Journal jottings from another day
This version of the story begins with another contemplation of drift wood and then, even more pondering. This piece eventually became the sculpture “Transformation.”
Such an amazing sequence of events had taken place. An amazing journey, years, decades of accumulated moments that tree root and trunk had experienced. I was fascinated with the idea that the carved wood had such a life prior to my brief dealings with it.
I look over to a mountain and marvel that a mountain has had a crucial and significant role yet now it would, at first glance, appear to have played an insignificant part in this story.
Storms, a mountain, a seedling on a hillside, affecting a single, insignificant, small tree in a forest of green.
Although I don’t know the specifics of this tree root’s particular journey, each event, sunlight, wind, nutrients and tide, played a part.
One of those mountains off in the distance, it too played a role. That mountain, seemingly solid, fixed.
How could this mountain be part of the story? It is part of the story. It contributed for nearly one hundred years, each day providing nutrients from soil and granules of rocks that were once its mountainside, all broken down by the components of raindrops. Each quiet drizzly day of fog and rain has played a part in our story.
I express this portion of the sculpting story in some detail, the portion of the story that is familiar to me, yet this is just a small part of the journey of what become the makings of a realization of a vision. The beautifully sunny day, sun shining through the cedar trees, dappling forest floor. This too is significant. So too, the history of growth, the heaving up of rock to form the mountain, the history of the seed one day falling to the ground. Or was it the day the sun pierced through the clouds on soil and seed, or was it the warmth of the dappled sunlight on the moss? Or both, and more? As root began to form, to take nourishment from the mountain itself and from the forest floor, so roots grew slowly, year after year after year, one day to become driftwood on island shore with mountain seemingly motionless in the distance. A century of story available if we take time to wonder and marvel at the stunning beauty revealing itself in a piece of driftwood.
We might reflect on the journey that has delivered this piece. The story is there, or we might refer to this digression as “chasing squirrels,” an off-topic digression. We might choose to treat this driftwood simply as another piece of driftwood.
The choices are ours, the stories unfold as we unfold. We become, we are, but minor characters as we become our part in this tapestry.
As we come to understand chapters within the story, the story becomes interwoven with our unique life stories. We become connected to the distant mountain, and to a tree growing in a forest, to a piece of driftwood on a beach and connected to a sculptor’s journey as “Transformation” is born of driftwood root. Almost simultaneously pieces of other trees come together in the workshop and slowly weave themselves into the collective story, becoming minute strands within humanity’s tapestry. Experiencers too have a place in this story and each have the opportunity to create and to discover more of themselves within both this story, and within life’s tapestry.