Year End Blog
25 December 2009
“There is Glory in Darkness”
Well, it’s that time of year again: Christmas, New Years, and the typical year end items. You know the drill: best scandals, best accomplishments, biggest sports stories, all kinds of stories and retrospectives. And that being the way of it, I thought it might be well if we ended the year in similar fashion.
My partner Joe Dusel and I have been at this blog business for quite a while now, and it is finally beginning to bear fruit. At first, as it is with every blogging venture, we had a fair number of friends and family who clicked on our site to see what we were doing, but that eventually faded away, and we got to where we had only three hits a day. But, we have continued with it, and over this last year, we have had one hundred thousand hits on this site.
We are very proud of what we have accomplished thus far, and we pledge to our readers to do more of the same in the New Year. As cabinetmakers, we can and do work in every room of the house, but the bulk of our focus will be, as it has been, on cutting edge designs for kitchens and baths. Traditional kitchens and bathrooms will always be an important part of this blog site, but I have to say that I am much more interested in where these designs are going then in where they have been.
The living room kitchen concept is something new and exciting, and it not only mirrors recent shifts in people’s living habits, but it tends to get in front of the trend, as it were, with new ideas and new concepts. Kitchens, in the beginning were really just a pot by the fire. Then as time went on, because of the fire hazard, those with the money for such things had their kitchens in a separate house altogether, at the rear of their main living quarters. Then with the advent of items like the Hoosier Kitchen Cabinet, kitchens, which by then were in the house again, began to assume something of their present configuration. Now, we are entertaining ideas like Johnny Grey’s unfitted kitchens and Electrolux Live-in Kitchens. We will cover these ideas extensively in the New Year and much, much more.
But for now, it is very much a journey’s end type of moment, a time to simply set one’s tools down and reflect, for a time, on what has been, and what is yet to come, knowing, as always, that it will require a great deal of work. Our next blog will appear on January 4, 2010, giving us a little time to spend with our families. In the meantime, because it is Christmas, we would like to leave you with a letter written by a Franciscan Friar on Christmas Eve, 1513:
I salute you.
I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got. But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see. And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!
Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there.
The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Your joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts. Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it; that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country home.
And so, at this time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
Fra Giovanni
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