JULY 14, 2025 – Back to Project Zen. Over the weekend I reverted to “Zen mode.” I had to. I mean, with everything from tariff terror to the Epstein Files crowding the hourly news cycle, one must seek refuge where one can. My sanctuary is currently “Project Zen,” to which I’ve now assigned the label, “elevated pergola,” when friends ask, “What in the world . . . ?”
One feature of the project is what has become an interactive drawing in my graph paper book. It’s the front elevation, which, as it turns out, also works as the back elevation, since the planned structure is symmetrical. Along the way, I’ve erased, redrawn, re-erased various lines to reflect chosen deviations and re-deviations from my original plan. One example is the length of the purlins, which went from eight feet to six feet before I settled on six feet-eight inches. Another example, again pertaining to the purlins, was to change square ends to curved, then to diagonal. The curves looked nice—and aesthetically speaking, I’ve always had an affinity for curves—but for the sake of consistency with other diagonal cuts in elements of the base, I decided that diagonal-end purlins were the right-style “shirt” (pergola) for the diagonal-cut members of the “trousers” (40-inch-high base for the pergola). Besides, making 14 angular cuts with a mini-Skilsaw are much easier than using a coping saw to cut consistently by hand, 14 curves, each with a radius of four inches.
Most of my efforts this weekend, however, involved paint and a paint brush. As any painter—pro or am—knows, more than half the battle is in the set-up and the clean-up. Moreover, as anyone familiar with the physics of photometry knows, plain white paint in the summer sunshine at 45-degrees of latitude can be blinding to the unprotected eyeballs. This latter phenomenon adds a further dimension to the painting challenge.
On the other hand, painting brings special gratification. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful, it’s meditative—like sailing in fair winds. Sure, you have to be thoughtful about how you set your sails—that is, how you set up your paint and accessories, drying racks and so on, so that in your moment of forgetfulness, you don’t jibe (trip over things you’ve left strewn in the work area) and have the boom knock you off the gunwale (tip over the whole damn paint can onto the driveway).
Some painters deploy a sound device to blast out tunes, blaring not only over the immediate work site but wafting, as it were, over the airspace several urban lots away. I prefer no music, except what I can conjure up mentally. Yesterday I selected “random,” and what should “play” inside my head but Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy for violin, followed (after about half a dozen loops) by Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1. I have no idea why those two pieces leap-frogged to the front. I haven’t heard either—live or a recording—in years. But when you’re in “Zen mode,” all sorts of wonderfully inexplicable phenomena occur.
The discerning reader might fairly ask why urban references have appeared in the context of a project destined for largely inaccessible reaches of our woods “up at the lake.” This puzzlement is easily addressed: for a variety of reasons, I de-camped from our Shangri-La last Tuesday for a week-long stint back in civilization. Many parts of “Project Zen” remain . . . apart from one another. Before departing the northwoods, I loaded many of the building “parts”—along with my plans and sketchbooks—into my car and hauled them back to the city so that during considerable “down time” I could continue work. This suits me fine. When neighbors who espied me at work as they strolled down the alley, called out to me, “Why aren’t you up at the lake?!” I explained that in my head I was as happy as a lark, pretending I was painting out in front of our cabin. Every time I chose to look up, my eyes feasted on the beautiful lake scene visible through the pine boughs gently stirred by the gentle breeze.” My neighbors were skeptical. What they saw when they looked to the left of where I was standing were our refuse and recycling bins.
Each to his own. Painting the purlins in our backyard at home brought the unanticipated reward of an unintended sculpture. After the second coat of paint was sufficiently dry to allow me to remove the purlins from the drying rack, I leaned them up against the straight-as-an-arrow trunk of our backyard maple. The top of each board rested against trunk immediately below the first tier of branches of the lush, perfectly symmetrical tree. When I later glanced at the tree, I saw an amusing sculpture: imagine a stylized six-foot-high white teepee with a giant green leafy ball balanced on top. In the extreme heat I made myself some fresh-squeezed lemonade and parked myself out on the back porch to enjoy the accidental “art.” I had half a mind to leave it in place to see how long it would take the neighbors to ask, “What in the world . . .?”
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
