There is a video of me on Instagram with a sphere I made for my granddaughter, out of Kapla blocks. It shows me lifting it up on to a tower of blocks, while she watches excitedly . Apparently, it attracted a lot of attention. (Eighty-one thousand views so far, after having posted it only three days ago.) I was, of course, delighted to see all the activity and read the many comments. Some of them very amusing.
The video seems to very effectively capture the tension of trying to build something that could fall down at any moment. It reminded me of watching Andy Goldsworthy building his fragile installations in the video Rivers and Tides.
Anyway, as you can see above, in the clips from a that event, I lifted it successfully.
I began to think of how similar the activity of stone balancing is to balancing wooden spheres.
I realized that all that excitement could now be brought indoors, and all kinds of safer balancing can be done on the living room coffee table!
So here's the thing, I'm already thinking of all the wooden block 'rock shapes' that are crying out to be 'balanced', starting of course with more spheres and then moving on to wooden cubes, on their edge, and even more challenging irregular shapes.
Maybe it will become a trend and go viral, reaching thousands of new followers. Ha.
