Sheens

I walked along a shoreline looking at the rocks that have been tumbling for ages.  Embedded within them were various pieces of wood, some driven so deeply into the high tide line it seemed as if they had grown there. Some, it seemed, had actually grown there, maybe before the tides carried the rocks up around them, back before the land was claimed by the sea's reach.  Trunks left standing dead, and isn't it great, I thought, that they have maintained their place even in their last years of existence, maybe not dead from a perspective that there is an ongoing existence, flow and exchange of physical stuff on this earth...


And then there was the driftwood.  There was one piece of birch that must have floated in on the last storm's seas.  I saw it from a distance - the bark was shimmering in the late afternoon's glow.  I didn't remember seeing that sort of birch around in the area, but there is, supposedly, a prevalence of birch, white birch, along the shorelines of Nova Scotia.

I brought the piece back with me, back to my own shoreline of existence, flow and exchange.  To eplore into a piece of wood to effect it into a different form is not much different from time transforming a tree upon a shoreline?

We reside on so many edges, within so many lees, exposed stretches of openness, surrounded by a constant interchange of materiality, eperiencing so many levels of sheen of surfaces.  To "know" or to move within are different aspects of the same thing?

As if knocking on rock butter

Some will say that there is more to a tree's growth rings than an indication of years passing.  They'll tell you that the rings do not always tell the whole truth - sometimes a tree can grow two rings in a year, sometimes there will not be one for a couple years.  But something that seems to hold true is the fact that on good years the rings are larger and on tough struggling years the rings are smaller.

If the rings on trees along the Nova Scotia coastline are an indication of the years that have passed, they tell a story of a very harsh reality.  The struggle to grow shows within the almost unseen thin lines of rings in the trees that I've happened to be able to glimpse at.  I cut into one deadfall a few days back, it was like rock-butter, a solidity of resin that effused such an amazing scent.  I took one piece back to the garage and have been working my way into it, marveling at the seeming lack of any real sense of distance between each ring.  It is as if they have become bonded by the resin that is there, leaving almost no trace of singularity.

There is a slight shade of an outreaching tendency where an ingrown branch was entombed.  I knocked on the space of the shadow and heard a very uniquely soft hardness...  I have heard that sound before but I cannot place it.  I'm hoping that the sound will remain within the wood as I continue to move within it. Was it a wooden box, a cup, a bowl, a spoon, a wooden statue or figurine?  A boat bow?  A child's toy?  A stray piece of lumber, a staircase railing, a branch along a trail?