Life on the Edge

Anzac Day, celebrated this past Friday in Australia, is a national day of honouring Australia's soldiers; in particular, those World War I soldiers who served at Gallipoli in Turkey. This morning, in today’s post, I received two small stones taken from the beach at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. The sender asked that they be placed with the many other stones that comprise the Ancestral Midden section of the Windgrove Peace Garden. “My partner wept at Lone Pine, partly through anger at the senseless waste of young lives, and partly because of grief.” Our political leaders today are basking in the glorification of war and will succeed for a short while in becoming miniature heroes hiding behind the cloak of another’s bravery. But behind their pomp and ceremony lies the horrific reality of the gassing, the wounding, the torturing and the killing of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of soldiering men and women throughout the world. Lest we forget. This is the true meaning of Anzac Day. Lest we forget that Australia's longest lived Anzac who died just last year, Alec Campbell, was a life long pacifist. Lest we forget the words spoken this last Anzac Day by World War I Digger, Marcel Caux: “War is so useless. There’s nothing gained by it”. This afternoon I placed the two Anzac Cove stones on the Ancestral Midden and offered a prayer that someday the world will have politicians with the wisdom to understand that violence only begets violence and that a lasting peace will only ever be achieved through peaceful means.

No, this isn’t a story about having better eye sight as a result of drinking wine. It is about how small gifts are as coloured ribbons of celebration, gratitude and thanks. Pinned to an activist’s life, they lighten the burden of making oneself publicly vulnerable while defending the earth. Today, I received my new eye glasses. The old glasses were several years old, scratched and bent beyond their prescription use by date. It was time to get new ones. While checking me out, the optometrist, Finian MacCana, asked what I had been up to. When I mentioned that I was doing some environmental activist work while also trying to set up Windgrove as a refuge for art and ecology, he said that he knew this because he had been reading about me in the newspapers. When it came time to pay my $500 bill, Finian said, “No charge. This is my way of helping the cause.” The wine just arrived from Italy. Cristina and Giorgio Pelissero read about Generational Flow/an altar to the Long Now (see March 8) and wanted to share their vineyards wine, also called the Long Now. As Cristina wrote in the comment box: "Is really wonderful to discover that at the other part of the world some people are working following the same philosophy and feeling in the same way. Hopeful!” My gross income last financial year from the sale of my sculpture was just under $30,000 (US$18,000). Take away expenses for materials, tools and freight and there isn’t much left. But somehow $2000 is found to maintain the Peace Fire, $3000 for tree planting, $1,500 on forestry protest signs, $600 on public events and $500 for donations to environmental causes. Plus ongoing construction to build the Windgrove Centre. Doesn’t add up, does it? Yes, I am always scraping the bottom of the barrel to make ends meet, and my friends always wonder how I manage to survive. However, like the Stone Soup parable, when friends and visitors continuously contribute bits and pieces to the pot, board by board, nail by nail, Windgrove gets built and I am fed. First the bus with candles and a dream, now a 2000 square foot centre accommodating Refugees-in-Residence. Windgrove’s success is a ten dollar donation from a tourist from Germany, a larger check in the mail from America or England, a web master who gives his time freely, neighbours who cook me dinners or someone else offering an offering. It all adds up to a “Life at the Edge” where I don’t fall over the edge. I am thankful. Very thankful. And tonight, I’ll be having a glass of wine while clearly reading the label on the bottle.

Last October when I first started the ritual of surfing Roaring Beach everyday, I had assumed that it would end on the first year anniversary of the Peace Fire, April 6. Obviously, this date has come and gone and I still find myself walking down to the beach each day dressed up in my wet suit, carrying flippers and boogie board. The intention, now, is to continue through autumn and winter until the full year comes around in October. My motivation: simply to keep learning what can come out of a devotion to a sacred discipline. The end goal of having surfed through a winter at Roaring Beach is not important. What is, is to learn to walk through the wall of inertia that confronts me each day with more and more acceptance; to understand how water is an extended part of my being rather than an environmental border to be crossed; to become more aware of the many languages spoken through the medium of water; and, most importantly, to learn to love this world ever deeper by being more conversant with its many moods. And besides, what a privilege and blessing it is just to live here at Windgrove and be able to embark upon this little pilgrimage to the beach each and every day. How many people get a chance to surf 200 days in their whole lives, let alone 200 days in a row? Then again, maybe I’m the only one who wants to.

For the past two weeks, the wood ashes that were taken from the fire pit of the Peace Fire on its first year anniversary, have been cooling. Today, Easter Sunday, I have begun sifting these (still warm) ashes to create sacred "white ash" that can be used in ceremonies or any other way people wish. Several bottles filled with these ashes will be sent around the world to help spread the notion of Peace. One might be sceptical of the power of these ashes. But consider this: over ten tons of firewood went into the making of this small pile of ash. If nothing else, the mineral content will be quite high. Beyond this, and more importantly, I and others meditated and said prayers around the Peace Fire twice a day for a whole year. These ashes carry the goodness of these prayers and wishes. As well, when the Peace Fire pit was dug, we came upon an ancient charcoal midden and some stone tools demonstrating that this site was used for many hundreds of years by the original occupants of this land. This ancestral energy would have to be present in these ashes. Consider this: the amount of wood consumed by the Peace Fire (15 tons per year) over six hundred years (9000 tons) equals what Forestry Tasmania and Gunns Ltd. cut down in Tasmania during the first "four" hours of each day. Therefore, if the thousands of people who will visit the Peace Fire in the next six hundred years can stop Forestry Tasmania from cutting down our old growth forests for just one week, the amount of fire wood consumed by the Peace Fire becomes insignificant. On this Easter Sunday, may a just and lasting peace visit all the lands and people of the world. May there be born within humanity a new awareness of the sacredness of "all" life. May every religion of the world preach this.

Just after one in the morning. Way past my bedtime. But I’ve just come in from a fire vigil for the last four hours and even though I should call it a day, I feel compelled to get this entry in before the ashes get cold. Tonight’s fire was not at the Peace Fire. It was on the Windgrove property but at a location near where I shot the above photo this afternoon. The reason the photo was taken was because my neighbour's dog, Clamp, who had been missing for eight days, was seen at the bottom of the far cliff by a fisherman passing by in a boat. Now, see the wave in the foreground? Nearly a twenty foot breaking swell. See the cliff face? Over a 170 foot vertical drop or 60 meters. Don't ask how the dog got to such an inaccessible spot. How to get the dog? Since the marines are all in Iraq, the dog’s owner, Donna, decided to abseil down herself to rescue the dog from terrorist seals, penguins and bull kelp. Just to get to the top of the cliff face was an arduous half mile walk down a thickly forested hillside. Eventually, from my side of the little bay called The Tea Gardens, I watched as a tiny figure in the distance eased herself off the edge of the cliff and made her way down to the shelf at the base where Clamp was last seen. Confident that she and the other five men on top of the cliff would complete the job, I headed back to the studio for another hour of carving before calling it quits for the day. A couple of hours later after dinner, Donna’s husband, Stan telephones me to say that Clamp is safe at home by the wood heater all curled up and sleeping. The only problem, Stan says, is that Donna is still at the base of the cliff. Seems that it got too dark and dangerous for Donna to safely climb back up; that a Tasmanian state emergency rescue crew was arriving soon from Hobart to get her so that she wouldn’t have to spend the night exposed to freezing strong southerly winds; that because of the noise of the wind and pounding surf, Donna could not have been told that help was coming. Wanting to do something, I figured the best thing I could do was to go back out to the point, build a fire and signal to Donna that I was nearby doing what I could to hold the energy. As my neighbour, she would know that I would be praying for the safety of her and those who would eventually be making their way down to her in the dark. Dragging branches from a spot where they had been placed for soil erosion control, I was able to maintain, despite the stiff wind, a big fire for the next four hours or until I saw the last of the bobbing flickering lights ascend to the top of the hill and disappear into the black night.

Question: What's missing in the above photo? Answer: A diminutive, red breasted scarlet robin sitting on my head singing a song. Although this photo was taken this evening to (sort of) show how things were this morning, what happened is this: Every morning I start my day off by first going over to sit on the ancestral midden bench for a few moments; meditating a little and thanking the ancestral spirits for protecting this property. This morning, with eyes closed trying to wake up my heart and mind to move into the work of the day, I sort of felt a bit defeated at the prospect of people ever living in peace with the world let alone with themselves. Worse still, I felt no energy towards contributing anything to the global peace process. I just wanted to stay at home. My thoughts then turned into a simple prayer confiding that all I really wanted was to just be guided into a gentle awareness of how to be totally "at one" with those sentient beings around me here at Windgrove; where boundaries were fluid and I could dissolve my tiny self into a greater whole; where, if I were to live in peace with anyone or anything, it would begin here. With eyes still closed, a peace dropped over me as the earlier anxieties evaporated. I opened my eyes and, as I gazed out across the pond to the spiral of hope, a little bird landed on my head. I didn't know what kind of bird it was, but I could feel its tiny feet prancing lightly on my skull. Then it began to sing. Chirp, chirp, chirp. The sensation was..... was.... well..... just wonderful. When it flew off revealing itself as a scarlet robin, I smiled a big smile and then laughed as I put my hand on top of my head to feel if my friend had left a small white gift behind.

Taken almost from the same spot a couple of days ago, the above photos demonstrate how complex are the issues of peace. In the morning I photographed the Peace Fire and the sky was clear; there was a tranquility that allowed my inner being to relax. In the evening, however, the vast red sky signalled yet another round of multiple forestry burnoffs, visibly marking the death of more ancient forests and the animals and plants within the burning coupes. The newspaper that day also carried an angry letter from an old union boss, John Halfpenny, that supported the governments forestry program by condemning a message from Gunter Grass in the Future Perfect exhibition catalogue of which I was a part. What to do? How does one sit besides a Peace Fire twice a day in an attempt to learn to live peacefully and yet remain committed to stopping humanities violent behaviour toward humans and towards all living beings? Below is a letter to the editor I wrote yesterday. Am I being fair? Am I bearing witness? Or am I fuelling the fires of anger? Dear Editor, One hopes that as a person gets older, their life’s experiences mature them with wisdom, compassion and an unfailing sense of the need for a peaceful coexistence between every living being on this planet. Instead, with John Halfpenny’s letter to the Mercury (April 9), I read a letter from someone whose ageing heart and mind seem to have ossified into brittle comments of half truths. On the one hand he condemns the burning of the Dixie Chicks CD’s; a paragraph later, he changes his mind on literary freedom and condemns the artist and Nobel Prize winner, Gunter Grass, because of Grass’s written plea to our government to stop its “uncultured, unsustainable behaviour” of clear felling. Nowhere does Grass accuse forestry workers of book burning as Halfpenny would have us believe. The actual paragraph by Grass reads: “To this day, fire-bombs are dropped over clearings to destroy what life and vegetation remains. This is inhumane. It is part of a failed, yet still dangerous, uncultured attitude, of which burning books is but one aspect, and poisoning animals and plants but another.” Would anyone accuse Halfpenny of despising Australian soldiers were he to write an antiwar statement about Howard’s involvement in Iraq? Of course not. In both cases, it is the government’s immoral attitudes towards the sanctity of life that is being attacked, not the decent fellow that has to shoulder either the gun or chain saw. He labels Gunter Grass’s writing as “outrageously dishonest and irrational”. In order to seek clarification, I have read Grass’s and Halfpenny’s two statements several times and I remain confounded over why Halfpenny is so vehemently opposed to what is a decent proscription of how we, as humans, as Tasmanians, might live. The only answer that seems to make sense is that, whereas Grass has grown into his senior years with a deepening sense of morality, Halfpenny is stuck somewhere between a street battle and senility.

Two days after the event and I want look at the long lasting significance of putting together the Peace Sunday prayer and celebration day. There is no doubt that those that came (around 50) enjoyed the day. Children and adults alike were all smiles as they basked in the palpable delight of the dancing prayer flags. The question I want to ask is whether or not these feelings were superficial; a light hearted good time equivalent to going to the city park with a picnic and flying a kite? Or, did they go deeper; penetrating an atavistic memory of our human connection to tribe, to earth, to spirit, allowing them to flow unimpeded without fear or mistrust? A form of healthy cleansing? Will the good will generated on Sunday still be lingering today, tomorrow, next week? Will some part of our soul/ the earth’s soul be healed because of the cumulative effect of intent, location, prayers, mood, weather and open hearts? During a storm last night, several of the flags broke away from the bamboo poles. By the end of the week I will take the rest of the 50 flags down and, like taking the Christmas tree ornaments down, will there be a bit of sadness mixing in with the memory of the festivities? During this lifetime, I desire to give birth to at least one angel; my own. And, if possible, to help others give birth to their angels. Unlike the Christmas angel that gets put into a box for the rest of the year, I hope that I can nurture and acknowledge my angel more frequently. Events like the Peace Sunday help with this.