The fences in our neighborhood are a dapple of white and grey: rickety colonnade and garish vinyl randomly overlapping; huddling impossibly close to virtually nonexistent property lines; taking their half, as my mother would say, out of the middle.

Yet somehow the occasional seed finds sanctuary in one of the small and nearly sunless canyons created by this assertive demarcation. It takes root there among the stray blades of crab grass and tendrils of Virginia Creeper, only to hurl itself emphatically towards the light; threatening in its struggle to topple the very walls of the fortress that surrounds it.

One such seed became the Mulberry tree I was forced to drop earlier this summer. As a rule I never fell a living tree for my carving. I typically resort to road-kill wood or timber brought down by storms or high winds. But the location of this particular tree and its impending assault on my and my neighbor’s fences meant that it had to come down. As I needed to replace the fence panel anyway, I decided to do the deed myself. And so armed with chainsaw, axe, and root-cutting shovel, I went to work

The tree was gracious in its death and generously gifted me with an abundance of beautiful white and golden-yellow billets, one of which yielded the spoon pictured above.

My ongoing recovery has taught me to acknowledge the contributions of the ones who’ve come before us: the sacrifices that put the food on our table, the lifework of Elders handed down to generations of children walking behind them, the impact of our parents’ sickness expressing itself as the wounds we seek to heal.

Grandfather Joseph Rael (aka Beautiful Painted Arrow), the visionary of Picuris Pueblo and Ute descent whose teachings resonate at the heart of so much of the ceremonial work undertaken by our spiritual community, tells us that work is worship. If so, then perhaps the spoon itself is a remembering of this; a prayer of gratitude given form and released into world for the service of others…