Tonight I was sitting in a pile of wood shavings, they fell like heavy flakes of snow as I carved away layers of beech, until I was adrift. A seated Buddha is concealed within what was originally a modest 6″ block of roughcut. The Buddha’s always within… I know that… you just need the patience and the skill to find it.

Meanwhile, I almost lopped off the Buddha’s nose last week, having angled my gouge slightly too deeply along the grain, with the pressure of my desire to find Buddha, the fibers released all at once, and a large wedge of wood pulled up right at the middle way where his face might have been. Justin, a master carver and this group’s guide, said “Well… maybe the Buddha in there is smaller than you thought…”

You have to go fishing for Buddha, with a knife between your teeth.

On the way home, my son Nicolas was talking High School, looming just a few months away, and his worries about the added work load. “I’m trying to please everybody, trying to get all my homework done, play with friends, work with the school theater, go to after-school things like this…” You got it, man, there’s the trick, and you have it at age 14, staring you in the face. “When did I start preschool? When I was four? So that’s ten years of school; and I have another eight until I am done with college… schooling shouldn’t start until kids are 8, so kids can be kids for a bit before they have to grow up.”

I told him that, if his experience is anything like mine, he won’t be able to do everything he is supposed to, and even less of what he wants to. Some things will fall away, and he will choose the things that do, and the consequences that follow will belong to him. Poor kid, has to listen to that kind of downer.

At 10pm, after I dropped him off at his mother’s house, I came home and started my evening work, and decided at midnight that my work had had enough of me.

And then… and then I played some music, because while some things must fall away, others must not. The original version of this song (the one with the nose still on it) is somewhere on this blog, written not long ago; a couple of takes made this version clean enough to offer, my excuse being that imperfection makes it human.

You can listen to it in MP3 format below. Better than the words themselves is the heart concealed within them… revealed when the world’s blade cuts carefully, and deep.
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A Word on the Wind

A word on the wind at the window pane
the winter’s come to stay a while
the heart longs for heaven
the heart looks for the sun
but this song is sung alone

That’s all right
there’s a sad kind of sweetness in a song
or a sweet kind of sadness
that carries you along
from the best of intentions
which gently go wrong
to saying sorry
as though you owed them
somehow

I was born on a hill
by a stream, in a town
in a country, on an earth
whose sun follows us around
as we spin in our glory
making glorious sounds
that are echoes of the very first word

And the word on the wind
that awoke me tonight
came to whisper the way
to the day that I will die
but I couldn’t quite hear it
as hard as I tried
maybe trying, I didn’t listen
so well

Oh well, here’s an echo
that’s as good as it gets
and my heart is as warm as the sun
as it sets
it’s a pretty fine color
and the sky that comes next
is a wonder I really can’t miss.

Word on the Wind – Mark Schultz

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