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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