The soul returns to land it knows

Hello and welcome to Hungry Woodworker, a newsletter about learning the art and craft of building stuff out of wood. I’m Taliesin and one thing I do when I’m not in the shop is jot down notes and edit some of them into essays. I share those every other Thursday. Thank you for being here.

A brief update—still working on my children’s dressers, interspersed with learning math games to play at home with the kids. I have the good people at Math for Love to thank for teaching me. (Do you like puzzles?)

In the last few years of woodworking, I’ve become more reliable about marking up my pieces. I’m halfway through fitting the double tenons on the bottom rails to the legs. In a way, these joints are like the math puzzles—there are several ways to go about shaping the tenons and cleaning out the mortises to ensure the joint locks together properly, and treating the task like a game makes it more fun than swearing at the pieces.

My essay is below. I hope the next couple weeks bring you good puzzles to solve!

A friend made the mallet I use—the top is melted down plastic and the handle is red cedar. I have grown to love my red marker during this project. There are so many pieces fit to specific other pieces that I'd be lost without it.

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The soul returns to land it knows

Do you have to be a perfectionist to be a fine woodworker?

You need to have an obsessiveness—that’s part of it, my mentor told me. It can become an addiction. There is a feeling of relief from anxiety when you are in control of the building process: making the pieces exactly so, the one thing in life (possibly?) that actually lives up to your expectation. That you can force to.

Nothing else will come close—not other people, not our relationships, not outcomes that are predetermined by an outside form (group projects, anyone?).

I grew up watching some of the adults around me make bad decisions or treat others terribly, marking it down in my mental ledger and vowing not to become like them.

Much of what I witnessed was rigidity, bias, close-mindedness, control, and perfectionism. And it wouldn’t be too far a stretch to say that one person’s perfectionism in particular terrorized me as a child.

Perfection was making others small and afraid.

Perfection was constant unhappiness. A vision narrowed to anger and disgust. An inability to truly love the people around you because they would never be up to standard.

Perfection was tyranny, taking our beautiful home and warping it, as if through a prism, so that if you tilted your head one way it was lovely but just slightly the other and the lines of madness were revealed.

In the end, perfection is just another pitiful story of a broken human intent on breaking everyone around instead of managing his own internal struggle.

Easy enough to want no part of that. Lucky for me, it’s also refreshingly easy to not be a perfectionist. That is a well-worn path sloping gently downward the whole way.

Gary Rogowski wrestles with his perfectionist tendencies throughout his book, Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction. “This standard of mine for perfection made me strive to do really good work, but it was crippling,” he writes.

As I read his book, I thought about how my impulse to woodwork is fed by different forces. As a committed non-perfectionist, I couldn’t relate to those aspects of his personality.

But perfection is cropping up everywhere. It’s in the complex, multi-layered details R. Bruce Hoadley carefully lays out in Understanding Wood. It’s woven through the stories of the woodworkers in Deirdre Visser’s Joinery, Joists and Gender.

And its absence is showing up in my own shop, as when I failed to properly flatten a board and had to take a weekend to remove the slight curve. Or in its full presence, such as when I spent more than half an hour making minute adjustments to the mortising machine’s fence to ensure that the cut was exactly 3/8” in from the side.

Test piece and marking out mortises.

It appears I loped away from perfectionism only to run headlong into a field that prizes it and cultivates more than its fair share of perfectionists.

The soul returns to land it knows.

“Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once,” writes David Whyte.

I’m not sure I possess the stamina or drive to stay at the bench reaching the exacting standards of beauty, form, and functionality that rise to the level of heirloom. Which begs the question: Can you do high quality work if you’re not a perfectionist? Do you have to tap into a vein of obsessiveness to create at that level? Must life be spent trying to prove one’s worth and value until the living energy is exhausted?

I don’t know the answers. Reflecting on these questions, which I jotted down months ago, I realize I don’t worry about them as much anymore. The more time spent in the shop, the more they recede into the background. Or maybe I’ve learned to embrace my ordinariness, to be okay with good enough.

Alongside his passages about the temptations and pitfalls of perfection, Rogowski notes: “There is a certain amount of healing that also needs to go on at the bench. This is your time spent conversing with your history or working out the day’s issues, coming up with new designs or plans as you work on a project, working out a new way of being in this world.”

Maybe there is a path to thread this needle more deftly. One interweaving goodness and ugliness. Maybe that reveals a life more complex and nuanced, one that accepts beauty born from darkness.

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A few other essays:

A slab becomes a charcuterie board—it’s easy to imagine what could be, harder to accept the reality that will never quite live up to that imagination

Choice and follow through—turning a massive branch from the family’s Maple tree into a table

May I be in your bunker?—learning to be useful