Something inside me comes alive when I carve, when the chips start to curl away from the wood, when I feel the grains scraping against the bare steel of the chisel, when I pivot a skew gouge against my thumb and feel the wood's texture through the blade. It's a timeless craft. Forearms taught and sinewy, riven with a maze of veins and blood vesels that work their way across the striations of the underlying muscle, winding their way down to the strong confident hands that merge seemlessly with mallet and chisel. These veins that flow with artist's blood, blood that flows from an artist's heart, are carrying my passion and vision down through my hands and into the grains and fibers of the wood. The chips fly, as do sparks under the sonourous ringing of the blacksmith's sledge. Thus the peripheral material disolves in a shower of chips, receding like a tide and leaving in its wake the master's work, the fruition of his vision.