Chalk up yet another perfect Canberra morning in the Autumn that just keeps on giving. A morning walk by the lake. A wake of golden-red foliage.

The RSPCA was running their ‘million paws walk’, and we turned up late to catch the stragglers and sleepers-in. Juno immediately slotted in for bit of pack weaving, butt sniffing, tail wagging, lead entangled joy.

…

I made a thing.

When you stumble off a cliff, there is this moment of incredulous normality. Before the ohhhh shit!
Before the unstoppable falling.
Before the ground rush.

Climate change. War. Political uncertainty. Rampant, meaningless consumerism.

That moment when you know you are over the edge, yet remain suspended by your total disbelief in the grim certainty of your future.
It almost feels like everything is going to be OK.

The view is vast as you rest in this impossibly long, breathtakingly sad, razor sharp moment of equipoise.
And then you drop.

That is where I feel we are right now. I mean all of us.
We are that cartoon moment when Wile E. Coyote looks to camera with a realisation he is all out of ground and fresh out of luck.

How do you respond to such a time of groundlessness?

No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need to risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.

—Carl Jung.

Well, as I dig in looking for a path of ascent, I made a thing.

I picked up a couple of free palates from a local garden centre. And with some recycled bed slats and a bit of lumbar, I built a garden workbench.

I have never built anything out of wood before.
The legs are slightly colly-whumpus, I was sadly lacking a spirit level (metaphorical and otherwise) and the design practicality is a little sub-optimal. But there you go. I built it myself. It was therapy.
I love the rustic aesthetic. I love that I still have 10 fingers despite power tools. And I love that I made something utilitarian out of discarded stuff.

Vanishing shapes, shaped anew.