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?...

Why does everyone want to turn on the lights?

So many times it seems that when I'm carving it's when the day is moving on towards dusk - like I've acknowledged that all the everythings of the physical day to day world have been sufficiently acknowledged and I can set them aside for a while as I slip into the fluidity and timelessness of some assumed surface of wood...
I start to move within that momentless moment of carrying myself into the essence of senses I get, I see a spoon, I see movement...  The world moves on.
Many times, before I know it, it's dark - but not the darkness of not being able to see, but of a different sort of light...  The shadows of the curves upon the wood become alive within the light that is there- there is always light.
And then sometimes someone walks into that world and asks if I want the light on.
It's as if asking me to blink away a dream.  I don't want to blink; I can either try to keep my eyes open, or hold them closed.  The seeing within the moments with working with wood in those dusky not quite darknesses of not quite days is more like the ease of holding my eyes closed - I do not fight anything, I just rest there, but it's not anything being closed, but of everything being open.  And it's not a dream; it's me, and the fluidity of the spoon carries over into my existence just as much as my existence carries over into that fluidity...

The boundary of "I"

I was thinking about how a certain shape is carved upon the surface of wood and got wondering how I could envision what might be a sort of mental-physical-emotional dynamic that moves between the way we formulate a shape in our mind and feel it in our body and the way that shape slowly emerges within a piece of wood... 

How might any sort of connection being made from the mind to our hands to our movements to the surface and what might be extended to the "essence" of the wood be conceptualized?

Well, I started to explore if there has been any research done in this area, found some research on primitive tool use, and got enthralled with some of the writings that were exploring the question of who the "conscious individuals" were who for instance shaped the first hand axes out of stone.

Within an exploration of a question about self-consciousness (when did man begin to regard himself as the source of his own decisions), there was an interesting suggestion that "...the boundary of this ‘I’ may be changeable and extendable to the outside world rather than fixed at the surface of the skin..."

When working with wood, using a knife, saw, chisel, sandpaper, file or whatever means of "tending that wood towards a sense of a self-imagined shape, there is always that self being projected upon that solidity.  How much is translated over?

Oak revisited

I recently gave a spoon to a friend for his wedding.  To me, it has always been a spoon of balance and a spoon of sharing - the way it rests in your hand when you pass it to someone else has a sense of floating between that moment of grasping and the moment of losing one's grasp, which is like one aspect of every moment of letting go of anything we pass along, which is never really letting go as much as the sharing of an experience.  And we might realize that the material object is nothing compared to the feeling shared in the passing on...

The spoon is also a spoon of oak.  Its surface texture seemed "large"; at times I remember thinking that they felt a bit cumbersome, like the surface of the hands of a man who has been working the land for decades yet which possess the sensitivity of an evening's reassurances to a child when saying good night.

The texture got me thinking of the growth rings of this particular piece of wood, which seemed quite large, and I got wondering if a slower-growing oak tree would be more amenable to a smoother surface, which got me thinking about how a tree's environment plays a very direct role in its shape and feel. 

And then I thought about the experience of passing on what is essentially a material manifestation of the process of growth, as important as knowledge, or forgiveness, or love...

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"...