Personal

Twenty years ago my optometrist told me that because of a mild astigmatism in each of my two eyes I should wear glasses to correct both the near and far “imperfections” of my sight. I took his advice for reading and sculpting, but didn’t care to increase the focal length of “perfect” vision beyond reading because of the hassle of dealing with glasses while being outdoors. Besides, it wasn’t such a big issue in that even with my diminished focusability I could still enjoy all that passed before me.

All, that is, except the stars. They just weren’t crisp and pinpoint sharp as in my youth. Nightly I yearned to gaze upon them with focused clarity and marvel once again at their scintillating brilliance where each distinct star was full of planetary potential capable of being home to untold numbers of exquisite life forms.

Yesterday I picked up my new “star gazing” glasses and when I first put them on back at Windgrove to look into the huddle of trees near the house, well, it was nothing short of a miracle. Such clarity. The peelings of bark and each individual twig with each individual leaf stood out clearly in all their radiant selfness as though a dirty window had been washed clean. I could see more “into” the tree than ever before and I felt like a scientist with some giant high resolution microscope able to differentiate the numerable parts of the whole. All afternoon I stared in awe at the squeeky clean highly defined world before my eyes.

Slowly, though, I began to feel like some sort of peeping Tom peering into the inner workings of the more secret private life of the tree. The increased clarity was certainly welcome, but thinking about it now, maybe I don’t need to see so clearly and with such individuation each of the component parts that make up the whole. Maybe I only need to wear my new miracle glasses just occasionally like on cold nights to view a pointillist Milky Way. Maybe I bit of fuzziness to fuse the world back together into a single tapestry of color and light is okay. Like a Monet painting. Like the following poem:

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the street lights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affection.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: Fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the houses of parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that do not know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, liles on water
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

…… Lisel Mueller

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How will time judge me? Damned if I know.
My accomplishment is, I got up today.
I tried to write a poem. K’ung-fu Tzu said,
“The study of the low penetrates the high.”

Sam Hamill

The poetry of Hamill speaks to me on those slow mornings when high inspiration fails in its bid to whip me into a frenzy of creative endeavor.  Just getting out of bed and being a quiet observer provides sufficient meaning to the day. A walk of low expectations has many delights.

…..And in the end,
it doesn’t matter that we suffered or
did not suffer for our art, but that we
found in verse the courage to stand against
the state, political and religious.

How often you’ve said you don’t know a thing
about Zen or the Tao, but you’re a sage
all the same, and in the tradition of
Chuang Tzu and Confucius, a questioner,
a loner who has struggled to reach out.

Sam Hamill

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Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes—all those things you learned about in school biology—but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterwards so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, you brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defence the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you—billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. So let us take a moment now to regard them with the wonder and appreciation they deserve.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

A week ago, last Wednesday, I went into surgery for a definite inguinal hernia operation on the right side of my groin with the possibility of a second one on the left side. Opening my eyes after the anaesthetic wore off, the surgeon said that he had actually performed a triple hernia operation with the third one being an umbilical hernia.

Initially, I was glad that all the holes had been patched and sewn up, but, as the invasive nature of the operation covered a wider than normal section of my belly, the pain associated with “one” hernia operation was multiplied by three, and, as the morphine’s soporific effect diminished, I more than once cursed the frailty of my body as I attempted to walk from the bed to the toilet; as, I attempted, even to pee.

However (and here is why I started off with the Bill Bryson quote), as the days moved along and I could ease into the comfort of the fireside sofa more freely, I was able to look down onto my belly and not just see an ugly wound. Rather, it became an area of marvellous magic; a continuous healing machine working 24 hours, seven days a week to keep itself whole.

The bruise, whilst seemingly not the prettiest thing to look at, is actually a very visual indication of the cells Bryson talks about doing their work. Isolating the bruise, as in the above photo, reveals a beautifully abstract “live” color-field painting that daily takes on different hues and patterns. The little wisps of black brush strokes are the re-emerging belly hairs; not yet curly, but definitely well on their way. The first days of anguish are now gone and I watch in fascination, and gratitude, as this vastly complex system rearranges itself back into health.

So, a round of applause to all those involved in this great group effort. First, to the billions of cells doing their thing so that I can continue doing my thing. Second, to the very skilful surgeon, Rob Bohmer, and the many nurses who took care of me while in hospital.  And, thirdly, to my partner, Sally, who not only has had the sole task of feeding and looking after my comfort levels here at Windgrove, but has also had to do all the daily chores around the place, including splitting two wheelbarrow loads of wood each day to keep the house fires burning these wintry days and nights.

Come to think of it, I’m beginning to like the cosiness of the sofa and all the attendant services. Maybe, I’ll fake the pain a bit, just to have one more tea and cake served with, yet another, kiss on the forehead.

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Winter solstice eve in the southern hemisphere. The sun sets early; too early. Pushes the man, who has been outside sculptling, inside to find the hearth’s warmth. Pushes him inward, into himself, to fathom this longest passage of dark time. By fireside, as a second, tinier “winter sun” heats up both the soup and those great paws of hands that have fondled tree and stone some 60 odd years, the man wonders just how many more of these great turnings of the earth and sun he will witness before becoming too witless to know what it was ever all about.

He thinks of what still needs to be done on the land upon which he dwells. He thinks of his teacher, Wendell Berry, and a line from this farmer’s poem, A Vision: … a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here…

On this winter solstice eve, a chilling winter rain is blown through the dark. As the ground moistens and softens up for tree planting, a possibility is nurtured and a calculation is made on how many more trees need still be planted before “an old forest will stand”. Fifteen thousand. On average, he puts in 400 per year. Looks like he’ll be putting in the last trees on his 100th birthday. Looks like he needs to keep his wits about in order to be around to witness forty more winter solstices.

A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our season welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
along the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windrows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

Wendell Berry

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Oh, Divine One.

Life has tumbled me in so many harsh ways that, now, the bones of this scrubbed body lie clean and free of the last resistance to Love.

Take these bones then,

And, at cliff’s edge, place in a nest of she-oak needles, lichen and bedfordia.

Softly,

Your heart flies in on dimming light. Touches down, caresses. Makes me finally whole.

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