Alive together

I don't know why this particular spoon has given me so much of a sense of peace. 
It has me feel lightness.  It has me feel goodness.
I have taken the surface all the way to 2000 grit and have enjoyed the journey like a journey of calmness and easeful breathing.
I have not hurried, I have not worried myself towards its completion.
It has been itself and has allowed me space for my own sense of self within it. 
When I hold it between my fingers, I can feel my pulse through the woodgrain.
It is as if we are alive together within the wood.

Touch

Touch 
is not necessarily 
about physical proximity, 
just as light 
is not necessarily 
about visual dexterity...

Beech

There was a magnificent beech tree growing on the main lawn at my high school when I was attending there.  I have fond memories of that tree; it was a peripheral aspect of some defining moments in my teenage years.  For instance, it was the tree under which a girl accepted my invitation to go to the high school prom with me...  Ah the memories.

Sometime in the past year or so, this tree was cut down, but my father saved a few pieces of the trunk wood.  Just recently, my father showed me these pieces.  When I picked them up I have to admit that I wasn't so impressed; they felt a bit punky, seeemed overly light, like pine gets when starting to get dry-rot.  The splits were not even, which seemed to indicate that the wood did not have "integrity".

But I decided to work on it anyways.  And what began emerging was not only a discovery of its true essence of property, but a journey into the nature of Beech both as a substance and as a subject of lore.

Beech is a wonderful wood, soft yet hard, with a sort of cross-grained depth that seems similar to what's translated from Finnish as "stressed birch".  When carving into its grains, it develops a sense of a cross-hatched weave of a very subtle sense of strength.

In tree-lore, Beech is known as the tree of learning, symbolizing change that arises from realization.

For me, this is a very appropriate wood as I move through my own spaces of learning, change and realization.  Somehow, the balance of these evokes within me a challenge of a "thinness" of my perception of surfaces.

What is a surface?  What holds a surface together?  When are we below a surface and when are we upon it?  When are we moving through it or within it?  Is there ever really a point of demarcation where we can say this is its end?  Or do we always ever move within that thinness of a perception of what we might define as solidity for lack of any better way of describing the experience of physically seeing, approaching and meeting "things"...

Sharpness and shavings and the third element

Many times it feels that a steel blade takes some time to grow accustomed to the wood it works upon...

For instance, when you first take up a knife and place it on the surface of a piece of wood, it seems that it is distant to that wood...  Standoffish..  Awkward...  Like a child trying to hide confusion underneath the veneer of a haughty sort of disinterest...  The wood shavings that are drawn from the wood are just as awkward, flaking off with no sense of grace...

Slowly, the blade seems to "warm to the wood" and starts to slide through the grain more easily; the hand holding the blade gets more comfortable, the wood merges into the movement, and the shavings begin to show signs of softening towards a dancing sense of flow...

Like with many relationships, the merging of motion of a steel blade and a piece of wood does not necessarily build upon solidity, but upon the warmth of their flow of exploration towards the moment of a peaceful coexistence, when their elements can find ease, possibly even rest, within the simplicity of their dance of joined purpose.

Sometimes it's nice to take the piece of wood and the knife and hold them together for some moments of time.  The third element, hands, bringing their own warmth to the dance...

a greater completion

I started another spoon today, to mirror the first leaf of spring, which will, in some way, in this second spoon, be brought to a nearness of a sense of a greater completion of a thought, a mood, a feeling, a way of perception that continues to evolve...  This one will be fine...  With a fineness of flow of peaceful movement, like just what I feel I need to keep telling myself to keep in mind every day...

Spring

I went for a walk in the woods and stopped to look at buds beginning to show on one of the trees.  Looking closely, I caught a sense of the buds already looking very much like the leaves they would soon become, miniature resemblences of their future emergence to fullness.

It was like journeying into a moment of the emergence of eternity - the core of the essence of the future of anything as understood within the smallest of details, every moment as a fleeting moment of a next emergence. 

It is so easy to get distracted by physical solidities, but this physical world offers millions of windows to the eternities.

Context

In his Nobel Prize lecture in 2002, Daniel Kahneman spoke about research he had been doing on intuition.  Reading through his speech, one drawing caught my eye:

"Ambiguous stimulus that is perceived as a letter in a context of letters is seen as a number in a context of numbers."

It's interesting how often this seems to occur in everyday life.

For example, I have come to see many objects in the context of spoons.  I look for spoons, I see spoons.  It's nice actually.  I like the discovery, the searching, the wash of sight across the visual world, the flow of touch upon surfaces. 

I was looking at a piece of wood the other day - my neighbor had cut down a tree and he let me work my way through the branches.  He knows about my "spoon-thing" and was amused to watch me step through the piles like a kid on a shoreline looking for seashells.  Treasure.  Messages in bottles.  Ancient pirate medallions.

I eyed one branch.  Sure, I thought.  Yes.  Nothing ambiguous.  It was nice.