The Knife

This is an excerpt from a book I'm reading.


. . . perhaps it was a story in the Haida sense in which time operates more like a spiral, or like the rings of a tree. There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: "The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife," and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset's first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. "If you live on the edge of a circle," he explained in a documentary film, "that is the present moment. What's inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What's outside has yet to be experienced. The knife's edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick," says Davidson, "is to live on the edge."


The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant

(i highly recommend)