Teak's Way (2)

When I placed the knife blade against the wood, I went back in time...  I was siting by a river.   There was a piece of wood that was floating by and I scooped it out of the languidly flowing water.  Nothing was moving fast that day.  There was a lull to all of existance.

The piece of wood - a branch about wrist-thick - did not seem to have been in the water for long.  It seemed like it was green wood - wood that had not been away from its tree for very long.  Its end was of a wind-shorn sort of rip of strands.  I imagined the wind storm in the past night's darkness, and envisioned the branch straining to maintain itself against the pull of swind.  Maybe a larger branch had fallen upon it.

I looked closer.  Yes, there was a rip upon the bark, like something had been dashed upn it, maybe as it hit the ground, maybe to induce it to break and fall.  I felt like I could walk upstream and find the tree that it had been ripped from.

I moved the knife blade against the teak.  When I had mentioned to friends that I had gotten a piece of teak, they asked if it was actual teak - maybe it was acacia, they ventured.  But I had explored it and had come to the conclusion that it was actual teak.  Fine-grained, oily, smelling of leather.  The knife dug through some first initial grain, and like most times, I felt the blade warm to the wood, like it needed to gauge the wood for a few cuts before settling upon the texture of the rhythm - a texture of slow yet solid growth amidst a spectrum of seasons.  I felt like I could begin to see the tree.  What a majestic tree it must have been.

And I felt like I could begin to see a spoon.

Teak's Way (1)

A piece of teak, a knife, some time and a balcony on a side road in Bangalore, India.
I got this piece of teak from one of the sawmills here.   It seems to be authentic, actual teak, not acacia... 
This wood has a way about it - even in its present solidity, its form and structure, it seems to be telling me that there is thinness within it.  I'm not sure what that means.

A window

You open a window, the breeze feels just right;

please open it wide, or shut it up tight... 

I don't fear the breeze as much as its touch,

yet a fluttering sail never longed for so much...

Inner transformation

Where do we go, what activities do we do, what interactions do we take part in that takes us into spaces of transformation? 
Generosity allows for many points of access.

The character of searching

What begins as a journey of the sharpness of a blade searching out the last moment of surface emerges as an exploration of your own character of searching, the wood, in effect, becoming more and more accentuated towards your own existence. 

The warmth of your body wraps itself around that whisper of substance, the last vestiges of any solid sense nestling there like a trusting child cuddling upon your chest as you both lie down to take an easeful, restful sleep. 

And you dream.

But at some point you need to stop. 

In shaping solidity, in moving towards an ultimate end of carving down to nothing, at some point all that remains on that other side is your own skin.

Crescent and Other Moons

I could try to convince myself that it could have been otherwise, could have been held within its original hue of wholeness, but the truth is that right that evening on a waxing moon the shadows belied solidity and there was a slight breeze within the depths of the forest that seemed to calm all need for further deliberation about whether a tiny hint of a crack in the thinnest part of the bowl, a hint that might not even have been a hint should be a cause for worry. I decided to explore it and moved deeper and deeper as if following the breeze that was urging the moon's brightness to ride the entangled branches and ended up with a sense of space that allowed me to smile at its whimsical challenge to what we might "ordinarily" think of as a bowl just as we might accept all phases of our moons within their own sense of containing fullness, wholeness, completeness.

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...