A Christmas walk through the wet, eventually snowy, alpine rainforest of Mt. Field was a real holiday treat. To have opened up in front of our eyes the beauty of blossoming red waratah, wet barked snow gums, ancient pencil pines and numerous pandani in a dense carpet of understory was a gift wrapped present of pure Zen. Summer in Tasmania is certainly a wild mixture of weather.
Good cheers to All
May Peace prevail on Earth
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A Christmas walk through the wet, eventually snowy, alpine rainforest of Mt. Field was a real holiday treat. To have opened up in front of our eyes the beauty of blossoming red waratah, wet barked snow gums, ancient pencil pines and numerous pandani in a dense carpet of understory was a gift wrapped present of pure Zen. Summer in Tasmania is certainly a wild mixture of weather.
Good cheers to All
May Peace prevail on Earth
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The above “33 hearts mandala” was one of three mandalas gifted to me yesterday by Sally; a day that marked 22,280 days in procession that I have walked this earth—just over two thirds of the way to where I hope to end up having had a life of 33,000 days.
I like the number three. Open on one side, yet protected on the other, there is a lovely give and take in its asymmetrical symmetry. Linear, yet bulbous, it is the most sensual of all the numbers.
33 is the atomic number of arsenic, as well as, the ripe old age to which Alexander the Great and Jesus lived. It is also the number of the most professional baseball innings played.
Being fascinated with this likeable number gave me the commitment to complete the 3 year, 3 month, 3 week, 3 day daily surf that I finished last year.
The two other mandalas from Sally were an oil painting on canvas and an acrylic painting on stone. In the birthday card accompanying them, she wrote:
In honour of the ups and downs of love…
The Cosmic Heart Mandala represents the “ups” of love; love at the spirit level. It is soft and malleable like a tender heart. The heart is nourished by deep-reaching roots, and feeds and nourishes a green shoot that is infused with new life. The shoot pushes its way up and out, sprouting into an endless spirited sky.
The Rocky Love Mandala represents the “downs” of love; love on the mundane earthly level. It is the stable force for when the road gets rocky. It signifies that aspect of love that stands through thick and thin. It is solid and grounded and strong.
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Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.Rainer Maria Rilke
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Sally moved to Windgrove this week. After returning from China, she packed up her Melbourne belongings into her little red car, took the overnight ferry across Bass Straight, drove six hours down the middle of Tasmania and then arrived at Windgrove for the start of an uninterrupted year long stay before she returns to Melbourne to finish her fifth year at medical school.
Nothing overly unusual about such a move except this: at sixty years of age and, for the first time in my life, a woman is moving into a committed, serious partnership with me. Excited and nervous, I have put a lot of time lately into sprucing up the house and yard in preparation for Sally’s arrival. New rock stepping stones to her studio along with a raised garden bed of kangaroo paws beneath her studio window are an attempt to demonstrate my desire to create a home where beauty resides along with love.
I know that what I have done is just window dressing, so to speak, and that the real tests of living together will soon bare their teeth, but my hands have always been creative at expressing what my heart feels and I have liked the building of our nest.
Anyway, several days after re-sowing several sections of lawn, I noticed little piles of grass seed beginning to appear like white mounds of rice over the areas of sown lawn. Closer examination revealed all the grass seed I had sown earlier was being removed by teams of ants to their individual homes in the ground.
My first reaction was to mutter a few swear words and to curse the ants from undoing the work I had done for Sally’s homecoming. But, then, I realised that what the ants were doing was no different than what I was doing: working industriously to create a home that sustains life.
In a way, it is all about a love of sorts. Bringing in the seed to nourish those with whom we live.
I set up a lady’s writing desk to create a space that might nourish the imagination. I thinned out the garden, replanted seedlings and watered them carefully, so that upon her return, my love, like the busy ants, would have food to munch on with contentment as the days drift past.
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Although true, it is too easy to just say that the shadow figures nudging up to the Peace Pole are myself and my partner.
Although true, it is too easy to just only talk about the love that spirals up between the two of us and abandon the rest of the world.
What I want to say, what I would rather say, is that the shadow figures represent people who, though once full of enmity for each other, had a conversion somehow, somewhere and were finally able to humble themselves before the face of love.
Such a trite word these days, “love”. Sometimes almost as banal—or as silly—as “peace”.
What I want to say, what I would rather say about love is that it is nothing if not powerful.
If our imagination is courageous enough, powerful enough, the two shadow figures holding hands are a Lebanese Muslim and an Israeli Jew.
Imagine it. Imagine it happening. Imagine it happening and we can change the world.
The US serviceman who bombed children with napalm during the Vietnam war eventually met with the grown Vietnamese woman who was the naked, fleeing, scorched child captured in a photo at the time.
Karen Eberhardt Shelton writes of this 2nd meeting.
Making Amends
He has closed her horrified mouth
With a kiss of apology,
His own suffering
A bridge between them.He is a rare gift:
To heal with an embrace
So many years after burning off her flesh
In a hateful war;
Having forgiveness come back to him
Was the closure of a century.That she survived to face him,
That he lived to grow into compassion;
One of those perfect miracles
You can’t explain, yet it is so beautiful,
It illuminates everyone.Karaen Eberhardt Shelton
(from Resurgence magazine #219)
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Windgrove is a 100 acre coastal property in the south-east of Tasmania that borders Roaring Beach and looks out across Storm Bay to the Antarctic 3000 kilometers away. ‘Life on the Edge’, first published in 2003, is a weekly diary of photos and prose about the comings and goings here.
The author of this blog and steward/ caretaker of Windgrove is Peter Adams. American born (Detroit), Harvard graduate (1968), Peace Corps volunteer (Korea), carpenter (Alaska), furniture designer/maker (North Carolina), sculptor and environmental writer (Tasmania).
His art is in six museums internationally and he has taught at schools in England, America, Korea and Australia.
After purchasing Windgrove in 1991, Peter has spent the ensuing years transforming the landscape through the planting of 8,000 trees and the creation of several large scale Earth Art features. In the process he, himself, has been transformed by the land.
This blog is the story of that reciprocal transformation.
Week of July 3-8, 2011
Learning From Leonardo: The Role of the Arts in Overcoming Our Crisis of Perception
Fritjof Capra & Peter Adams
Week of July 17-22, 2011
Artful Strategies for a Changing World
Peter Adams
More information here.
