An Adequate Maker

Being an adequate maker is always enough. It’s a good place to be, I think. Most makers find solace in hard times by working their craft, you know, when they face a sad loss that’s hard to reconcile the sanity in. Crises come often enough for all of us -- times when we must realise that whatever it is it will pass. In times of crisis, when I couldn’t make because other responsibilities took precedent and the crisis must be met face on, I need only think of something I made to find the solace I speak of. I would remember the way the cabinet door swung to on its newly set hinges or the drawer that seemed to glide with the grace of a swan.

There are times when I think of a loss that happened in years past when the grieving brought healing and my making resumed. A lost friend I treasured greatly seemed to come to life and smile as I dovetailed the casket from pine in the workshop a day or two after his passing. As I pressed the dovetails in place my heart wept with the mixture of joy and sadness at the family loss and so too my own. The complexity of our emotions is somehow redefined in the making of many things as if we build to enclose our feelings into the cradle of made things, an act of simple defiance to lift us above words that somehow don’t measure up. It’s in these things that making seems to me at least to bring the healing deeply into our very souls as they are surely meant to. If a picture paints a thousand words then making makes sense of them all.

A child, your son, your daughter, loses a much-loved dog after many years of faithfulness. How old was she? Ten, twelve no thirteen, and you weep for the sadness of the loss you cannot explain. You comfort your loved one but grieve alone and you make to see something made take your grief.

The very first walking can I made for a woman who’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and I had just that day met for the first time. She was young, mid-thirties. I poured myself into making the cane. Made a twisted stem and a handle I carved to fit her small and delicate hand. She was no longer steady on her legs and the sadness overwhelmed me as I thought of her in future days leaning wholely on the thinness of the cane and I wept to absorb something I knew so little of at the time.

So it is for the maker of many things wood. But joy seems always to come in the morning when you make for future life and then too for the end of life and all in between. I have lost track of the beautiful things I have made but I still feel a certain praise I cannot explain that I found the calling for my life at so young an age and I had parents that supported my early days to become, well, an adequate furniture maker. It's all I have ever wanted to be!