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In accordance with these beliefs,
Mountain Lake Director Ray Kass, in the role of a Kanushi (a
Shinto monk), donned full Shinto ceremonial robes and, with
participants in attendance, recited prayers in Japanese that had
been especially prepared by the Shinto priests at Uji for the
ceremony. Using a large, flat rock as an altar, he offered
natural foods, sake, and water in a traditional Shinto ceremony
of blessing.
The trees were cut only following this ceremony emphasizing the
sacredness of all nature and the interconnectedness of the living
spirit inside of all things. They were then hauled to the Brooks
Forest Products Center where they were sawn into boards and left
to cure until mid-summer when Okura would come back to Mountain
Lake for the actual creation of the piece.
From the ceremony used to bless and cut the trees, it became
immediately clear that the workshop project would entail a
cross-cultural orientation. A central consideration for the
project would be the relationships between ecological
responsibility and Eastern belief systems, traditional and
contemporary sculpture methods, and prescribed practices and
indeterminism of both materials and process.44
