peace

“Blessings always beg for calm
In spite of their silvery arms”

Maritime- Calm

I pray a lot. I really started about a year ago. Growing up I thought it went along the lines of “Dear Jesus, please give me a pony.” I didn’t really understand prayer until pretty recently. You can pray to Jesus, or whatever divine being you have faith in so long as it is bigger than yourself. I talk to the Universe. I didn’t talk to the Universe for a long time. I found that I really needed help with the simple things. There was little help in books, on the internet, or from people (books and internet both come from people, and nobody REALLY knows what’s going on). So I started asking the universe for help. This has never been easy for me because I try to do everything myself. Instead of powering through everything, I would try (the operative word is try) to be quiet and still and ask. The first thing I asked the universe for was guidance.

“Universe, please give me guidance.”

A week later I lost my job.

You have to be careful what you ask for because if you are expecting something specific you are probably going to be disappointed. Once I got over the shock I tried to find more quiet spaces and ask for more simple things that could help me. Universe, please help find peace. Universe, please help me to trust. Universe, please help me to know strong boundaries. In certain situations I kindly ask the Universe to help me not fuck up. And so on and so forth.

Most recently I have been asking the Universe for calm. And the Universe has given me calm but something hasn’t been quite right. The calm is there, I can project it, but I don’t feel it in me. In areas where I find the calm but don’t feel it, I gently ask the Universe to help me to accept it.

None of this is overnight. There is no flash of enlightenment or instant nirvana. So I ask the Universe to help me find patience.

A few weeks ago we had a giant snowstorm. There was somewhere between 12 and 18 inches. I love snowstorms. It is calm embodied. Everything slows down and gets very quiet. Many people stay home, the city shuts down, and nothing has to happen. It happened on a Friday and all of my work got cancelled. My girlfriend and I decided to get snowed in together. We went to the store and stocked up on supplies and then headed to her place to batten down the hatches. Then after a little while we noticed the heat wasn’t working.

I love this woman deeply. I love how she makes things nice. I love how she plans things. She is talented and good at many things I am not, and will help me with those things. She owns every bit of herself. She is vulnerable and I see how empowering that is. She is kind to my various maladjustments and occasional dysfunctions and the other parts of my being that I don’t love so much. It’s far from perfect but it continues to bloom and makes me a better man. Throughout all of this she is exquisitely beautiful and profoundly elegant and quite often gives me butterflies. There are also things I am good at that help her. Situations like heat and snowstorms are two of those things.

Back to the heat. It was a full on snowstorm and it was glorious. We went and picked up a kerosene heater from the warehouse where my workshop is. We helped a couple of people get their cars unstuck. We saw how beautiful everything was. I have a 1997 Nissan Pathfinder with good four wheel drive and strong heat and we slid around a bit. I found it to be very calming.

I have a friend who does heating and HVAC work and he is a great guy. He is also a workaholic. I gave him a call to see if he could talk me through troubleshooting the system and he was actually up the street working. He said he would be right over. His wife must be a very patient woman.

Sure enough he got the furnace fired up. I asked him what his price was for coming over and all he asked for was a couple bucks for gas. That didn’t feel right so I offered to make him a knife. He was down. He likes to hunt and seems rather unfazed by the elements so I designed a skinner and named it the Snowjumper. It is a winter blade. I found some spalted Tamarind, which is a bright wood. I used tin spacers: they are nearly the same color as the steel of the tang and are concealed in the way that the snow conceals the earth. I also used steel rivets to match the spacers.

1095 spring steel:

Hardened

Tempered:
Spalted Tamarind: Those dark lines are actually where a fungus has eaten it’s way through the wood.

Time lapse of the handle fitting:

The Snowjumper: 1095 spring steel with a phosphoric acid etch, Spalted Tamarind handle, tin spacers, and steel hardware:

Hidden tin spacers…

Be careful what you pray for. Calm may come in a way you least expect it. Accept it.

This is the lesson of the Snowjumper.

“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”

― John Wayne

soldier on: phrasal verb with soldier. to continue doing something although it is difficult

–Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Thesaurus

This blade was a commission for the father of a gentleman who is a professional videographer. I came to know this gentleman after building a knife for him. He called and asked if I could make a blade for a very special person- his father.

When I first met with the client, we talked for about an hour. He showed me a short film he had made about his father, his father’s deep love of football, and how it brought the two of them closer as adults. The film was quite stunning. The NFL thought so too- it won their family tickets to the Super Bowl.

In the film, he told his father’s story of how he lost a chance to play for the Baltimore Colts, losing out to Johnny Unitas. What followed was a strained relationship where the client really didn’t get a chance to know his father. The film documented how football brought bonding and healing. He asked if I could make a blade with an element of the game that his father loves.

I felt quite a bit of anxiety in making this blade. I had to design it and give it a life for somebody’s loved one whom I had never met before. It took a very long time because I really wanted to make the right statement. The recipient of this blade is a man’s man, stoic, and has taken his licks. He has a bit of cowboy in him- John Wayne was mentioned during our talk. I named it the Rio Bravo after the John Wayne film. Wayne was 51 when he starred in the film but still kicks a lot of ass.

I write this from a man’s perspective. As a man I have a hard time dealing with difficult emotions and I think most men would agree that it is a bitch coming to terms with them. They don’t go away, they just sit and fester if not dealt with. In dealing with them we often fall apart, have meltdowns, withdraw, avoid, and sometimes leave a path of destruction. You want to succeed, to have a purpose, to leave your mark on the world, and make things right. When that doesn’t happen you can find yourself questioning your self-worth. I don’t have children but when there are little ones looking up to you and watching you I imagine it adds that much more pressure.

The lesson of the Rio Bravo is that no matter what you soldier on. The only way out is through. You show up, you do the work, you laugh, you cry, and you take the bitter with the sweet. I crafted this blade for a man who has done all of that and serves as an inspiration of what soldiering on earns you.

The beautiful part of this commission has been seeing how inspiring the healing can be. A son did this for a father where there was pain on both ends. The client showed me, a stranger, this incredibly vulnerable and moving film. It’s hard to imagine the courage it took to make that film and to put an intimate story out into the world.

I loved working with this client. There were multiple conversations about designs and materials. He is an artist and we can talk about concrete things in abstract and obtuse ways. At the end of it he always told me to do what I thought and that he trusted me. This is where I started:

Some jimping for grip, and a nod to the laces of a football.

Rough Grind

Hardened…

….and tempered

I wanted something with the feel of a football…

I cut it into strips and glued it together….

…and it failed miserably. Still, I really wanted to work the leather in. That’s the spirit of football even though it isn’t pigskin. I was also really into the idea of having a part of something that once walked the earth be a part of this blade. I wanted this to be a very masculine blade, with a southwestern theme. For me it doesn’t get much more manly than the combination of Texas Mesquite, leather, and steel. I put in some thin tin spacers for a bit of sparkle.

I have a cousin in Texas who is a woodturner with a sawmill. He handpicks cutoffs with the most gorgeous figures and sends them to me. When I’m using his wood for a handle it’s like Christmas morning- think of opening your favorite Christmas present, only you get to do it for two and a half hours. Thank you Bill Cockrell. You are a very good man.