Where Did That Come From?

 

Where Did That Come From?

God is The Creator and he created man in his own image. Therefore, man is creative. This is the line of thinking that spurred me to become a writer. When I was young, I used to think my creativity was expressed on the basketball court. Perhaps it was true, but to be honest, it was a low target (and likely a copout) so when I couldn’t play, what then? I searched and now I write. Here I go…

While condensing my parent’s lives from a house and woodcrafter’s shop on ten acres with storage in every nook and cranny to a target of a family history and distributed memories, I have over the past 18 months drifted in and out of grief and written of it from time to time. Today I was at the storage facility where we keep boxes of stuff (tools, papers, photos, memories), high-end golf equipment, a piece of furniture, and an old workbench. My target for the day was to dismantle the workbench.

My objective was troubling to me and I went about the work with a haze of melancholy draped over my shoulders. It was easy for me to understand. The bench was older than me. My grandfather built it for his workshop in Gardena. My dad brought it to La Crescenta and put it in his little workshop that he had excavated underneath our deck in the backyard in La Crescenta and he then moved it to Merlin, Oregon and created amazing works of intarsia on it.

I moved it to the storage facility with the thought we would move it to Ashley and Matt’s new place in Santa Barbara once they were organized in their garage and they would create on it. However, the bench needed a lot of work to be stable and it was on its last legs. I discussed this at length with Ashley and we decided to move it to an alternate place which would have been in our backyard as a potting bench. It still needed a lot of work and we don’t pot much so we passed and there was no one in the family who could use it.

When I put screwdriver, claw hammer, and prybar to the bench I was saddened. I could not figure out how to get another generation out of this thing. I removed the three-sixteenth-inch steel top and decided to put it on the worktable I’d built in my own garage. As I stacked the 2x12s and 2x4s on my dolly I sunk a little deeper into glummyland but when I got down to the 1x stuff, a tongue-and-grove backing and some support strips, I remembered the Christmas trees I’d made of the old roofing materials from our front porch project and now I think there will be a Christmas tree or two to pass along. Then I remembered the bird houses and other decorative things I made from the old cedar fencing from our replacement project and I think there will be birds finding new nesting places.

The wood from a two-generation old workbench will find new life with three more generations; mine, my kids, and their kids.

Thinking about how creativity sprung from a feeling of melancholy lead me to wondering what it was that inspired God to create. Was He melancholy and then turned his creativity to making everything we see and feel? Was She lonely? These are not questions I will try to answer – they are way beyond my paygrade. It likely has something to do with the fact that God is love and needs entities to express that love toward.

While pondering this and wondering where sparks of creativity come from and what motivates someone to create, I came across one of my favorite Bible verses:

Psalm 121: 1 – “I lift up my eyes to the hills-- where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

No mater the source or who your muse is, once the spark is set to the idea, put your heart and hands to the task and see what good comes from it.

In His grip,

jerry

 

Author’s note: Melancholy may not be the proper word for me to use in describing my feelings of the day as an online definition reads, “a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause”. I know the cause but I like the term and my friend Webster’s definitions give me some latitude so I’m keeping melancholy. After all, it’s my story.