What Two Woodworkers and a Snowflake Teach Us About Formation
Paul Tan
Hartmut Rosa opens his book on uncontrollability with a question: Do you still remember the first snowfall on a late autumn day, when you were a child?
Not the snow you checked the forecast for. Not the snow you drove to on a ski trip. The snow that arrived — shy, strange, uninvited — and transformed the world without asking permission. You did not make it happen. You could not have made it happen. And the moment you reached out your hand to hold a flake, or save the snow in the freezer, it was gone. It melted on your palm or turned to ice. The snow was real. The snow was beautiful. And the snow could not be grasped.
Rosa calls this Unverfügbarkeit — the quality of the world that withdraws the moment you try to control it. His translators settled on “uncontrollability,” but the German word carries something the English doesn’t: unavailability, un-graspability, the condition of being beyond your disposition. The snowflake is the purest manifestation of it. You cannot manufacture it, force it, or even confidently predict it. You cannot get hold of it or make it your own. You can only be present when it falls.
I have spent thirty years building formation environments for young people, immigrant and refugee families, and neurodivergent communities in the Puget Sound region. And the thing I have learned — the thing no training prepared me for, the thing I am still learning — is that formation is snow. It falls when the conditions are right. It transforms whatever it touches. And it cannot be grasped.
James Krenov learned to read the grain of wood before he could read it in anything else. He grew up in Seattle, building boats on Puget Sound with a retired sea captain who gave him informal shipbuilding lessons on the beach. He worked at Jensen Motor Boat, building yachts. He sailed the Sound with friends. And then he moved to Sweden, studied under Carl Malmsten, and became the most influential cabinetmaker of the twentieth century — a man whose cabinets, rarely more than four feet high, are in museums in Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the United States.
But the thing that made Krenov, Krenov, was not his technique. It was his refusal to start with a drawing.
Krenov composed his cabinets directly in the wood. He did not begin with dimensioned plans and then find wood to match. He began with the wood — its color, its figure, its weight, the way light moved across its surface — and let the piece emerge from what the material actually was. He called this composing. Not building. Not constructing. Composing — like music, like poetry, like something that must be listened for rather than imposed.
When the Smithsonian asked him whether he made furniture professionally, he said: “I’ve never made furniture professionally. I’m an amateur and I always will be.” He did not mean he lacked skill. He meant that the word “professional” carried a competitive stance that caused you to compromise your values. The amateur — from the Latin amator, one who loves — works for love. So does the artisan, the craftsman. The professional works for the market. And the market wants straight lines, right angles, uniform surfaces, predictable results. The market wants snow you can schedule.
Krenov wanted what the wood wanted.
He wrote about ships the way most people write about first loves: “Probably I talk too much about ships, but they had a definite and lasting effect upon me, with their grace or lack of grace, their symmetry — not that perfect symmetry, but always something alive.” Not that perfect symmetry. Always something alive. A hull has no straight lines. Its curves are compound — they bend in two directions at once, and no two cross-sections are the same. A boatbuilder cannot work from templates because the shape changes continuously along the length of the vessel. The builder must read the curve as it develops, adjusting the next plank to the one already fitted, responding to the actual shape rather than the ideal one.
This is what Krenov brought from the boatyard to the cabinet shop: the conviction that the most beautiful things are composed in the material, not imposed upon it. That the grain has its own direction, and the maker’s task is to read it — not with instruments, not with measurements, but with hands and eyes and the patience that only comes from caring about the outcome more than the schedule.
George Nakashima came to the same place from a different direction. Where Krenov was the wanderer — Siberia, Shanghai, Alaska, Seattle, Sweden, Fort Bragg — Nakashima was the integrator. Born in Spokane, he studied undergrad at UW, architecture at MIT, traveled to Paris and Tokyo, designed an ashram in Pondicherry, was interned at Camp Minidoka during the war, and then settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he built furniture for the rest of his life. He called himself “a Hindu Catholic Shaker Japanese American” — five traditions held together not by resolution but by the practice of making.
Nakashima’s deepest conviction was that a noble tree, once felled, deserved a second life. Not as lumber — dimensioned, planed, squared into uniformity — but as furniture that honored the tree’s original character. He preserved the natural edge: the bark side, the live edge, the curve of the trunk where the tree met the world. He displayed the knots, the burls, the figuring that industrial milling treats as defects. He let the wood be what it was.
His daughter Mira, who has led the studio for thirty-five years since his death, describes the work this way: “Nakashima furniture is meant to be lived with as a member of the family, full of imperfections as we all are, but maintaining a sense of balance and equanimity through all stages of life.” She also says that when clients come to choose wood, one piece will speak to them over another. The trees, she says, “certainly have vibrations and you can feel them. There is some kind of communication between human beings and wood.”
Vibrations. Communication. The wood speaks. The maker listens. And the piece that emerges is not what the maker planned. It is what the wood and the maker discovered together.
This is what Rosa means by resonance: a responsive relationship between self and world in which both are transformed. The maker reaches out to the wood. The wood answers back. The maker is changed by what the wood reveals. The wood is changed by what the maker’s hands do. And the outcome — the table, the cabinet, the chair — is something neither could have produced alone. It is the sound the encounter makes when the conditions are right.
Now here is the thing that connects the snowflake, the grain, and the work I have been doing for thirty years.
Rosa’s deepest claim is not that resonance feels good. His deepest claim is that resonance is inherently uncontrollable. You can create the conditions for it. You can build the room, bring the presence, set the table, light the warm lamps, ask the real question instead of the one on the form. But the moment of encounter — when a person’s frequency sounds for the first time, when the world answers back, when the snow falls — cannot be engineered. It cannot be scheduled. It cannot be predicted. And it cannot be grasped.
The moment you try to control it, it vanishes. The moment you try to manufacture it, you get a snow cannon — Rosa’s own image — which produces something that looks like snow and functions like snow but has none of the transformative power of the real thing. The ski resort ensures it has snow. It does not have snowfall. The difference is everything.
Krenov knew this about wood. You can force a board into a shape it doesn’t want to hold. You can plane against the grain, cut across the figure, impose the drawing on the material. The wood will comply — for a while. But eventually it will split, warp, check, or crack along the lines you ignored. The grain remembers what you refused to read. And the piece fails not because the wood was bad, but because the maker was not listening.
Nakashima knew this about trees. Every plank has one ideal use. The woodworker’s task is to discover it — not to produce it, not to assign it, but to find it through attention, patience, and the willingness to let the material speak. Discovery, not manufacture. Reading, not writing. Composing, not processing.
This is what “people work” might look like.
In thirty years of formation work, the moments that changed everything were never the ones I planned. They were never on the agenda, in the logic model, or predicted by the theory of change. They were always snow.
A mother in a minivan at ten o’clock on a school night, refusing to start the car. A young man at a Popeyes counter pulling out his money and saying “I got this, Paul” — and me having to learn to receive from someone the system saw only as a recipient. A cook setting her own cloth on a table in a community center that the world had decided was not worth beauty. A young woman sitting behind a set of kulintang gongs and discovering that the ear the system tried to fix was the exact instrument those gongs were made for.
I did not make any of those moments happen. I was present for them. I had built the room. I had set the table. I had stayed long enough for the nervous system to register that the room might be safe. But the moment of resonance — the shiver, the shift, the sound — was uncontrollable. It fell like snow. And any attempt to manufacture it would have produced the snow cannon version: something that looks like transformation in a quarterly report but melts before it reaches the ground.
This is the hardest thing to tell a funder. This is the hardest thing to write in a grant application. This is the hardest thing to explain to a board: the most important thing we do is the thing we cannot control.
We can control the room. We can control the food, the schedule, the hiring, the training, the quality of the facilitation. We can build the hull. We can bend the ribs and fit the planks and shape the vessel with all the craft and care and technical skill that thirty years of practice can produce. What we cannot control is the wind. The wind is the person’s response — the moment when they stop talking and look at their mother’s face and everything changes. The moment when the young man who reads rooms stops monitoring the exits and starts cutting onions. The moment when the snow falls.
Rosa’s four characteristics of resonance map exactly onto what the craftsmen know:
Being affected. Krenov let the wood affect him. He did not approach it as raw material to be conquered. He approached it as a presence to be encountered. The maker is changed by the making. The formation practitioner is changed by the person they accompany. If you have not been changed by the people you serve, you have not been serving. You have been processing.
Self-efficacy. Nakashima’s hands shaped the wood, and the shaping mattered. The maker acts and the world responds. The person in formation acts — tells their story, makes a meal, builds something with their hands, shows up for the next session — and the world answers back. The answering is the resonance. The person discovers that their action has consequence, that their presence makes a difference, that they are not invisible.
Adaptive transformation. Both are changed. The wood becomes a table and is no longer just a plank. The maker becomes the person who made that table and is no longer just a woodworker. The formation practitioner and the person at the bench are both forming. The mutual formation is real. It runs in both directions, and it produces something neither could have produced alone.
Uncontrollability. The snowflake. The grain that will not be forced. The moment in the minivan that cannot be scheduled. The frequency that sounds when — and only when — the conditions are right. You can build the conditions. You cannot build the frequency. The frequency is snow.
There is a sentence in Rosa’s book that I think about often. He says that the fundamental contradiction at the heart of modernity is the basic conflict between our desire for control and our longing for resonance.
This is the sentence that should be framed on the wall of every human services agency, every school administration office, every nonprofit boardroom, every government office that funds programs for vulnerable people. The entire social services sector is built on the desire for control: controlled outcomes, controlled timelines, controlled dosages of intervention, controlled metrics of success. And the thing the sector most needs — the thing the people it serves most need — is resonance. Which is inherently uncontrollable.
Processing is the attempt to control formation. It is the snow cannon. It produces something measurable, schedulable, reportable. It can generate data for the quarterly report. It can demonstrate fidelity to the model. It can show that the intervention was delivered as designed. What it cannot do is transform a person. Because transformation is snow, and snow cannot be manufactured.
Composing is the alternative. It is what Krenov did with wood and what Nakashima did with trees and what the formation practitioner does with people. It begins with the material — not the template. It reads the grain — not the intake form. It preserves the free edge — the bark, the curve, the irregularity that makes this person this person and not the person the program was designed for. And it holds space for the uncontrollable — the moment of resonance that cannot be predicted, the frequency that sounds when the conditions are right, the snow that falls when it falls.
The practitioner’s task is the same as the woodworker’s: to create the conditions. To build the room. To set the table. To stay. To read the grain with hands and eyes and thirty years of accumulated attention. And then to wait — not passively, not inattentively, but with the active patience of a maker who knows that the most important thing that will happen today is the thing that is not on the schedule.
Krenov worked for decades in a small shop in the basement of his home. When he died at eighty-eight, he was holding a piece of sandalwood he had shaped and smoothed. He kept shavings of cedar and sandalwood in a box beneath his bed so he could savor their fragrance. At the end, when his eyes failed and he could no longer build cabinets, he made hand planes — by feel, by touch, by the knowledge that lives in the hands after a lifetime of reading grain.
Nakashima conceived his Altars for Peace — monumental tables carved from extraordinary walnut logs, placed across continents as gathering places. Tables where people who disagree might sit together. Tables where the grain is visible, the natural edge preserved, the imperfections honored. He died before all of them were placed. His daughter continues the work.
Mira Nakashima said, when asked how she would summarize what the studio does: “No longer a catalog, but an intimate window into how and why we do what we do.” She replaced the product catalog with a process book. Not what we make, but how we make. Not the outcome, but the practice. The practice is the thing.
This “Reading the Grain” essay was supposed to be about woodworking. It turned out to be about snow.
Formation is the practice of building conditions for something you cannot control. The room, the table, the presence, the question that is not on the form — these are the conditions. The frequency is the snow. It falls when it falls. And the only thing you can do — the only thing that has ever worked, in thirty years of building rooms — is to be present when it does. To be the kind of maker who is still holding the wood when the light changes. To be the kind of practitioner who is still in the room when the young person finally says the true thing. To be the kind of parent who drives the minivan to the driveway at ten o’clock on a school night and does not start the car.
Not that perfect symmetry. Always something alive.
The grain varies. The joinery is universal. And the snow — the snow is the frequency, falling.
Paul Tan is the founder of Good Protocols, SPC, and the author of True Frequency: Finding the Sound Every Person Carries, forthcoming. He has spent thirty years building formation environments for young adults, immigrant and refugee families, and neurodivergent communities in the Puget Sound region.