Personal

I had a dream the other night.

While walking along the shore of Roaring Beach, I came across a curiously shaped bottle half buried in the sand. I dug it out and, while rubbing the darkened glass to cleanse it, a genie appeared and granted me three wishes.

Immediately, my first wish was for all the old growth forests of Tasmania and the world to be protected from the destructive practice of clear-felling and napalm ignited burn offs.

Poof. It was done. And I breathed a great sigh of relief for the trees.

Emboldened by the seeming power of this genie, my second wish was for all the peoples of the world to be united in peaceful co-existence where army tanks rusted into oblivion, “love” was the only four letter word ever used, social justice was the norm, religions and science learned from each other, and, every individual recognized their connection to the whole like pearls to a necklace.

Poof. It was done. And I was moved to tears and wept that such a joyful manifestation of the world could become a reality.

“Wow”, I thought, this genie’s good.

For my third and last wish, knowing of the genie’s immense power to manifest one’s wishes, I decided to move away from the grandiosity of global concerns and concentrate on just me and “my” desires.

This took a little longer. I hemmed and hawed, fidgeted, and felt a little guilty about using this last wish just on my own selfish needs. But the genie reassured that this was really okay. One for all, all for one. The macro in the micro. The heavens in a grain of sand. You know, that sort of stuff. Whatever is me could be shared with others. Etc. Etc.

So, I closed my eyes and listened to an inner small voice and heard its concerns. The dialogue within me was dealing with the aftermath of my recent hospitalization coupled with turning 65 this year. Basically, for the past few months I hadn’t been feeling as lovable or attractive enough as I once might have felt in my youth (in photo with dark hair at age 16).

And the prostate surgery certainly didn’t help my sense of feeling sexy.

“Okay”, I said, to the kindly genie waiting patiently for my third wish. “Grant me this: May women once again look upon me and find me very desirable and totally irresistible.”

“Your wish shall be granted”, the genie extolled before returning into the bottle.

Poof. It was done.

Within seconds, I was turned into a bowl of chocolates.

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In April of this year the 15th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre occurred. In two weeks there will be the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Ground zero for Norway is presently happening.

Can organized religions with their penchant for homilies of shallow acceptance help us find “an answer” to these murders that makes any sense? Can a life of abstinence, piety or sweet innocence guarantee smooth sailing?

Go over and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead,
wear your hair matted, long, and ostentatious,
but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you have God?
……

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

Kabir

What Kabir hints at is the futility of organized religion to make sense of any of this. All one can really do is enter into life fully and walk one’s lament with praise.

To love-with-fullness is not an easy task.

Compassion and deep love, however, are found no other way. To remain stable within the peaks and troughs of existence demands an engagement with dread.

More than once I have mentioned to you how my life and work have been guided by the effort to overcome the old pressures that rob us of mystery, the mystery essential to our capacity to love from fullness. Humanity has been terrified and beset by dread; but is there anything noble and gracious that has not, from time to time, worn the mask of dread?

Rilke

There was one night this past week when “dread” kept me awake. A double whammy of continued internal bleeding from recent surgery coupled with chronic back pain caused the shadowy ghoul of fear to flicker in and out of my darkened bedroom. Despite attempts to meditate myself to sleep with lovingkindness, I ended up medicating myself to sleep with codeine and valium.

In the morning, instead of reaching for the Bible for inspiration (as I would have as an naive person 50 years ago) I picked up books of poetry by Rilke and Kabir. To a troubled soul in turmoil their words were a calming wisdom that brought a sense of balanced acceptance back into my life.

I have been housebound for too long. What I really need to do is get out and walk the land. A land bursting with healing.

Land — where a true understanding of the sacred and one’s place within this sacredness is found.

Let me close this week’s blog with a short piece I wrote after the Port Arthur massacre.

Port Arthur

One can never know for certain that the blessedness felt today will be upon us tomorrow. So, how do we survive the change, the ebbing tide? And what sustains us when the moon of our being moves into those voids of the unknown, totally lost? Who or what can pull us out?

It is April 1996, the last Sunday. Morning has such a serene sweetness to it that I can be seen in my studio, not hunched over the work at hand, but looking out over the she-oak and sagg pastured landscape so absorbed into it that I just stand there doing nothing. It is a delicious meditation. Early afternoon and I am on the beach idly poking around rocks and tidal pools with a tranquility that borders on sleep.

Then the helicopters start to fly past, low and directly overhead. From Hobart towards, I guess, Port Arthur. And then back again. Then again, and again like something out of Vietnam. Not having a telephone, I walk to my nearest neighbour’s house out of curiosity. No one at home. Nor at another neighbour’s house. Roaring Beach Road, normally busy on a warm, Sunday afternoon, has absolutely no traffic on it. Back home I do the very unusual and listen to the 6 o’clock news on the truck radio.

My world in an instant unravels; its goodness vanquished by the murders of 35 people. Amongst people I know — three dead and one seriously wounded. And, as if to make the darkness darker, the next day I learn of the suicide of a friend.

A long, very long month later I wake up early, before dawn, with the full moon slapping me on the face. Knowing that I will not get back to sleep, I dress warmly and climb to the top of the hill back of the bus and out to a cliff edge that rises 200 meters above the waters of Storm Bay and the Southern Ocean. I say a prayer for the Port Arthur victims. Sitting down, I watch the yellow-orange moon with its watery shaft slowly descend way to the south-west behind Bruny Island. In the pregnant half hour of half light before the full dawn, I continue to remain motionless, content to watch the landscape and seascape and sky-scape awake to a new day and allow myself the pleasure of immersion into its beauty. Deep within, the beginnings of a heart purr are felt.

Then… right at eye level just a few meters out in front of me on its early morning breakfast run, a white breasted sea eagle ever so majestically floats past on grand, outstretched wings.

For an instant and in that moment only, the “I” and “Thou” merge and I have the sensation that I am observing myself. Myself the hungry eagle and the thunderous cloud; the fruiting tree, the sea’s water. All is One. The awesome beauty and pain of life becomes inextricably linked and all seems just. Those nights that I woke up crying after Port Arthur were as much a part of life as this beautiful dawn. The great Wheel contains it all and I am intimately fused onto it.

Within a few seconds I lose the ability to hold onto this truth, but I feel, none the less, blest. On this particular Sunday morning, nature has given me a sermon on the mount. I have tasted of the sacrament and it is good. With the sun beginning to warm up my backside, I understand that a new day has begun; that a hearty breakfast waits for me, too; that there is honest work to be done in the healing of this planet, friends to gather round and play to be had.

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Some five hundred years ago Leonardo da Vinci dissected corpses in order to view the hidden workings of the human body. The exquisite drawings that resulted from his observations are still marvels today for their fusion of science and art.

This past week I had a MRI done of the lumbar region of my spine to help diagnose a chronic problem associated with a lower back that has taken the brunt of many years of physical challenges associated with apprenticing myself to this earth. I’ll not pretend to liking the pain, but to ripen fully as a human being requires more than just dancing in the lightness of joy; it demands, as Rilke would write, an equal share of “darkness and travail”.

On the bright side, to see through modern technology what Leonardo was able to see, and, better yet, take a revealing look at “my very own inner workings”, is nothing short of miraculous.

We human animals have evolved into a complex and intricate piece of machinery. What I do with all the many parts that create my whole is, I hope, worthy of the millions of years of creation that went into its making. I know that I am a stunning piece of work. We all are. But we are asked to do more than just strut our stuff.

In the Drawing Room

They are all around us, these lordly men
in courtiers’ attire and ruffled shirts
like an evening sky that gradually
loses its light to the constellations; and these ladies,
delicate, fragile, enlarged by their dresses,
one hand poised on the neck-ribbon of their lapdog.

Tactful, they leave us undisturbed
to live life as we grasp it
and as they could never comprehend it.
They wanted to bloom
and to bloom is to be beautiful.
But we want to ripen,
and for that we open ourselves to darkness and travail.

Rilke

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While still a young man, the poet Rilke stayed with the sculptor Rodin in Paris in order to write an essay on the man and his work. Notwithstanding the immensity the experience had on Rilke (his first great poem ‘The Panther’ resulted because of Rodin’s instructions to him to go to the Paris zoo and observe for days on end, if necessary, one animal until he actually “saw” it) what I really appreciate is how Rilke wrote about his first encounter with Rodin.

Arriving at Rodin’s Place in Meudon

He has received me, but that means nothing untilI tell you how. Thus: the way a beloved place receives you on your return through many tangled trails. A spring which you sang and lived for day and night while you were gone. A grove over whose leafy canopies the birds cast shadows as they fly back and forth. A path along the roses that never ceased to lead you where you needed to go. And like a great dog did he receive me, recognizing me with peaceable, caressing eyes. And like an eastern god, moving only from within his noble calm, and with the smiles of a woman and the eager hands of a child. And he led me around to see the gardens and houses ad studios.

Rilke

Greeting guests and friends with “peaceable, caressing eyes”, the gentle “smiles of a woman and the eager hands of a child” are all attributes I want to emulate and aspire to. Every Monday morning my good neighbour Steve arrives to help me around the gardens, house and studio. “Like a great dog” and “from within a [sometimes] noble calm”, I extend a giant paw of welcome.

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Holy Shit!

Has it really been a year and a half since my last journal entry on 5 June, 2008? Yep. Just shy of the mark by only two weeks.

Well, I’m back. Welcome home.

My shadow precedes me as I walk through the gate.

In the intervening 18 months since the last entry I spent six of them travelling around the world, installed and de-installed after a month’s exhibition a 6 metre/ 20 foot tall one ton sculpture in Denmark that took four full months to carve at Windgrove before shipping, heart-breakingly separated from my partner Sally, lost my confidence and sense of purpose, charged into my early childhood behavioral patterns through therapy sessions,got back into Buddhist mindfulness meditation, kayaked in northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, hugged several gigantic red wood trees in California, spent three nude weeks at the Harbin hot springs resort, walked with poet David Whyte in England’s Lake District, studied a full month with Thomas Moore, Jules Cashford and Fritjof Capra at Schumacher College, undertook an eight day silent retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, nourished my soul, reconnected with scores of friends in Germany, France, England and America, swam with the wild dolphins in Hawaii and, above all else, kept the faith that one day I would find more light in the day than darkness.

That’s it in a very tiny one sentence nutshell. Over the coming months I will tease out the above as well as keeping my readers informed of the daily happenings at Windgrove.

Past regular readers will notice that today’s blog has a new look and layout. My webmaster Allan Moult has spent the past three days here at Windgrove working with me in setting up the new look blog site. Moving all the earlier material over from Expression Engine to the new blogging platform Word Press will take time. Just to move one previous entry over to the new site takes approximately 5 to 10 minutes depending on the number of photos and the formatting of the writing. As there were 300 previous entries from five years of writing, this process will take a few weeks. So, bear with me while I slowly bring the past journal entries over to this new site.

Although there are bittersweet moments in rereading each previous entry that has a photo of Sally in it, and there are many that do, there is a lesson here in letting go with compassion and kindness rather than trying to block out the past through forgetfulness.

Actually, it fits right in with most of the philosophy of this blog: Life is a mixture of bliss and torment. It is a worthy pursuit to walk this human path with a generosity of spirit endeavoring to spread happiness to all beings. May we never stray too far off.

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