The Carpenter and the Crooked Tree
Short story about the part of you that doesn't fit.
The oak at the bend of the road was enormous and completely useless — trunk twisted like a wrung cloth, grain running in three directions, nothing you could plane straight or split clean.
"Bad wood," the master carpenter said, the way he said it every time they passed it.
The apprentice, still young enough to ask things, said, "Then why is it the biggest tree in the valley?"
The master actually stopped walking, which he never did on a working morning. "Because it is bad wood."
The apprentice did the arithmetic slowly, the way his master had taught him to do everything. The straight pines went for scaffolding at forty years old. The good oaks, the ones with grain you could trust, became beams at eighty. The cherry trees left the valley the moment anyone married, cut for chests and cradles before they'd had time to grow old.
The useless oak had stood two hundred years and counting. It was the only real shade on the whole road. Farmers ate their lunch under it. Children were told to wait there for their mothers. When people in the valley said meet me at the tree, there was only ever one tree they could mean.
Years passed. The apprentice became a master himself, with an apprentice of his own, and one ordinary morning they stopped at the same bend for the same reason.
"So why has nobody cut it down?" the boy asked.
The old carpenter looked up at the branches a long time before answering. "Be careful what you make yourself excellent for. The wood they can use, they use up."
Perhaps the part of you that doesn't fit is the part you were never meant to cut away.
Tao Te Ching ch. 11; Zhuangzi, “The Useless Tree”
Inspired by the Taoist theme of useful uselessness — chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching and the crooked-tree passages in the Zhuangzi. This retelling is Ohananda's own.
Zhuangzi tells of a tree too gnarled to be worth cutting — and therefore left to grow enormous. A tree that can be made into beams gets made into beams.
Taoism is not praising laziness. It is warning about optimisation: a life shaped entirely around being useful to others may get exactly what it asks for.
Questions & answers
+What is the message of "The Carpenter and the Crooked Tree"?
Perhaps the part of you that doesn't fit is the part you were never meant to cut away. Zhuangzi tells of a tree too gnarled to be worth cutting — and therefore left to grow enormous. A tree that can be made into beams gets made into beams. Taoism is not praising laziness. It is warning about optimisation: a life shaped entirely around being useful to others may get exactly what it asks for.
+Is this a true story?
Inspired by the Taoist theme of useful uselessness — chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching and the crooked-tree passages in the Zhuangzi. This retelling is Ohananda's own.
+Which wisdom tradition inspired this story?
Tao Te Ching — Tao Te Ching ch. 11; Zhuangzi, “The Useless Tree”. The strength of what yields.
What have you made yourself useful for — and did you ever choose it?
