There is an obvious sense of ritual about the process. Laying out the tools. Stropping the blades. Testing their sharpness against the hair on my left arm.

When speaking of ceremony, we often talk of entering liminal space; of crossing a line into that place where one experiences directly the presence of something beyond words – something powerful, unknown, and unknowable.

And yet, there is also an awareness of something familiar.

There’s a definite feeling of coming home…although we’re not quite certain what – or where – that home even is.

I find myself entering this place almost every time I pick up my tools to carve. Even if the billet I’m working on is as square as my current level of mastery will allow. Even if the template is precisely traced and my tools honed to their keenest edge, there’s still a bit of the Trickster in the recipe: a hidden inclusion in the wood, a random twisting of the grain, the occasional exchange of greetings with a neighbor walking by that momentarily pulls me back across the line from that place of silence and mystery.

And yet, these things are all still part of the ritual. Their very presence changes the objects in my hands; changes the hands themselves. It’s this transformative quality that lures me to the ceremony of this work – the slow and determined removal of excess matter obscuring the truth of whatever lies beneath it…