Your task is to make something with feeling. The following hints may get you on the right track. Try to make something which has a subdued feeling, something soft in spirit, something very unpretentious, easy-going, but orderly.
At the berkeley zen center we have a vegetable garden and it has a wooden gate. For my ornament, I wanted to add something to this gate to help knit it together and make it friendlier (following Christopher Alexander's admonition that ornament should connect different levels of scale). One can find my earliest sketches for this here:
gate
I abandoned that direction due to time considerations and wanting to make something subtle and quiet. Even a small window might've been to0 loud. So I made a wooden latch.
Before this project the gate had a metal latch that was only visible from the inside of the garden. I wanted to add a wooden latch with a little faceplate and a knob on the out-facing side of the gate.
At first I tried a bunch of knobs and faceplates willy-nilly trying to find some combination that had deep feeling:
I liked the round one the best so I picked a faceplate that didn't feel too bad and spent the last day of the project hurriedly carving the knob out of wood and assembling the latch.
I didn't feel great about this. Fortunately we were all asked to try again. I got some really good feedback, "Find a faceplate that fits the gate. Then make a knob that fits both." Dropping levels of scale one-by-one and focusing on one thing at a time..
So I made one. And shaved it thinner bit-by-bit. And tweaked the shape bit-by-bit. And then got this:
...which felt just right for the gate. Totally ordinary. Totally whole.
Then I had to make a knob that felt the same:
None of these quite had deep feeling. Then I went back to one I had tried earlier and oooo something moved in me. So I carved out a better version of one and..:
Now we have a little latch for our gate. Of course it broke as soon as the rain came and jammed everything up (and I never had time to fix it before I left sorry bzc)... looking at it again it looks a little weird but I think it felt soft and sweet in person...
Thank u Genpo for driving all over berkeley with me looking for a good branch to cut to make the knob.