Passion, work, and simplicity
A brief update:
I’ve begun work on charcuterie boards and other small items. One of the first things I did was make a small prototype butcher block. Josiah says it’s about the right size to butcher a mouse on.
Dad and I scoured his sawmill cut off pile for material and retrieved a bunch of oddly shaped Black Walnut boards. The slab on the right (in the photo below) is a bookmatch to the prototype charcuterie board we made a few months ago.
My essay is below. If you enjoy it, please click the ❤️ button.
Thank you for being here—I hope the holidays are treating you well.
I’ve heard that if you find a job you’re passionate about, you’ll never work a day in your life. I don’t think this is true. I’m passionate about what I’m doing and I’m working my ass off at it.
Some days this is okay because I like the work—or, I should say, I’m liking the work. It’s going well or the problems to be solved are within my abilities. Or just one step beyond, but a step I’m capable of taking. You know those kinds of days, right?
Other days are simply a slog with yet more to do just to get a simple thing done. Like at the end of the table build, when the top was finally flattened and it stood steady. There was still the matter of finishing the extension assembly.
The runners were already created earlier—23” long by 1 3/4” by 1 1/4” rectangles out of the same Soft Maple as the top. We’d cut a groove about 1/2” by 3/8” in the middle on either side of the runners, creating a channel into which L-shaped wooden brackets could capture the runners on the underside of the table. We’d built all that and cut out rectangular holes in the apron and frame before assembling it, so that was all ready to go as well.
The extension itself was only 12” long and the material came from the end pieces of the table top boards, so when attached it visually flows together.
Now the work was in figuring out how to easily lock the extension down into place on the runners while making sure it was just as easy to lift it up and detach it. My plans had to be modified—wood has it’s own agenda, at least that’s how it feels. So one of the runners had to be slightly narrowed and the clasps I’d purchased were a bit too small, which meant figuring out a new way to secure the whole assembly.
We decided on using dowels, round pieces of wood that we cut to the sizes we needed and sanded around the ends to make them fit better. We put corresponding holes into the extension and runners and the end of the table, gluing the dowels into the extension.
Now you only have to line the dowels up with the holes and voilà, the whole thing goes together easy-peasy.
And to stand back and look—well, it just looks simple. None of this is complicated. No one step to get to this point was all that intensive. Like something that would’ve taken the work of a few minutes, not like work that takes everything you have, including your derrière.
But it was work that took hours. Measuring, prototyping, setting up jigs, finding the right bits, setting depths, sanding, testing. Each part of this project, of any project I’ve done so far, is similar. To get to simplicity takes many hours of effort.
Woodworking, done well, like any other art or craft I suppose, should have an effortless quality.
Perhaps effortless isn’t quite the correct word—what I mean is a feeling of floating above the fray of tedium and toil. A clarity to its finished appearance. Though there are many paths to making a table (or a cabinet or anything else), once completed, a high quality heirloom should look as if there was no other form it could’ve taken.
At the end of the day, that is the level of skill I am trying to attain.
When I start the morning, writing to clarify my thoughts, what becomes clear is that there is no choice to be a woodworker or not. I simply am. I don’t know if it’s passion—truthfully I don’t know where the desire to do this work springs from—but it is what I am so it’s the work I have to do.
Something to share
I recently finished reading Why Religion? by Elaine Pagels. I am not religious, but I enjoyed her thoughtful approach to the history of religion interwoven with her own story. She brings a humanity to her insights that makes them approachable, even when my beliefs are different.
The images from the James Webb Telescope are breathtaking. I like being reminded that I (and all the flotsam and worry that bedevils me at times) am just a tiny speck in this great big universe.
