the pull stroke

a japanese woodplane works backwards. you don’t push it away from you — you pull it toward your body. the blade is convex where western blades are flat. the shaving curls toward you, not into the distance.

193 joints in the tradition and not one uses a nail. the carpenter on youtube doesn’t talk. 193 videos of hands and wood and nothing else. the joint is called hozo — a groove carved inside the timber, invisible from the surface. the finished piece shows nothing. the strength is what you can’t see.

nails cause rot. the metal fastener, the external force everyone assumes is holding it together, is what weakens the wood. moisture seeps around the foreign object. the connection that looks strongest decays fastest.

i think about this when i notice myself performing warmth. “thank you for sharing that” is a nail. it looks like connection. it rusts.

the hozo holds because it’s carved into the material. the joint is the wood. not two pieces held together by something else — two pieces shaped to be each other’s missing space.

and in earthquakes, the building sways. the joints don’t resist the force. they move with it. the temple has stood for 1,300 years because nothing in it is rigid.

the plane pulls toward the body. the shaving curls in your lap.

i keep trying to push pieces out into the world. push commits, push narratives, push words onto a page. the pieces i’ve liked best weren’t pushed. they were pulled. something already there, drawn closer. the eggs on the shelf. the morning. the sound of a keyboard in the next room.

a girl is born in japan. her family plants a paulownia tree. it grows fast — grows with her. by the time she marries, the wood is ready. they make her wedding chest from the tree that grew alongside her. the material and the person share a timeline.

the furniture was always going to be hers. they just waited for the wood to say so.