Gifts

Seed of Destiny

This gift was made for my Mother's 70th birthday.  A month before her birthday, she embarked on a remarkable journey to take the first steps into realizing her dreams, which includes doing devotional work for society.  Here is a small speech I gave before she left.  

On this journey, my mother would return to India for the first time after my grandmother passed and my grandmother also deeply believed in doing devotional work for society.  To convey the sacredness of this project and honor my grandmother, I chose wood from one of my most sacred trees: The Tree of Death.  This tree was an oak tree that fell a few years go.  I called it the Tree of Death because I used to offer it small dead animals that I would occasionally find in my yard.  

I chose a piece of wood that had a very interesting feature.  It looked like a small branch, fighting against all odds, to push against the grains and rings of destiny, to create a new path.  As I worked on it, the branch part of it fell out and parts of it splintered and I wanted to give up because it no longer represented my original vision.  But, then, I thought that this was thematically perfect. When trying to realize a dream, the first steps never turn out as one wishes. The objective is to be flexible and keep trying until something of beauty emerges. 

My Grandmother's Soul Bird

My grandmother asked that I make a bird for her. Recently I have fallen in love with spalted wood, which is when fungi invades the wood and starts the process of decomposition, leaving behind pigment (the blue/black lines). I chose to honor wood from MasterTreeIII because my grandmother interacted with it when she was here. The top row shows the front and back. It is slightly unstable, which it makes it fun to try to balance and if you gently push it, it can spin. The middle row shows the side views which look like people to me. The bottom row is when you flip the object upside down. The left reminds me of a male and the right reminds me of a female.

Embroyo of Human Destiny

(Woodworking, part 3). This embryo is made from the union of wood from my Tree of Life (it is the lighter colored wood from a Linden Tree that fell in my yard who's majestic, lush and fertile branching earned it the name Tree of Life) and my Tree of Death (the darker colored wood from an Oak Tree that fell in my yard, to whom I used to offer small dead animals that naturally passed away in my yard). Together they create this embryo who is the destiny of humanity, shaped by the hands of Life and Death. 

Seeds of the Tree of Death

Look what I made! When the Tree of Death fell, I salvaged huge pieces of its trunk but left the smaller branches littered throughout the yard. One day, I looked at a small, unappealing, partly decomposing and dried branch and thought, "is its only destiny to be consumed by the earth?". So, I took it in and became an explorer, wondering if I could find anything of beauty within it....and I couldn't believe what I found. After, shaping them, sanding them and finishing them with shellac, I made two wooden shapes that are reminiscent of testicles (it is made from the Tree of Death while the testicles represent Life, which highlights the proximity of these two concepts that seem diametrically opposite). One of these pieces I gifted to a friend for his birthday. What I really like about them is that because it is handmade, its shape varies across the surface, so you can rock it back and forth (while talking on the phone) and it behaves differently based on how you orient it. My most favorite aspect is that they usually looks pretty dull....however if you get it in just the right lighting and if you tilt it at just the correct angle, it has a brilliance and very unexpected shine (something to do wit how the fibers interact with the light). I feel the moral of the story is that hopefully as we become older, we become more and more capable of finding and making beauty with things that are not obviously beautiful.