Fall brought the possibility of advancing stone layouts towards finished form. Desk work at my day job interfered with pursuing completion of layout, but I continued refining the design, tweaking it, tightening it, and getting it ready for mortaring, sporadically through winter and on into spring. Tediously slow but surprisingly fulfilling work. Mid-may saw me finally retire from paid work and I quickly begin expanding the time available for finishing layout and starting the process of sticking the stone arrangements in place. It took forever to get to mortar, perhaps because I'm hard to please. But I had many a day out on those rocks from mid-May until late June, chipping bits off stones and tightening layouts, where the sheer fact of being there and working the stone was sufficient for satisfaction. Progress is slow at best in this idiom, patience more necessity than virtue. With patience, and time of day and quality of light, come transporting views of an evolving scene, especially for a creator of form.
There were a lot of objectives embedded in this terrace layout. For cosmic reasons, I wanted the stones' placement to reflect the flow of natural energies across the terrace: wind, water, waves and sunlight all pour out of the south towards the north, meaning the stone would run crosswise to the length of the pad. This aligned with another layer of choice, just as zen, which was to run the stone counter to the length of the pad in order to slow the eye and expand the perceived extent of the realm. My view is that you want to hold the attention of the viewer, and that that is best done by checking the flow forward. So energy flows in nature aligned with energy flows in layout equaling, in my cosmology at least, increased synergy and harmony of feeling in the outcome. I also wanted there to be further hints of our oceanic environment, as in distant references to schools of fish flowing through the space.
It will also require scrubbing down with a stiff brush and a hose, a supplementary step and then a drying-out afterwards. But this is the path to a happy, lasting outcome, and therefor must be done. And it's not a process to be hurried. Further complication emerges once the step into mortaring is taken: edges suddenly need shoring up, since my making them wander overtop of the rigid geometry of the pad, to take some steam out of the declaration of straight lines, means expanding the pad to support the new edge.
Wandering edges requiring a base weren't the only problem, however. I was rusty, plain and simple, not having mortared for well over a year. My knees, back, shoulders and arms were a year older, with significant consequences. As to technique,paths have their own unique requirements: batches of mortar that are manageable in size but sufficient to complete a segment; techniques for placing and pinning stones to fill in large voids and to ensure that stones set on over-wet mortar don't slump (I set it a bit loose in summer heat). As it happens, it takes a while to recover a sense of how all that's best done, and how to recognize an emergent problem and nip it in the bud. There was more of a struggle with self for the patience to accept the unforeseen and address it. But it does come back, and fairly quickly. All the while, the rough layout encourages one to pass it through the process so that paved scenes can begin to emerge. It's a bit like giving birth when they finally do. I offer some below.
As I stick these stones down into what I hope is a long-lasting relationship with their neighbours, I often think of what I'm doing as 'working on panels'. Despite the terrace being continuous, each set of stones has an intimate relationship with those next to it, and some resolve into distinct patterns despite their integration with everything else. I enjoy this aspect, emphasizing it when I'm in the trimming and tweaking layout phase. I try to keep whatever I've found my way to - a sort of dynamic, even cosmic balance, for lack of a better term - through the mortaring phase. This is a moving target, into whose trajectory loads of factors, some exogamous, enter. But I still like the idea of completing panels as units and watching the whole grow slowly in extent.
You can see the base extension I'm doing in the photo above - there's a glimpse of some brutal modernist geometry just visible at the far left, the rest is a bump-out intended to secure the full curving alignment of this stone. It works pretty well, just entailing a supplementary set of operations before you can get to the main event. Patience, patience, patience.
Then, you mortar it into place along with its companion stones, and you glimpse form emerging. Paving occurs as an event in time, so exciting if you are the one making it happen. For others, bystanders and onlookers, not so much. But then, people generally are tuned out and will simply not see change occurring at this level. The beauty is, a slow process leads to profound change, and even the insensitive experience it at some point. If it works out, it will command people's attention while feeling that it fits in entirely.
