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.

it-ness

As I have worked into this latest piece of wood, from bark-strewn surface to an innerness of patterning of grain, I have been wondering about the different woods that various spoons have emerged from, and the role I have taken within that emergence.  

I hold a knife, a chisel, a piece of sandpaper, the wood itself as I eventually will hold a spoon.  All of these can seem as extensions of my senses that have me, allow me, invite me to move into the wood in ways that fingers themselves are not capable of.  Tools.  Implements.  A being-ness of something that creates a space for a journey that takes our senses beyond what we as human bodies are not capable of creating except possibly within imagination.  

Just as mountains and streams and glaciers and endlessnesses of deserts and other “objects of nature” have for centuries served to allow imaginative compost to settle within their "it-ness" and bubble into ideas, sometimes into for instance metaphors that conveniently house content, a spoon, spoons, the way of spoons, also have their own it-ness...

A spoon, as an essence of concaveness, containment, nurturing, caring, holding, housing, serves to allow a similar settling of my own imaginative compost, taking me on journeys through a thousand landscapes of potential - even as the "it-ness" of  what will become an actual, physical spoon allows me a maintain my exploration within a framework of focus that holds me nurturingly, caringly…

Exploration

Someone once told me that a forester they knew had once claimed to be able to identify over 70 different characteristics that indicate the quality of resonance within a tree.

I was heading up a trail, a logging road that has been turned into mincemeat by the Forest Service because, it seems, as I've been told, they no longer want to maintain those roads that lead into the depths of spaces where they once claimed wood, and do not want to have liability for those trails, those explorations, so they're returning them back as if they are able to return.  Moving through trees crashed down, interlocking with brush, wood doing its own reclaiming and returning, sometimes branches, sometimes roots, and always as I would climb in and out, the flow of grains and textures, swirls, ingrown bark, growth-ring stripes, flakes, burl waves, streaks, pocks, pitch pockets, bird pecks, checks and splits, we explore wood as wood is there around us.

I stopped to rest and there between my rifle and a pile of bear scat was a piece of wood, where I wondered at solidity, intrigued with the potentials of interiority and and the whats and hows of exploring it even as I hope to explore my own sense of wonder of potentials.  I wonder what is there within, as solidity, as flow, as resonance.

a fish, a sunrise, a step

You stood by the edge of that endless river.

it was that moment just before dawn.

Some say it is the coldest moment;

Some say the most beautiful;

Some say the softness of the hand that motions to wait

in that moment is as soft as the breath of things unnecessary to say…

You cast your line out.

The line went tight to the current’s pull.

And you waited.

You had taken a lifetime to get there, to the edge of that river.

You saw what looked like a star,

as if right there at the end of your line,

out there upon the water, shimmering upon the water’s surface.

Why were you there?

Maybe trying to catch a little bit of daylight ?

Only one brief moment maybe?

Thinking for instance that the first moment of a new day like a soft hand touching time?…

Waiting, to be timeless…

Then there was a tug…

what felt like large fish lunging at your line

and you began reeling in, quickly,

reeling, reeling, getting tired quickly,

getting excited, fearing,

in your excitement, in your tiredness,

that you might lose that fish.

“Keep the line tight,” you heard a voice say next to you,

somehow insistent, yet as softly as

the calmest of sighs, the softest of hands telling you to wait,

to hold on, to be steady

within a steadiness of trying to maintain that tightness,

that hold upon such vibrant life,

and then the surface broke, the star there shattered,

and suddenly, the day - it dawned…

and the night - it took that star

and just disappeared with it

and as if wanting also to go

just then, the fish broke free, and the line went slack…

A glint, a flash of beauty.  A splash of light,

a simple, beautiful moment, the simplicity, the beauty

of that moment

and then, the fish – it disappeared…

And then there was nothing there but the endlessness of that river… 

And you took a step, forward, didn’t you,

looking, maybe not thinking, maybe only leaning, forward,

maybe feeling so alone, maybe lost, maybe bewildered, leaning,

as if maybe only wanting to be close to all of that beautiful disappearance…

And there you waited.  

And there was silence.  And peace.  And calm.

“It’s the way it is with the dawn,” you heard a voice say - not so much

a voice as the feeling of a soft hand upon your breast

in that moment.

“There and then gone,” it said.

 “Like that star,” it said.

“Like that fish,” it said.

 “Like that moment,” it said.

“Sometimes it’s the ones you love,” it said.

“Always only that one step – maybe only a leaning forward,

looking, waiting,

like that one step in your whole life where you might think

you are so alone,

like there is only disappearance before you…

like there is absolutely no one to guide you, to hold you,

to hold you tight…

A step, there and then gone…”

We will all take that step, we will maybe wait, maybe listen…

But is it our step to take, ours to have - to call our own?

A step to take alone and then to be gone?

No.

It is not ours to take.

Because we are not alone in that moment.

(In this moment.)

Because there are always the infinite spaces

of light, and love..,

And that one step, that needs no guiding…

that one true step through the dark night to dawn…

that one step upon all of this assumed solidity…

That’s the fish – that’s the star…

there in the depths, there upon the surfaces,

at daybreak, at dawn and light and love

are not at all like the disappearance

of that star, of that fish, of that moment,

of that step,

but are the emergence

of a calm beauty

of the endlessness of river

whose edge takes us a lifetime to get to.

Peacefully, calmly, bravely, serenely, faithfully, trustfully, simply, beautifully.

Like your whole life, solid, good and true.