Process

For many folks who integrate carving into their life, it’s a quiet (or not) meditative / deeply therapeutic / revealing / embodiment practice. Ive said this, others have, maybe it's obvious but i feel compelled to keep saying it, sharing more about this process that ive always done privately (theres a theme here…) but desire to hold up, bring into and share with community in new ways.

Being in dialogue with greenwood, taking the branch/ trunk/ once living body into my home and moving it into form after form, into vessel / object / tool holds so much care, intimacy, reciprocity and teachings.

Ill try to show you what I mean.

The other week, i went so grief filled, tired, in days on days of debilitating face nerve and muscle and skeletal pain, added years of single parenting thru it all during a pandemic and more, to my wobbly chopping block. With no plan, just need. Like most times.

Using an axe or adze and knives requires a level of strength and tenacity, you dont wanna miss with that shit (For me i dont want to injure my wrist or elbows or fingers which are prone to dislocation and inflammation too). Sometimes I don’t have it, but my need for the wordless conversation, relief/healing that comes from creating in wood sometimes overrides these desired prerequisites, having strength.

As mentioned, i had been in many consecutive days of severe pain, with no signs of it going away, and had several intense back to back talk therapy sessions that beheld /ushered forth / accessed lifetimes worth of this grief and pain, exhaustion, deaths, unintelligibility. It was as if i was pinned way down under all of it and all i could do was see up thru a small knothole that went up to the surface, communicating to life up there via the tiny specks of light that reached me and bounced off my tear streams—a way of waving, signaling, showing life below.

Being witnessed under there…holding/ not holding it all …by this therapist was hard and sortve unpleasant/new, an unfathomable life-giving gift, and ultimately gave me many medicines of “i see you and can sense or perceive the edges of your pain, and in this moment hold that reality with you” ...which wrenched the tear spigot all the way open, as it does, an exhausting but anchoring? phenomenon that held no answers or relief for soo many days but led to great healing and possibility of transformation/ transmutation, truths revealed...

In that time and space I followed a quiet heart call over to my chopping block to make an applewood vessel, climb back into my body- at least my hands- maybe to catch tears with, hold me, all of us, nothing- to just be, which is a type of holding/ being held.

After getting the rough shape out of this twisted wood, i was using my adze and beloved twca cam (pictured/ made by Reid Schwartz🌿) to hollow out the bowl and  saw the dark brown heartwood peeking thru --kept going even though my body was fatigued, cramped, over it.

Why not stop/ take a break?

Carvers chase grain, form/ edges, lines, curves with our blades, brains, fingers and palms and eyes-- maybe some of us with our hearts too. Swinging an axe is like opening a door....the feeling of the thing im holding also holding me back. This is a conversation with trees that is particular, spiritual, sensual and deeply instructive, ancient... how could it not be? It's a big part of what brings me back over and over, weary and ragged, even / especially in my most desperate and alone and bereft states to crafting in + with wood. The things i can communicate and share here have different/ less oppressive  origins-- plus the tree does half the work/talking and urges me on.

No doubt, carving wood is practicing the language of, and being present amidst, transformation and embodiment, taking a form that holds so many forms and mysteries within, and revealing truths under bark and fibers of growth rings.…sometimes it’s in huge chunks and chips flying, sometimes just the tiniest shaving, curl to get somewhere new. A tree’s last and first stop, all at once. 

I saw the little knot in the bowl, and the heart emerge. The wood growing around the knot, the dead wood, into a perfectly   beautiful and intelligible heart. This has happened before. I didnt stop carving, urged on, pulling and pushing my knife thru heavy apple, making a pile of soft and small circular shavings on my lap and feet, so i could get it to a place it would dry without cracking.

See? This mangled, knot-seeded heart, tucked away so deep pushed me on, showed me (literally) i could / would/ must push on and thru, that what might come of this overwhelming grief, pain, isolation, fatigue, could be beautiful, teachable, strong, used as vessel. It was terrible and funny and perfect, sacred...sweet.

And I had / have what it --that knotted up heart bowl--needed, the tools (and the need) to find it, free it, to make it smooth, make it into something to soothe, thats soothes, make it something holdable, teachable, pleasing—left rough and wild and curved in spots, —to ease into a palm. To remind me.

A vessel that holds things we arent supposed to grip and bear alone.

Something to give,
to grow, to soak up,
to put rest to,

to be taken in by
and to take back into

my hands / my home
under cover, the light

my heart,
my eyes…

and burnish till it shines.