Windgrove

Carbon

January 30, 2012

Vascular: having the form of tubular vessels; consisting of continuous tubes of simple membranes.

In my garden, sunlight illuminates these green tubes of the squash plant.

During the Silurian Period of earth’s evolution (443-418 million years ago, MYA), the first vascular, upright-growing land plants started to green the landscape and, in the process, grab carbon out of the air to build themselves. It took another 50 million years for these tubular stems to grow in strength to create the first tree like plants of 2-3 meters tall (390 MYA). The first forests (360 MYA) didn’t appear until the Devonian Period (418-354 MYA).

[As an fascinating aside, other than when the green producing chlorophyll got depleted and allowed other coloured pigments to exhibit a bit of yellow, brown or red, it took another whopping 235 million years for the flamboyance of flower power to arrive on the scene during Cretaceous Period. Then, finally, those ever-green vascular plants and woody trees decided to adorn themselves with a bit of colour for a bit of pro-creative pizazz and dance with pollen stealing, symbiotic insects. This was 125 million years ago. Talk about slow.]

To get back to the subject on hand — carbon — in between the Devonian and Cretaceous periods, besides the dinosaurs munching on everything green in the Triassic (252-200 MYA) and Jurassic (200-142 MYA) periods, there was the earlier Carboniferous Period (354-290 MYA) where vast tropical forests laid down vast depositions of coal-bearing shales. This was never to be repeated again.

I say “never to be repeated again” because, until the end of the Carboniferous Period, there just weren’t decomposer fungi to compost the fallen trees before they turned into coal. Today, when a tree falls in the forest, fungi gets to it first before there is a chance for the tree to become coal, but not then. Amazing? Yes.

[Another fascinating aside is this: We know that our present day climate is warming due to (among other things) an increased carbon dioxide (CO2) presence in the atmosphere. However, during the late Carboniferous Period so much carbon had been locked up in the making of coal that “too much” was taken out of the atmosphere and the earth’s average temperature dropped to 10 degrees C as opposed to 20 degrees C during the early Carboniferous and 15 degrees C today.]

Now, however, it behoves us to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and to live out our personal lives as close to carbon neutral as possible.

By going on-line one can easily work out their yearly carbon footprint. The above photo shows around 16 tons of firewood being stacked this past week in and outside the wood shed equating to a year and a half’s supply of home heat. When I also factor in my use of a car, household purchases, gas hot water and fridge, food, and even a round-the-world flight, my yearly carbon footprint is 12 metric tons of CO2 per year.

With a deep bow, and a smug smile, I will admit to being even better than “carbon neutral”.

Why? Because I sequester away more carbon than I consume.

Seen through a telephoto lens from a neighbour’s porch 2 kilometers away, is a tree circle with a 140 foot diameter that was planted out 14 years ago with around 1,000 she-oak trees. These trees — along with the “other” 7,000 trees and shrubs planted over the past 20 years — are allowing me to build up a hugh reserve of carbon credits.

How? Assuming the average of each tree is 100 kilos, there is now 800 metric tons of wood growing. This equates to around 60 metric tons of CO2 currently sequestered.

As my carbon footprint is only 12 metric tons of CO2 per year, I’m well ahead of the game. With each passing year, as the trees grow even more, and, as more trees get planted, I just might consider a trip overseas to Cuba and not be too bothered about either the carbon footprint the jet trails leave behind nor the smoke from my big, fat cigar while listening to the Buena Vista Social Club.

Then again, I think I’ll just hang out here at Windgrove and stack up so much carbon credit in the years to come that I’ll wipe clean the debt on the carbon credit card given to me at birth. A credit card that is certainly, as a westerner, still well over the limit.

It’s a good feeling knowing that when my friends sequester my body in the dirt, my final carbon tally will be a healthy one for all concerned.

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Walking time

January 23, 2012

Ants first appeared 140 to 168 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, but they only began to flourish about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period in concert with the flowering plants.

So what’s with this “Jurassic”, “Cretaceous” talk?

And what does a breaking wave have to do with an ant on a hakea bush?

To answer the lathing latter question, I just liked how the two photos looked together. The curling spidery creamy white flowers of the hakea seemed not too unlike the wispy back spray off the waves. Maybe the ant enjoys hanging onto his green tube inside this unfurling whiteness as much as a surfer enjoys being on her board in the green room. Who knows?

What I do know is that a walk of observation around Windgrove always presents new wonders to the senses and brings me a little closer to understanding (actually “embodying” is a better choice of words) my connection to the time line that has placed me here on this earth at this moment.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

To get back to the ants, what I originally started out to write was that, with the help of Jess and Ruth, a new project was begun at Windgrove last week when we hammered into the ground at 50 meter intervals enough stakes to mark out 1.2 kilometers (or, for the metric challenged just under a mile). This will eventually become the Gaia Walk where people will be able to trace an evolutionary history of the earth from 600 million years ago to the present day.

Each step a person takes (assuming each step is a meter long) equals 500,000 years. The Gaia Walk will begin just as the last snowball earth event (see? more white) is about to blizzard near the end of the Precambrian Eon 600 million years ago.

Along the walk, as people walk through the years, signage will list the various time periods (Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous, Jurassic, etc.) as well as denote things of interest such as first trees, first flies, first cockroaches, first land snails, first snakes. Get the picture?

And, of course, the first flowering plants and the first ants.

As for those two people in the photo, where one is squatting and the other standing, the earliest evidence of bipedalism is the Orrorin leg bone from 6 million years ago. The first direct evidence of bipedalism is the Laetoli footprints found in east Africa dated to be 3.6 million years old.

Our current “modern civilization’s” time on this earth thought by scholars and experts to be the last 12,000 years or since the last ice age (forgetting, of course, the 50,000 year history of the Australian aborigines), is just a fat pencil mark on the fence post at the end of the Gaia Walk.

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Changing focus

January 16, 2012

This press of time we humans seem born into, how often do we walk or worked rushed, absorbed in thought as beauty bursts forth unrecognized?

“Stop and tarry”, I say.

Admittedly, it is hard to see the rainbow when standing directly beneath its arching grandeur, but the point I want to make is that our intense focus to get from A to B can deny us from seeing what is actually happening under our noses, or behind us, or in the sky above, or…

or to the left on the rocks 20 metres below the cliff we’re standing on where the power of an incoming wave wells up to break in dramatic fashion.

Soften the gaze, open up to the wider scheme of things. Shift focus; change direction. Then, bring one’s attention to detail.

We set the pace.
But this press of time –
take it as a little thing
next to what endures.

All this hurrying
soon will be over.
Only when we tarry
do we touch the holy.

Rumi

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A stronger Christmas message

December 19, 2011

Does good will blossom at this time of year?

When gift giving is pushed upon us by stores everywhere large and small, on-line or in malls, if we take away the guilt factor from beneath the Christmas tree are we left with anything?

Hopefully, the notion that offering something to someone — whether family, friend or foe — is not seen as an obligation, but a heart felt act of goodliness.

And the offering does not have to be gift wrapped in a box delivered by three wise men. It can be as simple as a gesture of kindliness. A smile to a stranger could do. Or, better yet, extending a hand of empathic compassion to a street person living hard.

Second Chances

What are the chances a raindrop
from last night’s storm caught
in the upturned cup of an autumn leaf
will fall from this tree I pass under
and land on the tip of my lit cigarette,
scuffing it out? What are the chances
my niece will hit bottom before Christmas,
a drop we all long for, and quit heroin?
What are the chances of being hit
by a bus, a truck, a hell-bound train
or inheriting the gene for cancer,
addiction? What good are statistics
on a morning like this? What good
is my niece to anyone but herself?
What are the chances any of you
are reading this poem?
Dear men,
whom I have not met,
when you meet her on the street
wearing the wounds that won’t heal
and she offers you the only thing
she has left, what are the chances
you’ll take pity on her fallen body?

Dorianne Laux

Maybe the above poem seems a bit strong for a Christmas message of goodwill to all, peace on earth and joyful tidings, but what “Second Chances” hints at is that we all have an opportunity, especially at Christmas, to change how we behave towards others. As in every year at this time, we have another chance to reach out for the hand that is extended in a plea for help.

And possibly more important, we just might have a second chance to reach out for the hand that is extended to help lift us up.

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Put simply, “Work”

October 31, 2011

In preparation of a bus load of kindergarten kids coming to Windgrove tomorrow, two of us worked at the Peace Garden earlier in the week clearing algae off the pond (Steve) and raking up wallaby turds (me). Was the work mundane, a tedious chore, a distraction from the serious work that “I”, as a serious artist, should be undertaking elsewhere?

Hell, no. Because on this day, something in the way the sun shone soft, the wind blew gentle, the ground comforted and our banter was amiable, our sweat was made meaningful because the day became exquisitely alive with beauty, colour, texture and intensity. Eros was fully present and easily evident. Scooping up wallaby turds into a wheelbarrow seemed as important and worthy of my time as sitting in the studio carving or, perhaps, sitting on a cushion listening attentively to the Dalai Lama.

Even if the day had been sodden, it wouldn’t have mattered because we’re talking about Work — wherever, whatever, with whomever — and its serious importance to the well being of our lives.

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
The person who wants to live is the person in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

Miguel de Unamuna

This painting by Jean Leon Gerome holds the key to how we, as individuals and as society, will survive the struggles of “blessed unrest” as 7 billion people make their peace with global economic and climate upheavals by adapting artful strategies to their changing world.

There are many interpretations and re-interpretations of the story of Pygmalion and his carving of Galatea (or in other versions, Aphrodite), but to me the simplest and more profound aspect of the story speaks about what happens when one brings skill, intensity, passion and commitment to one’s work.

When viewing the painting, sure, go ahead and allow the first impressions of firm buttocks and erotic embrace to waft over and give pleasure. But then, appreciate the deeper message conveyed: that passion in one’s work makes love visible and brings Eros out of the cracks, into full view penetrating and permeating all.

When work is imagined different from love, work becomes a punishing, and, what I would say, “de-mortalizing” job as well as demoralizing.

(In order to give another visual perspective to the story, there are three photos of the construction of the Peace Garden from eleven years ago.)

(Black and white photos have been included as sort of an analogy to Wim Wenders’ movie ‘Wings of Desire’ where angels can only see in b&w, but one angel decides to become a mortal human just to experience fleshy earthy sensuality and where even seeing his own “red” blood is a moment of wonderment.)

From a psychological point of view, we can say that Pygmalion never found the divine feminine either within himself or within the world at large; hence, he remained single (read steadfastly macho). Eventually, though, through his art, he makes a heart connection to the cold, hard marble of his sculpture and, lo and behold, he falls in love “with his work” and this work becomes a marriage: alive, meaningful and fulfilling (if not difficult).

Rilke reminds us that the winged energy of puer flights of imagination might have been helpful in one’s youth, but as a mature adult, hubris is an unwillingness to pick up wallaby poo. Besides, he states, it is the work of humans that allows the sacred, divine presence of earth, of God, to learn.

Just as the Winged Energy of Delight

Just as the winged energy of delight
carried you over many chasms early on,
now raise the daringly imagined arch
holding up the astounding bridges.

Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living through and defeat of danger;
miracles become miracles in the clear
achievement that is earned.

To work with things is not hubris
when building the association beyond words;
denser and denser the pattern becomes –
being carried along is not enough.

Take your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Transformations of landscape by the thoughtful work of humans blesses the Earth. By being blessed, the Earth in return will bless us all.

Click here for larger image

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Who resides here?

October 24, 2011

At the far end of Roaring Beach are sand stone and sedentary cliffs born in the oceans millions of years ago; now risen to offer shelter within caves carved by wind and waves.

A young child sits beneath an overhang. To her right are the remnants of an aboriginal charcoal midden of blackened shells exposed by recent storms. How old? The girl 12. The midden? 1,000 or 2,000 or 5,000 years of age? Without carbon dating, no one really knows.

This morning I download yesterday’s photos of the cave and on the computer screen there appear, next to this ancient midden, some mysterious white vertical shimmering lines that I was unaware of when standing in front with camera in hand.

Try as I might, they remain unfathomable to my rational mind.