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?...
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