Musings

Monday. Sixteen days spent mostly in the house convalescing. Cabin fever? No. Itching curiosity to fathom more of this world? Yes. If I can’t get my fingers into the earth, I’ll read about her.

At this moment billions of photons from the mid-morning sun are streaming in through the french doors enabling my eyes to see the coffee cup in my steady hand held silently for a moment before first sip. It is a daily ritual; a profoundly important ritual of delight to savor the aroma and taste of this most exquisite addictive excellence of earthy flesh. Yes, dark roasted beans joined with frothed milk.

Below the cup is a hefty book on our Earth. Both coffee and Earth are important to me. The former for the sensory delight it brings to my humble home. The second for the multitude of gratitude I daily feel for the interwoven fleshy intricacies of this greater Home.

Kabir writes:

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,
and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

Seeing the cup and book together gets me to do some simple calculations on how the orbit of our little planet might relate to the sun if the sun were in the middle of the cup and our planet’s orbit were the rim of the coffee cup:

With our sun in the middle of the cup, this fiery ball would be just half a millimeter across. Sunlight streaming from our sun star would take 8 minutes crossing frothy foam to hit our Earth before venturing out to the greater world. At only .005mm in size, our planet would be hard to find anywhere along the cup’s rim.

I like drawing comparisons like this because as an artist it helps me embody some sense of factual truth about our/my place in the universe.

While sipping this ancient star dust made flesh (actually true), I make this calculation: Moving out beyond the coffee cup, the nearest star to our half millimeter sized sun would not be found anywhere in the house. Not even close. Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.2 light years away, would be well over half a kilometer away (630 meters) as a grain of sand at the far end of Roaring Beach.

Bit of space between our two stars, isn’t there?

Maintaining the relative size of our coffee cup sun, if I wanted to travel from my wee half grain of sand-“sun”-star in Tasmania beyond our nearest star and travel all the way across our Milky Way galaxy to its far end, I would find myself in my brother’s kitchen in Dallas, Texas. Like something out of Doctor Who. No wonder I feel so separated from my family.

Let’s move this theoretical distance over to the other side of our galaxy and drop off our sun into “Dallas” and into the hands of my two nephews Alejandro and James. But we’re going to scale things up a bit to give another sense of perspective to the vastness of space. Now, instead of a grain of sand, we enlarge our “sun” into the size of a basketball.

James is under his hoop bouncing our sun. Guess where Alejandro would have to be if he were at the other end of the basketball court bouncing our nearest star Proxima Centauri?

Madrid, Spain. Close your eyes and try and embody a sense of this distance. Our “basketball sized sun” is in Dallas, Texas and our nearest star Proxima Centauri is way, way over in Spain. Wow. Mind boggling, isn’t it?

One last item of info while the cup is drained of the last drop.

To show the dynamics of our own Milky Way and how the stars are moving continuously about, check out the above chart and, in particular, the star Ross 248. Presently 10.3 light-years away, in 31,000 years time Ross 248 will replace Proxima Centauri as the closest star to our sun at “only” 3.02 light-years distant. Can’t wait.

I think I need another cup of coffee to provide more insight into the working wonders of this grand universe.

The best artists…. are those who inhabit the warm world, who hear the blood of the moon humming in the seas and who know the dark sounds of the human body, hearing their own blood in their own ears.

Jay Griffiths, from ‘A Love Letter from a Stray Moon’

In my own life, I work to exemplify what Jay Griffiths writes of artists. It means to daily walk away from the comfort zone of house and studio and stalk the land with no other purpose than to connect with whatever, whomever is attached, floats within or resides here at Windgrove.

By listening with an unfocused, yet intense awareness, something drops on me, around me, into me and the truths of a “sense of place” — even though ultimately remaining mysterious and hidden — become attached.

The land’s stories ultimately enliven the need to live a life of necessity that is born out of a desire take part in the creation of a habitable earth governed by a sacredness that honors all beings bereft of dogma.

“He saw nothing. The country was thick with sacred stories more ancient than the ones he carried in his sweat-slippery Bible. He did not even imagine their presence…. These stories were like fleas, thrip, so tiny that they might inhabit a place…he would later walk across without even seeing.”

Peter Carey from ‘Oscar & Lucinda’

On a small point of land fifty feet above the shoreline not far from my house is an ancient aboriginal midden made up of thousands of discarded shells and opercula; cast there from 12,000 years ago up until the early 1800‘s when God fearing Christians inflicted their own brand of genocide upon the aboriginal’s extremely stable culture.

Click here for larger image of midden

I pick up a single dirt stained operculum and know that I’m holding a single story of life, of birth, of joy, of full bellies around a fire of dance and song.

Somewhere in this midden is the very, very last operculum placed there by the unwary black hand. And it’s single story portends the all too sad and common history of eviction and extermination perpetuated by missionary zeal accompanied by political/business greed and corruption.

After several minutes of sitting with the stories of this midden, I walk away, not so much depressed by what unfolded here, but emboldened to live my life with as much courage and truth as is possible.

I live my life

I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

Rilke translated by Robert Bly

… while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same
beautiful and lonely cry and is never
tired; dreams the same dreams,
And hears at night the rock-slides rattle
and thunder in the throats of these
living mountains.

Robinson Jeffers, The Beaks of Eagles

Silhouetted against the background of a forested Roaring Beach hill, this wedged tail eagle with its wing span exceeding nine feet (2.9m) makes light work of traveling the many miles between its nest and the hill top behind my house.

In alchemy, the eagle is portrayed as the ascension of the spirit from the prima materia, a way of describing how, when understanding separates from the chaos of emotion, it takes wing and can easily disappear into the ether. The alchemists believed that ascent must be answered by its opposite, which means that our loftiest illuminations must descend into integrated embodiment and be applied.

The Book of Symbols, Taschen

As my knees progressively wear out and the freedom associated with good mobility lessens, I can only stand and marvel with increasing envy this bird’s ability to transcend distance so easily and so elegantly.

Just possibly, my “grounding” allows for a slow seep of wisdom into my daily aspirations.

The opportunity here is to greet each day with a smile even while limping through it.

Another phrase I like is: “To walk our lament with praise”.

The Unspeaking Center

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth –
it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it’s you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.

Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 17

Sing, My Heart

Sing, my heart, the gardens you never walked,
like gardens sealed in glass balls, unreachable.
Sing the waters and roses of Isfahan and Shiraz;
praise them, lush beyond compare.

Swear, my heart, that you will never give them up.
That the figs they ripened ripened for you.
That you could tell by its fragrance
each blossoming branch.

Don’t imagine you could ever let them go
once they made the daring choice: to be!
Like a silken thread, you entered the weaving.

whatever image you take within you deeply,
even for a moment in a lifetime of pain,
see how it reveals the whole — the great tapestry.

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 21

I converse often on the land here at Windgrove although my daily conversations tend not to be in English; rather, a non-verbal, felt communion with echidnas, wombats, wallabies, eagles and the occasional whale (one seen four days ago). Aren’t we all such strange and wildly beautiful animals, even if a bit batty?

Speaking of which, David Abram’s new book ‘Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology’ has just been released. From his publisher:

The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species, but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself—a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.

Sitting in their Santa Fe home garden is David Abram and partner Carmen who I visited two months ago. I miss them and our lively discussions on love, gardening, more love, the earth, even more love, the human animal, and, did I forget to mention, a little more talk of love?

To be honest, since returning from my three months of global travels, I have to admit to missing the buzz of being surrounded 24/7 by likable people of mutual respect who carry a love for the earth in their hearts. Not to say that my neighbours here don’t, because they do, it’s just that when travelling I become addicted to the “daily” intense discussions one can have at Schumacher or Esalen or Tassajara or Sprit Rock or Harbin Hot Springs or any number of Berkeley cafes. Here at Windgrove, though, the frequency of human dialogue is far less and its been hard to “slow down” even though my meditative practice asks for this.

And so I am in the process of re-learning why I live where I do and submitting to the conditions my life and my life’s teachings have dealt me. Most of the time this is a smooth, easy re-entry like putting on a well worn glove. Sometimes, though, this submission brings forth an uneasy anxiety, as when I get an email from Thomas Moore and his wife Hari Kirin that reads in part: “we both profoundly appreciate your life and work”.

Make no mistake, a real gratitude for their appreciative words does fill my heart, but a sad, old wound also gets pricked.

“Great”, I moan, “but you two have each other, and David Abram has a partner, and so does Fritjof Capra. Where is my love? Where is the intimacy in my life?”

When this wound opens, I question the worth of what others see as my “profound life and work” and wonder whether or not a simple house with a white picket fence and a loving wife (maybe, even two little kids) would have been a whole lot easier.

Yet….. even as I speak these words, I also know that the black dog of loneliness that “occasionally” stalks me at Windgrove (and I want to emphasize occasionally) is one of the many teachers that have pushed me into awareness. For in truth, I could not be the good teacher I am in England and America if not for the challenges faced at Windgrove where I have chosen, and deliberately so, to live a life on the edge.

This morning, in supposedly cold Tasmania, I photographed my Windgrove home where moments earlier I had basked shirtless on the deck in the soft heat of a winter’s sun. Later, hand weeding my small garden, dark hands loosened and released the composting soil back onto the earth so that it could do its work.

Like a Holy Face

Only as a child am I awake
and able to trusty
that in every fear and every night
I will behold you again.

However often I get lost,
however far my thinking strays,
I know you will be here, right here,
untouched by time.

To me it is as if I were at once
infant, boy, man and more.
I feel that only as it circles
is abundance found.

I thank you, deep power
that works me ever more lightly
in ways I can’t make out.
The day’s labor grows simple now,
and like a holy face
held in my dark hands.

The Book of Hours I, 62
translation — Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows