Inner transformation

Where do we go, what activities do we do, what interactions do we take part in that takes us into spaces of transformation? 
Generosity allows for many points of access.

The character of searching

What begins as a journey of the sharpness of a blade searching out the last moment of surface emerges as an exploration of your own character of searching, the wood, in effect, becoming more and more accentuated towards your own existence. 

The warmth of your body wraps itself around that whisper of substance, the last vestiges of any solid sense nestling there like a trusting child cuddling upon your chest as you both lie down to take an easeful, restful sleep. 

And you dream.

But at some point you need to stop. 

In shaping solidity, in moving towards an ultimate end of carving down to nothing, at some point all that remains on that other side is your own skin.

Crescent and Other Moons

I could try to convince myself that it could have been otherwise, could have been held within its original hue of wholeness, but the truth is that right that evening on a waxing moon the shadows belied solidity and there was a slight breeze within the depths of the forest that seemed to calm all need for further deliberation about whether a tiny hint of a crack in the thinnest part of the bowl, a hint that might not even have been a hint should be a cause for worry. I decided to explore it and moved deeper and deeper as if following the breeze that was urging the moon's brightness to ride the entangled branches and ended up with a sense of space that allowed me to smile at its whimsical challenge to what we might "ordinarily" think of as a bowl just as we might accept all phases of our moons within their own sense of containing fullness, wholeness, completeness.

Circularity

She laughed when I told her how it might be best to roll the spoon between her thumb and index finger so that it kind of easefully rotated. "I've never had instructions on how to hold a spoon before," she said.

But there's something to getting some insight into various ways to bring yourself to and into an external shape.   Take for instance a sythe.  I would think that most people when they first pick up a sythe and go to swing it, they move in a way that seems natural to a human body but is not actually most optimal for the movement of the sythe blade for smooth cutting.  The movement that best creates rhythmic cutting is a bit, well, against first logic, seems somewhat ungainly when first attempted. But over time, the movement becomes one with the body, the blade and handle communicate their logic and there is an ongoingness of flow that's established.

It's the same with a spoon, or with some spoons, to some extent.  The wood, though, needs to have the qualities within that allow the carver to bring out that communication.  If you force a circle into a straight grain, at some point there's going to be a spot where the grain just doesn't hold.

It begins with the search, effecting that sense of a rolling, rotating, circularity of motion, feeling with sight, flowing with thought into the potential of the form.

Patterns within the tree limbs can be seen as pointing towards these potentials, but that's another thing...

Bandsaw

A bandsaw can be fascinating – in the sense of entwining and captivating our attention within its way of cutting through wood so easily…

I was using a bandsaw.  I was enthralled… I was cutting wood like it was butter.  I was thoroughly enjoying the way I could create swirls, shapes, concave and convex bends, then shave off tidbits of excess, round edges, trim ends and take a surface down to the most minute essence of thinness…   

But then I went back to using a few of my knives and got wondering if it wasn’t all just a distraction…  Because I noticed that with the knives I was moving with the wood very differently – I was seeing "it", rather than seeing a shape other than what was there…  With the bandsaw, I had been cutting shapes that I was imagining in my mind.  With the knives, I was exploring what was in the wood

…   

The time it took to use the knife was an important thing, I noticed – it allowed me to acknowledge many aspects of what was there right before my eyes…  I would move within and through and around the grain and angles and knots to see how to develop what was in a sense making itself known to me there within my exploration.

Whereas with the bandsaw, I was… cutting.   

How often do we allow ourselves to let this happen to us within our everyday lives – take the bandsaw approach to the world around us, rip and tear at the substance of existence to create what we envision to be what is there to be created…  Rather than moving within the flow of what is there to be experienced, and working through its fluidity to discover how it might be creating itself for our own way of experiencing it?...

Why does everyone want to turn on the lights?

So many times it seems that when I'm carving it's when the day is moving on towards dusk - like I've acknowledged that all the everythings of the physical day to day world have been sufficiently acknowledged and I can set them aside for a while as I slip into the fluidity and timelessness of some assumed surface of wood...
I start to move within that momentless moment of carrying myself into the essence of senses I get, I see a spoon, I see movement...  The world moves on.
Many times, before I know it, it's dark - but not the darkness of not being able to see, but of a different sort of light...  The shadows of the curves upon the wood become alive within the light that is there- there is always light.
And then sometimes someone walks into that world and asks if I want the light on.
It's as if asking me to blink away a dream.  I don't want to blink; I can either try to keep my eyes open, or hold them closed.  The seeing within the moments with working with wood in those dusky not quite darknesses of not quite days is more like the ease of holding my eyes closed - I do not fight anything, I just rest there, but it's not anything being closed, but of everything being open.  And it's not a dream; it's me, and the fluidity of the spoon carries over into my existence just as much as my existence carries over into that fluidity...

The boundary of "I"

I was thinking about how a certain shape is carved upon the surface of wood and got wondering how I could envision what might be a sort of mental-physical-emotional dynamic that moves between the way we formulate a shape in our mind and feel it in our body and the way that shape slowly emerges within a piece of wood... 

How might any sort of connection being made from the mind to our hands to our movements to the surface and what might be extended to the "essence" of the wood be conceptualized?

Well, I started to explore if there has been any research done in this area, found some research on primitive tool use, and got enthralled with some of the writings that were exploring the question of who the "conscious individuals" were who for instance shaped the first hand axes out of stone.

Within an exploration of a question about self-consciousness (when did man begin to regard himself as the source of his own decisions), there was an interesting suggestion that "...the boundary of this ‘I’ may be changeable and extendable to the outside world rather than fixed at the surface of the skin..."

When working with wood, using a knife, saw, chisel, sandpaper, file or whatever means of "tending that wood towards a sense of a self-imagined shape, there is always that self being projected upon that solidity.  How much is translated over?

Oak revisited

I recently gave a spoon to a friend for his wedding.  To me, it has always been a spoon of balance and a spoon of sharing - the way it rests in your hand when you pass it to someone else has a sense of floating between that moment of grasping and the moment of losing one's grasp, which is like one aspect of every moment of letting go of anything we pass along, which is never really letting go as much as the sharing of an experience.  And we might realize that the material object is nothing compared to the feeling shared in the passing on...

The spoon is also a spoon of oak.  Its surface texture seemed "large"; at times I remember thinking that they felt a bit cumbersome, like the surface of the hands of a man who has been working the land for decades yet which possess the sensitivity of an evening's reassurances to a child when saying good night.

The texture got me thinking of the growth rings of this particular piece of wood, which seemed quite large, and I got wondering if a slower-growing oak tree would be more amenable to a smoother surface, which got me thinking about how a tree's environment plays a very direct role in its shape and feel. 

And then I thought about the experience of passing on what is essentially a material manifestation of the process of growth, as important as knowledge, or forgiveness, or love...

Alive together

I don't know why this particular spoon has given me so much of a sense of peace. 
It has me feel lightness.  It has me feel goodness.
I have taken the surface all the way to 2000 grit and have enjoyed the journey like a journey of calmness and easeful breathing.
I have not hurried, I have not worried myself towards its completion.
It has been itself and has allowed me space for my own sense of self within it. 
When I hold it between my fingers, I can feel my pulse through the woodgrain.
It is as if we are alive together within the wood.

Touch

Touch 
is not necessarily 
about physical proximity, 
just as light 
is not necessarily 
about visual dexterity...

Beech

There was a magnificent beech tree growing on the main lawn at my high school when I was attending there.  I have fond memories of that tree; it was a peripheral aspect of some defining moments in my teenage years.  For instance, it was the tree under which a girl accepted my invitation to go to the high school prom with me...  Ah the memories.

Sometime in the past year or so, this tree was cut down, but my father saved a few pieces of the trunk wood.  Just recently, my father showed me these pieces.  When I picked them up I have to admit that I wasn't so impressed; they felt a bit punky, seeemed overly light, like pine gets when starting to get dry-rot.  The splits were not even, which seemed to indicate that the wood did not have "integrity".

But I decided to work on it anyways.  And what began emerging was not only a discovery of its true essence of property, but a journey into the nature of Beech both as a substance and as a subject of lore.

Beech is a wonderful wood, soft yet hard, with a sort of cross-grained depth that seems similar to what's translated from Finnish as "stressed birch".  When carving into its grains, it develops a sense of a cross-hatched weave of a very subtle sense of strength.

In tree-lore, Beech is known as the tree of learning, symbolizing change that arises from realization.

For me, this is a very appropriate wood as I move through my own spaces of learning, change and realization.  Somehow, the balance of these evokes within me a challenge of a "thinness" of my perception of surfaces.

What is a surface?  What holds a surface together?  When are we below a surface and when are we upon it?  When are we moving through it or within it?  Is there ever really a point of demarcation where we can say this is its end?  Or do we always ever move within that thinness of a perception of what we might define as solidity for lack of any better way of describing the experience of physically seeing, approaching and meeting "things"...

Sharpness and shavings and the third element

Many times it feels that a steel blade takes some time to grow accustomed to the wood it works upon...

For instance, when you first take up a knife and place it on the surface of a piece of wood, it seems that it is distant to that wood...  Standoffish..  Awkward...  Like a child trying to hide confusion underneath the veneer of a haughty sort of disinterest...  The wood shavings that are drawn from the wood are just as awkward, flaking off with no sense of grace...

Slowly, the blade seems to "warm to the wood" and starts to slide through the grain more easily; the hand holding the blade gets more comfortable, the wood merges into the movement, and the shavings begin to show signs of softening towards a dancing sense of flow...

Like with many relationships, the merging of motion of a steel blade and a piece of wood does not necessarily build upon solidity, but upon the warmth of their flow of exploration towards the moment of a peaceful coexistence, when their elements can find ease, possibly even rest, within the simplicity of their dance of joined purpose.

Sometimes it's nice to take the piece of wood and the knife and hold them together for some moments of time.  The third element, hands, bringing their own warmth to the dance...

a greater completion

I started another spoon today, to mirror the first leaf of spring, which will, in some way, in this second spoon, be brought to a nearness of a sense of a greater completion of a thought, a mood, a feeling, a way of perception that continues to evolve...  This one will be fine...  With a fineness of flow of peaceful movement, like just what I feel I need to keep telling myself to keep in mind every day...

Spring

I went for a walk in the woods and stopped to look at buds beginning to show on one of the trees.  Looking closely, I caught a sense of the buds already looking very much like the leaves they would soon become, miniature resemblences of their future emergence to fullness.

It was like journeying into a moment of the emergence of eternity - the core of the essence of the future of anything as understood within the smallest of details, every moment as a fleeting moment of a next emergence. 

It is so easy to get distracted by physical solidities, but this physical world offers millions of windows to the eternities.

Context

In his Nobel Prize lecture in 2002, Daniel Kahneman spoke about research he had been doing on intuition.  Reading through his speech, one drawing caught my eye:

"Ambiguous stimulus that is perceived as a letter in a context of letters is seen as a number in a context of numbers."

It's interesting how often this seems to occur in everyday life.

For example, I have come to see many objects in the context of spoons.  I look for spoons, I see spoons.  It's nice actually.  I like the discovery, the searching, the wash of sight across the visual world, the flow of touch upon surfaces. 

I was looking at a piece of wood the other day - my neighbor had cut down a tree and he let me work my way through the branches.  He knows about my "spoon-thing" and was amused to watch me step through the piles like a kid on a shoreline looking for seashells.  Treasure.  Messages in bottles.  Ancient pirate medallions.

I eyed one branch.  Sure, I thought.  Yes.  Nothing ambiguous.  It was nice.

Plying

Plying upon surfaces that shift with the winds,
that carry us everywhere and nowhere
as they toy with our sense of solidity,
we create furrows that appear,
and disappear within our lives.
We leave no trace within these spaces,
yet we can carve them
upon presents and futures,
lingerings of moments
that tell upon our time.