…you look upon your work and call it good…
I spent a couple of hours this morning repairing the edge of one of my carving axes.
After that I broke for lunch and worked in the kitchen until almost 4 o’clock.
Now I’m relaxing on the patio with a cup of coffee and a piece of cake; the events of the day settling in around me.
No matter what happens beyond this point, nothing can ever change the fact that my life was blessed with the gift of these last few hours…
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…
It’s been a busy and productive couple of days.
My brother in-law came over on the weekend and we installed an electric awning over the postage stamp-sized slab of concrete in the back yard that passes for our patio. Afterwards I dug out the furniture we had buried away and knocked together a small coffee table from some of the scrap wood that’s been accumulating in the garage.
It’s not exactly top of the line furniture, but it answers to the work it’s called to do, and has just enough dents, gouges, and imperfections to bless it with what a more gracious observer might refer to as “a rustic sort of character”. I torched and sanded the table before I sealed it, and the ordeal seems to have reawakened something inside the wood.
But isn’t that what ordeals often do?
I’m reminded of the difficulties I’ve faced during my recovery work; the dents and gouges – visible and invisible – that mark the trials of growing up as the child of an alcoholic and emotionally unstable father, and a fiercely and terminally codependent mother.
These experiences have shaped me accordingly; sanded away a few of my straighter edges…left me a good deal more than a little bit scrappy. And yet, in spite of – or perhaps more accurately, because of – all of this, I seem to notice that nearly every day something else inside me reawakens…
Of the many things in this life for which I am grateful, the two that currently come to mind are my spiritual practice (and the healing and community it has provided), and the afternoons I get to spend out in the garage chipping away at a billet of wood, trying to uncover the treasure hidden inside it.
It’s important to remember that these two things aren’t necessarily unrelated.
The rough-cut spoon in the picture above comes from a Cherry tree on a property in Pennsylvania where I’ve danced and prayed; laughed and sweat. Like the sap in the wood, these experiences have soaked deeply into my bones. They’ve nourished me. And they’ve shaped my life in ways my linear mind could never have imagined.
It’s not so much a matter of planning as it is a product of surrender; a willingness to step aside and allow something unintended to happen simply because it feels right. There’s more at work here than hand and mind and eye. There’s a deep-down shaping that can only be accomplished by heart and soul and Spirit – and even then, the material must be ready.
Having left most of its billet behind, the spoon is currently resting in the wood chips. It’ll wait there – patiently – for the next round of work to shape it into something a bit more viable…
Lately I find myself becoming more aware of the blessings my life has provided me. It was earlier this year that I found myself standing in my garage on a beautiful spring day, carving away at a billet of Pennsylvania Cherry from a tree that had come down on the property of a friend of mine.
The weather was perfect; my tools were surgically honed; the background music was spot on; and I had absolutely no other requirements in the middle of this pleasant Tuesday afternoon except to be where I was, to do what I was doing, and to let the rest of world rumble on about its own damn business.
I found myself thinking that I could really be this guy. And then another thought immediately followed: “I AM this guy.”
It’s a different kind of life these days: Simpler. Less demanding. Working on healing the wounds of the past in an effort not to inflict any more in the present; or at the very least, nothing that a BAND-AID or two and little hydrogen peroxide can’t fix.
Chipping away at life.
It’s a good place to be…
Bonja the Bodger 