Presentation at the International Log Builders' Conference

I’ve recently returned from delivering the keynote address at the conference of the International Log Builders’ Association. It was an interesting, engaging experience: a diverse crowd of craftspeople, architects, eccentrics, scientists, and so on. In my address, I spoke about the nature of building within the flow of nature rather than against it. I talked about the modern environment and the ancient, sacred traditions of our ancestors. And I read from both of my books.

For those who might be interested, I’ve posted full address here on my weblog.
It begins following the line below, and continues in an extended entry.

The oldest surviving human-made structures — Stonehenge, the pyramids at Giza, fragments of megalithic temples in Malta and elsewhere — are thousands of years old. No one knows for sure how many thousands. But when you consider the most aged structures, one thing becomes immediately obvious: they are all made of stone. Limestone, usually, though the ashlars of various temples are made of harder, heavier stones like granite. But it’s all stone. And for good reason: stone is fairly resistant to decay and fire and weather. Wood is much less so. The oldest wood buildings are perhaps a few hundred years old: about as old as the trunk of a dead cedar will last on the ground in a rain forest. Four, maybe five hundred years (with the exception of log buildings preserved in peat bogs and no longer in actual use. Some of those structures are thousands of years old). Wood structures vanish relatively quickly in this world of fire and water.

And this is why the oldest craft federations are those composed of stone masons. Though today’s masonic groups are a far cry from the original philosophy of what was once called hermeticism, the traditions of stone craftsmanship stretch back perhaps five thousand years, all the way to the Egyptians. This has been a long and healthy tradition for the stone masons. And it owes its existence to one thing only: wood decays. For there is no doubt that wood craftsmanship is as vastly old as stone work. In fact they must have grown up together, beginning a hundred thousand years ago or more, when humans first hewed both wood and stone with crude tools split off from shale beds or fished from rivers. Indeed, wood may have been the first building material of ancient humans: before stone or mud or rushes. Tree trunks, as I’m sure you know, seem perfectly designed for the fashioning of roofs and walls. They come in all sizes and lengths, and, compared to stone, are easy to move, hoist, secure, replace. It’s possible that our distant ancestors were building post and beam structures long before they stacked stones.

But like the people of today, the ancients possessed a proclivity for war, and they went around quite frequently burning each other’s (and their own) structures to the ground. This we know from the ash layers found at many dig sites around the world. Take Solomon’s temple, for example, the superstructure of which was made from Lebanon cedars. The building was burned to the ground by invaders in about 600 BC, leaving only a fragment of the stone foundation, now called the Western or Wailing Wall. Today, it’s the holiest site in all of Judaism (and just above it, by the way, on the Temple Mount, is the third holiest site in Islam). Imagine if the cedars, or the walls of the inner temple, which held the ark of the covenant, had survived.

But the stones remain, and the wood does not. This is the reason we do not have secret societies of wood masons, orders of the golden birch, and other such designations. Whereas stone reminds us of the lasting and the permanent, wood speaks of things passing away and being renewed.

Wood is an organic material, and it exerts its influence on us by way of its impermanence. Wood reminds us of time, of the turning of seasons. In this sense, wood reflects and informs the human journey. This is one reason there is much mythology about wood, particularly from the ancient world. The oldest surviving wood mythologies are from the Middle East, and they tell of heroes like Gilgamesh entering the sacred cedar forest which protects the gate to heaven. In all aboriginal cultures there still exists a vibrant mythology of wood, though such mythologies are becoming more static and rooted in the past as aboriginal societies are increasingly at risk of extinction. In North America, in Europe, in Polynesia — wherever one wants to look, there are countless stories of the magical properties of wood. Maple wards off lightning. Lignum vitae can cure any illness. The Rowan, which is the namesake tree of my daughter, is the tree of white magic. And cedar, which has several complete myth cycles built around it, is attributed with countless assistive and magical properties. If you must approach the gods, take a cedar bough. Or a bough of ash, if the gods happen to be European. In many mythologies, wood is the means by which we may come in contact with the sacred.

I’m working my way round to making an argument for something we don’t hear much about in the world of the craftsman: the sacredness of the work that we do. I use the word ‘sacred’ intentionally and advisedly. It comes from an old word meaning “to consecrate,” as one consecrates or blesses a church, or a temple. One thing we can be sure of in our ancient history: the oldest wood craftsmen built temples far more than they built anything else. By the work of their hands, they consecrated the wood and the land.

Log buildings offer a holistic sense of place, a connection to nature — and to human nature — that most other architectures have abandoned. The function of modern architectures, especially the urban varieties, is essentially to protect us from nature; whereas a primary function of log building is to develop and preserve our intimacy with nature. In this sense, the log craftsman carries on the ancient tradition of rooting ourselves in the earth. It’s an old, powerful, and indeed sacred way of life. And working with wood can be a sacrament, as many contemporary builders know, a communion of craftsmanship.

But we don’t talk about this much. We modern craftspeople are tough, after all, tough and practical people with no time for New Age bullshit. Just make the joint fit, please, and leave out the philosophizing. We aint doin’ Zen Buddhism here.

And yet, a craftsman does not build, year in and year out, in good weather and foul, enduring injuries and the rising costs of insurance and impossible customers because it’s fun. Those who don’t like the grind just get out of the game. It’s too much hassle, and besides, you can’t make a decent living at it. But what about those who stay? Is it too much of a stretch to say that there is something of love in this work that we do, something powerful and compelling and beautiful? You tell me. Is it just a business, or is it a devotion? When you pass your hand along a clear stretch of fine maple, and you smell the shavings fresh from the planer, is it just a perfunctory touch, the touch of business and efficiency, or is there something more?

In my conversations with craftsmen, I find that few are insensitive to the magic and sacredness of wood. They are hesitant to talk about it — they mumble and resist and swear a lot. But eventually most do acknowledge that they’re not just passing time.

The magic is a human magic. Every craftsman, whether in wood or stone or words, strives in the shadow of hidden possibilities, searching for a means of making the mystery visible. What happens in my shop and yours is no exception. Though you probably have a nicer shop than I do.

I’d like to describe to you a concrete experience of the sacredness I’m talking about. I wrote about it in my first book, Grain of Truth:

I stand in the great hall of the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, head bent back, gazing up forty feet to where precise images have been carved into cedar totem poles by craftsmen whose art has been almost entirely erased by time. This museum possesses one of the finest collections of carved wood artifacts in the world, and I feel quite at home here. Near the bottom of a nearby pole, a smooth-shouldered wolf rests in the shadow of a killer whale. The eye of the whale is a shadowed well. This wood, these bones, trace the nature and purpose of a vast awareness, a living spirit in the grain, each knot and every growth ring a secret hieroglyph worked carefully into many layers of meaning. The echo of leaves is here, the resonance of damp fields half submerged in twilight, of dark soil and tales of night. And long, interwoven strands of time knitted together by wood and human hands. The wood has been coaxed into shape — whittled, chiseled, sculpted with broad, incising strokes — by tools of utmost antiquity, by weapons, by stones, by meteors, by fragments of ships; countless forms oiled by luminous skin.

Although the focus of the collections is northwestern — hundreds of examples — I also find works from Indonesia and Greenland and China, specimens of all kinds and of diverse ages: an eagle with a five-foot, intricately carved beak, a tenebrous skull shape, moons and ravens and wild spirits of the forest. There are objects of great power here, and I am daunted by the virtuosity of craftsmanship displayed in so many of them. Working toward this level of refinement in carving will take me to the edge of my skill. But the spirit of creative work calls to whomever will listen, and as I gaze at these ethereal faces staring back from a lost age, their muted colors hiding a secret flame, once again I hear that whisper spiraling out from the primordial source of things.

In the instant I reach my hand to the wood and sense a silent energy thrumming inside, I become aware that many things will intrude to push and prod me out of this elemental state — mishaps and details and a pervasive lack of courage to do my absolutely best work — but an equal number will draw me back to the lucent and creative source. The stillness of that source lies behind the dream of an ancient, verdant grove that wakes me in the night, momentarily; it is the reason for my sudden pause, as I put the key in the lock, my knowledge that something fleetingly caught my eye — a shape I almost recognize — before stumbling into the house. Birds before morning and sand buried deep in the cold desert will together speak, reminding me that despite my umbrage and anticipation and indifference, behind my uncertain footfalls in the night’s shadow, quiet, undeniable hands usher me onward.

Now, if you’re like me, you don’t think such esoteric thoughts while you’re actually working and building with wood. There are too many other details to occupy your attention: engineering considerations, design challenges, physical laws — such as the one that decrees that the nearest electrical outlet is six inches further away than the longest extension cord you have. In the actual work of craftsmanship, there are plenty of things to distract us from the philosophical. It’s often later, when the work is done, that such ruminations have their place. When your hands have healed up again and the tools are put away and — this one is very important — the bill has been paid. Even then, it’s easy to miss the sacred in what we do. But look in the face of a satisfied customer, one for whom the ownership of a log building is a life transforming experience, and you begin to see that there are deep underpinnings to the traditions of building within the flow of nature rather than against it.

Those underpinnings go back to what I was talking about earlier: to mythologies of the earth, to spiritual traditions which speak of the ancient powers of wood, to rituals and half-forgotten practices that would have been familiar to humans fifty thousand years ago. Simple things, like the orientation of a building. Why do we so often orient to the directions, particularly to the north? It’s not just because the sun will come in the south windows more consistently that way. People have looked to the north for countless generations, to the stars that revolve around the pole but never set: the imperishable stars as they were once called, long ago by the Egyptians, to the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, where people once thought the gods lived.

These are old ideas, and hardly anyone believes consciously in them anymore. But we still do believe in the traditions, though we fashion new reasons for enacting their rituals. Craftspeople today carry on, usually without knowing it, the sacred practices of people whose art is long gone. And, as I’ve said, the art of the craftsperson is not just business. Indeed, until very recently — perhaps less than a hundred years — artists and craftspeople were thought to make a profound contribution to their communities. They showed society in its own reflection. Their works carried the collected wisdom of generations, and they held much more social power than they do today. But in the modern world, where art is so often a synonym for confusion and pretension, and craft is what you do in preschool, our sense of the larger contribution we make has faded away almost entirely. Most craftspeople think of themselves in purely practical terms, without a sense of the history of their own traditions or of the reverence in which those traditions were held. There’s a reason that Jesus was said to have been a carpenter.

Now, after saying that we aint doin’ Zen Buddhism, I’m going to make a claim for precisely that: craftsmanship as a type of spiritual practice. Craft work awakens us to something persistent and unfathomable, something about the soul. “The cedar does not decay,” observed the philosopher Origen almost two thousand years ago. “To use cedar for the beams of our house is to protect our soul from corruption.”

In the myths of Polynesia, the great god Maui fished up the North Island of New Zealand from the bottom of the sea using a hook made from his grandmother’s jawbone and blood from his own nose as bait. The hook snagged not on submerged land but on the porch of a log building, hidden at the bottom of the sea at the beginning of time. Wood is often at the beginning of things. And at the end of things, too, as Noah discovered.

There’s really no getting away from it: craft work and spirituality are dovetailed together. And this spirituality need not be esoteric or New Agey or religious in any way. After all, spirituality is not about what we believe but how we act, toward ourselves and others, here and now in the world today. In my own life, I have taken great spiritual sustenance from craft work. Wood has been at the center of that sustenance, but stone too. In 2001, on September 9th, I walked past the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park and into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I stood before the only remaining fragment of an ancient sculpture. The body had vanished, and most of the head was gone. What remained was a small artifact, about six inches high: an elegant mouth — smiling, in repose — and the beginning curve of a face, carved from yellow jasper. Between ragged fractures where the stone was sheared off — one just above the top lip, the other below the chin — the mouth had been sculpted with astonishing precision by Egyptian craftsmen in the age of the Hebrew’s exodus. This statue, all that was left of an archaic queen, was fashioned in devotion and shattered by war, almost twenty-five centuries ago.

I remained in the gallery a long while, absorbing the details of this remarkable object: bright and smooth, polished to a high sheen. Yellow jasper, symbol of the imperishable, the rain-bringer, a stone reputed to drive away evil spirits, has long been associated with healing. Perhaps this mouth, so fragile, the instrument of a forgotten voice, had been preserved by virtue of the jasper’s protection. The relic endured, even as the Taliban destroyed stone Buddhas in Afghanistan.

I returned home from New York at midnight on the tenth. A few hours later, hijacked airplanes flew into the World Trade Center, into the Pentagon, into the ground. Like their ancient allies, the attackers tore down the standing stones, trying to destroy all that is foreign and strange.

I was drawn away from the shop and into my grief for many days. I sat with my wife in the quiet sanctuary she has made of our yard. The first ochre leaves appeared, and we wondered how to make sense of such events. My nine-year-old daughter wrote a poem about the end of summer, in which birds fly to nice, warm places. Safe passage. As the season turned, I prayed that I would find the wisdom to weigh, in my own small and quotidian life, the will to heal against the wish to harm.

When I could no longer abide images from the television, I returned to my workbench. My affliction was softened as I cradled my tools and guided them across the stone, carving and polishing, finishing my long effort to carve an ancestral face. The facade of the stone gathered itself into the contours of a resolute chin, a strong mouth, and a cheek rising toward a restful eye.

A strange dread found its way into the rhythm of my work. I strained to reclaim, in the grain of dark stone, the soft faces of those now lost to our sight. I mourned the death of the isolated innocence of my culture. And I tried to answer the questions of my four-year-old son: he could not understand why the hijackers would hurt anyone. He devised surprisingly elaborate plans for talking to them, for asking them to stop.

He watched me work, brought me tools, drew close in this time of elemental fear. My hands traced their way across the smooth contours of the emerging stone face. I imagined the Egyptian craftsmen shaping the face of the jasper queen, and I wondered, as I inspected my work during a warm afternoon, if it was her voice I heard, humming among the trees behind my shop. I discovered, once again, that the simple work of hands is a guide in my own healing. I am shaped by the work of creativity as stone and wood are by tools. And I was sustained, finally, by the hope that my one stone, that my works in wood, might stand with the destroyed Buddhas, with the scattered and the fallen, with those on their way back home.

So let me make yet another improbable claim: that working with our hands, that building with the natural materials of the earth and the seasons, helps heal the world. Our work is quieter, yes, and makes fewer pretensions. But authentic craft work connects us to our origins, to our sense of place, to our deepest values and vitality. Craft work wakes us up to life, as profoundly as any other work we can do. It teaches us, if we listen to it.

The spirituality of craft is now undergoing a revival of sorts, as is our acknowledgment of the many personal and communal benefits of working with our hands. This is the reason Home Depot is doing so well. Those middle-aged guys in the plumbing isle on Saturday afternoons are meditating on their place in the universe. Perhaps they don’t think of it that way; but installing a leak-free sink or building a solid fence in the garden can provide a kind of epiphany when finally you get it right.

Call it what you will: pioneer spirit, mid-life crisis, handyman-ism. It’s all the same: feelings of empowerment and connection, of ownership and belonging, an authentic sentiment of place that log buildings in particular tend to evoke. These are spiritual emotions in the sense that I am talking about spirituality: as something you do that brings you into deeper contact with yourself and your environment. And two good strategies for developing that spirituality immediately come to my mind: build something from wood or stone, or hang out in a log building. In many ways, modern log buildings are reproductions of sacred sites designed to evoke such feelings: the longhouses of the Pacific northwest, the hogans of the American southwest, the Shinto shrines of Japan.

I suspect that most people who want to live in a log building are, consciously or otherwise, trying to find their way more authentically into a sense of place, of being, of old and natural wisdom almost forgotten. But it’s not simply a matter of hanging out in the building, is it? It helps to pay attention, to listen, to be open to such mysteries in a world where we don’t place too much value on contemplation.

I like to say that wood speaks. Or perhaps is sings. Most woodworkers sense that there is great resonance in wood touched and shaped by hands. In whatever way you want to understand it, hokey or plain mysterious, objects made by caring hands are alive.

The Cherokee tell an old story about this. The tale says that in the first days, humans were ambivalent about illumination. They negotiated back and forth with Ouga, the creator, first desiring eternal sunlight and then, when it became unbearably hot, campaigning for constant night. Eventually the people asked Ouga to balance night and day, but not before many had died during the endless night with its hardships of cold and darkness. Ouga shaped a new tree in compassion and remembrance for the deceased, the cedar, in which the departed spirits were invited to reside. The oldest cedars are thus ancestor trees; working with the wood of those trees is a sacrament, a communion of craftsmanship in which ancient bones step into the human world as witness to the centuries.

I’d like to end with a personal vignette about encountering wood, about listening and entering into the strange, sacred relationships with wood that I’ve been talking about today. Again, this is from Grain of Truth.

Dark sky, cold rain, and a ground made bright by the sinuous shapes of wood sawn fresh from the tree: ivory of birch, faded porcelain of maple, linen of alder. There is some cypress, too, its scent of lemons reaching up from the wet soil to sting me with exhilaration. A black, rough flitch of walnut rests alongside the opened bole of a Douglas fir, its orange grain glowing from a sunrise heart. A woodpecker knocks once on the bole of a cedar, and is still. I reach down to touch the alder, and in the moment of reaching, of touching the silent wood with its living core of mystery, it becomes clear what I must next do.

I’ve come again to Karl’s ramshackle wood yard to find some pieces for carving. Nothing is clear yet, nothing except this first step, which is to make peace with the fallen, restless wood so newly taken from the forest: to retrieve it and begin the long process of drying slabs for carving. I’ve returned, as I so often do, to a careful beginning, these first few crucial steps in which I try to coax the wood into new life by listening and feeling for the prevailing needs of the old. This cannot be done lightly or casually; trees thwarted from their nature by ill use will inevitably turn on the craftsman, splitting and checking. The character of the work is revealed in these first moments.

Wind flaps the corner of a tarp. A small branch clatters to the ground. I choose four round alder sections, bark intact, checks not yet formed in the core. And I take the cypress, too, sawn into rough boards but still thick enough for carving work. The wood is heavy and wet. I hoist the pieces through the tailgate of my station wagon and head home, listening for that discourse I know will come: the gentle opening of suggestions and demands and imprecations through which the work will slowly begin to grow. It is always thus, listening and waiting and reaching for an inscrutable source that guides my hand as a valley guides the river, shaping and being shaped as it wends toward the sea.

I place the alder and cypress on top of the stack of Douglas fir beside my shop. The wood lies neatly cocooned, taken in by the fir like a guest in from the rain. It will rest here, somnolent through winter and fragrant in summer, until I can bring it into the shop for final drying.

As I cover the stack, my thoughts turning to the work ahead, I acknowledge that the wood’s redemption—its escape from dissolution—is also my own. We are bound now, fragments of becoming. We share the journey of the totem; the faces of the figures are hidden in my hand.

The totem is a spiritual heraldry. It describes, through a vast shorthand, the indications of the unfathomable. It is a finger pointing to the beginning, a wind blowing from a pristine field of possibility. It relates the tale of meteoric iron birthed as companion to the sun. Totems, like tools and the quiet in my shop, are reminders to remember, and to act.

I step into the landscape of my own totem. I see my grandmother, the falcon, her brow etched like the grain of rough cedar, weathered by war, made bright with family. I hear the voice of my mother, the wolf: first a clear call, then a tremor, and finally a wail. I feel the hands of my father, the porpoise: bashed thumb, strong fingers, palm enough like my own that I sometimes watch, looking for myself.

The territory brightens with faces. I find the eagle, my wife Elizabeth, she who carries and sustains, whose touch is redolent with solace. My daughter Rowan, the deer, blackberry stains on her chin, shouts with joy as she runs through the golden field. And my son Avery, the seal, cradled by wonder, darts into the light.

In my own hands I see the small whittling scars, the insignia left by a mishap with bleached coral, the numb place where I almost sliced off my finger cutting firewood in the rain. I wonder what indelible traces will be left by this next endeavor—teeth marks from carved mouths. I reach toward a horizon of prophecy: to mentors and unknown guides, to an unbroken cord of lineage secured at the source by invisible hands.

This is where I begin: with everything.