Life on the Edge

Sometimes it is not enough to just plant trees on the hillside in the soft sun; parting those pubic grasses with your searching fingers and inserting into the moist dark earth a tender she-oak seedling; a newly born about to embark on its own search for sustenance from above and below. With each placement a prayer; with each placement a new family member welcomed into an already established family of 3000 sister and brother she-oaks planted over the past ten years. Beyond the goodness of this act, just a mile away bulldozers this past spring cut a swath through ancient soils and elder trees; trees whose roots, reaching down for countless years, have allowed branches to reach up and bring into the light of their leaves a co-existent beauty shared by many; trees who have asked nothing of anyone except to be who they are. The equivalent of my planting of ten years was undone in less than one day. Was it enough to "turn the other cheek" and continue to plant in contemplative silence on this particular hill while, within earshot, an unjust pain was heard just over there through the roar of engines. I thought not. Using my artistic mind, I had fabricated a professional looking, large metal sign (seven feet by four feet) and erected it at the entrance to my drive along Roaring Beach Road. After two months, I took it down feeling that it had served its purpose of "bearing witness" to the unethical, yet legal, practice of clearfelling.

This morning I walked up the hill seen in yesterday's photo to take today's photo looking back towards the beach (not seen; off to the right) in order to show that there really are buildings hiding in a grove of trees. Like everyone, when I first bought Windgrove back in 1991, my first thought was to build my "dream" home on a section of land where I would have commanding views of the beach, be sheltered from southerly winds and have plenty of sun. This was certainly possible, but what I hadn't taken into account, and what most architects and home owners fail to take into account, is what visual impact this house would have on the landscape. In other words, would this house, or any house, enhance or degrade the visual appearance and character of Roaring Beach? In 1993, before building anything, I drove a converted Befored bus onto the land, tucked it into the trees and planned to live in it for a couple of years to "listen" to the land in order to best locate a future building site. Within a week, a Roaring Beach neighbor came up to me and said: "I can see your bus through the trees while I'm surfing and it doesn't look good". Although I was correct in wanting to listen to the land, what I had failed to "listen" to were the concerns of my community. From this point forward, their concerns were my concerns. I had every legal right to build whatever and wherever I wanted and my artistic ego certainly wanted to express itself out in the open, but the lesson quickly learned was that visual structures on private land, like noise itself, knows no boundaries. I had a moral obligation to respect the wishes of my community and to those visitors who came to Roaring Beach wanting to walk and swim in a relatively wild environment.

Located approximately in the middle of today's photo is a two thousand square foot house, an office, a toilet block, a sculpture studio, a 30 foot Bedford bus, two shipping containers and three water tanks. Having trouble finding them? This is because a very important design consideration at Windgrove is to build so that no one walking along or surfing at Roaring Beach will see any structures on the landscape. This isn't because I want privacy; rather, I feel that the uniqueness of Roaring Beach is that it is still a fairly wild landscape and that exposing any architecture, no matter how beautiful, would detract from this wild quality. By tucking the buildings at Windgrove into a grove of silver peppermint trees, I had to sacrifice the grand sweeping view, but over the years I have begun to appreciate the importance of viewing landscape through the "little windows" created by gaps in trees, etc.. It also gets me out of the house to check out the surf; a modicom of exercise that will always benefit one's physical and mental well being. Tomorrow will be a photo of the Windgrove buildings' exposed backside.

Don't ever underestimate the power of suggestion. I woke up yesterday morning thinking about moving up to the faster broadband internet service, however, as I am in a rural district, the only available option is to do this via satellite. A few phone calls later I began to get a picture of the potential costs that would be incurred; the largest being the installation of a satellite dish on the roof of my house. The "thought" occurred to me that maybe I could save some money by building my own satellite dish and throughout the rest of the day I tinkered with this idea. Late in the afternoon, a freak wind blew in out of nowhere and the gods gave me their version of a satellite dish; a heavy, ten foot diameter, cloth, cafe umbrella was lifted out of the table and placed on the roof with a perfect line up for a north facing reception.

Kate Bull, a volcanist, is in Tasmania writing her doctoral thesis: "Facies architecture of the Early Devonian Ural Volcanics, NSW" that will provide information about the eruption and depositional history of a 400 million year old submarine volcanic succession.

Try to grasp that time span! It makes the Peace Fire (see http://www.windgrove.com), with its 600 year committment seem tiny by comparsion.

But grasp it we must if humans are ever going to have the capability to plan a sustainable future. Rather than the next election or the upcoming flinancial year dictating our planning, the seventh generation concept is a much better time frame for decision making .

Every first Sunday of each month at Windgrove is a dedicated Sacred Earth Sunday; a very informal Quaker like gathering of people who have come to honour their committment to seeking Peace within themselves and the world at large. From 8:30AM to 9:30AM is an hour of "respectful silence" where people either gather together to meditate or choose to go off alone. At 9:30 a bell is rung bringing everyone together for breakfast and conversation. The above photo is of a stone received in the mail yesterday from Western Australia and being placed on top of the Ancestral Midden during this morning's Sacred Earth Sunday. The Ancestral Midden is that part of the Windgrove Peace Garden that is dedicated to the "past" and the honouring of one's ancestors, one's own history, one's personal truth. Any visitor to Windgrove is encouraged to bring a stone with them from their home to be placed with all the other individual stories that comprise this growing, global pile of stories.

Jeannie Mooney from Maine, USA, the first artist-in-residence at Windgrove arrived just a week ago on Christmas day for a six week stay. Jeannie uses cloth to record organic transformations. In the photo above she prepares silk to wrap around a silver peppermint tree to document whatever interactions take place between the silk and other environmenal factors (tree sap, rain, insects, wind, sun) over the next few weeks.

See more of her work here.