Full Swing

I chopped down the old-fashioned lilac. It was probably 50 years old and had become diseased and scraggly. I started out by using a hand saw to take down the smaller trunks around the periphery and then got to the four main old-growth trunks in the center. I needed better access to one of the trunks, so I took an axe to it. There is something oddly congruent, if not quite poetic, about cutting down a tree with a wood-handled axe.

Lilac is either a fairly hard wood or it could be that I haven’t sharpened my axe. In any case, I was working low to the ground, so bending at the knees is required for each swing. But then as I established a feel for this specific task/target it encouraged a bit more force and I found myself really laying into it. I don’t often have permission or occasion to do something as hard as I can, so it’s a kinesthetic treat. The rhythm I adopted was structured by the technique: chambering my arms up past my right shoulder, axe well behind me, spine twisted to the right and legs mostly straightened: coiled clockwise. Then dropping my weight by bending at the knees, sinking my hips and returning my shoulders toward the trunk as my arms pull down at an angle to land each blow at about a 45 degree angle to the trunk. Every muscle involved, producing force to either move or stabilize a body part; continuous feedback from my eyes coordinating the strikes.

If you pay attention, you can feel your body do all these things more or less automatically. You simply run out of strength if you only use your arms to do the work, so if you’re intent on getting the job done, the rest of you gets involved whether you realize it or not.

It’s a gift to be able to bring our whole body to a task, even if it isn’t quite as vigorous or ballistic. Feeling so many different sensations and forces, hands and eyes coordinated—no, more than coordinated: unified. A few moments of flow in a vigorous movement. How often do we get to use our entire body to do something like that?