Things come to me in very odd ways…. like looking over while driving and seeing this woman with a mole on her face and wondering about self acceptance and personal beauty as one ages….or seeing a person in crocs and wondering about self worth and stereotypes…. and then there is stuff like this….. I was thinking of this yesterday as I sat there, hammer in hand, striking a piece of stubborn sheet metal against a homemade anvil.   The anvil is this scavenged piece of train track that I welded to a steel pipe.  It has been a faithful tool in my shop for years and has seen many a project forged on it’s steel plateaus.   Today…as this 9 lb hammer dropped onto heated metal…hoping it would give purchase to a rolling curve that would fit into the guts of that old Ford I’m working on… it struck me ( pun intended) .  What if life was sorta like the anvil?

Life goes on.  Regardless..unwavering…existent.  Look around… pretty much everything you are looking at will still be here after we have all turned to dust.  Life will go on… even with a natural disaster …life is gonna find a way, Mr. Goldblum.   So when you think of life…it’s very east to compare it to that anvil.   It bends and molds us to it’s will in many ways.  It applies heat and force….sometimes gentle…sometimes horrific…that molds and forges us into who we are.    I know it sounds sorta rudimentary.   Oh… we get beat up by life and it changes us…oh Chris, you are such a pessimist…life is beautiful and a gift.   I totally agree..but all of it was made through conflict and change.   Life being the anvil…change being the hammer…. we being the medium.

With that in mind you have to start asking personal things about the quality of your mettle….oh what…I mean metal.    Traditional samurai swords were folded steel…or nihonto…pretty much Damascus steel to us.   Folded hundred..perhaps thousands of times.   Each fold creating a stronger blade.   Starting out..that thin metal…was useless…but with time….heat…change…the anvil… it is forged into something almost magical…honorable…timeless.   As I am getting older…..I’ve seen people go from being a razor sharp katana to a useless butter knife in months.   Choices made… quality and integrity loss.   I wont lie…sometimes I feel my edges dulling and my compulsion to spread dairy products starts to become undeniable.  I guess we all have to do our own policing when it comes to things like that or hope we have a someone who can drop the hammer when it comes to it. I’ve been lucky to have people do that to me once in a while… guide me back to the forge… let me remold myself into the person I know I truly am.

So…can you see why this piece of old train track is such a metaphor? No matter how strong we think we are…how tempered the steel… we are constantly heading back to the forge…to be heated…hammered…molded…quenched and tempered.   We find the best and worse of ourselves in the process and not in the destination.  The artistry is in the technique not the show.   Without –us the anvil is nothing more than the forward march of time…but it is a constant…it’s this that lets us fill our years with an evolved spirit.

Lately my spirit has taken up some emotional spelunking…delving into those parts of myself that I may have shut off or ignored…. maybe out of pride…maybe out of the blindness of love… or just because the door I shut has not been ready to be reopened. Thats the beauty of the anvil…when it is time to work…its a tempest ready to be unleashed…

I guess my message here is that we are all works in progress…no one has this spiritual superiority over one another because we all are in the process of being sharpened or dulled.   The beauty is that we can always remake ourselves if our intent is true…it’s only when we lose sight of that progress…become stagnant or let someone else take the hammer… we lose the intent that the anvil was intended for.   We have all had people who have swung down on us and struck our lives in a good or bad way… it’s how we shape ourselves is the truest test of our integrity.