Is it what it is?

I've thought a lot about what I do when I take a piece of wood and begin exploring it, and wonder if my predilection towards envisioning spoons within that piece of wood is founded on anything more than a need to just be looking for "something"?...

Is it possible to carve a piece of wood with absolutely no sense of a feeling that even a peripheral aspect of the act of carving is to create a "thing"?

To take up a piece of wood and a knife and to run the blade upon the surface of what is there to run along, or to hold the knife and run the piece of wood along that sharpness - what happened when there is nothing more than that?

Well, actually, I've done that exercise many times...  I have taken a piece of wood, spend a long time looking at it trying to get a sense of what its innerness holds... the way the grains flow, how various aspects of its growth have affected the way the grains veer from straightness, how some woods just don't have that straightness anyways...  And to move with the blade, two hands holding two aspects of this supposedly so solid world and effecting movement, the knife like a ship plying the endlessness of seas that fold their fluidity around the plying bow...

What has tended to emerge within these exercises have been various curves.  Maybe because the grains of wood (at least the pieces of wood I end up using) do not tend typically towards straightness, and what naturally emerges is its own curving presence.  Maybe because the way I move my hands tends towards a curving sort of movement just naturally evokes curves.  Maybe because I like the beauty of the feel, of the sight, of those flowing curves.

And then to translate all of that over into an actual "recognizable thing" like a spoon - does it do justice to that whole mindset of exploring a naturally emerging innerness?  Does it preclude any true presence of the wood's own essence being discovered, manifested, celebrated?

I think life is balance - conversations with the potentials of balance.

A lot of people have asked me, "why spoons?"  Well, here's how it is - many years ago, I chose "spoons" as my symbol of all of the things we take up and use during the course of our days, our lives...  Every spoon I carve, every piece of wood within which I search out a spoon is a conversation with this physical world - about I, as the physical human being I am, searching for beauty within every moment of life, and exploring my physicality within the various concrete solidities of wood that I work with, converse with, discover beauty with, discover innerness with...