NOTABLE AND QUOTABLE: Favorite passages
Lao Tzu The Tao Te Ching
"Thirty spokes join at the hub:
Their use for the cart
Is where they are not.
When the potter's wheel makes a pot,
the use of the pot
is precisely where there is nothing.
When you open doors and windows for a room,
It is where there is nothing
that they are useful to the room.
Therefore being is for benefit
non-being is for usefulness."
"Having Everything Right" by Kim Stafford:
" When I walked into the wood yard with Ward, he knew at a glance which boards had grown in the west. His finger went out: "That's western black walnut - nice brown play. That's eastern: closer grain, and no figure to speak of. Lot simpler to work the eastern: find the downhill run for your plane, and you get a long curl. your western - now quarter, rift or flat sawn board - you'll fight chips all day, but what a face!" the upshot is this, as Ward told me: west coast trees grow faster. the season for growth
stretches out, and spring's early wood ring runs wide, followed each year by an ample band of the
late wood of summer. Long, hungry growth makes a rich ripple pattern for western boards. the grain in a flat-sawn plank tends to run wild, to show the moire of abundant light. And in the northwest, the wood-grain figure plays marionette to mild rain threaded down from Oregon clouds early as March, when leaves first explode, and deep into October. In the East, balance prevails. The tight dark wait of a longer winter corsets the heartwood, slows growth to a crawl, and yields a grain that tends to play out even, classical. I've met workers since who scoff at this guessing. They say it's bluff to claim Ward's regional code for a board. Soil, exposure, crowding and the sheer genetic pluck of certain trees make the figure in a board, not geography. I'm gullible. I will believe them about wood. Perhaps origin east or west is a minor fact for a board. But I will graft Ward's belief to people. Don't westerners grow fast and show the wild figure of abundant light?"