Patience

Oh Rock Nation

Teach Me Patience

I'm gunna find me a Rock-O Rock-O

I'm gunna find me a Rock

I'm gunna find me a Rock-O Rock-O

I'm gunna find me a Rock...

Or a stick. And make it into a bow. Over the course of six months.

I've cheated, a little, let Grey go to work on this project. He did in two hours what would take me two weeks. But for the most part, the eight hundred hours of rasping and draw-knife work it takes to take an Osage Orange stave down to a bow have been mine. I exaggerate. Slightly.

Photo taken by Grey. Bow looks even more like a bow since this photo was taken.

I'm approaching the end, now--both of the bow, and of this class. At Skills Night on Thursday I spend most of two hours turning 15 pieces of Dacron into a bow string. I need to bend the bow, figure out where I have to reduce certain segments of it just a little bit. Scrape or sand those places. Negotiate with Grey about whether I need to do more rasping (Answer: No). Cut in an arrow rest, if I can, so I don't bleed all over the wood. But the bow looks done to my amateur eye; it looks like I could string it and fire it right now. The work that remains is subtle, particular, patient. Every part of the process of creation has taxed me, but this last bit looks like it will cost me the most. Patience isn't really my jam.

I'm tying an overhand knot on the end of this piece of Dacron and trying to figure out what to do with the container of linseed oil after finally wiping down my bow. The linseed is for next week--we're going to Glass Buttes, and the change in air moisture content could impact the wood if it isn't oiled.

My bow also looks super shiny now, so that's a nice side effect.

And I'm singing the Rock Nation song, out-loud, as I finish off the bow string. Some of the other instructors mutter it along with me as they pack up their projects. It seems relevant, even though this project has nothing to do with rocks. It's 9 PM. I'm the last one in the building, practically, as I walk out the side door to burn my linseed rags.

Earlier that day we list what we want to accomplish by the end of the year. I have some projects I want to wrap up--the bow chief among them. But mostly what I want can't be written down in two minutes on a scrap of paper with a hastily sharpened green colored-pencil while it snows around the edges of the awning. And mostly what I want can't be accomplished between now and May 17. I've come to recognize this class as a sampler, an intro, not an end in and of itself, and I see my task now--my life's work, as a friend calls it--as nurturing the seeds that have been planted this year, and directing a ruthless scythe at the weeds that threaten to overwhelm my fragile seedlings.

I want to climb a mountain in the dark and watch the sun rise over a frozen wasteland, my breath curling up like pipe smoke in cloudy reams above my head as the ocher-orange sunlight starts to glint against my squinting face.

I want to dance, naked and alone in the middle of a deep forest, as the snow falls down around me so loud that I can hear the prickles as they hit my skin and melt. I want to hear the wolves howling in the distance, I want to shake with their vibration and the cold down to my bones.

I want to canoe portage across a thousand lakes as far north as possible into places where people don't ever go. I want to be in a place where I can't count the drone of airplanes. And I want to stay there until I have to turn back or risk starvation. I want to stagger back into town, drunk on solitude, after eating my last morsel of cheese three days prior.

I want to climb the red canyon faces, sweating and straining in the sun, hands chalky, throat parched, muscles I don't yet have rippling over my bones, popping out against my sun-darkened flesh. I want to reach the top and look up at the cloudless blue sky and cry out my joy and triumph to the eagles that circle overhead.

I want to sit on the edge of a sail boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, vast emptiness around me, a tiny boat in the bottom of a well of blue. I want to dangle my feet in the water, inhale salty brine and boiling heat, look down at my toes, look past my toes and grok the might and majesty, the destructive force, the sheer age, of the miles of water beneath me.

I want to ride a camel into the deepest part of the desert, into the places where the stars burn down like dark glass. I want to start a fire there and have a drumming dance party. When I'm exhausted from circling the fire I want to collapse, sweat pooling around me, into the sand as the coals go out. I want to curl up under the black blanket of sky and witness the universe exploding into fractals.

I want to spend a year, or two, or more? in silence in a remote and wild place, learning the ways of speaking that are out of my grasp now. I want to settle into the patience that I have only passing acquaintance with. I want to See others the way the way I am beginning to See myself--as protagonists, as myself, as parts of the whole.

I want to scream as loud as I can, in fear, in pain, in grief, in rage. I want to hurt in ways that I can't imagine, because the edge of death is the place where I feel most alive. I want to give my soul to the darkest caves, to the old and oldest places where humanity first learned of loss and love.

These things and more--I want them. I want them with my burning blood being. I want them in my heart-place, this part of me that I have left wilted and parched for my entire life. This part of me that I did not even know existed.

I do not know if what I want will happen. I cannot force anything to happen--what will come will come, when it comes, if it comes. I must practice patience.

Photo taken by Cameron MacPhail at Eel Creek earlier this year.