European weeping beech

Reverse-engineering restfulness

It's interesting how the thought of a particular aspect of a particular spoon gets into my head sometimes for instance in the early mornings like nestling into a soft space of warmth of half-waking and then lingers there throughout the day, nudging towards awareness, subtly blending in with the day's ongoingness like a shadow that for all practical purposes should not be there, but creates a nice kind of presence within all of the other plays of shadow upon the day.

The thought that got into my head today was about the bowl portion of a spoon I'm working on - what I call a thought spoon, whose sole (presently imagined) purpose will be to be held in my hand, meld into my hand and allow for simple moments of its not having to be anywhere else as I mentally, emotionally, sense-fully take in its shape of naturally melding simplicity of flow that, I'm imagining, will allow my thoughts to wander within a similar, parallel, maybe enmeshed sense of its own, or maybe a cojoined simplicity of restful flow...

From a certain perspective the spoon can be seen as the outcome of a process of reverse-engineering a hand-induced sense of restfulness...

Yeah, go that.

There's a bit of a challenge with the bowl - the wood presently stops at a point where I'm thinking it could so very easily have continued - that is, there does not seem to be enough wood at one particular point of the curve that arches from the handle down to the spoon's concave inner surface.  I've been thinking about that space of lack of wood for most of the day - not in any festering urge of constant bothersomeness, but in wash of breeze sort of way.  It keeps coming and going in that lingering nudge way...

So now I have a few free moments and will go explore that emptiness, which is also the sense of a potential for a smaller imagining.  What is my thumb meant to be doing there?  Can it rest elsewhere, which will be the where of a smaller space of flow?

I love my knife

Intention is like a child

I did not intend to carve two "musical spoons" for anything more than to have them be spoons for making music.  
I did not intend for them to take off on their own, like children, like a child - like their sound made together, their resonance, their way of being their own sense of musical creation - like a singularity, as if a child, heading out into an unknown, wondrous landscape that no parent can ever prepare them for...

But like children, like a child, the intention of their music has taken off.  It is beyond my grasp, even as I want to have some sense of it being something I can still feel close to.  But I am not close, but I am...

I received an email today from the woman who I had carved them for:

I just returned this morning after a wonderful concert in Trichy. It has been a wonderful experience not just for me, but for my whole team. While individually the spoon sound was great, neither of us was sure how it would complement the other sounds on stage. But it was simply beautiful. A very subtle yet very grounded sound. 

The concert was part of an initiative called 'Svanubhava', that takes classical music to children. So our audience comprised mostly school and college children. So it was an amazing opportunity for me to open out their imagination to a new sound and the possibility of imagining new instruments. This is the first time anything like this has been used in Carnatic music. The children showed a lot of interest. I seem to have had some influence on them. Many kids came and told me after the show that they wanted to go home and try. I also signed some autographs for the kids. The mridangam player's 6 year old daughter collected all forks and spoons from the dinner table last night and said she wanted to do a concert. It's just so heartening.  

उत्साहवर्धक   utsahavardhak

Passing them on

Well, it's happened. I've passed the spoons on to the woman who will use them in a concert in a few days.  When I met with her, she tried them out and didn't feel completely comfortable with them.  The handles were a but too wide and thick, the bottom of the spoon was a bit too thick, one of the handles was slightly too long...  So I got my knife and sandpaper and went to work.  She sat there patiently - not once fidgeting, not once taking out her mobile phone to sneak a glance...  It was impressive to see her serenity.

It took a while, but finally, everything was smoothed out and I handled them over to her.  "Are you sure you're ok giving them away?" she asked.  "They are like your babies."  I told her that they were not like anything that I felt I was giving away, but that they were just some aspect of the journey we are all on.

She played them for a while, tentatively trying them out in different ways.  And then she took off, the sounds took off, their future took off, the future took off...

Sweeping

Some will say that sandpaper is unnatural and that what is necessary is to smooth wood down with the edge of a blade - they will say that sandpaper tears at the fibers of the wood, creating an unnatural violence.  My feeling is that with sandpaper, the wood fibers are massaged, similar to how our muscles are massaged where well-practiced hands dig into those surprising points they discover...  Sometimes there is a feeling of a bit of pretty deep, unrelenting pain, but we make our way through it even as the hands continue to explore the grains of our body's muscles structures to eventually smooth them and finally sweep away the last final touch.

With wood, with sandpaper (and yes, with a blade also) the grains are explored in a similar way, but with sandpaper an interesting thing begins to happen especially when you get past 320 grit.  For some reason, 320 grit is another one of those defining moments, the end of a particular phase.  At 320, the surface is pretty much defined and all irregularities and imperfections are either there or not.  It seems that no amount of sanding with 400 onwards will completely take away a split or crack or ding, or nick or scratch...  You have to turn around, go back, revisit the heavier grits and once again make your way to that moment, and then continue onwards to the last sweep of the smoothest sandpaper, maybe cloth, maybe a hand itself.  Like waves washing upon a shoreline, as if exploring the smoothness of sands as they sweep upon their farthest reaches...

Just before sanding

It's always an interesting moment when you realize that an activity has reached its logical end.
The end of a phase, the end of a step among many.  It reminds me of canning fish in a pressure cooker - you pack the jars, you set them in the pressure cooker, you seal them in, you build it up to the proper pressure, you wait the 90 minutes or so, and then there is that moment when it's done, and you shut off the heat and call it good.  From that point on, there is nothing more you can do except to sit back and wait for the pressure cooker to cool and the temperature to drop to the point where the lids seal with a snap...
So, in a similar sense, the point is reached when a spoon is ready to be sanded.  All that's left is to sand it...