Background and Beginning Let me give you some background. I do carpentry to earn money so I can support my acting habit. My wife, Elli Michaels and I run the Woodstock Shakespeare Festival under the flag of the Bird-On-A-Cliff Theater Company. Being an actor makes me a physical artist. So being in the world of carpentry isn’t such a leap. Only, one time I got caught. I was working on a large unit for a TV editing house in NYC and was forced to rent shop space in a now long-gone warehouse on West 23rd Street. The weeks went by as I intuited my way through the lamination and oak veneer ply as I crafted my project together. One day, as I was solving a tricky problem of how to apply a final sheet of matte-black laminate (I’ll explain the problem and solution later), the shop boss came by. I must have been in commune with the Intuitive Carpenter, because he stopped, looked at me and then announced, “What are you, a poet?” Being in a portion of my mind that made me immune to insults, I didn’t get the full meaning of his collusion until years later when I was more in touch with how I worked on construction projects.

Intuitive Carpenter Everyone is an Intuitive Carpenter. Well, aren’t they? Back in the late '60s, in my early days at summer stock, I was faced with the task of having to construct five desks for a musical called “Stop the Presses." Desks that had to be sturdy enough to withstand the toe-tapping chorus of dancing reporters. I didn’t panic. I simply called upon the Intuitive Carpenter. How did I do this? I looked at the pile of materials that would become these desks and just started to dance with them. The five desks were all built that day. I had no preconceived plan and the construction of these items came so naturally to me that I thought that all creatures of the biped variety had this function. I still think this, but others will complain that they have no capacity for such ability. Oh, ye of little faith.

Useful Discoveries In my days as a struggling actor in NYC, when my singing teacher found out that I did carpentry work, he asked me to give an estimate on a large wine rack and large bookcase he wanted for his dinning room and bedroom. He lived in a very nice brownstone on West 87th Street. Not wanting to turn down the work, I obliged and he agreed to my terms. I contacted the Intuitive Carpenter and put together the project. I learned a simple thing on this project. I learned how to cut on a line. Sounds weird, I mean, that’s what you do. Cut on a line. Don’t you? Well, yes and no. You draw a straight line and when the cutting blade starts cutting will it follow it? Not always. It will drift on and off. Probably within a tolerance of 1/8 of an inch. Acceptable for some applications, but not finished cabinet work. Quite by chance, during the construction of the bookcase I discovered how to keep the cutting blade on the line. And I mean right on the line. No drifting. It takes a certain type of concentration along with breathing, and a certain tactile sense of the existence of the line and the existence of the cutting blade. I began to sense that in between these two things was another thing . . . a space . . . a space with total freedom in it. This caused me to actively relax. I got very still and quiet and felt like I was sinking into that space; and I let the vision of the space between the line and blade guide my hand. I was able to cut right along side the pencil mark without drifting because that’s where the space of freedom existed. Am I a poet or what? Problem Solving “There is no problem.” How many times I have faced a situation where there was absolutely no possible way of doing something. How was I going to apply 3/4 half-round grooves to 12 cabinet doors to give it a panel effect, and make it home in time for dinner? I had no miter box. For, as any carpenter knows, there is a lot of mitering that needs to be done to get this effect on cabinet doors. Once again, I woke up the Intuitive Carpenter, picked up my circular saw, set the base at 45 degrees and carefully (don’t try this one please!) made all my passes. Low and behold, I had all my pieces and simply brad-nailed them into place. I have spent too many sleepless nights worrying about how I was going to proceed with a job. When reconfiguring a door jamb, attaching a cabinet into a ceiling, installing an L-shaped counter top, I have learned to trust the Intuitive Carpenter. And to me it seems always when I arrive on the job the solution arrives with me. I have sat looking at point A and point B with absolutely no idea how I was going to get from one to the other, and sometimes I find that I have to tell myself to stop worrying, because the goal had already been achieved. David Aston-Reese (MA Thea., PSU) is currently an artistic director, along with his wife, Elli Michaels, of the Bird-On-A-Cliff Theater Company in Woodstock. As an apprentice in a summer stock theater company, he discovered his Intuitive Carpentry skills. www.bird-on-a-cliff.org