A story about a carpenter, told by a carpenter. She lives on the coast of Maine, and she built the most beautiful sailboat I have ever seen. After she told me this story, I wondered about the uses of its beauty. And to what destinations she might sail.
Once upon a time there was a woman who was carpenter of the heart. She could, by means of her constructions in rare woods, change the very cardiac inclinations of those who saw her work. For instance, by inlaying rosewood, ebony, and birch in a subtle pattern, a tabletop she created could cause certain people to remember all their dreams, and to know how the threads of those dreams are meant to be spun into the tapestry of daily affairs.
Another time, she designed a chair that made humans honest: everyone who sat in this chair and talked could not stop themselves from telling the truth. She made, as well, a little house no bigger than a breadbox that elves could not resist. All someone had to do was to take this little house and put it in a bedroom, and soon enough they would be able to talk privately to the elves who would make it their permanent residence. Now elves, of course, are ancient and enduring projects of the earth and carry a high energy of heart; like most of the important things in our lives, they are generally thought to be unreal. But even so, they give all sorts of outrageous, mantic, useful advice about a life that is within this life.
Now it was necessary for our carpenter friend to keep secret what she had discovered about the possibilities within carpentry, for her strange, happy work was not understood by every friend and neighbor. So most people thought she was an ordinary carpenter, and that her hands held not the saga of her blood and her humor and our future. When she died, almost no one mourned her.
The pieces of work, of course, remain. Here and there you may find a tabletop of ingenious, unnerving inlay, a chair of uncanny, graceful lines, or an extraordinary little house. It was the hope of the carpenter that these and other pieces of hers would be found, and that people would eventually use them to explore her methods, and apply them to their chosen, daily, ordinary labors—so that one day we might see mechanics hard at work in a repair shop for every model of the heart, mathematicians proving theorems with uncanny axioms offered by the heart, farmers tending rich soil found only in the garden of the heart. Now, we may ask, what would such people really do?
It’s difficult to say. What do you do?