Windgrove — Life on the Edge

Carbon

January 30, 2012

Vascular: having the form of tubular vessels; consisting of continuous tubes of simple membranes.

In my garden, sunlight illuminates these green tubes of the squash plant.

During the Silurian Period of earth’s evolution (443-418 million years ago, MYA), the first vascular, upright-growing land plants started to green the landscape and, in the process, grab carbon out of the air to build themselves. It took another 50 million years for these tubular stems to grow in strength to create the first tree like plants of 2-3 meters tall (390 MYA). The first forests (360 MYA) didn’t appear until the Devonian Period (418-354 MYA).

[As an fascinating aside, other than when the green producing chlorophyll got depleted and allowed other coloured pigments to exhibit a bit of yellow, brown or red, it took another whopping 235 million years for the flamboyance of flower power to arrive on the scene during Cretaceous Period. Then, finally, those ever-green vascular plants and woody trees decided to adorn themselves with a bit of colour for a bit of pro-creative pizazz and dance with pollen stealing, symbiotic insects. This was 125 million years ago. Talk about slow.]

To get back to the subject on hand — carbon — in between the Devonian and Cretaceous periods, besides the dinosaurs munching on everything green in the Triassic (252-200 MYA) and Jurassic (200-142 MYA) periods, there was the earlier Carboniferous Period (354-290 MYA) where vast tropical forests laid down vast depositions of coal-bearing shales. This was never to be repeated again.

I say “never to be repeated again” because, until the end of the Carboniferous Period, there just weren’t decomposer fungi to compost the fallen trees before they turned into coal. Today, when a tree falls in the forest, fungi gets to it first before there is a chance for the tree to become coal, but not then. Amazing? Yes.

[Another fascinating aside is this: We know that our present day climate is warming due to (among other things) an increased carbon dioxide (CO2) presence in the atmosphere. However, during the late Carboniferous Period so much carbon had been locked up in the making of coal that “too much” was taken out of the atmosphere and the earth’s average temperature dropped to 10 degrees C as opposed to 20 degrees C during the early Carboniferous and 15 degrees C today.]

Now, however, it behoves us to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and to live out our personal lives as close to carbon neutral as possible.

By going on-line one can easily work out their yearly carbon footprint. The above photo shows around 16 tons of firewood being stacked this past week in and outside the wood shed equating to a year and a half’s supply of home heat. When I also factor in my use of a car, household purchases, gas hot water and fridge, food, and even a round-the-world flight, my yearly carbon footprint is 12 metric tons of CO2 per year.

With a deep bow, and a smug smile, I will admit to being even better than “carbon neutral”.

Why? Because I sequester away more carbon than I consume.

Seen through a telephoto lens from a neighbour’s porch 2 kilometers away, is a tree circle with a 140 foot diameter that was planted out 14 years ago with around 1,000 she-oak trees. These trees — along with the “other” 7,000 trees and shrubs planted over the past 20 years — are allowing me to build up a hugh reserve of carbon credits.

How? Assuming the average of each tree is 100 kilos, there is now 800 metric tons of wood growing. This equates to around 60 metric tons of CO2 currently sequestered.

As my carbon footprint is only 12 metric tons of CO2 per year, I’m well ahead of the game. With each passing year, as the trees grow even more, and, as more trees get planted, I just might consider a trip overseas to Cuba and not be too bothered about either the carbon footprint the jet trails leave behind nor the smoke from my big, fat cigar while listening to the Buena Vista Social Club.

Then again, I think I’ll just hang out here at Windgrove and stack up so much carbon credit in the years to come that I’ll wipe clean the debt on the carbon credit card given to me at birth. A credit card that is certainly, as a westerner, still well over the limit.

It’s a good feeling knowing that when my friends sequester my body in the dirt, my final carbon tally will be a healthy one for all concerned.

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Walking time

January 23, 2012

Ants first appeared 140 to 168 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, but they only began to flourish about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period in concert with the flowering plants.

So what’s with this “Jurassic”, “Cretaceous” talk?

And what does a breaking wave have to do with an ant on a hakea bush?

To answer the lathing latter question, I just liked how the two photos looked together. The curling spidery creamy white flowers of the hakea seemed not too unlike the wispy back spray off the waves. Maybe the ant enjoys hanging onto his green tube inside this unfurling whiteness as much as a surfer enjoys being on her board in the green room. Who knows?

What I do know is that a walk of observation around Windgrove always presents new wonders to the senses and brings me a little closer to understanding (actually “embodying” is a better choice of words) my connection to the time line that has placed me here on this earth at this moment.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

To get back to the ants, what I originally started out to write was that, with the help of Jess and Ruth, a new project was begun at Windgrove last week when we hammered into the ground at 50 meter intervals enough stakes to mark out 1.2 kilometers (or, for the metric challenged just under a mile). This will eventually become the Gaia Walk where people will be able to trace an evolutionary history of the earth from 600 million years ago to the present day.

Each step a person takes (assuming each step is a meter long) equals 500,000 years. The Gaia Walk will begin just as the last snowball earth event (see? more white) is about to blizzard near the end of the Precambrian Eon 600 million years ago.

Along the walk, as people walk through the years, signage will list the various time periods (Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous, Jurassic, etc.) as well as denote things of interest such as first trees, first flies, first cockroaches, first land snails, first snakes. Get the picture?

And, of course, the first flowering plants and the first ants.

As for those two people in the photo, where one is squatting and the other standing, the earliest evidence of bipedalism is the Orrorin leg bone from 6 million years ago. The first direct evidence of bipedalism is the Laetoli footprints found in east Africa dated to be 3.6 million years old.

Our current “modern civilization’s” time on this earth thought by scholars and experts to be the last 12,000 years or since the last ice age (forgetting, of course, the 50,000 year history of the Australian aborigines), is just a fat pencil mark on the fence post at the end of the Gaia Walk.

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Changing focus

January 16, 2012

This press of time we humans seem born into, how often do we walk or worked rushed, absorbed in thought as beauty bursts forth unrecognized?

“Stop and tarry”, I say.

Admittedly, it is hard to see the rainbow when standing directly beneath its arching grandeur, but the point I want to make is that our intense focus to get from A to B can deny us from seeing what is actually happening under our noses, or behind us, or in the sky above, or…

or to the left on the rocks 20 metres below the cliff we’re standing on where the power of an incoming wave wells up to break in dramatic fashion.

Soften the gaze, open up to the wider scheme of things. Shift focus; change direction. Then, bring one’s attention to detail.

We set the pace.
But this press of time –
take it as a little thing
next to what endures.

All this hurrying
soon will be over.
Only when we tarry
do we touch the holy.

Rumi

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What’s past? What’s now? What’s next?

January 9, 2012

Last week’s blog was a double milestone. Not only did it see published the 400th entry, but the day was also the 9th anniversary of the very first, very hesitant, very hopeful blog entry that was posted on the 1st of January 2003. Whew!

Approaching 200,000 words with over a thousand photos, this is a rather unique library of written and visual information for a seemingly small bit of land that dangles on the end of Tasmania ready to drop off into the vastness of the Southern Antarctic ocean.

The first blog entry was of Jeannie Mooney who had just come to Windgrove as an artist-in-residence. The photo used on that propitious day showed her spreading out some cloth she was about to wrap around the tree growing next to her.

Where is she now? I’m not sure. Haven’t heard any news in years.

But I do know where that tree is, where it still stands with nine new annular rings around its girth. The additional growth is hardly noticeable. Hiding behind Jeannie in the hand held original photo, the worn track whispers that many feet have trod past in the ensuing years.

Where am I now?

Turns out the real reason for growing up
was to learn what to do with suffering.
Not being surprised was the answer.
What else do you want to know?

In the grass, energy and matter continue their conversation.
Clouds drift along the horizon.
From somewhere a bulletin arrives:
terrible things in the distance.

Tony Hoagland — from the poem “Powers”

To mark the nine years, I first thought of creating some sort of celebratory artistic event. Possibly, an arrangement of 400 stones in the manner of Andy Goldsworthy. In the end, though, what seemed most appropriate was for me to simply dig into the earth and harvest from the garden all the heads of garlic growing there and place them onto the large stone that, along with the three smaller totemic stones, guards the entrance to my home. Surely now, no vampire would dare enter from this direction.

Containing well over 400 individual cloves of pungent, earthy healing, these bulbs with their hairy roots and sun searching stems of green are symbolic of my search for, and movement into, a mature spirituality. A spirituality that understands where a sustaining, abiding, compassionate love comes from and how one’s daily behavioral patterns either enhance or degrade this love.

Love

The middle-aged man
who cannot make love to his wife
with the erectile authority of yesteryear
must lower his head and suck her breasts
with the tenderness and acumen of Walt Whitman.

And if the woman has lost her breasts
to the surgeon and his silver knife,
she must hump the man’s leg in the dark bedroom
like a rodeo bronco rider.

Let them be hard and wet again, respectively.
Let them convince, and be convinced.

It is the kind of heroic performance
that no one will ever mention.
It is the part of the journey where the staircase gets narrow
and you must turn sideways to pass.

Over the earth the clouds mutate and roll.
The trees catch their breath for another try.
Wind rips through the dried-out grass
with a threshing sound.

The man going under the covers.
The woman letting him.
Both of them refusing
to be stopped by shame.

All that talk about love, and This
is what that word was pointing at.

Tony Hoagland

So, where to in 2012 and beyond? The answer lies, I suppose, within the contextual whole of all the preceding nine years and 400 blog entries, within which, to quote Rainer Maria Rilke:

I have experienced a truth more completely than ever before: that life’s bestowal of riches already surpasses any subsequent impoverishment. What, then, remains to be feared? Only that we might forget this! But around and within us, how much it helps to remember!

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Mameen, trees and two hands

January 1, 2012

I look out through the window of the local fish shop and ponder what 2012 might bring and what New Year’s resolution I might make.

Standing there, lines from David Whyte’s poem “Mameen” come to mind:

Remember the way you are all possibilities
 you can see and how you live best
 as an appreciator of horizons, 
whether you reach them or not. 
Admit that once you have got up 
from your chair and opened the door,
 once you have walked out into the clean air
 toward that edge and taken the path up high
 beyond the ordinary, you have become 
the privileged and the pilgrim, 
the one who will tell the story
 and the one, coming back
 from the mountain,
 who helped to make it.

Back home I put hands together and pray for guidance. A simple gesture whose physicality unlocks one’s heart and opens it to suggestion.

The notion of Abundance comes flowing in. Not an abundance of material possessions. Rather, an abundance of joy, of beauty and love, of creative thought and action.

It is one thing to pray for abundance, but in the long commitment to this New Year’s resolution, will I really hold to the notion that I am worthy of such abundance?

Through prayerful hands I look to the trees for guidance. In the manner of the their “cupped” opening to the sky, they urge me to open my folded hands and fearful heart… and accept. Just accept.

And even as I accept the vast wealth of riches available to me, I simultaneously accept my infinitesimal place in the universe and that I “in particular, live a hairsbreadth from losing everyone I hold dear.”

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A stronger Christmas message #2

December 25, 2011

Continuing on with the theme of last week and how one learns compassion — whether towards others, or just as importantly, towards oneself — I gifted myself with an oil painting by friend and colleague Jerzy Michalski (shown sitting). It now hangs where an aboriginal dot painting once hung; this newer painting seeming more appropriate as it is a clearer, cleaner reference to my western cultural background: that part of me that needs recognition and understanding despite my rejection of current mainstream Judaeo/Christian power structures with their insistence on literal interpretations of the Bible and a heavy emphasis on the masculine.

Appropriately titled “Past Glory” the painting depicts a cathedral whose ruined interior is portrayed with peeling plaster walls, missing pews and an overall sense of “no longer useful”.

I agree that the old church edifices are no longer sufficient to contain the burgeoning needs of this world. In a way, the Church must be larger now. It has to move out beyond human constructed walls of conceit and enclosures that lock out the natural world.

Lest we forget: It is the trees that inform us of the shape of a cathedral’s pillars; it is the trees that we need to humbly come back to to create a hugely bigger church where our animal, earthly nature can reside more easily with our spirited selves and remain in balance.

That is one meaning. The power in this painting, though, and why I choose to hang it in my home, is that it conveys the message of what Christianity, even Buddhism, is about: Scarred by struggle, transformed by hope.

Descending Theology: The Nativity

She bore no more than other women bore,
but in her belly’s globe that desert night the earth’s
full burden swayed.
Maybe she held it in her clasped hands as expecting women often do
or monks in prayer. Maybe at the womb’s first clutch
. she briefly felt that star shine

as a blade point, but uttered no curses.
Then in the stable she writhed and heard
beasts stomp in their stalls,
their tails sweeping side to side
and between contractions, her skin flinched
with the thousand animal itches that plague
. a standing beast’s sleep.

But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid,
the child knew nothing
of its own fire. (No one ever does, though our names
are said to be writ down before
we come to be.) He came out a sticky grub, flailing
. the load of his own limbs

and was bound in cloth, his cheek brushed
with fingertip touch
so his lolling head lurched, and the sloppy mouth
found that first fullness — her milk
spilled along his throat, while his pure being
flooded her. (Each

feeds the other.) Then he was left
in the grain bin. Some animal muzzle against his swaddling perhaps breathed him warm
till sleep came pouring that first draught
of death, the one he’d wake from
. (as we all do) screaming.

Mary Karr

After reading Karr’s poem about the birth of Jesus, looking again at the painting “Past Glory” a new interpretation presents itself. The crumbling cathedral actually looks like a stable; an ancient medieval ruin turned into a farm yard stable. Throw in a mix of dirt, dung, hay and animals and baby Jesus would feel right at home.

Click here for larger image of painting

The hope in this painting is found in the far niche where a soft glow of radiant light streams into and throughout this struggling, well worn, humble cathedral; a cathedral where flesh and spirit can be worshiped together; where there is a direct connection between debris, decay, crumbling walls, rat shit and the divine.

James Hillman throughout his life argued that artists need to create art that helps heal the social ills and environmental problems of the world. Jerry’s painting “Past Glory” not only does this, but it is a daily reminder to me of what I should be concerned with.

Through the more feminine portal of earth’s arching branches, the fire light of spirit can stream through to warm up the moist ground below.

Lest we forget: It doesn’t matter whether or not we believe in Jesus as a fairly savvy social activist (as I do) or, indeed, as the “son of God”. The honest truth is that his first life experience — and no doubt first pleasurable moment — was at the breast of a woman.

Even the virgin Mary cannot escape the all too human/mammal condition of birth: for her just born baby to survive she must offer her own milk.