Wood, finely carved

There was a recent article about wooden buildings. 

The last paragraph was:  "Wood is also pleasant for both mind and body. It creates an agreeable acoustic and visual environment, evens out the moisture variations in indoor air and, according to studies, even calms pulse rates."

I thought about what will be inside these constructs.  Will there be wooden tables, chairs, lamps, bowls, spoons?  Will these aspects of spacial existence also be taken into account as points of balance within the experience of those moving through the zones established by the placement of everything around?

I would venture to say that a finely carved spoon can calm one's pulse rate.  And I would also venture to say that carving finely also calms one's pulse rate while establishing a sense of balance, acoustic, visual, tactile, temporal...

When I was (1)

When I was hanging by one hand gripping a thorny vine that should never have held my weight, I looked down my armpit into a chasm that seemed to understand that it held my death.  I had been climbing a mountain to go deer hunting, my rifle slung over my shoulder, shell in the chamber, the steepness becoming a cliff, I was going the wrong way up but was too stubborn to turn back.  Something inside me urged me on.  Crazed idiocy disguised as confused determination.  There was no way up.

I had taken hold of the vine to maintain my balance as I tried to look around a corner to search for a next foothold, but all I found was emptiness and I slipped, and slowly swung out over the chasm like being taken through a door that was more outside than inside, opening to a space that invited me with a pleasant carress of an assurance that it would be fast and easy and painless and good and right.  But for some reason the thin vine held me there suspended and somehow I reached out with my toe and caught upon solidity and somehow the ever so slight movement and ever so slight touch of my toe allowed me to swing back.  There had been nothing but calmness, nothing but the knowledge that I would not accept that invitation.  I came back for a reason.

When I place my hand upon the thinnest possible spoon handle that I can create, I remember that moment of suspension.  I remember that invitation.  And I remember that calmness.  That last tiny touch upon that last possible point of contact with the last essence of solidity upon that spoon.  If I let go, it is the spoon that falls.

Salt

I really have to wonder about this thing.

Someone has spent so much time and effort and innovative compulsion to create a spoon that monitors the salt content of soup, and when I think about it, well, it sort of makes sense, but not really for me, because I pretty much stopped using salt a few years ago, and if I want to check my soup I tend to make the effort to raise the spoon to my mouth.  But I guess there are those who have lost their sense of salt-taste because they use too much of it and some might say that if that's the case maybe it would do them well to stop using such a dangerous substance.

A spoon for tasting soup might be slender so that it could be held with two fingers, index finger and thumb, held suspended until the weight of the soup would tip the spoon downwards and build pressure on the thumb.  A fine balance to be effected.

There are many such balances within our lives as we reach out with hands, spoons, minds and words to contain...

Perfection

I would guess that we all have some concept of perfection.  For some maybe it's a view of a physical form, like a spoon, its sense of being just right, feeling just right, looking just right.  Maybe it's the functional value of that object - it gets the job done. Perfect and there you have it.  For some it might be a perception of one's action, or that action within the context of a response, like doing something, the feeling of doing it or the sense of having someone else acknowledge what you're doing.  For some there might be some moral aspect, perfection in the overall goodness of an action or the outcome of an action.  For some it might be something about naturalness, a feeling that something is just as it should be.  For some it might just be a feeling of relief, that you can finally rest, breathe in and relax knowing that you've done the best you can, have gotten as realistically close to perfection as you can ever possibly get, so that's that, enjoy. 

A hand moves along a surface.  An eye moves along a surface.  Breath moves along a surface.  Maybe the surface itself is moving, seeing, breathing back.

Sleepwalking

The surface of the earth has these trees like stubble of a two-day growth of a beard on a face of a man who just wants to let things be for a bit.  Sometimes he shaves. 

These days, a lot of days I walk through areas where there used to be forest.  Most times I don't wonder why or why not there are or are not trees.  And I don't feel any sense of sadness that they're gone.  I can already see the new-growth emerging.  It's a different landscape that necessitates a different way of seeing and moving.

Back when there had been forest, there had been days when I would try to feel lost even as I pretty much new that I would be able to suss out every slant of every incline that carried itself into the next all too well-known space, every group of trees with their indicative postures and alignments of bends and twists and branch-cast configurations; nevertheless, for lack of any better way to bring some disorientation into my life, because at the time it was a pretty straightforward sort of existence back in the days when there were trees, I would try to confuse myself, try to feel like I didn't know where I was going, but I always knew where I was going, until the day I didn't.

It was a cloudy late autumn day, so the sun was up there in a pasty sort of vagueness and I went up a hill blind-stepping, sleepwalking, not worrying, not facilitating any sense of awareness beyond the acknowledgement of placing my feet one footfall at a time upon what I would have told myself were well-worn spaces.  I was looking at trees that I had looked at hundreds of times but still trying to see something there that I may not have seen any other time, like believing that trees could change, and maybe they do, and I would look at the branches and wonder if there was something there to see beyond what I had already seen, and many times I saw something different but not usually what I thought I wanted to see.

And then I went over a ridge, down and around and looked at the sky that was slowly darkening and had a sinking feeling that if I ever did in fact get lost in a moment like that the sun wouldn't be any help at all because it was everywhere and nowhere and offered no clue at all about direction.

And I took a step and looked up at a tree that seemed to be a tree that I had never seen before.  Ever.  I walked around it and wondered at its magnificent strangeness, and then felt a sinking feeling of thinking that maybe this was a tree that I had never seen, but how could that be, I thought, this forest was not so big, I had been walking within it for years...

And then I saw myself standing there as if from a mile above myself, and placed a landscape around me, with paths and roads that were paths and roads that I knew were somewhere near, and I assured myself that I could walk in any direction and find my way back to somewhere if I could in fact keep myself walking in a straight line.

I started walking in a straight line.  It was not long before I got back to familiar space.  But I have never found that tree again.

The one for the time-being

I have all of these goofy spoons lying around the place like some lazy slobs of last lingerers of some forgotten party.  They're looking relaxed, easeful in their lack of any seeming need to do anything even close anything that would have some hint of that reek of practicality that most of the "other" spoons tend to effuse... 

And there's this one particular one that's doing more "just being" than the others, just being what it is, there to be seen, gazed upon, left to be where it rests in all of its purposeless glory.  It's the one my eyes catch most of the time.  Or is it the other way around, this curved carved solidity catching my eyes like my eyes are intrigued with this sense of just being, like some allegory of some exemplary case of what Plato pinned as the imitators of imitators, the artists who mimic what has been created by the craftsmen who have themselves imitated what, essentially, God had already crafted... 

So is it that I want to say that I created something that imitates what God created as an "essence of artist"?  Which would be the first imitation, which would make me a craftsman?  Or am I already into the realm of the second sort of imitation, taking up the spoon that has been created from God's idea of spoon-ness that has nevertheless been somehow tossed to the winds of reason and landed as something other-than-practical-tending-spoon? 

It's just there.  It would be so different if it looked like it was waiting to do something more than just be there.  And I had to try - I took it up to see if I could actually use it as a spoon.  I could.

Shadow and Truth

Someone might suggest that truth is a representation of things as they are.  Sure, someone else might say, that statement might very well hold some element of truth.  Someone else might ask where then, do shadows begin and end - some trick of light, a play of sight, a toying of thought, ways that we carry our understandings across stretches of our many questions of what is what, wondering if truth is within the holding of so many varieties and flavors of the day's offerings of senses of solidity as we sense our passing upon things of what we like to call a physical sort of reality, even as we feel that whisper of shadow within a breath's moment of being so close as to become part of that breath, but don't let it fool you, don't let it take you too far away if what keeps your mind quiet is the moment, not the shadow?