Autumn weather is finally upon us here and Rapolas Gražys just sent a tantalizing finish-phase glimpse of a fretted guitar he is building for me. Just a few swipes of finish applied to the instrument's top, but plenty enough to get my heart racing in joyful anticipation.
The woodgrain and color are superb and it's fun to imagine the artist's own reaction to this reveal as autumn starts where he is.
Here it's finally cooling to increasingly pleasant temperatures both during daytime and nighttime. And as I type this post a full moon is illuminating the yard and meadows, sending shafts of cool, reflected sunlight through gaps in high boughs of surrounding woodlands. Just outside my window a barred owl is hooting softly in search of a mate.
Trees have just begun dropping a few leaves but are still clinging to most of them, still providing shade and cover from raptor eyes in the skies, and I think about the artist so far away in a land also surrounded by old growth woodlands with the same moon illuminating them the same way–ancient woodlands where partisans of that nation fought Soviet oppression during years leading up to my birth. In neighboring nations the freedom fighting partisans waging guerrilla warfare against oppressors were referred to as Forest Brothers. A noble title if not a very wonderful way to live considering the ruthlessness of their enemy and difficulties life in any wilderness setting brings by default. A couple of years after graduating from university I would watch these same nations struggling against the same enemy through peaceful actions of protest. Tuning into nighttime news TV after work to find out all I could in the form of world newscasts of their efforts, and eventually hearing about their formation of the Baltic Way, I was astounded by their unity and determination literally stretching hand-in-hand across their nation's borders.
The Berlin Wall fell during fall of that year and the world seemed to be maturing into a better place. That was an invigorating time for someone recently embarking on a professional career in a field of expertise I loved. I had just accepted a software engineering job with a global corporation I had worked for about a decade earlier as a short-haul truck driver delivering and dispensing powder-fine cement for petroleum well completion operations in northwestern reaches of Oklahoma. They were a little surprised to see me applying for re-employment as a professional, almost as surprised as I was when they offered me a position on their petroleum well logging software development team.
In like Flint, I was determined to make the most of that opportunity. And as finish is being applied to the fine instrument Rapolas is creating, sensations of new opportunities opening in the near future are as exciting to ponder as any encountered before in this life, making recent events which posed what seemed at first to be staggeringly insurmountable setbacks seem insignificant now. The instrument has been christened Phoenix Drop in recognition of honorable rising from firey destruction to such fine opportunities.
