What has (the) water taught me?

(there is nothing to learn

there is everything to feel

as you are out on the water-crease)

teachers are everywhere

love is even more

there is an endlessness

to consider

and then the next moment

to deal with

you create a mindset of the ways

the water moves

it’s your creation

it’s your movement

and the water is right there

forever

within you and there

you can try to find it

you can imagine

finding it

there can be love stories

written by lovers

about how it was

tried to be found

find it

the movement

the creation

the love of bodies

as water flowing

upon and within

your existence

and water?

it has nothing to teach

Veering

Well, I pretty much knew that sooner or later I would begin to veer away from carving "only spoons"...  But actually I'm not sure if I need to say "away" because after all, it might just be that what I am doing is a sort of parallel exploration of the very same things I do when carving a spoon.

Take for instance a sculpture.  You begin with a piece of wood.  You look at it, you try to imagine the dynamic of the grain within, all the the different types of surprises that might emerge as you start to move your touch into the wood.

At first there might not even be a very clear idea of what you want to create.  At first there might be a thought, or a sense of something imagined.  At first there is the block of wood.  It might be a block of wind-curled pine from a tree that grew on the slope of a hill that overlooked a barren shoreline on the west coast of Finland.  There is beauty.  There is everything that can be imagined.

And you continue to move various blades upon the surface, and the surface begins to change its shape.  Flows begin to emerge.  They are the same flows, whether it's a spoon, a door handle or a woman's hip.  Everything flows, and the flows carry you further into the surfaces that continue to change with each caress...

The tree that is always there

You are the tree that rests in my mind

You are the forest, you are the glade

To the touch

You are the shadow made by the moon

A whispingly easeful laugh of such

Calm joy, the sigh

You are that sigh that does not smile

But smiles

Set by who knows who who knows when

You pour wine after dinner

As pure as giving, you slowly

Move the glass towards

That beautiful moment

When a rainbow hints

Of so much magic and then

You are no longer there

You are the tree that was

Always there

You are always there

I closed my eyes

Many years back, I was living in a cabin a few miles from a small coastal town.  When there were low tides in the early mornings I would walk to town along the shoreline.  There was a large expanse of tidal flats where I could walk way, way out beyond the high tide mark, cross a river and continue onwards.

On one of these walks one morning, I decided to close my eyes and count one hundred steps.  There was only the flat expanse of exposed shoreline there ahead of me, and that river crossing somewhere up ahead.  I figured that the river crossing was much farther away than one hundred steps, and I began walking.

The experience was one of amazement, wonder and even a small tinge of what I might admit to as terror.  I refused to open my eyes until I had walked that one hundred steps.  During those steps, I imagined so many things, felt so many things, heard so many things, smelled so many things.  I felt what I now describe as a renewed texture of each moment, each step.

Over these many years, I have taken many types of one hundred step walks.  Out in my kayak, I have closed my eyes and paddled for one hundred seconds.  In the Arizona desert, I plugged my ears and watched an early morning rainstorm in perfect silence as I counted one hundred raindrops fall upon my face.  I have run around in a snowstorm like a crazed, giddy child catching one hundred snowflakes on my tongue.  I chewed a small almond one hundred times. I gauged one hundred sips of a cup of tea. And once, I read one beautiful sentence one hundred times aloud.

Last week I put a new door handle on my sauna.  It is made from a piece of wood from a branch of a tree that I spent weeks roaming the forest looking for.  There had been an old metal handle on the door, that had been attached with two bolts.  I needed to find a piece of wood that perfectly matched the holes of those two bolts.  I finally, I think, found it.

As I was taking the bark off the bend of wood and starting to whittle it down, I thought of all of those many one hundred step times in my past.  What emerged was a thought that I would identify the one small area where my fingers would linger the most on that handle while opening the door or closing the door, and I would try to merge a smoothness on the backside of the handle - the invisible side facing the door - with a roughness on the front side, so that every time I opened or closed the door, I could rest my fingers on that spot, actually, as it turns out, rest one finger - as it tuns out, the middle finger on my right hand - there in that space of transition, and allow it to feel that moment, that sense of flow, that question, that answer, that music, that whisper, that taste of the most wondrous slightness of hint of sapphron in a cup of tea, that smell of sea amidst endlessness...

I'm sure I have already done it a hundred times, but am not counting this time.

from times past yet still with us

Spoons made across centuries still inspire, the wood still remains beautiful.  I would hope that hands of this time can still work in similar ways, to create a similar simplicity of beauty?

pre-view

One early morning in Connecticut within the haze of another summer day's not quite yet sunrise, I went outside to feel the cool air, the stillness, the ache of the first hints of humidity. I carried a small wooden spoon with me.

I had just finished the spoon the night before.  I had set it upon the table after feeling its smoothness, not looking at it but only feeling it.  And then I had gone to sleep.

In the morning I picked it up and brought it outside with me, still not looking at it, still only sensing its presence, there within my hand, as smoothness, as sway of form, as various arches and rolls.  It felt good; soothing.  I placed it down upon the ground where there was a small tuft of grass, and then, finally, peacefully, looked at it.  When my eyes first rested upon it, I did not see the spoon as a whole entity, but I saw what can be described as a blending of various aspects of sight -there was no spoon as such, but only some sense of it within a sense of the morning, the light, even the smells of the morning's emerging humidity and the touch of tightness of air that seems to come with that humidity.

There seemed somehow to be a similarity of placement of those aspects of presence to when I had physically placed the spoon on the ground. The placement of a physical object.  The placement of sense.  Yes, it was mostly sight.  But there was that moment of everything coming together before quite all being together...

It's like when you're making a puzzle - when there are still many "unplaced" pieces lying around but you are nevertheless able to get a sense of what the fullness of the image will be, and can sense the placement of those unplaced pieces even as you sense the disjointedness of something not-yet-complete.  It's like when you're in a situation in life when things are not quite working out as you had "first envisioned" but there is a feeling of things coming together - you can't quite place each individual activity within any real sense of clarity but there is a feeling of them all being there in motion, forming a sense of commonality of movement towards something, if not clearly envisioned, at least felt as being there ahead.  We might stop at some point to assess what there is, and we might even be able to believe that we can identify each and every activity that is there in motion.  But most times it might be that we scan upon it all and "sense" those individual activities, those individual moments.

We live our lives within billions of these acts of placement yet probably already when we are still quite young,  all of these individual acts become blended, melded, within a sense of flow.  

Yet each act, each moment, has its own magical aspect.

Sometimes, I would guess most times, we search out the act, the moment, that makes most sense - we stop upon the image that contains things that are understandable, palatable, able to be placed within a sense of recognition and, many times, an "ease of meaning".  We feel good when the moment is one of something that takes us into a space of what we feel comfortable taking in - we stop upon the view of two chairs set there in front of a window rather than upon the view of a slightness of shadow along the floor that intersects with a carpet that is a bit crumpled.  

Yet that second moment, that second view, which is maybe the pre-view, the view our eyes move past to settle upon the ease of meaning of the two chairs, has its own sense of moment - if not easeful meaning, then an off-ness of how we might place meaning.  In that pre-view there is another sense.

Anticipatory physicality

Instinctual, beyond reason, we sometimes have a sense of things - a sense of not having to place everything within a framework of reason, or even within the limitation of the usual five senses of this five-sensed world…  

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to really touch something without “actually” touching, but to acknowledge that there is more happening within space and time than what we rationally or even sensually tend to acknowledge.  I see carving as a way to move within this instinctual space.  

One person has written of Kandinsky's works: "There was no question of looking for representation; a harmony had been set up, and that was enough."  "Kandinsky is painting music. That is to say, he has broken down the barrier between music and painting, and has isolated the pure emotion which, for want of a better name, we call the artistic emotion."

Then there's Jackson Pollock:  "When you look at a Pollock don't worry about what it is about. It is not about what we want it to be. When you look at a Pollock, you should be appreciating what art essentially is; you should be appreciating the freedom of the lines, the thick impasto of the drips that refused to stop embracing each other, the intersection of colours, the beautiful dynamism."  

It gets me thinking that there are innate patterns of expression within each of us - not only emotional but also functional and structural, as in bodily movement, a sense of physical flow... There is a movement I find myself tending towards when I carve.  I search out pieces of wood that somehow hold this also within, as if as an anticipatory physicality.  So when I carve, this movement, this flow, emerges naturally, because the physicality of the wood and my self are aligned in ways that allow me to share my movement within the wood even as I respect the wood's own flow, because I have tried to match our physicalities as well as possible within an instinctual space that has us maintain a wondrous freedom of movement and exploration even as we work towards harmony together...