Celebration

for Tina Smit 1925-2012

Yesterday, Sunday, I took these photos for today’s blog, the day of Tina’s funeral. I hope they capture the essence of Mark Strand’s words, but also hint at the importance for those of us still alive — and for those children about to be born — that we have no choice but to live and seek out beauty (and humour) in the craziness of today’s world.

The Old Age of Nostalgia

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with a purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of a summer night.

Mark Strand

Dream Testicles, Vanished Vaginas

Horace, the corpse, said, “I kept believing that tomorrow would come and I would get up, put on my socks, my boxer shorts, go to the kitchen, make myself coffee, read the paper, and call some friends. But tomorrow came and I was not in it. Instead, I found myself on a powder-blue sofa in a field of bright grass that rolled on forever.” “How awful,” said Mildred, who was not yet a corpse, but in close touch with Horace, “how awful to be so far away with nothing to do, and without sex to distract you. I’ve heard that all vaginas up there, even the most open, honest, and energetic, are shut down, and that all testicles, even the most forthright and gifted, swing dreamily among the clouds like little chandeliers.”

Mark Strand

Both prose poems are from Strand’s book ‘Almost Invisible’

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Yesterday, after a night of hail and brimstone, lightning, thunderous claps and the continuous roar of 33 foot waves during the darkest hours, I awoke to a quieter dawn and dressed to attend church.

Well, my sort of church.

Sunday sermon morning finds me sitting outside attending to my religious needs. The chalice of transubstantiation I hold is a mug of coffee; my vestments a down vest and woolen beanie. Through the trees my sacred bodily senses are witness to, and carried along by, the rows of rolling white pews shouting out the gospel: “Hallelujah. Praise be to the Earth and your unique place within her bosomed land.”

Who says religious services have to be confined to a walled mortar and brick temple, church or mosque?

Not at Roaring Beach, anyways.

Consider this… the “nave” of a church — defined as the body of a church from the inner door to the choir or chancel, usually separated from the aisles by pillars — is Latin for “ship”. As in navy, or naval. Guess who’s sitting on the poop deck?

The trinity to whom I bow down most reverentially, are these three clustered hakea blossoms. More sweetly pungent than any incense and definitely not as smoky, the congregation of each tiny bud’s fragrance sends samadhi through me with each olfactory inhalation. Soft pink nestled on perky white within a crown of thorns gets me every time.

And in the sacrificial altar bowl? Today, there are cucumbers and three wee squash picked fresh from my own garden of Eden.

If I have any sermon to offer it is this: when your despairing soul cries out in need and prayerfully pleads for a touch of the jubilant — to awaken and move your dreaded existence to a place of hope curtained with passion — get thee to your own garden.

In time of need there are angels aplenty in the guise of carrots, bees, clouds, wind. Found in the apse of your tilled patch of earth they will be tasted in garlic, fondled in dirt and guaranteed to stampede the heart when called upon.

Make compost, plant seeds and then, when the time is ripe, pull gently on those firm orangish shafts until release comes. Nothing tastes better than when handled by love.

It wasn’t just “a game” that had me going back through the mists of time to conjure up a story of fossilized bones found at the far end of Roaring Beach.

I, therefore, must explain why it is that I spent, not just a casual afternoon writing last week’s blog for April Fool’s Day, but several days in its preparation, from the setting up of the photographs, researching the science of evolution and then putting it all together in a format that would be believable to some, yet potentially self informative and a chuckle to everyone.

Wrapped up in this blog of trying to fool people, is Nietzche’s idea that “in our time of doubt about all ‘certainties’, sustained intellectual discourse is hypocrisy.”

I’ve been doing an occasional April Fool’s Day “performance” for over 30 years in order to get people to understand the importance of accepting what it means to be the “fool” in everyday life.

For me, living an artful and/or Artist’s life requires one to be willing to “make a fool of himself/herself”.

When teaching full time years ago, one of my favorite lessons to first year art students — on their very first nervous day at university — was to have them go stand and talk gibberish in a public space for fifteen minutes. When we gathered back into the classroom I would ask how the experience was for them. “I felt foolish.” “I felt really vulnerable.” “I felt alone and unsure of what to do.” “I felt uncomfortable with all these people thinking I was nuts.”

In reply I said: “Get used to this. This is how your whole life will be if you’re serious about being an artist.”

When the muse visits and the artist rafts along on the exciting steady pulse of creative flow, this is exhilarating. This moment, however, is but the rare reward for a life mostly spent outside of one’s comfort zone. It may be rare, but this flash of insight will never visit the timid whose lives are dictated by conformity and living within the rules.

The Tarot cards recognize the importance of The Fool: quirky, crazy wisdom and allowing oneself to be open to vulnerability. All societies recognize the importance of the Fool, the trickster Coyote, the rascal Raven, Brer Rabbit. This character is a balance of both folly and wisdom, a teacher interested in the inversion of social norms, the breaking of boundaries and the shattering of cultural taboos.

In the context of last week’s blog, I would say: “If you want to learn artful behavioral strategies for coping with a changing world, look no further than the lesson of the Fool.”

Accepting the role of the Fool in one’s adult — supposedly mature — persona is what Jungian psychologist James Hillman calls “living the paradox of a puer/senex life”: a combination of youthful goofy irrelevance with teacherly wisdom; the blending of laughter with the serious.

Lastly, let me add that the April Fool’s Day blog entry had as much to do with my own personal growth as with any reader’s.

This is because I’ll do anything to learn how to speak more effectively for the forests. If I make an ass of myself but can save one tree, so be it.

So, no ancient bones to be found at Windgrove. But, hopefully, it is a land that speaks of kindness, compassion and a quirky sense of humour.

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!

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.”