Walnut Records

Walnut

I looked after I planed. Glimpsed first. Stopped. Looked again as if looking back at what caught my eye, stopped me in my tracks. And lifted the wood closer to look inside the pores I'd just opened with my plane's last stroke to where no man had ever seen before, been before and I saw a year’s growth, in a single band split in two by two seasons and I knew then that life lived had been recorded in a tree and for me it was a first glimpse into a history of life during which I was yet unborn but about to be born into a world unknown to me but one I would live in alongside a tree with pores that were cells reaching from earth for the warmth of a sunlit sky and here I planed the release with certainty the history that included the day I was born in the one growth ring encaptured before and after by many rings of grown wood recording the year I came into being and seeing the pores inside a tree stem in a section of wood I first sawed then planed with a newly sharpened edge that left the pores crystal clear by the severing edge for me to know my life had purpose in the things I made and was making now as texture to texture the lives of others in the generations yet to know and understand what I saw in stopping my work to catch that brief glimpse and record it in my  mind’s eye and write of in a few narrow bands like the growth ring of a solitary tree but typed out and computed for another to read what they would never could never read in the band of a fallen walnut tree as me in my workshop and the push of a plane that caught me, caught my eye in the sense of arresting me as though life itself spoke and said some need galaxies and others need science but a section of tree holds more than a man can know though he spend a lifetime with it in his working.