I don't like to do is churn out meaningless words just for the sake of indulging my writing. Same on other platforms too but especially is this so in my blog space and YouTube because what I say means more to me when I know that it's truly changing perspectives people might have and thereby changing lives.

Whereas many express their preference for me to stick purely to woodworking, that I do not digress along rabbit trails like this one, but the truth is, these rabbit trails are as much about my life as a woodworker as actual woodworking itself. I do understand the desire for more information about something you are all fairly passionate about, but without nature, interest in people, pastoral considerations, cooking my own food and gardening for food and such, I think we often leave people behind. For me, woodworking is as much about people understanding the reasons we work wood and the therapy of working with our hands as it is the beautiful tenon that fits the pristinely into its mortise hole, or the newly made coffee table that graces a home. I can recall the delivery of a clock I once made as a gift and then a rocking chair I made from curly maple where the new owner was a friend who told me a month after she had commissioned it that she had bequeathed it back to me in her will should anything happen to her.

Another time I wrote of changed lives through the restoration of a smoothing plane when a man changed his drug habit and dealing drugs to support his habit to become a woodworker. What of the other, a man, or two, or three, those who had several heart-bypasses who improved their heart conditions so much and so rapidly that the consultants were amazed by their heart's amazing transformations to good health. They traced it back to a direct correlation woodworking had to create a natural exercise program when hand tools become the preferred means of making.

Everything from heart to mind and mental wellbeing may well come from the tool's cutting edge in simple tasks like planing and sawing. As I took a bit of a sabbatical this last week or two through the COVID-19 issue I found myself in deep reflection that it is important to reconcile the whys of why we do things and discover that too goes far beyond just making. I have enjoyed all of the tools I have garnered over the years and storing them safely is not only my ambition but my sanity and wellbeing because I am not yet quite done with them.