Wood for Good

During the last few weeks I’ve been “making a lot of sawdust”, as I describe working in my workshop.  I’ve been working on two projects, and both direct me to the same inner truth.

Terry is a friend-at-first-sight who lives directly across the street from us.  His open heart and ready smile make him a gift to all who see him, and I’m especially blessed to see him all the time.  I was honest with him right from the start that living on retirement income was scary for me, that I looked forward to finding some source of income to supplement our hopefully adequate savings.  I shared with him my dreams of continuing to work with the homeless here, to help build community partnerships as I did in Detroit, and to work with wood more, now that I have the time.  He also has known all of the developments with questions of my heart health, and has encouraged in the frightening times and rejoiced with me when we discovered that things look fine.

As a matter of fact, as soon as he found out that I had the all-clear from my doctor to resume heavy work, he asked me to build some cabinets for his home office.  A few weeks ago, measurements and ideas turned into drawings, and the drawings turned into a lumber order, and some of that lumber turned into some of the sawdust on my workshop floor.  There is a kind of Zen to woodworking for me, a kind of meditative calm that is within it, if I allow myself to enter.  I found myself in that calm again and again while doing Terry’s cabinets, and I found myself blocked from it too. 

During the previous months of restricted exertion (“Don’t lift more than ten pounds”) directed by my cardiologist during diagnosis of my heart issues, I had begun making breadboards from a pile of hundreds small pieces of surplus oak that I had long ago purchased from a furniture manufacturer up here.  The small pieces let me work for hours and days and weeks within my imposed limits, milling and gluing and forming and sanding and oiling dozens of breadboards.  As with Terry’s cabinets, I found myself drawn into that calm again and again, and found myself blocked from it too.

Two things drew me into the calm, the joy.  One was the delight of the work itself, the wood, the grain, the smell, the precision of the machines, the feel of the handwork.  The other was the good of the product, the use to which it would be put.  Wood for Good; that was the name I’d come up with for a dream I’d developed in my first months here, to do good with woodworking, turning wood into money for the homeless and poor.  But that phrase, “turning wood into money” was also the thing that blocked my entrance into that calm in my workshop.

Last weekend I rolled Terry’s virtually complete cabinets out of my workshop into the next room, clearing the way for final preparation for a first sale of my breadboards at an art fair here on Sunday.   The finished boards came off the shelf for a final touchup and oiling.  Those that were not complete came down from their shelf too, and made more sawdust as I took them through the many steps of shaping and finishing to add to our inventory.  The Old Town Arts and Crafts Fair will be the debut of my dream – “Wood for Good” as a way of sharing revenue with Goodwill Inn, where I have met so many talented, compassionate, struggling homeless neighbors and the good people who help them find jobs and homes.  At times I fretted about how many we would sell, how much my 60% would be, and I started doing the math and wondering if all the work was worth it.  As with Terry’s cabinets, doing the mental math blocked me from joy, held me outside the calm. 

There was a moment so profound that I noticed it, when I was drawn in.  While I was doing the endless sanding on one of the boards, I saw the faces of the people that I work with at Goodwill Inn.  I saw S., the kind, gray-haired woman that her roommates call “Mom”.  I saw D., whose worn face carries a warmth and kindness that hardship has not eradicated.  I watched them going through the food line, some hopeful, some worn.  The mental math disappeared.  The money was merely a way of turning the boards into good.  A similar thing had happened with Terry’s cabinets, as I found the endless details taking much more time than I had estimated, and the mental math figuring hourly profit was distracting me.  I thought of the cabinets in Terry’s office, in his home, in his home.  I thought of his wife, and their two kids, and the love and the struggles and the growing and loving.  And the mental math disappeared. 

A couple of Sundays ago our friend Fr. Norm Dixon had said it.  All is gift.  Mental math holds me away from joy and calm.  What invites me in is knowing that in these years of my retirement I’m free to work with wood for good.  Pray for good weather Sunday!

You can see more about my woodworking at www.LignumSacrumWoodworking.com  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.