I closed my eyes

Many years back, I was living in a cabin a few miles from a small coastal town.  When there were low tides in the early mornings I would walk to town along the shoreline.  There was a large expanse of tidal flats where I could walk way, way out beyond the high tide mark, cross a river and continue onwards.

On one of these walks one morning, I decided to close my eyes and count one hundred steps.  There was only the flat expanse of exposed shoreline there ahead of me, and that river crossing somewhere up ahead.  I figured that the river crossing was much farther away than one hundred steps, and I began walking.

The experience was one of amazement, wonder and even a small tinge of what I might admit to as terror.  I refused to open my eyes until I had walked that one hundred steps.  During those steps, I imagined so many things, felt so many things, heard so many things, smelled so many things.  I felt what I now describe as a renewed texture of each moment, each step.

Over these many years, I have taken many types of one hundred step walks.  Out in my kayak, I have closed my eyes and paddled for one hundred seconds.  In the Arizona desert, I plugged my ears and watched an early morning rainstorm in perfect silence as I counted one hundred raindrops fall upon my face.  I have run around in a snowstorm like a crazed, giddy child catching one hundred snowflakes on my tongue.  I chewed a small almond one hundred times. I gauged one hundred sips of a cup of tea. And once, I read one beautiful sentence one hundred times aloud.

Last week I put a new door handle on my sauna.  It is made from a piece of wood from a branch of a tree that I spent weeks roaming the forest looking for.  There had been an old metal handle on the door, that had been attached with two bolts.  I needed to find a piece of wood that perfectly matched the holes of those two bolts.  I finally, I think, found it.

As I was taking the bark off the bend of wood and starting to whittle it down, I thought of all of those many one hundred step times in my past.  What emerged was a thought that I would identify the one small area where my fingers would linger the most on that handle while opening the door or closing the door, and I would try to merge a smoothness on the backside of the handle - the invisible side facing the door - with a roughness on the front side, so that every time I opened or closed the door, I could rest my fingers on that spot, actually, as it turns out, rest one finger - as it tuns out, the middle finger on my right hand - there in that space of transition, and allow it to feel that moment, that sense of flow, that question, that answer, that music, that whisper, that taste of the most wondrous slightness of hint of sapphron in a cup of tea, that smell of sea amidst endlessness...

I'm sure I have already done it a hundred times, but am not counting this time.

from times past yet still with us

Spoons made across centuries still inspire, the wood still remains beautiful.  I would hope that hands of this time can still work in similar ways, to create a similar simplicity of beauty?

pre-view

One early morning in Connecticut within the haze of another summer day's not quite yet sunrise, I went outside to feel the cool air, the stillness, the ache of the first hints of humidity. I carried a small wooden spoon with me.

I had just finished the spoon the night before.  I had set it upon the table after feeling its smoothness, not looking at it but only feeling it.  And then I had gone to sleep.

In the morning I picked it up and brought it outside with me, still not looking at it, still only sensing its presence, there within my hand, as smoothness, as sway of form, as various arches and rolls.  It felt good; soothing.  I placed it down upon the ground where there was a small tuft of grass, and then, finally, peacefully, looked at it.  When my eyes first rested upon it, I did not see the spoon as a whole entity, but I saw what can be described as a blending of various aspects of sight -there was no spoon as such, but only some sense of it within a sense of the morning, the light, even the smells of the morning's emerging humidity and the touch of tightness of air that seems to come with that humidity.

There seemed somehow to be a similarity of placement of those aspects of presence to when I had physically placed the spoon on the ground. The placement of a physical object.  The placement of sense.  Yes, it was mostly sight.  But there was that moment of everything coming together before quite all being together...

It's like when you're making a puzzle - when there are still many "unplaced" pieces lying around but you are nevertheless able to get a sense of what the fullness of the image will be, and can sense the placement of those unplaced pieces even as you sense the disjointedness of something not-yet-complete.  It's like when you're in a situation in life when things are not quite working out as you had "first envisioned" but there is a feeling of things coming together - you can't quite place each individual activity within any real sense of clarity but there is a feeling of them all being there in motion, forming a sense of commonality of movement towards something, if not clearly envisioned, at least felt as being there ahead.  We might stop at some point to assess what there is, and we might even be able to believe that we can identify each and every activity that is there in motion.  But most times it might be that we scan upon it all and "sense" those individual activities, those individual moments.

We live our lives within billions of these acts of placement yet probably already when we are still quite young,  all of these individual acts become blended, melded, within a sense of flow.  

Yet each act, each moment, has its own magical aspect.

Sometimes, I would guess most times, we search out the act, the moment, that makes most sense - we stop upon the image that contains things that are understandable, palatable, able to be placed within a sense of recognition and, many times, an "ease of meaning".  We feel good when the moment is one of something that takes us into a space of what we feel comfortable taking in - we stop upon the view of two chairs set there in front of a window rather than upon the view of a slightness of shadow along the floor that intersects with a carpet that is a bit crumpled.  

Yet that second moment, that second view, which is maybe the pre-view, the view our eyes move past to settle upon the ease of meaning of the two chairs, has its own sense of moment - if not easeful meaning, then an off-ness of how we might place meaning.  In that pre-view there is another sense.

Anticipatory physicality

Instinctual, beyond reason, we sometimes have a sense of things - a sense of not having to place everything within a framework of reason, or even within the limitation of the usual five senses of this five-sensed world…  

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to really touch something without “actually” touching, but to acknowledge that there is more happening within space and time than what we rationally or even sensually tend to acknowledge.  I see carving as a way to move within this instinctual space.  

One person has written of Kandinsky's works: "There was no question of looking for representation; a harmony had been set up, and that was enough."  "Kandinsky is painting music. That is to say, he has broken down the barrier between music and painting, and has isolated the pure emotion which, for want of a better name, we call the artistic emotion."

Then there's Jackson Pollock:  "When you look at a Pollock don't worry about what it is about. It is not about what we want it to be. When you look at a Pollock, you should be appreciating what art essentially is; you should be appreciating the freedom of the lines, the thick impasto of the drips that refused to stop embracing each other, the intersection of colours, the beautiful dynamism."  

It gets me thinking that there are innate patterns of expression within each of us - not only emotional but also functional and structural, as in bodily movement, a sense of physical flow... There is a movement I find myself tending towards when I carve.  I search out pieces of wood that somehow hold this also within, as if as an anticipatory physicality.  So when I carve, this movement, this flow, emerges naturally, because the physicality of the wood and my self are aligned in ways that allow me to share my movement within the wood even as I respect the wood's own flow, because I have tried to match our physicalities as well as possible within an instinctual space that has us maintain a wondrous freedom of movement and exploration even as we work towards harmony together...

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? 

Nova Scotia pine

I was walking along a beach on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, the wind blowing so strongly that I needed to lean into it and push myself forward as if stepping upwards even as I was moving along very level terrain.  It's the way I felt about the piece of wood I found - driftwood pine, leaning itself into a huge pile of snow-encrusted seaweed at the high tide line.  There was a bend at its point of most leaning, as if it had been there for a hundred years slowly forming into that seaweed mound, perfectly placed there upon its bend.  There seemed to be such a bend as to effect a circularity within, possibly deep within the grain, and I picked up the piece of driftwood and attached it to my backpack, and when I placed the backpack on my back, I felt its own leaning, forming and we all leaned into the wind together.