The slow grain of patience

Two summers in a Pangasinan workshop taught me that heartwood doesn't yield to the plane — it asks you to slow down and listen.

I arrived at the old workshop in Lingayen in July of 2014, fresh from a six-year stint designing interfaces in Makati. I thought I understood craft. I had spent countless hours refining pixel grids and type scales, and I assumed that precision — real precision — was something I already knew. Then the foreman handed me a block of rough-sawn narra and a hand plane that had not been sharpened since before the EDSA Revolution, and I discovered that a century's worth of slow-grown heartwood has no interest in your timeline.

The grain resists, then reveals

Narra does not work like other hardwoods. Its interlocked grain changes direction every few millimeters — a wavy, almost liquid figure that catches light differently at every angle. Run a plane against it and the blade chatters, digs in, tears out. The trick, I learned after ruining three blanks, is to tilt the iron to a steeper pitch and take passes so thin the shavings curl like parchment.

You cannot rush what took a hundred years to grow. The tree kept its own time. So must you.