The Willow and the Slow Morning

In a dew-soaked meadow at daybreak, an old maker of willow bows begins to teach three young visitors his craft, and one by one they slip away, each carrying home a fragment and believing it to be the whole. The old man works on alone, unhurried and untroubled, until the finished bow is lifted into the noon light, a quiet reminder that mastery lives in the patient hours nobody wants to sit through.