Life on the Edge

For the past two months—or ever since the last piece of wood was put onto the Peace Fire on April 6, thereby allowing it to come to an end after six continuous years of burning— a sense of “empty anticipation” has been a constant companion. Empty in the sense that what I most desire right now is to simply empty myself out, sit still and listen. Anticipation, in the sense that the next important phase of my life is arriving and I want to be ready for this encounter; uncluttered and free of excessive constraints whether physical, emotional or even spiritual.

There Is a Place Beyond Ambition

Mary Oliver


Alice Walker dedicated the following poem, “Light Baggage”, to Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, and Jean Toomer; all writers who, at some point in their careers, left the “career” of writing and went off seeking writing’s very heart: life itself. Zora went back to her native Florida where she lived in a one-room cabin and raised her own food; Jean Toomer became a Quaker and country philosopher in Bucks Counth, Pennsylvania; and Nella Larson became a nurse.

Light Baggage

there is a magic
lingering after people
to whom success is merely personal.
who, when the public prepares a feast
for their belated acceptance parties,
pack it up like light baggage
and disappear into the swamps of Florida
or go looking for newer Gods
in the Oak tree country
of Pennsylvania.
or decide, quite suddenly, to try nursing,
midwifery, anonymous among the sick and the poor.
stories about such people
tell us little;
and if a hundred photographs survive
each one will show a different face.
someone out of step. alone out there, absorbed;
fishing in the waters of experience
a slouched back against the shoulders
of the world.

I, like Zora, Nella and Jean, feel the need to leave the public’s gaze, close the gates of Windgrove and turn the energy of my emerging elder years towards a new, as yet unknown, direction. These next months are to be a period of emptying myself of ritualized duties, writing weeky blogs and laying down the banners, so to speak, to find more time in the day to just listen. To be like the empty Tibetan temple bowl that resonants clearly and beautifully when hit, this is my present goal.

As patterns emerge, I’ll blog them. If nothing else, there will be the occasional post on whatever artistic endeavors I am undertaking. 

So, for now, after five and a half years of weekly blogs, goodbye.

A leaf flew into the window last night during a storm of 170 kilometres per hour winds. It plastered itself onto the glass and is still there now stuck like glue offering an image to the brief frailty of all life. Everywhere I turn and look there is branch debris, the wind is still strong, the waves tumultuous and the light foreboding. Inside the cocoon of my house and warming fire I ponder the words of Mary Oliver who writes in Winter Hours near the end of the book (and winter):
 
“Now the winter, the winter I am writing about, begins to ease. And what if anything has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age—events pass, things change, trauma fades. Good fortune rises, fades, and rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on. Somewhere the words I will write down next year, and the next, are drifting into the wind, out of the ornate pods of the weeds of the Provincelands.
 
Once I went into the woods to find and almost unfindable bird, a blue grosbeak. And I found it: a rough deep blue, almost black, with a heavy beak; it was plucking one by one the humped, pale green caterpillars from the leaves of a thick green tree. Then it vanished into the shadows of the leaves and, in the same moment, from the crown of the tree flew a western bluebird—little aqua thrush of the mountain, hundreds of miles from its home. It is a moment hard to top—but I can. Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap and trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement.”

With Zimbabwe and Tibet in the global news and Tasmania’s pulp mill given more federal approval, it is hard to live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement. But not impossible. The hill is still there behind the fog. The unfindable is findable. The secret of light will reveal it yet again. Perhaps tomorrow.

A Gary Snyder zen poem reads: “In the shaping of the axe the model is close at hand.”

As a sculpture who uses axes, chisels, gouges, rasps and other tools-of-removal, I am fond of this poem because of its inherent wisdom in the notion that if one wants to make an axe, all one need do is simply look at the carving axe already in your hand as the model to create the new axe.

(As a sort of koan, there are multiple meanings to this poem, but I will leave these up to the reader to pursue and ponder.)

Not quite in the sense of Snyder’s poem, but now in my studio I have my own “model close at hand” and am using it to create a much larger sculpture of around nine feet in length (2.7 meters). The small model seen in the photo started off as an experiment where I carved two spirals going in opposing directions. I had no idea what the finished piece would look like and was rather surprised at what emerged. Sort of humorous, actually. Like a stack of fish eggs that diminished in size or an aquatic, never before seen species of sea weed. Although complex in a mathematical sense and a bit daunting to carve, the little model never fails to put a smile on my face much in the same way seeing someone strumming on a ukulele never fails to cheer me up.

Anyway, I hope the full scale sculpture turns out as intriguing as the model. Plans now are to carve a grouping of four of them (one for each finger of my carving hand). 

A dog sits calmly, head turned towards a glow that emanates soft yellow. Does the dog understand what it is looking at? Maybe to the dog, its just the tail end of that “giant dog in the sky” she howls at monthly. Maybe, maybe not.

Or is cognition just the domain of humans? This, they say, is what separates humans from other animals because we can look at something, a photograph let’s say, and discern what is happening in that photograph. Us humans are supposedly intelligent enough and up to date on events and visual imagery to know that the “tail” in the above photo is the exhaust plume left behind by the space shuttle as it blasts into orbit.

We know these sort of things.

This week, Australia’s prime minister looked at several pictures of the Chinese military crushing monks and indigenous Tibetans where 80 to 100 people have been killed. Kevin Rudd’s response to what he saw put him below the intelligence of the dog.  He weakly urged “Chinese authorities to exercise restraint”, but condoned their actions by immediately adding the qualifier, “Australia has always recognised China’s sovereignty over Tibet”. In other words, Australia is not going to jeopardise its relationship with China with any demands to stop the cultural genocide happening in Tibet. Rudd doesn’t even have much bark, let alone any bite to his message of restraint.

Kevin Rudd says “The recent developments in Tibet are disturbing and the Australian Government has made its position known”. Well, Mr. Rudd, lap dog of the Chinese military, why don’t you tell the Australian citizenry what it is you actually said? Why such a compassionate less, bureaucratic response to the situation? Surely, the more than 20 YouTube videos coming out of China (before China blocked access to them) and the eye witness accounts from tourists within Tibet should be enough to put a little snarl on your lips.

Greens leader Bob Brown certainly has heart when he calls on Rudd to get some backbone. “Rudd has fallen in line with John Howard on China, that is, see no evil, because trade’s too important.”

What I have never been able to fathom about this trade issue is why the worry? Australia, as far as I can see, holds the trump cards. We have the ore, gas and coal that China desperately needs for the continuation of China’s economic growth. If Australia withholds its precious resources as an economic embargo, certainly China will sit up and take notice. Why, when China is so brutish to the indigenous people of Tibet, do we give them a piece of meat and then say, “Bad dog”?

So, Mr. Rudd, keep examining those photos coming in through secret government channels. Look carefully, start exercising your heart muscles and you just might mature into a global prime minister worthy of the job. To help you along, I’ll include one recently taken of an indigenous woman and child in the Amazon.—a defenceless woman being shoved and beaten by faceless, armoured authority.

Cultural genocide, whether in Australia, China or Brazil, needs more than just you to mouth, “I’m sorry”.  Throw some meaningful weight behind your words.

Most readers would be familiar with the story of the two people who are looking at a drinking glass that has been filled to the half way mark. One optimistically says, “It’s half full” while the other person says in a more pessimistic voice, “It’s half empty”.

Since writing last week’s blog entry about the young girl and her apparent happiness with a tiny jar of face cream, I have been pondering what it means for any of us to remain satisfied with what we have. My fear for the girl was that with the western world’s advertising pressures assailing her from all directions, her requirements to remain happy would be constantly rising. Today the tiny jar of face cream, tomorrow the red sports car or mansion on the Riviera. That day in the train her glass was “half full”; in a year’s time I imagined she would think it was “half empty”.

To live on a sustainable earth, resource depletion and human consumption—along with population growth and climate change—must be addressed. But how?

My simple answer is not so much how we interpret the level of wine (or other goodies) in our glass, but that we take whatever we do have and pour those items into a smaller “glass of expectations”. Then, without doubt, our cup will be full to the brim or even overflow.

It is not that any of us (certainly anyone reading this blog) don’t have enough material possessions to live comfortably.  Our problem is that the more we accumulate, the bigger our “glass of expectations” becomes. And the glass doesn’t get just big enough to accommodate what we have, it always grows to remain twice the size of our material wealth.  Even with the optimist exclaiming “It’s half full”, the optimist is only more certain than the pessimist that he/she can eventually fill the glass.  Which never happens.

The two glasses in the photo each hold an equal amount of wine. The one on the left holds its share of wine with much more elegance and is certainly more pleasing to the eye and connotes celebration. It behoves all of us to design a way of living that enhances rather than diminishes the fewer possessions we own. It is possible. And the earth will appreciate us for it.

Yesterday I splashed out on a new pair of cream coloured pants and a green shirt in order to be a little more presentable than normal at an upcoming wedding in two weeks. (My wardrobe of well worn, mostly work clothes, has now been increased by about 20%). Driving home from Hobart with my fresh purchases folded neatly in a stylish Rivers clothing bag, I began to wonder how long it would be before what was so new in the bag would become just another thread bare cloth that carried more dirt than fashion on its sleeves.

The photo shows where some rotten boards were replaced this past week. We constantly build, make new, repair and then throw away. The cells in our bodies do it daily; my wardrobe gets madeover every few years; the house Sally and I live in gets mended somewhere in-between.

Just like the constantly changing physical dimensions happening within and around us, can the same be said of our emotional or spiritual lives? Have any of those fond, happy memories of the past become too faded to keep around anymore and should they be discarded? Are there any emotional decking boards, once solid, now rotten, that need to be replaced? Those spiritual teachings I wrap myself in, are they still giving me warmth or protection from whatever lurks out there?  Do I really want to be so green in my life that I “recycle” and “reuse” whatever emotional baggage I have been hauling around? Probably not.

Looking now at the bag containing my new shirt and pants, I cast my mind back to the time when I sat next to a young girl on a train in Germany in 1990. The Berlin Wall had just come down and I was travelling from the former, more affluent West Berlin to the more impoverished East German town of Potsdam. On the train were many East Germans who had just been, probably for the first time ever, into West Berlin to visit relatives and to purchase whatever they could afford of the many consumer goods available there. The girl was about fifteen, not poorly dressed, but definitely poor. She held a brown paper bag on her lap. Held it tightly, as though holding onto a treasure; possibly fearful that someone might take it from her. I imagined that she had spent whatever little money she had on whatever it was that was hidden in the bag.

She travelled alone. Never spoke a word. But every few minutes the girl would carefully unfold the rolled down top of the paper bag and take a peek at her secret. Then a smile would spread across her face. A very sweet, happy smile. And my heart opened and I felt happy for her too; happy that the Wall had come tumbling down and that the East could once again move freely into and out of the West.

No longer content to just look at her treasure, the girl started to reach in and hold the object for a short while before pulling her hand back out and refolding the bag. And all the while wearing her smile.

My curiosity got the better of me and I began to lean into her a little whenever she opened the bag in an attempt to see what was down there. Every jerky train movement would have my head and eyes fall nearly on top of her, but to no avail. Whatever was in there was tiny and impossible to see.

Finally, she reached in with both hands and pulled it out. It was a little jar of “Ponds Beauty Cream”. She opened it and with eyes closed put the slightest dab on her young face. She was glowing with joy and, although I was happy for her present happiness, I also felt a touch of sadness for this young girl because, to me, she had taken that first slippery step along the path towards living in our “western” seductive consumerist society where advertising dictates whether or not you have the right goods to be loveable. After she went through that first jar of “expensive” cream to make herself more beautiful and nothing happened, what next?

This was 18 years ago. The young girl of then would now be in her mid 30’s. I wonder if she still has managed to keep that sweet smile on her face? Does she do it by walking in the forests near her home or by yet another train trip, but this time to Paris, Amsterdam or London?

I look into my own bag and do feel a little guilty for spending money on some new clothes. I think of the wedding I bought them for though. I think of the young girl again, close my eyes and imagine being at my own wedding when Sally and I get married. A sweet smile comes across my face and I feel an urge to dance, and dance and dance.

The “giant squid” egg on the beach didn’t actually arrive on the rising tide. That was just me having fun trying to get an interesting photo. Instead, it was sent in a padded box by young fourth grader Patrick Kammar from the Jemicy School near Baltimore, Maryland as part of a “migration project’ that is looking at the survival rate of those species that migrate through the seasons.

The teacher initially wrote: “We’ve had some trouble in the past getting our eggs through Australian Customs intact, but we thought we’d try.”

Well, the egg did make the 25,000 mile journey all in one piece. No Humpty Dumpty here. Not so lucky, though, (and this is what the school’s experiment is looking into) are the dead blue-bottle jelly fish and the never-to-hatch fish eggs seen in the photo alongside Patrick’s egg. Migration is a tricky business. Whether one is a bird, fish or human refugee, moving around the globe trying to survive is fraught with plenty of danger.

PS. For us surfers, seeing blue-bottle jellyfish is both good and bad. They have a nasty sting, but are an unfailing indication of warmer water as they come down to Tasmania on the warm currents from eastern Australia.

Last night I slept 12 hours. Bone tired, I was. Not to say that I wasn’t content in my tiredness, because I was. You see, the past two weeks have been spent preparing for and executing a site specific sculpture at the Friendly Beaches Eco-Lodge on the east coast of Tasmania. The only requirements were that the sculpture was to be “ephemeral”, be comprised of natural materials and relate to the surrounding environment before degrading back into nature. (My last blog of two weeks ago—apologies for missing last week—had two photos of the full scale model I had assembled here before I went as an experiment into whether or not I could create a three dimensional model of the phyllotaxis pattern found in a sunflower.) The photos below are of the actual “sand galaxy” mandala constructed over the past week at the lodge.

My tiredness was mainly a result of the huge physical effort needed to haul several tons of sand and dirt to the site to build the 460 individual “seed” mounds that graduated in size from two feet in diameter down to three inches in diameter. The overall diameter of the piece was just under 20 feet or 6.5 meters. Without the help of Oliver, Ron and Sally, it would not have been completed on time. To them I owe a heap of thanks.

As for the ephemeral quality of the piece, within an hour of “finishing” it a gale force storm roared in and lashed the area with wind and rain. At the time it hit, I was on the way to a local restaurant to celebrate the completion of the sculpture. As I sat at the dining table looking out through the gigantic plate glass window that framed the beautiful Mt. Hazards, I was doing anything but celebrating. Too bad about it only lasting an hour, I thought. My only consolation was that I had at least made it ephemeral; sort of like the sand mandalas the Gyoto monks create and then cast away off the mountain or into the sea. In bed that night the rain drumming on the roof constantly belted out the refrain of temporality to all existence.

The following morning my fears proved groundless. The rain did change the sculpture, but not in a destructive manner. In fact, the effect of the hitting rain drops was to create a beautiful hammered look, much like a stone sculptor would impart on granite. Yes, it lost the smooth, pristine quality of fine, dry sand slowly drizzled, but it’s new appearance was—as in the changing of all life forms—just an ageing process that could be looked at with either awe or a sense of loss. I choose the former.