Nature as teacher

For a year I lived on a farm in Korea that was run by an in-house Catholic priest and frequented regularly by other priests from throughout the country. They seemed wonderfully warm hearted men doing what they thought best for those in their charge. On the surface their public persona was exemplary. Behind closed doors, however, I learned of their being all too human, all to susceptible to the complexities of being human and all to susceptible to the many human frailties including sexual misconduct. I was saddened and appalled and left Korea with a hugh dislike for those in power who not only abused their power, but couldn’t walk the talk they were so ardently preaching.

That was nearly 40 years ago. Today I only have to look at myself and my own long shadow to see that being human — that being part of the animal kingdom — is to be set up for disappointment if total perfection is what one aims for. Wearing the robes of goodliness is never sufficient enough to disguise the earthly animal donning them.

Late on Sunday of this week, when most churches were having evening services, I planted the last of this year’s seedling trees. I held it up to the setting sun, much like a priest holding aloft a chalice or holy book, and with a prayer that honoured the miracle of its young life, placed it into the ground.

When I first started planting trees on this land 16 years ago, I strove for a 100% success rate ardently wishing, more or less expecting, that with enough understanding and technical expertise, this could happen.

The intervening years have taught me, however, that nothing can guarantee protection against the vicissitudes of life. We can water, we can fence, we can pile branches waist high, we can lay down mulch mats, we can increase the size of the the U.V. bags and we can use ever taller and thicker bamboo stakes, but in the end, just like the good priest in Korea, being of this world means being caught up in the wheel of chance where justice and injustice, righteousness and immorality, life and death are interchangeable.

On Wednesday, I spent the day in gale force winds re-bagging and re-staking trees that had been planted two to three years ago and were still surviving; trees next to, but outside of the new protective fencing. I hammered over two hundred stakes into the ground and did my best to protect these struggling young trees from the wind and wallabies. Maybe all this work will be for naught. It could happen that this particular section of the cliff will remain barren despite all the many years of attention, discipline and dedication given to it.

Being human, though, it is in my/your nature to strive for perfection and to live in hope that growth—whether physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual—is an ever-present possibility.

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The above photo of Wedge island, which is just off the southern end of Windgrove, conveys nature as a multiple of dualisms: beautiful and sinister, foreboding and enticing, stormy and calm. There is no one description of nature that fits. The flip side of today’s description will be tomorrow’s reality. Similar, I suppose (if memory serves me correct), to what Tom Robbins wrote about in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues when he said: Everything is beautiful; nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred; nothing is beautiful.

The only issue subject to debate with any of the several qualities of nature is their relative weighting or frequency of occurrence.

I say this because of a comment by an art critic who, in his review last year of an “ephemeral” art exhibition of site specific sculpture, wrote:

Anyone who has watched a David Attenborough documentary will know that peace, tranquility and spiritual renewal are entirely foreign to the natural world. Tennyson’s nature red in tooth and claw is much closer to reality.

Peace, tranquility and spiritual renewal – entirely foreign to the natural world? Give me a break.

My immediate response is to say that the reviewer has been watching too much TV and that he should leave the city and try living surrounded by nature for a period of time. If so, he would come to know that the operative word for nature is “benign”; that, if action and drama are to be filmed, hours of waiting are the norm. Certainly, there is a violent aspect surrounding territorial squabbles and the acquisition of food, but after 15 years of watching the eagles float endlessly for hours at a time, I have only seen an eagle red in tooth and claw twice.

When I encounter a snake along a Windgrove path, I always manage to levitate higher than I can when meditating, but these encounters are a sum total of 15 seconds per year. Compare this with the countless hours of walking I do on these paths and my point is made: if drama is what one is after, then be prepared to wait. Peace and tranquility are the rule rather than the exception.

Capturing Wedge Island in the right light has taken years.

The storms that bend and shape the trees happen only infrequently.

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Today marks another equinoctial day on the year’s calendar where night and day are equal throughout the world. Equal, perhaps, between the amount of hours given to either light or darkness, but not so much a blending of the two. Reminds me of the old, discriminatory, “Separate, but Equal” apartheid laws of America.

Maybe we should abolish the separateness of light from dark and make the whole of the day a fusion of half light, half dark. What would it be like to walk through a noon landscape that looked more moon lit than sun lit? Colors red, blue and yellow would bleed off into soft greys. The grey hairs on my head would be indistinguishable from the dark hairs of my lover. (Hey, I’m beginning to like this, this dimming of contrasts to a soft, muted togetherness.)

Usually, the color grey connotes ageing and death or the slightly sinister. Ghosts, fog, a grey day, battleship grey, men in grey suits. Not exactly cheerful. But, when I sit down to keep company with grey weathered logs nestled among grey weathered stones, I am moved by their sleepy, slow dissolve into each other. This might be the grey of decay and death, but is there not beauty in this final release of differences and the coming together in balanced rest? My eyes tell me there is.

Maybe heaven is but one joyful mass of grey where beauty lies in the greys of the beholder.

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Apologies for not putting up a blog last week. It’s just that I couldn’t find the motivation.

In his book, The Devil in Tim, author Tim Bowden has written:

If there is a piece of paradise on this earth, Peter Adams has come close to finding it with his coastal property Windgrove…

No, my motivation did not fall asleep in a gently swaying hammock whilst drinking rum. Living in paradise can be exhilarating, but it is not always a shield from depression, or more exactly, depressing news.

A couple of months ago, the environmental movement had a terrific day when Australia’s Green Senator, Bob Brown, won a landmark court case against Forestry Tasmania. The federal court decision found that logging of the Wielangta Forest in Tasmania’s east coast was illegal because the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was not being adhered to. By implication, this could be applied to the present logging practices in all of the old growth forests of Tasmania including the Upper Florentine.

Last week, however, the state Labor government joined forces with the federal Liberal government to change the existing laws governing threatened species thereby making any and all logging operations “legal”.

At the same time, the brave protesters trying to stop the destructive logging practices in the Upper Florentine continued to be harassed and arrested. Their actions were deemed “illegal” and they were hauled off to jail.

So much for the workings of democracy.

Climate change and the environment are certainly off the back burner in political and corporate circles around the globe, but Tasmania and Australia are still ruled by people who wouldn’t have a clue in understanding Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the preservation of the world.

And so I lost a bit of steam last week as I got caught up in my own and other’s despair over the blatant unethical behaviour of the two major political parties to “legally” find a way to circumvent the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

An ear of corn, however, showed me a way back into thinking positively.

For several months I watched as five seedlings grew into tall green stalks with each bearing one bulging ear of corn. Whether by myself or others, they were daily watered and nurtured. Everyday, that is, except last week when I lost interest and a bit of motivation.

Today, when I peeled back the leaves of one of the ears of corn expecting to find a nice juicy golden explosion of kernels ready to steam and butter, I found an inedible ear of corn, dry and starchy; the result of not being watered. I dropped my guard for just three days and all the good work gone into the cultivation and growing of the corn came undone.

Looking at the ear with its deflated kernels could have been depressing. Instead, I saw it as a lesson that when taking on a project, any project, to see it through to fruition, the garden, so to speak, must be diligently guarded. Nurturing becomes a constant responsibility.

We all want a more peaceful, sustainable world. To achieve such an end requires a sustained effort. Let’s not let the bastards diminish our resolve to make such a world a reality.

(Forest photo: Matthew Newton)

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