Chopping block

The whole passage of "The Writing Life" was confusing to me as anyone who read my first blog would already know. I decided to close read a part of this passage that particularly confused me but stood out in my mind, the part about the chopping block. Sense this part is so long I decided to narrow it down to the specific portion about Dillard's dream at the end of the third page and goes onto the top of the fourth. I read through it a couple of time and the things that stood out to me were the idea of "treating the wood as the transparent means to an end, by aiming past it". I originally concluded that this meant that she was able to write more freely. Then I also remembered the line "I never did get warm". Now does this mean that she was not able to have a break through that she wanted? So I went back to the transparent means to an end. I thought that maybe she means that the particular words don't matter so much as the over all end product. That didn't make much sense to me so I referred to the very end of the passage. The second to last paragraph talks about the page as the teacher to the writer. So I concluded that maybe the page is the transparent means to any end. That still leaves me wondering about what she meant by "then you forfeit your only chance of getting warm". Does anyone else have any ideas to what she maybe referring to?