I made a scarf joint ...

At my university, classes begin on Monday. Normally, I love this time of year, full of anticipation, excitement ready for the new challenges. Yet this year something else is in the air. In the preparatory meetings, besides the usual anticipation, I have detected apprehension and some fearfulness. The pandemic seems relentless. In June we could see light at the end of the tunnel. Everything would be back to normal by September and preparations for the new school year were to be as for fall 2019. Then came Delta and faculty and staff are now fearful for what lays ahead. Friends are catching Covid, even those fully vaccinated. I read a serious medical commentary saying that the vaccination is like a good raincoat. It protects against showers, but when constant thunderstorms arise we may well get wet. And Delta is the thunderstorm. I'm very glad for the raincoat, but we're in a bad storm, and too many folk around me are not wearing coats, and those wearing coats are getting wet too.

Then there's Afghanistan. A heartbreaking, unimaginable human tragedy. We have watch renewed and emboldened terrorism, the violent deaths of too many, and a massive, heroic evacuation mission of the kind we have not seen before. We dare not think of the uncertain future for women and girls in a Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Twenty years of war, for what?

So what did I do? I made a scarf joint. As I build a traditional classical guitar the first task is to make the angled neck where the tuners will eventually rest. The neck has to be angled to create a "break point" where the strings pass over the nut. The nut marks the beginning of the string length that will ensure the guitar plays in tune. Out of a number of ways of creating this angle in the neck, my preferred method is the scarf joint. The neck is made from a single piece of Sipo mahogany 36 inches by thee-and-a-half by three-quarters. The end of the wood is cut off diagonally, the short piece turned over and glued on the underside. Doing so creates the correct angle for the strings. That is, if you do it corrrectly. It requires much measuring and remeasuring. Measure many times cut once, is the general rule. Some time ago I neglected the rule and cut the neck completely wrong. An expensive mistake! When I am making the scarf joint I can't think of anything else, nothing can distract. The sawing, the planing, the shaping require total focus. The process is at once thoughtful, meditative and tactile.

The pandemic, and Afghanistan are massive things outside my control—overwhelming, if you dwell on them. So I turn to something more immediate. I turn to wood and saw and plane and chisel. Of course, it would be foolish to think I could control the wood. Rather, I work with the wood. It's human hubris that we can control nature. When we think we are in control, nature surprises us—global warming comes to mind. Treat the wood with respect, work with it rather than against it. Up close and personal with a piece of wood—its feel, its smell, its characteristics—has an immediacy, a communication, a connection. Working with wood is deeply spiritual. 

Spirituality is not just about religious ideas to be believed and religious rituals to be performed. Spirituality is what connects us to our essential humanity. The Jewish creation myth has it that the first human being, adamah, was formed from the soil and from living breath. To be human is to be soil and air, to be earth and spirit. Finding the connection sustains us. Mystical traditions teach us that the divine within connects to the whole of the natural world. The Celtic tradition of the Carmina Gadelica has spirituality as a very earthy affair. Spirituality is in the kindling of fire, the milking of cows, is in "the rocks, the drifts, the streams," the making of cloth, in the choosing of wood:

Choose the willow of the streams

Choose the hazel of the rocks

Choose the alder of the marshes

Chose the birch of the waterfalls

Spirituality is that which sustains us in the good times and the not so good times. In the Celtic tradition spirituality is in the everyday, the ordinary, the connection with nature. I find that spiritual connection in working with wood. So, this week I made a scarf joint.

Am I the proverbial ostrich burying my head in the sand to avoid an oncoming rhino? Maybe, maybe not.  I begin this week to teach inquiring minds what philosophers have said about war and terrorism and how we might think about human violence today. My thinking for fifteen weeks will be immersed in humanity's efforts to maim,  kill and destroy. To do such work I need to be sustained. To do such work I need to make a scarf joint.

So, in the midst of all that's out of control, anxiety creating and fearful I hope you find your own scarf joint.

+Ab. Andy

"Choosing the Timber" from Alexander Carmichael, New Moon of the Season: Prayers from the Highlands and Islands, Floris Classics, 1986, 45.