Saturday, January 30, 2016

The trees teach patience

While axing off the waste from the bottom of a promising bowl, I made the mistake of levering with the axe more than I should have.


I was rushing.
To be truthful, I had rushed the whole bowl.  I had stolen an hour from a busy day, and there would be hell to pay if it did not get back to the chores.  As Thoreau put it, I had crept away from the family, "to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour." As a result, i did not remove as much as I normally do from the base core, so there was a lot to axe off at the end.  

I suppose I could have glued the base back on.  Few if any would have noticed.  But I decided to leave it alone, to smooth up the jagged edges and put it into circulation in my own house-- an ode to patience.  



"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience.  Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence."
--Hal Borland


2 comments:

  1. Eric - I have a hewn bowl I was working on a few weeks ago. It was going to be a beauty...past tense. Using a gouge, I cut the bottom so thin that even a politician could see through it, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie. So like yours, my home has a new bowl coming...

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    1. Hey Peter, glad to hear even the pros have their off days. If your home is anything like mine, the mistakes are piling up. A friend of mine, Alex Yerks, purges his stock every year with a bit of spoon kindling. My wife won't let me do that. She wants to save it all, in boxes, little boxes... I say let it go. What to do?

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