Inertia results, not so much in the delay of the future, but in the destruction of its potential.
For a very long time I was aware that the Shakespeare Bench was slowly degrading and that if I wanted its carved-into-the-wood message of “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in brooks” to have a longer life, the bench would need to be taken away from its outdoor position along the Peace Path, refurbished and placed indoors.
Although my seemingly good intentions were stymied by a host of delaying factors, the underlying theme was “I’ll do it tomorrow”.
Well, tomorrow is now not likely to come, not after a neighbour and I sat on the bench and it collapsed to the ground under our combined weight because the bench’s interior wood had rotted away leaving just a thin outer shell of little strength.
I could go on and write about how the bench was “returning back to nature” and only following a “natural cycle of life”.
But while true that it was aging nicely and taking on a wonderful patina of grey and lichen, with a modicum of care it could have remained in service many, many more years.
And this is the point I want to make: Even as an ardent environmentalist/artist, I was caught napping, so to speak, and let a very important sculpture fall into disrepair basically through laziness.
It doesn’t matter if this “laziness” was culturally, hormonally, politically, relationally or circumstantially induced. The bottom line is that the talk I talk: “that there are tongues in trees and sermons in stones”, wasn’t honoured by a willingness on my part to be an engaged steward of this message.
So, I’ll take on this “healthy” shame, learn from it, and do what I can to be a better active reciprocator of all the goodness given me by the trees and stones of this earth.
The broken bench has been taken away. Not to be placed on the trash heap, but to be brought to my studio as there just might be a “new” sculpture in the making. One that carries several messages of deep ecology, stewardship and reciprocity and the dangers of not living the words.
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Needless to say, the effort required to shape a two ton log into a one ton sculpture was intense. To paraphrase Rodin, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his/her own creation. True enough, but during these particular months of hard slog, I had several fires burning simultaneously and only one concerned an artistic creation.
In these pages I have often written about the importance of art in healing the human disconnect from nature. This held true for the Beads in that its physical shape was abstracted from a Tasmanian sea grass — Neptune’s necklace — found here at Roaring Beach and I wanted people, when viewing the grander of the sculpture, to know that its beauty was reliant upon a natural form. Also, as Princess Mary of Denmark was born in Tasmania, it seemed fitting that some connection be made between her human royalty and the botanic royalty of the sea grass from her place of birth. (Mary, by the way, along with husband Prince Frederick, were the patrons of Denmark’s Aarhus Sculpture-by-the-Sea exhibition.) 
Believing, as I do, in the interconnectedness of all things, if the people of Denmark, who love Princess Mary, also admired the beauty of the sculpture, they would unconsciously or otherwise connect with the natural beauty of Tasmania’s Neptune’s Necklace and, thereby, move that little bit closer to understanding how humans are but one species of leaf on the great tree of life.
My only consolation was that I had at least made it ephemeral; sort of like the sand mandalas the Gyoto monks create and then cast away off the mountain or into the sea. In bed that night the rain drumming on the roof constantly belted out the refrain of temporality to all existence.
The following morning my fears proved groundless. The rain did change the sculpture, but not in a destructive manner. In fact, the effect of the hitting rain drops was to create a beautiful hammered look, much like a stone sculptor would impart on granite. Yes, it lost the smooth, pristine quality of fine, dry sand slowly drizzled, but it’s new appearance was—as in the changing of all life forms—just an ageing process that could be looked at with either awe or a sense of loss. I choose the former.
