It begins with the heft of a thing in the hand, a weight rising like a question shaped in the palm. The first encounter with a tool that means business—a plane or a chisel—draws the room to attention. The body, raised on its own familiar grammar, meets a fresh syntax across the dense grain of oak and the yielding face of clay. Learning takes root here, within the quiet shock of matter answering touch. A conversation older than words opens between skin and world, and a kind of freedom steps through that exchange. George Nakashima spoke of giving a tree a second life, of finding the one right task asleep in a plank of wood. That vision arrives after patient listening. Humility enters before mastery. The body, this coat we carry through our days, reveals its blind corners. The mind draws grand shapes on air; the hands reveal where practice must begin. Embodied thinking speaks through this rhythm. Mind learns through the doings of bone and sinew. The first motion falters and teaches. Wood whispers its rules. James Krenov stands beside the bench in memory and shows a listening that shapes design. Attention gains courage and breath. The body stands at the doorway like willing clay. Michel Foucault named bodies malleable and machines in need of tuning; that insight breathes through the first day at the bench. Willing clay presents itself for shaping. Hands ask for teaching. Early awkwardness turns into a prayer and then into a plan. Shoulders settle. Eyes weigh the line. Steel meets fibre with growing grace. Apprenticeship begins with that small surrender to reality. A chosen discipline sets its posts and lays a path that stretches across seasons, through bright mornings and long dusks, through days of making and mending, through truth measured in grain and weight and honest finish.
