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?...