On the Anvil

The craftsman uses various instruments in shaping his tools - hammers, forges, anvils. Some of the tools now lie on a junk pile, broken, outdated, dull, rusty. There, heaped in a cob-webbed corner, they have become useless, never fulfilling the purposes for which they were created. Other tools are still on the anvil, being melted down, molten hot, malleable, changeable. They wait on the anvil, being shaped by the craftsman's hammer, becoming in the sometimes painful process what they were meant to be. They become tools of usefulness: sharpened, primed, defined, mobile. They lie ready in the craftman's toolchest, available to their master, ready to fulfill their calling. We are all somewhere there in the craftman's shop.