morning in the wood shop...

I am in the process of getting chapters 5 and 6 of my current book off to the publisher, taking a few beauty shots for earlier chapters and will be spending some time on chapter 7. It is fun to visualize new designs and my head was full of those designs as I faded in and out of sleep.

Last night I went to see US Congressman Steve Womack in a public meeting. He's voted about 40 times against "Obamacare", but only promised to ask SWEPCO some more questions about the powerline project that the utility company intends to force through our local community. In Q and A, as I challenged him with my own questions, he asked, "Speaking hypothetically, if I, as a private citizen, not as a member of the house of representatives, were to write a letter to SWEPCO asking that they halt the project, do you think that would do ANY good?" I answered, "At least we would know whose side you're on. We might take some comfort knowing that in the struggle to protect the sanctity of our homes we were not standing alone."

I am absolutely sick and tired of corporations and politicians and how closely they are aligned. I've come to the conclusion that corporations are not real people. Those politicians closely aligned with corporations as it appears Womack may be, suffer from the same loss of humanity. Once they get so high and mighty and full of themselves from feeding at the corporate trough, they are of no use to the rest of us.

Fortunately, I do have my wood shop. There is a Chinese saying that when you are confronted by evil, it is best to not confront it directly and become entangled in it, but to simply proceed to do the good. I disagree with that statement in part. We must confront evil directly. But we must also have those safe zones of retreat to remove ourselves from entanglement. To have something that is so life affirming and creative as making beautiful and useful objects from wood can restore the sensibilities after dealing with darkness. Speaking of dark, Edgar Alen Poe had written a line from his poem The Raven as follows:

"Eagerly I wished the morrow;
vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow."

If Poe had sought to find himself in concrete creative acts, he might have found what his books could not provide.

Make, fix and create...