Kerf

 

February 21, 2022

 Greetings from the sawyer,

 There is an almost guilty comfort in reaching an age when your experience finally tells you that your beliefs were mostly right.  It’s difficult to give that comfort up for something that is disruptive and unsettling. 

 I have spent my life forming opinions and choosing sides and putting down dogmatic roots, even while learning that being flexible, adaptable, and open to change, is what I need to evolve as a human being.  Anyone else feel this conflict, or more important, what to do with it?

 I have many examples, which I was tempted to share here, but I found myself simply writing out why I am right and how I can’t believe everyone doesn’t agree with me.  Thankfully, just writing that sentence made me laugh out loud.

 I found some of the answer to the struggle watching the trees I pass each day.  It is in the pattern of the bark, in the sinew of the core, where nature has infused a resilience that is inspiring.  The last few days I watched the winter wind thrash these proud beings, watched them bend and sway, groan in the struggle.  Bend, not break.

 Wood is the living descendant of trees, a reincarnation of the oaks and pines and maples, whose cousins are still green, still drawing life from earth and sun.  I look at a piece of oak and see the texture of the tree reflected in the grain of the wood.  The knots, the cracks, the burls, the holes, the places where the tree has had to change in order to survive.  The evidence of it living by bending, tearing a little in the process and healing, but not breaking.

 Here I will introduce an unusual word that I found helpful: Kerf. 

 When you shape wood into something new, you use a saw or other sharp tool, to remove the tissue of the wood, and leave a space.  The space, often the width of a blade, is known as the kerf. 

 What erupts from the kerf is dust, the shredded bits of what is no longer needed, and it makes room for the air and light that is needed.  Here the wood evolves into picture frames and chairs and tables and cribs and other iterations the tree never dreamed of. 

 Imagine a plank of walnut, hard, rigid, durable, beautiful.  It is proud of its place, perhaps kiln dried, made more useful and stronger.  It has no way of imagining being better.  There is a method of shaping wood by cutting a series of kerfs in one side of the plank. These slices leave some room on the inside of the piece that allows you to bend the wood.  It makes a rigid thing flexible.  It makes it possible to evolve into something more beautiful, graceful, and still strong.

 Sometimes the kerf allows the wood to be joined with other pieces, which can make it more powerful, take on new shapes, become useful in ways otherwise impossible.  But first, the kerf needs to be cut.

 We grow ourselves strong and rigid.  We spend our lives learning what we believe in and then it becomes unassailable.  We become proud of this rigidness, perhaps of how well we protect what we know from other’s strange ideas.  Politics and religion and rituals and traditions and history and science, all invite us to think a truth, and then we meet others who somehow, unbelievably, think a different truth. 

 We are not helpless in the face of this dilemma.  We can see what nature suggests, that there can be strength, and greater beauty, in bending.  Not breaking.  Our texture may change, but we are often made better.

 Or to look at the tree’s new iteration, the wood in our hands. Strong, useful, rigid, but one dimensional, its potential dormant.  We can be more than this, but perhaps a tool is needed. 

 The hard part may be allowing the kerf to be cut.  To remove what is not needed, to make room for air and light, so that we can bend without breaking.  So that we can be more graceful and grace full, and create new versions of ourselves.  So that we can join with others to make something more beautiful.

  

Hope this finds you swaying,

 

David

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2022  David Smith