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...