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...