Life on the Edge

Apologies for not putting up a blog last week. It’s just that I couldn’t find the motivation.

In his book, The Devil in Tim, author Tim Bowden has written: If there is a piece of paradise on this earth, Peter Adams has come close to finding it with his coastal property Windgrove…

No, my motivation did not fall asleep in a gently swaying hammock whilst drinking rum. Living in paradise can be exhilarating, but it is not always a shield from depression, or more exactly, depressing news.

A couple of months ago, the environmental movement had a terrific day when Australia’s Green Senator, Bob Brown, won a landmark court case against Forestry Tasmania. The federal court decision found that logging of the Wielangta Forest in Tasmania’s east coast was illegal because the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was not being adhered to. By implication, this could be applied to the present logging practices in all of the old growth forests of Tasmania including the Upper Florentine.

Last week, however, the state Labor government joined forces with the federal Liberal government to change the existing laws governing threatened species thereby making any and all logging operations “legal”.

At the same time, the brave protesters trying to stop the destructive logging practices in the Upper Florentine continued to be harassed and arrested. Their actions were deemed “illegal” and they were hauled off to jail.

So much for the workings of democracy.

Climate change and the environment are certainly off the back burner in political and corporate circles around the globe, but Tasmania and Australia are still ruled by people who wouldn’t have a clue in understanding Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the preservation of the world.

And so I lost a bit of steam last week as I got caught up in my own and other’s despair over the blatant unethical behaviour of the two major political parties to “legally” find a way to circumvent the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

An ear of corn, however, showed me a way back into thinking positively. 

For several months I watched as five seedlings grew into tall green stalks with each bearing one bulging ear of corn. Whether by myself or others, they were daily watered and nurtured. Everyday, that is, except last week when I lost interest and a bit of motivation.

Today, when I peeled back the leaves of one of the ears of corn expecting to find a nice juicy golden explosion of kernels ready to steam and butter, I found an inedible ear of corn, dry and starchy; the result of not being watered. I dropped my guard for just three days and all the good work gone into the cultivation and growing of the corn came undone.

Looking at the ear with its deflated kernels could have been depressing. Instead, I saw it as a lesson that when taking on a project, any project, to see it through to fruition, the garden, so to speak, must be diligently guarded. Nurturing becomes a constant responsibility.

We all want a more peaceful, sustainable world. To achieve such an end requires a sustained effort. Let’s not let the bastards diminish our resolve to make such a world a reality.

(Forest photo: Matthew Newton)

Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Laurie Duesing has a line in a poem that reads: Now I am rapt and looking for the still point between earth and air.

There is also the line: I want to drive spirit into flesh, a desire often confused with sex.

To me, living at Windgrove is an excercise in doing what Duesing writes about. Whether working on the land or simply meditating on the Breakfast deck, there is a felt energy associated with being “amongst the trees” on a daily basis that aids in this endeavour. The land is infused with spirit. The sacred and the profane mingle easily here. My role is to open myself up to all that is present. Some days this is easy.

However, there are those days when engaging is hard. It was only a few days ago that I went for my first swim since returning three weeks earlier from China. Something held me back from even walking down to the beach and mingling my toes with the sand. (The wave photo of two weeks ago was taken from the cliff top while sitting at the Drop Stone bench.) Considering I recently surfed at Roaring Beach everyday, rain or shine, for over three years, I’m certain Freud or Jung would have a word or two to say about this. For me, though, the timing just didn’t seem right and it wasn’t until after Sally had arrived and settled in that the desire to enter those sometimes languid, sometimes turbulent waters of Roaring Beach returned. Now I am rapt once again.

Roll on life, roll on.

*********************

Wild and Blue

I want to be lifted, to meet the air
halfway—two reasons I can’t forget
that gospel singer in her sassy
middle age. The way she mixed
everything up: black hair, bleached
red; tacky expensive dress; that muddle
of church and sex. But when the voice
of the Lord said, Throw yourself into it,
she did: jumped right into the air
and screamed. I didn’t think a heavy woman
could get so far off the ground.

I want to rise under my own power
but the closest I’ve come
is the afternoon I threw myself
down on the ground and wept.
The scene was the woods and a person I loved.
That day, that place, that man
were not repeatable. Why wait, I thought
and gave into grief.
The ground folded around me. I could not talk
but as I listened,
the earth began to stutter.

Perhaps direction does not matter
but before a woman can descend or rise,
before the universe can move her,
she must show she can pick up
the beat, the way people speaking
in tongues allow another voice to move
through their mouths while their lips
keep time. When I get the blues,
I am trying to show the earth I can reflect
her deepest colors, that I will take
whatever she sends through me.

I want to drive spirit into flesh,
a desire often confused with sex.
I once made love to a man
who had lost the woman he loved.
He sobbed and sobbed but I kept on
to show that when grieving stopped,
he would have something to look forward to.
If we are broken or forcefully
opened, it is only to get our attention.

Now I am rapt and looking for the still point
between earth and air. I am willing
to wait while the world turns red,
to watch while everything comes at me.

Laurie Duesing

Sally moved to Windgrove this week. After returning from China, she packed up her Melbourne belongings into her little red car, took the overnight ferry across Bass Straight, drove six hours down the middle of Tasmania and then arrived at Windgrove for the start of an uninterrupted year long stay before she returns to Melbourne to finish her fifth year at medical school.

Nothing overly unusual about such a move except this: at sixty years of age and, for the first time in my life, a woman is moving into a committed, serious partnership with me. Excited and nervous, I have put a lot of time lately into sprucing up the house and yard in preparation for Sally’s arrival. New rock stepping stones to her studio along with a raised garden bed of kangaroo paws beneath her studio window are an attempt to demonstrate my desire to create a home where beauty resides along with love.

I know that what I have done is just window dressing, so to speak, and that the real tests of living together will soon bare their teeth, but my hands have always been creative at expressing what my heart feels and I have liked the building of our nest.

Anyway, several days after re-sowing several sections of lawn, I noticed little piles of grass seed beginning to appear like white mounds of rice over the areas of sown lawn. Closer examination revealed all the grass seed I had sown earlier was being removed by teams of ants to their individual homes in the ground.

My first reaction was to mutter a few swear words and to curse the ants from undoing the work I had done for Sally’s homecoming. But, then, I realised that what the ants were doing was no different than what I was doing: working industriously to create a home that sustains life. 

In a way, it is all about a love of sorts. Bringing in the seed to nourish those with whom we live.

I set up a lady’s writing desk to create a space that might nourish the imagination. I thinned out the garden, replanted seedlings and watered them carefully, so that upon her return, my love, like the busy ants, would have food to munch on with contentment as the days drift past.

After a long trip away, how does one reconnect with home? After speaking in broken sentences for weeks in a foreign language barely understood, where does one relocate the language common to one’s self of well being? Tongues in trees as Shakespeare said?

I ask these questions because it has been just over two weeks since returning to Tasmania from my stay in China and time enough, I would have expected, to have gotten back into some form of rhythm here. Not so.

It was easy enough to open the door and walk into the house that is nestled in the grove of trees on the hill that overlooks the ocean.  Harder, though, has been opening and walking into Windgrove’s larger house: the one that is the hill and the ocean itself.

So daily I venture out of the one house to try and familiarise myself with the other house. Some wanderings start off totally aimless. Other times, I have taken several groups of people around Windgrove’s Peace path or have worked clearing a new footpath through the scrub. But, in the midst of all this, I have kept searching for some clue, some hint, some hook to finally bring me back to this place; this land called Windgrove. My home. Something that will ease me back into a comfort zone of recognition.

Colour, oddly enough, is helping with this process.

And the colour is green. Or, more precisely, lime green.

Yesterday’s evening sun reflected in breaking waves produced such a green.

During recent rains, the wet eucalypt bark cracking off a branch revealed such a green.

The colours I associated with China were red and gold. Here, the signature colour of the land—the fresh perky quality of new green/ spring green—is bathing my spirit with a welcoming home coming.

How marvellous to reunite with such vibrancy.

This calls for a gin and tonic. And, a slice of lime, for sure. 

I’ve been back for over a week now from China and have found the process of settling back into a “normal” routine is taking longer than expected. For sure, I am more than happy to be back on home soil and tending to the Peace Fire and such, but like the photo above, a partial fog hovers over my mood like a soft blanket of sadness.

For the past few days I have been mulling over what this feeling is about and from whence it comes. This morning I received the following email from my partner, Sally, who, after three months of living in China, is leaving in a couple of days to return to Australia. What she writes points towards this difficulty of adjustment.

I am sad to be leaving. Ready for a change from the hospital hours, but there is a part of me that would like to stay and enrich the relationships that have been slowly building, learn the language and get to know this nation’s people a little more. I will miss their friendliness and their gentle innocent humour. There is such a softness to the people here, and a softness between the people and an ability to live so easily amongst one-another, or on top of one-another. There is a basic acceptance of human nature and survival that I’m not sure exists at home. Less ego. Less toes to be stepped on (even though there are more toes around.)

Wandered through the streets. Lots of activity, different smells, red lanterns, street stalls cooking meat, flute music here, rock music there, handbags and high-heels, cars honking, bicycles, people. How will Australia feel after all of this?? I will miss this crazy place.

What she writes encapsulates clearly the pain all travellers experience (must experience) after immersing themselves into another culture and then choosing to move on to another place or returning home. 

And “home” is never quite the same again. When I returned home last week after dark and after a 30 hour flight, two things stood out: the total lack of sound and the unpeopled sense of emptiness. No wind, no waves hitting the beach, no animal noises. It was as though the land had fallen quiet out of respect for what I had left behind. Eerie, it was.

So, we do the simple things to stay in touch; to rekindle the memories.  Mornings still find me carrying on the practice of learning the Chinese language. I’m also looking into taking Chinese cooking lessons. More importantly, though, the stone from Taishan Mountain that I swapped with the Roaring Beach stone is now nestled among the other stones on the Ancestral Midden (it’s the brown and white one near centre bottom of the photo).

It gets a special pat on my daily visit to the Peace Garden.

A fitting ending to my month long stay in China was to climb Tai Shan (Peaceful Mountain); the most climbed mountain in China and the most revered of its five sacred mountains.

Getting to the base of the mountain for the start of the climb provided the usual minor hassles – taxi to bus station, bus to Tai’an, find a bank when we realized we didn’t have enough money and then a 2nd taxi ride to the trail head.

Once walking, everything changed into a lovely, quiet, winter stroll up the mountain past shrines, temples, old cypress trees, tea shops and idyllic scenic spots. Truly wonderful. Actually, stroll isn’t the correct word to use because it was a steady uphill walk till we reached the mid-way point (about a 800metre/2500 foot rise in elevation over five kilometres). 

The second half was shorter in length, but much steeper. Being the weak kneed coward that I am, the cable car ride proved a god-send and I was able to arrive at the summit with enough energy to walk around it and explore things a bit more. Looking down upon the stairs from above was certainly less tiring than looking up at the cable car from below.

The cable car didn’t quite go to the very top and there were still plenty of stairs to climb. And I mean stairs. From the base of Tai Shan to the top there are supposedly 6660 of them. The amount of work that would have gone into the cutting and laying of these many granite steps and paving squares boggles the mind. They were certainly built to last. Winding their way through the trees and, more or less in an upward direction, their beauty added a another aspect to the walk.

One very important aspect of coming to Tai Shan was to place a Roaring Beach stone in some out-of-the way, protective spot. Just below the summit, in a sheltered, sunny location I both hid the stone and picked up another to bring back to Windgrove. For whatever reason (conscious or unconscious) there was in doing this “swap”, it felt plain honest good and I look forward to placing the Tai Shan stone on the Ancestral Midden back at Windgrove.

At the summit of 1,545 metres, a sense of closure to my Chinese adventure and a profound good feeling towards the Chinese people came into my heart.  They have their problems, certainly, and the land is suffering greatly, but my overwhelming sense of the people (at least, in ShangDong Province) is that at their core there is a selfless sense of well being that exudes a generous kindness to all. If the world is to have 9 billion people living on it, the Chinese will be the most capable of living together.

And once any summit is reached, the only alternative is to turn around and find your way back down to where you started. In my case, Australia.

Winter came briefly to Jinan this past Saturday. Exciting, but at the same time a bit of bother as this was supposed to be the day Sally and I were going to the town of Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. After sitting in snarled traffic for nearly an hour and only getting half way to the bus station, we told the taxi driver to turn around and take us back to the hotel.

Changed plans, however, meant that we were able to climb the hills back of Jinan and visit two Buddha sculptures carved into the cliffs. Following narrow trails, we got (almost) lost, but seeing these two, relatively unknown Buddhas in the snow and silence were a welcome change from the usual din of a noisy city.

On Sunday we took another chance, caught the bus and headed two and a half hours through the mist south to Qufu.  Here, we were able to spend the day (although cold and wet) walking through the Confucius Temple, the Kong family’s Mansion and the Confucius Forest (a 200 acre cemetery where the Kong descendants of Confucius are still being buried today; Confucius being a romanization of Kong Fuzi, meaning Master Kong).

As a sculptor, what most fascinated me was the exquisite carvings and attention to detail that was evident everywhere. Although a bit weary with age, the technical mastery and former grandeur was still evident (with a slight squint of the eyes and a bit of imagination).

In the vast cemetery, the lightly falling mist provided a gentle, mysterious aura over this ancient site. Couple this with limited people around (alive, that is) and being able to walk around by myself, my sense of time was transported back two thousand years and more. At times, I truly felt as though I was with those very Chinese sages and peasants who walked this land those many years ago.

Finding myself alone with a 1,500 year old cypress tree, I did the old tree hugger trick and wrapped my arms tightly around it. Within a few moments of meditative prayer, faint whispers came through the trunk. I pressed my ear against this certainly wise old tree. I distinctly heard: “Confucius says: Baseball all wrong – man with four balls cannot walk.”

Upon returning to Jinan we were able to catch a bit of New Year’s fun and bring in 2007 with a night out on the town.