I stand in the great hall of the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, head bent back, gazing up forty feet to where precise images have been carved into cedar totem poles by craftsmen whose art has been almost entirely erased by time. This museum possesses one of the finest collections of carved wood artifacts in the world, and I feel quite at home here. Near the bottom of a nearby pole, a smooth shouldered wolf rests in the shadow of a killer whale. The eye of the whale is a shadowed well. This wood, these bones, trace the nature and purpose of a vast awareness, a living spirit in the grain, each knot and every growth ring a secret hieroglyph worked carefully into many layers of meaning. The echo of leaves is here, the resonance of damp fields half submerged in twilight, of dark soil and tales of night. And long, interwoven strands of time knitted together by wood and human hands. The wood has been coaxed into shape – whittled, chiseled, sculpted with broad, incising strokes – by tools of utmost antiquity, by weapons, by stones, by meteors, by fragments of ships: countless forms oiled by luminous skin.

It was windy today, and though it’s still spring, I’ve begun to think of summer. When I was a boy, during many late summers, when sun and breeze had heated the water enough that it was no longer bracing but…

In my work with wood, sometimes I become distracted, or fickle, or too bent on perfection, and I slide into frustrating repetitions of strain or injury or &#8211 this is the worst &#8211 complete stalling, so that I am left…

The Cherokee story of first days tells how humans were at one time ambivalent about illumination. They negotiated back and forth with Ouga, the creator, first desiring eternal sunlight and then, when it became unbearably hot, campaigning for constant night….