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...

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...