Here’s an interesting way of looking at trees and the wood that comes from deceased specimens upon which a “woodworker” like myself might try to lay hands and shape into something of practical or impractical form.

Now, as we all know, there’s very little new in this universe at the atomic scale. Everything about you, including you, essentially came into existence quite a long time ago. 14 + billion years or so, if our cosmological theories are in order. 

Since that time, it’s just been a big game of rearranging, reconfiguring, and recycling. Basic gases, heated and compressed by gravity into light, and heat, and other such bits, compressed still further in hearts of stars, ancient and modern, until they become something else, ejected during the processes of collapse and titanic explosion.

None of this is new thinking, said better elsewhere many times over. But it’s undeniable fact. There ain’t much new stuff out there to play with. Just recycled, reshaped, and reconfigured odds and ends.

Now, think about that in terms of that pile of pine or mass of maple sitting on your bench top waiting for its turn to go under the knives. It’s all existed in the past, further back than is conceptually possible to really grasp using one’s everyday senses. 

That pile of pine and mass of maple is as old as spacetime itself. I would also say that it is conceivable – conceivable – if not plausible that the pile of pine and mass of maple on your bench was, a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, another tree, or another table, or another chair, crafted by a being perhaps more or less like yourself. Recycled again and again, tree, to wood, to table, back to atoms, then, well, this here pile of pine and mass of maple. 

So, why do I spin this possible tale of cosmic goings-on in relation to the craft at hand – of transforming deceased trees into practical or impractical objects of daily living? Well, the idea that I had on my dog walk this morning was that we’re really just our own little supernovas. Reconfiguring and transforming what is already there into something different. So, yeah, woodworker as supernova. How’s that for a connection between the mysterious and unfathomably powerful cosmological goings on and the firing up one’s table saw? 

We inherit in one form or another something that’s always existed for all practical purposes of discussion and debate. It’s continuity on the largest scale possible. Woodworking is a participation in an unending chain of material transformation.