Transformation – Bowls

These artisanal wooden bowls are brand new – freshly turned – and yet they have ancient stories to tell. Their emptiness holds meaning, memories, history, promise, nourishment.

 

It’s been over a year, my heart broken, many losses and drastic changes, transformations. February 2023 starts with the murder of my step daughter Marya (by her vet husband who then killed himself). Then two months later another huge loss: fourteen years of drought here in California finally kills my stately 140-year-old live oak. She is the mother tree of a small grove of four live oaks and one cork oak. The loss of Mama Oak is momentous for the hillside and me. Both events are mirroring – alas in lesser ways – the devastating effects of rapidly growing mass shootings, wars, wild fires, heat domes, flash floods and more. For fifteen years I have been sleeping in the embrace of Mama Oak’s arms – in my tiny bedroom cottage beneath the far-reaching branches. By the end of June, the celebration with friends to honor Mama Oak (click for stills) lightens my mood.

 

For three days in beginning of July last year, I am able to witness and document the beautiful and dangerous “dance” of having Mama Oak removed (click for story & stills) by a highly skilled crew of seven professional tree workers. Mama Oak is being recycled, mulched and distributed to a children playground in El Cerrito. Kids jumping and falling into soft ground which once was a 140-years-old Live Oak with a trunk that took two grown people to put their arms around. Now, a year later, a skilled wood worker has begun to turn bowls from the big heavy chunks the workers I had saved for him.

 

Just ten days ago, out of nowhere, David texts me: “Here is the first piece from your oak.”  My heart leaps.  A week later: “You can pick up two bowls today.” When I arrive at his shop, there are three bowls waiting for me. Instantly I am flooded with enormous gratitude and joy. He rubs them with walnut oil. I will eat from them, for now they are sitting in my living room to be admired.

My whole life I have been eating from wooden boards and bowls using wooden spoons. Now Mama Oak’s unexpected gifts are in my hands. Nourishing me in new ways. So let me introduce to you David Long (click for more on him), a wood worker of 40 years, with an incredible workshop at street level in Berkeley. That’s how I met him, walking by, curious, like many others. Turning bowls is a long endeavor, from cutting the blocs of wood (avoiding the pith of trunk), drying them as evenly as possible for a year or so. Then starting the process of turning, making first a “foot,” allowing the wood’s grain to guide the shape of bowl. Through this extraction process empty space arises. It all becomes about proportions. All along the dangers of cracking or splitting of the wood, or injuries, mishaps with the powerful machinery.

Great love brings searing loss and a broken heart. Throughout my life, I have dared to fall in love and to commit deeply several times to people, art projects, music, places, and trees. And the older I get, the more poignant the losses become. The love maybe more mature and ripened, my own mortality snuggling up to me. Irreversibly I am somehow transformed. And the gifts of that transformation can often only be deciphered many years later.

David gifts me these beautiful bowls. We talk about the long process. I admire his skills and art. Tangible transformation. From my own work I know the thrill of mysterious metamorphosis from design to a piece of jewelry or clothing, from a single vision to a theater piece or film, to their afterlife of worldwide presentations. From inspiration to Garage Memorial Mural or my metal gate, from penciled sketches to my tiny casitas on the hill. Some transformation processes are faster, others take years or decades. Earth‘s transformative powers stretch over millennia. The arc of each of our lives – always precious. From childhood dreams to the unimaginable unfurling. We are chiseled, molded, shaped. We turn beautiful through detraction of extraneous features. Like a bowl. Essence becomes visible, gets to shine. For long, I have been aspiring to become a useful empty vessel. Vibrating with a ring… a melody… the mysterious song of life and transformation.

Mama Oak said: “You can do it.”