Oak Lessons

Splitting some sections of new oak today, out of long habit wielding maul and wedge without too much thought: not hurrying to get the job done, just hitting the wedge a couple of times and pausing, listening for the tiny sounds that are oak's language of compromise, then hitting a couple times more, pausing again, actions my body and mind have learned to do without me... It surprised me enough to ask myself: When had I learned that? 

How had I acquired the ability to dialog with oak? I had often been in a hurry during the early firewood years, so I had to learn that oak yields slowly and at the price of effort, which is the nature of things in general, oak responding perhaps a little more fairly and intelligently than other materials. So I guess by force of habitual listening I learned when to move and when to wait, so as not to do twice the work for half the result. It doesn't pay to be pushy; oak isn't dumb just because it talks in whispers. 

Being wild, oak is also pretty wily, and has its quirks. If you insist on your way, oak will make you wait, one way or another. If in your interactions with that wood grain you try to hurry, in time you'll get angry and lose, because if there’s one thing oak knows, it's duration. If you're angry splitting oak, you're beside the point.

Then some time later comes the big oak lesson: your mind knows more than you do.

ON BEING GOOD

How good one feels, when one is good at last! It is so worth the wait, in fact, that, as soon as one is bad again, one is immediately persuaded to stretch the badness a bit more, make it last, at least until the next occasion of goodness. Thus are the heights of goodness raised to these admirable summits, and the more lowly delights in between given a moral luster they might otherwise lack.

For alas, what is the good in being only good? It's not in the good, after all, that the value resides, but in the rarity of the good, the effort invested in the good. Flood the world with diamonds: what then is the value of those in your crown? No, keep the diamonds hid; dole them out one at a time, like De Beers so reputably does, and get true value for every carat of your morality; then - and only then - can you say, with earned conviction, a priceless crown on your head and and a forward look in your eyes: "I'll be good again one day!"

Hiroshige
never heard of Goethe
and yet... and yet...