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.

Plying

Plying upon surfaces that shift with the winds,
that carry us everywhere and nowhere
as they toy with our sense of solidity,
we create furrows that appear,
and disappear within our lives.
We leave no trace within these spaces,
yet we can carve them
upon presents and futures,
lingerings of moments
that tell upon our time.

Seeing new

It was like I got a whole new perspective on and appreciation for life the other day...

I read about the spoon theory.   It tells of a view of a spoon being like a miracle of a chance to experience life.  When you are healthy, your days are loaded with spoons.  When you're sick, or disabled, the amount of spoons become more and more limited.  And when there are very few spoons possible for use, the choice of the spoon you choose becomes more and more important.

I thought about my aunt Elaine, who had died years back and who had been having to make important spoon sorts of decisions for many years - every day deciding what it was that was essential, important, maybe good and right and just what was the thing to do.

I take up one of my "goofy spoons".  I look at its essence of curves, grains, edges.  I feel its flow in my hands. One of many miracles.  I walk in the forest.  I look in the trees - a limitlessness of potential.  I look in my workroom where there are piles of not-quite-spoons in all stages of process.

How many "spoons" do we let go of, every day, for lack of appreciating their beauty, for lack of acknowledging that we are given these as so many simple gifts?..

Sharpness

It's an incredible act of faith and determination to take a sharp-edged piece of steel into your hands and place that edge into another solid substance with the intention of providing that other substance with a renewed shape. 

In the moment just before the sharp edge meets wood grain, a thousand decisions are made.

It reminds me of that moment in the movie Apollo 13 when they need to determine the precise angle at which they'll slam into the earth's atmosphere.  The slightest error would have caused them to burn to ash.  They would have existed no more.

In the moment just before the sharp edge meets wood grain,a wondrous sense of faith pervades - the unwavering sense of faith in the solidity of both objects.