Trusting your own instincts
Hello and welcome to Hungry Woodworker, a humanistic exploration of woodworking, purpose, and making a living. I’m Taliesin and one thing I do when not working is write; some of which gets edited into essays and shared every other Thursday. Thank you for being here.
A brief update: First, I want to say thank you to my new free and paid subscribers! Welcome 😄 I'm glad you're here and appreciate your support.
Work-wise, last week Dad and I built a countertop out of Black Walnut for my friend who owns and runs ClaraLouise, a terrific shop in town to find local, upcycled, handmade, and vintage goods. You can see a photo of the soon-to-be-finished project above; I'll share an image once it's installed.
Writing-wise, I'm thinking about the future of this newsletter, which has been somewhat amorphous since its inception about two years ago. Though I've no good relationship with structure, this newsletter could stand to have a little, at least in the topics covered. Mostly I write about whatever has been on my mind in the past couple of weeks while woodworking. That's not a terribly coherent theme. This summer feels like it'll be a good time to figure that out. Have any suggestions? Ideas? Cute pictures of your dog for inspiration? Send them my way!
I hope your next couple of weeks are filled with fruitful conversations with good people in your life! ❤️
This past weekend, I traveled north to a woodworking retreat led by Mark Laub. The event was small, just three other woodworkers, me, and Mark, and it was at his home shop. (I won’t gush too long, but it was basically my dream shop—well lit, spacious, great dust collection system running throughout, plenty of horizontal space, and all the tools I could think to want. If only my family would be so kind as to give up the first floor of our house to me, I’d have such a shop. Alas, they like having their living room, dining room, and kitchen dust-free. Selfish!)
Perhaps my experience is limited, but I haven’t known too many people working at Mark’s level—renowned, winner of numerous awards, recognized for his intricate and enchanting curved cabinets with their hidden drawers, unexpected chambers, spinning parts, and magical attention to the most minute details—who are also kind, generous, and normal.
He kicked off the retreat by telling us there were two rules: (1) we were all equals, so we should leave our egos at the door and know that we were all there learning together; and (2) any negative words about Bruce Springsteen would lead to immediate dismissal.
I can't speak much to that second rule (though can confirm that Mr. Springsteen received only praise from our group), but the first was refreshing. I've only been in a couple of learning situations in which the person doing the teaching realizes that they are also in the midst of learning, too.
He called the retreat “Parlor Tricks” and indeed it was filled with lessons about the tricks he uses to build his wonderful creations.
Beyond these skills, though, a few more ephemeral ideas have stuck with me these last few days. Instead of trying to shoehorn all of them into one essay, I’ll take each in turn on its own over this and the following two newsletters, starting with this: trusting yourself.
Learning from Mark was as much about learning to trust my own instincts, creativity, and aesthetic as it was about learning how to cut marquetry or inlay mother of pearl into a cabinet door.
Too many situations in our lives ask us to put our faith in something or someone outside of ourselves. This can be useful at times (building solidarity for a movement is one that comes to my mind, though a certain amount of individual agency is still called for, I’d argue). But in the everyday—in those moments when the synthetic demands our attention with its notifications and pings or when we're in the audience listening to someone up on a stage—this willingness to trust that someone or something else holds the answers can dull the senses to some of the most wondrous parts of our own humanity: our fresh creations, our questions of why and why not, our minds’ abilities to look at a situation and, instead of resigning to “this is just how it is because that’s how it’s always been,” rising up to “how could we make this better?”
Mark shared an anecdote about being on a panel at some woodworking event. The guy who spoke before him talked about how he created his plans for a project using CAD software so he could know every precise measurement and curvature and angle and so on.
The next speaker was Mark, uncertain of how best to follow that guy’s talk. He shared his process, which involves creating a scaled drawing by hand from the top down of a project and figuring things out as he goes. He doesn’t calculate his angles or curves based on a formula but instead based on his own eye and commonsense.
“You can look at a piece,” he said, “ and know if it looks right to you.”
To do so, you have to take your time and trust your own judgment. It’s about slowing down and noticing the world around us. Doing so allows us to develop our aesthetic sensibility. Translating that into some kind of real-world form allows us to share it with others. Trusting ourselves with this creative power is placing faith in the vessels that can use it most: our own minds, hearts, and hands.
But I also think that having this kind of internal trust in yourself means you're okay screwing up, too. Making mistakes, learning from them, repairing any damage, not repeating them (there are always new, currently unknown mistakes to make!). We will inevitably get things wrong from time to time. Do we cower from that experience? Deny that its happened? Bluster our way through? Or are we resilient enough to handle the discomfort of not being right?
I think my takeaway from this lesson is that we can all learn to trust ourselves where we’re at right now, with the skills and knowledge we have in this moment, recognizing there is always more room for growth, but that we have instincts worth appreciating even if we don’t yet possess the mastery we aspire to.
I’m nowhere near the caliber of woodworker that many others are; the way to bridge that gap isn’t to abdicate my own sensibility, replacing it with my interpretation of someone else’s. It's to learn from what's been done while daring to put my own spin on it.
My other takeaway is that my sometimes meandering method of woodworking—which involves holding the object to be built in my mind more than it does drafting out each angle and joint on paper—is perhaps just fine. Maybe slower but it also gives me the space to iterate as I go, to take advantage of attributes in the wood that I hadn’t planned on, to be more present in the work while I’m working on it.*
*Apologies to Josiah, my long-suffering partner, for what this all means is that it is going to take me that much longer to finish those bedside tables.