If a Tree Falls in the Forest ….
My little brother was just down touring the redwood groves near Eureka. Like almost any six foot human he was mightily awed by a living thing 300 feet high, wide as a 747 fuselage and older than almost anything living on the planet. These are magnificent beings and amazingly, we didn’t cut every damn one down for Malibu decks and the furniture to adorn them.
I guess the photos of these arboreal giants he sent via his smartphone camera made me dig out an old burl a sculptor friend had given me, a remnant from her countertop she’d slabbed onto an ugly one and pretty much turned her kitchen into a work of art with one fell swoop. That’s kind of what artists do, take something the rest of us never notice, then make the ordinary into the extraordinary. And more — they make us take a second look at the ordinary, the banal, the day to day until we see it differently too. This is what we call inspirational, meaning, it inspires us to reimagine the world around us.
So I dragged out this big slab of redwood burl, almost 40 pounds, a tiny sliver of some behemoth California old growth three plus inches thick, and I thought, I wonder what it would sound like? I had to cut an edge off with a chainsaw, then I smoothed two sides flat and then I carved out a banjo neck, sanded it, oiled it and thought, holy cow, what a beautiful dark red wood, all kinds of figuring, birdseyes, tiger striping, gnarls, knots and grain. So I continued on, cut out the foot round pot from one piece, sanded and oiled it, then stood back in awe the way my brother did from the living tree.
I’m a week into this now, making parts, working the wood, watching it come back to life. In a few days I’ll assemble the parts, all re-imagined, and then I’ll string it up. There will be, I have no doubt, a sublime moment, one only heard by me, when a tree that fell in the forest after growing a thousand years, makes the sound it’s held until now.
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