Splitting Wood
At first, in the good old days, I did not know how to split wood. I set a chunk of alder on the chopping block and harrassed it, at enormous exertion, into tiny wedges that flew all over the sandlfat and lost themselves. What I did was less like splitting wood than chipping flint. After a few whacks my alder chunk still stood serene and unmoved, its tip a thorn. And then I actually tried to turn the sorry thing over and balance it on its wee head while I tried to chop its feet off before it fell over. God save us...
I did not know it at the time, but during those first weeks when I attacked my wood every morning, I was collecting a crowd - or what passed on the island for a crowd. At the sound of my ax, Doe and Bob - real islanders, proper, wood-splitting islanders - paused in their activities and mustered, unseen, across the sandflat, under the firs. They were watching me (oh, the idleness) try to split wood. It must have been a largely silent comedy. Later, when they confessed and I railed at them, Bob said innocently that the single remark he had ever permitted himself had been, "I love to watch Annie split wood."
One night, while all this had been going on, I had a dream in which I was given to understand, by the powers that be, how to split wood. You aim, said the dream - of course! - at the chopping block. It is true. You aim at the chopping block, not at the wood; then you split the wood instead of chipping it. You cannot do the job cleanly unless you treat the wood as the transparent means to an end, by aiming past it.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life