Life on the Edge

It never ceases to amaze me when I think about rainbows. They’ll only ever happen when there is both sun and rain. Such a great analogy for understanding how one’s life is most magical only when it has both sunny days and stormy days.

People who prefer to have the nightly weather forecast read “Fine and sunny for tomorrow and for the rest of the week” just haven’t a clue to the importance of a bit of turbulence. And, I bet their lives remain, for the most part, passionless.

The term “fine and perfect” when describing the weather should actually mean “a bit of sun, a bit of rain, a bit of wind, a bit of heat, even a bit of hail thrown in for good measure”.

Come to think of it, this is exactly how the weather has been around here this past week: fine and perfect.

(And speaking of passion, my girlfriend arrives next week from Melbourne. We get along just fine and perfect.)

On my bookshelf there is a well read anthology of poems, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. In section #2 of this book, Fathers’ Prayers for Sons and Daughters, there is an excerpt from a poem by William Butler Yeats.

This poem seems apt for today’s blog because recently I have had several conversations with friends about the precariousness of watching their children, in today’s crazy world, grow from tiny bundles of joy into an adult mixture of seemingly contradictory dualisms.

Every parent wants their child to enter into the fullness of life with wisdom, courage, skill, compassion and grace. Most would want their child to have many friends and to choose a decent partner based on heart love. Most will fret for many years; possibly, many more years than at first seemed necessary.

How does the rainbow magic of a child’s presence stay whole through the storm?

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For a bit of clarification, near the end of his poem, Yeats writes about “Helen” and the “Great Queen”. These would be Helen of Troy, who chose to abandon her husband and child for an affair with Paris (resulting in the Trojan War), and, Aphrodite, who, although married to the great blacksmith/craftsman Hephaestus, had many, many lovers.

Interesting to note that the “bandy-legs” of Hephaestus were the result of his parents (Zeus and Hera) tossing him outside the family home because he was an ugly baby.

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from: A Prayer for my Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack— and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that Great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

A figure floating across sky.
A Good Friday figure floating across sky?
Falling or rising? Descent or resurrection?

From Pattiann Rogers:

If Dying Means Becoming Pure Spirit

Then I think it must be like falling,
that giving-up of the body.
Who wouldn’t try to catch hold
of something fast, jerk forward, reaching
with the fingers spread, before the hands
were gone, before the arms
disappeared?

I could never willingly withdraw
from my ribs, pull out of the good bars
and cage, leave the marrow, the temple
of salt, of welling and subsiding, abandon
complacently the swallow, the tongue, the voice.

How could I regard a crab apple
flustered with long-stalked blossoms
or a sycamore hung with nutlets and tufts,
with no face to catch the shadow-splatter
of their limbs and leaves? How could I apprehend
mixed fields of cordgrasses and barleys,
with no breath to detect the scent
of their sedges and clefts?

Even though it’s said the spirit
is weightless, still, I think it must be
like falling a terrible fall,
to leave the body, to speed away
backwards, cut off from the humming
a cappella of pines, the skeltered
burring of grasshoppers, from the fragrances
of low wood fires beside a river, clean
ice on stalks of cattail and rye, lost
to the purple spice of scattered
thunders, no belly left to feel
the wide, easy range of the earth.

I admit to being angry
and frightened tonight at the thought
of such a plummeting.

"In imagination is the preservation of wilderness.”

This is my corollary to Thoreau’s more famous quote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world”.

By this I mean, no matter where we are living, we can, through our imaginations, conjure up the earth in all its splendid glory. By so doing, we keep alive within us the “spirit of place” wherever we are.

Likewise, by keeping the earth wild, we are then able to maintain the wild within ourselves.

Imaginative stories can assist us in maintaining both our connection to the earth and to our personal “wildness”. As Stafford says: feeling “your whiskers wider than your mind, away out over everything.”

Below are three linked photos. No words. Use your imagination to create your own story about the preservation of wilderness.

If any reader would like, email stories to me at:

I have a TV in my house. A Sony Trinitron, in fact. I even have a DVD player. But they sit on the floor of a closet. Not so much hidden away out of disgust or abhorrence of their addictive qualities, but simply that I have no real desire to use them. In the last ten years the total hours watched would most likely equal what the average child in Australia and America views in ten days. Maybe an exaggeration, but closer to my reality than reality TV. Might I suggest that people, just as an experiment, put their TV in a closet for a month, or perhaps a week, at least? Not that the news and one's favourite program aren't informative or entertaining, but it could prove interesting. So, telephone your partner or a friend and say invitingly: "Guess who's coming home to dinner tonight" and have a different type of TV dinner. What type of TV dinner you ask?

For me, this means sitting down with a glass of organic wine, munching on a stir fry and.... gazing into the intricate face of a sun flower so stunning in its format that my plate of food gets cold. The pixels of this screen -- around 50 seeds per square inch -- shine with a clarity and depth not found in any plasma screen that I know of. When I am in town visiting with my city friends, what I find most disturbing is the phrase: "I'm going home tonight and veg out in front of the TV". This statement, "veg out", does a great injustice to the integrity and stature of vegetables. They do not sit around remaining idle and sloth like. They are constantly growing inside and out, never resting; developing into their fullest potential. Besides this, they are in constant search of a "grand coupling". Their sole mission is to sink roots deep into the fertile soil, spread out luscious, searching tendrils of communication, burst forth in gorgeous displays of flower, fornicate copiously and then bear the most mouth watering succulent fruit. The next time a friend says they are spending the night vegging out, give them a wink, a knowing smile and remind them to practice safe sex.

Pudenda: the external genital organs This is the anatomical medical definition of both the man's penis/scrotum and the woman's outer vaginal area. Any doctor will know this. What the good doctor might not be aware of is the etymological Latin root of pudenda; (to me, a reflection of the cause of a lot of our society's pornographic perversions and environmental destructiveness). "Pudenda", instead of translating as a "place of creation" or "wonder" or "birth", is translated as a "place of shame". Isn't it nice to know that the source of all human life on earth, both male and female, is known to originate from A Place of Shame?

Today, I stand before you naked, publicly declaring that there is no part of my body of which I am ashamed. It might be battered, wrinkled, flabby and weathering, but it is not a place of shame. Especially, my penis is not a place of shame. Nor, is a woman's vagina a place of shame. Neither are her breasts. Fundamentalist religions the world over want us to cover up. They want to remove our animal nature from this earthly garden of paradise. They want to shame the wild nature within us, out of us. If out of public apathy or fear they are allowed to do so, they will wreck further havoc upon the earth and sow the seeds of further sexual perversions. I refuse to be cowered into submission. I will not stand by and let anyone shame me into believing that nudity is an act of ungodliness; that my body is not sacred. For every reader out there who looks upon the above photo with either repulsion or discuss, I can only feel pity because you have lost touch with your inner wild nature with its rooted connection to the sensuous wildness that is this earth, this bountiful, delicious earth. For every reader that looks at the above photo and sees a scene completely natural, with nothing and no one "out of place"; who only sees a beautiful tree glistening in moistness towering above a human man prayerfully standing on the lush green foliage that carpets his temple, then I applaud you. You are one of the defenders of God's earth. Upon seeing a naked body, you see beauty because nature is beautiful. You have discarded the notion of "original sin" and, instead, speak lovingly of "original blessing". Upon viewing my pudenda, you see nothing obscene or shameful, rather something tremendously important in the evolution of humankind. All of us began our life's journey as a seed within someone's scrotum. Here is half of the sacred nature of creation; half of the source of all being. When we view each other's nakedness, may we see the wonderment of the divine. When others attempt to shame us into believing that the naked body is not part of the divine creation, may we act with courage to allow for the presentation of public images of the body. Images that portray its fascinating beauty throughout all its ages from tender new born through to tender decay. May we never be afraid to present a healthier reality to the world. Without fear, may we allow others to bear witness to our vision for a resacralization of this world. The future well being of our children and our forests depends upon this.

A medical scientist recently gave credence to the notion that older people can be as smart and still capable of learning as those younger than them. He stated that even though an older person's brain loses millions of neurons through the ageing process, it more than makes up for this by using life's experiences to create synapses. In other words, it's all about networking.

For the last couple of months I have been slowly, ever so slowly, learning the very slow First Gymnopedie for piano by Erik Satie. On the cover of the edition I am using, there is Joan Miro's painting "Ciphers and Constellations in Love with a Woman". Looking at it this morning, it reminded me, not only of Orion, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, etc., but also what the good doctor said about gaining connections as one got older. My fingers may be getting stiffer and unable to fluidly follow the dotted musical notes, but I think my imagination is finally beginning to loosen up and is getting good at connecting up the many dots in life found here, there and everywhere.

And, this afternoon, a confirmation of sorts came in the form of a natural Miro when a heavy gust of wind blew down onto the picnic table countless thousands of filaments from the blossoming silver peppermint eucalyptus trees. Are you old enough to see the connection?

Over the past several months, the financial situation here has been squeezing me closer and closer to selling up Windgrove and moving back to America where I was invited to join an intentional community in Hawaii. Not a bad option, actually. For me. However, when I see how important Windgrove is to the happiness and well being and potential development of people, especially children, it pains me to have to give up the vision of Windgrove just because of a lack of money. So I have wavered; looking for a sign as to the best solution. Praying. This past weekend the answer revealed itself. First in the stone.

Then in the spirits and little bodies of Brook, Kate and Isabella; aged between nine and eleven. Three girls. Three wonderful girls. Three wonderfully adventurous girls. After their visit, I knew I had to stay.

So, I have made the decision to sell off some of Windgrove's magnificent acreage in order to help secure its future. The details are still to be worked out, but, most likely, two blocks of ten acres each will be sold at around US$200,000 to $300,000 per block. Enough to build five "retreat" cabins with one adjoining kitchen and bath. Enough to offer free food and board to those lucky individuals selected to the Windgrove Resident Program. Enough to supply firewood to the Peace Fire for an indefinite period. Enough to plant out another 10,000 trees. Enough to allow me to continue carving sculptures to place along the Peace Path. Enough to, maybe, fly to Hawaii and visit my friends for a vacation, but knowing that I will be returning back to Windgrove.