Hilary showed me this picture a few weeks ago. She’s a maker, hands alive with a maker’s knowledge, and she fixes all kinds of instruments at the Music Inn in New York City. Some of them are instruments she’s never worked on before. Lots of the repairs, like this one to replace the goat skip top, mean working with a variety of materials. Wood. Metal. Skin. Bone. Hair. That means she needs to keep learning, and keep a gentle grip on what she knows. Following the way another maker balanced weights and forces, and the way these materials change and stay steady.
                When Hilary showed me this picture we both went silent, looking at the wood, the way it’s been carved away, the peg ends that anchor the sympathetic strings. It looked like a place I could go. Like sandstone canyons and caves I’ve walked through in Cedar Mesa and Escalante Canyons. I fell silent a lot in those places, too—with wonder, with curiosity, with delight, with a sense of my own smallness as I climbed these thin ribbons of air down into earth. I love Hilary’s picture because, in it, I see a hint of how worlds cohere. How they play together on music, lean together with rock walls, weave together as we talk and share. How details come together into one version of here. There’s a sense of connection—fingers on wood, breath in the narrow breadth of a sandstone canyon—that doesn’t explain everything, but that instead draws close enough to touch. Wood. Stone. Skin. Bone. These pieces joining together into a world where, for a little while, we walk.