Dark and Light Things

It's a day like any other. I open the door and everything is just as it should be. I stand in the doorway for just a few seconds and then drift towards my bench, the tools and the piece I'm working on. I want to take in everything as I left it last night; the scents and sights, yes, but then more than that. There are the feelings too, both good and possibly bad. I'd rather say bad than 'not so good' in the way people do now. Better the honesty of precise words in the phrasing, I think.

I don't put the big light on, not just yet, not at first. I want to look into the depths where pockets of shadow surround my place, where the wood casts long and short lines of shadows and the tools with their curves do too. I savour looking in from the shadows before taking my stand by the vise; it's the place before light arrives to wash everything out and the contrast becomes colour rather than dark areas in varying shades of grey as my eyes become accustomed to the light.

The pieces lay side by side and yet seem still to be embraced by the shadows in that resting way things are, coming out of the darkness is. The more subtle glimpses of light glancing off the diverse gathering of items as I move my head seem more the shimmering of light off moving water at dusk in a low and lowering sun. There is no recording beyond the brain's impulsing that takes in a million points from pinpricks to broad expanses reflecting from a wide surface of a newly planed board; yesterday's work that shows the undulation of plane work with the grain regains the pains you took as the wood yielded to muscle and sinew in the doing of it. The flattening took something. It cost you, and you recall the strokes, stroke on stroke. Remember the sharpenings at the stones, the bubbles in fluid moved to the edges of the plates as you honed and whetted the bevels and cutting edges many times yesterday. And then there is the reflection of medullary rays that flashed, changed position, grew and shrank until you said without heard words: Enough!

These, can I call them 'daily rituals', perhaps, we makers look for at the close of one day and the opening of yet another, matter? They can be the best reflections we ever have. Light and dark, contrast when colour disappears to give the purer vision of our day's working. We understand ourselves the better by such things.

See the tenon, the pockets made, the slight wavering where the plane balked and the wood resisted. And what of the roundedness you made with a single plane, anyway. The plane, the scraping and then the chisel work you pared the way for other work to come to completion with. And then there was the sigh of satisfaction just before you doused the light with a single switch. How your brain registered that closing scene as if a play concluded, the act over and scene-one done.

But it's not a play nor is it play. It's a deep thing to be real, rather than that stage performer 'merely acting' as Shakespeare said in his pastoral comedic offering, As you like it. No, it's the deeply embedded world of realness in our woodworking. The live performance of our working that takes no audience with us, nor needs any approving by clapping and cheers at the ends of the scenes performed to titillate and meant for admiration. We just make in the realness of our making life. We take the privacy of our space as that of a privileged few might watch as say an otter approaching the river bank, a secluded passage of time delivered and valued differently than watching a screen of plastic separation from any reality.

So I walk forward into my space by my bench in my workshop and begin the next scene no other will see today, for I am on my own. I like the times when I am alone to work and then too when my friends are in there with me to record differently from another angle for other people to see and learn from, for I must do this in the conservation not of what I make but the craft and art of the making of it.

Good morning, everyone!