Life on the Edge

On Saturday last, my friend and comrade in arms, Heather Rose (spokesperson for Artist-for-Forests), gave me the great honour of reading the just finished manuscript of her latest novel, "Dispossessed". On Monday, late in the afternoon while curled up in a cushioned chair with a quiet winter sun flooding into the room with a soft tenderness, I sobbed uncontrollably as the last few pages were read.

How is it, that what I know as fiction can touch the deeper recesses of a buried sadness within my soul and bring it to the surface of the physical realm manifesting as great balls of tears, wet cheeks and guttural howls? In moments like this, despite revisiting old pains, I marvel at how art, in the fulness of its creativeness, can move mountains and can bring to the forefront those aspects of our lives that can get lost in the hurly burly of today's world. Art is a reminder that a little more attentiveness be given to the ethical and moral responsibilities behind the priorities we might place on ourselves. The power of art is its ability to help us see more clearly what needs to be seen.

This morning, while sitting by the Peace Fire watching the dawn's light slowly advance from the distant hills toward the shadowed flames in front of me, I reflected on these words written by Heather in "Dispossessed": "What is true, is that it is but a fortunate few of us who make peace with those we have loved, and those we have hurt, before we die." "The curse of growing older is that we must live not only with what we have become but also with what we will never be." "Two fluid things, me water, it water, hearing one another, like two instruments lying side by side, a flute and a cello maybe, finding the sound we shared and playing it." "But was it a matter of struggling? Or was it about forests, and going when your time was up? Did a giant eucalyptus lament its passing? Did an oak, split in two by lightning, long for something other than its destiny?" *********** When I walked away from the Peace Fire, I left behind a simple prayer that somewhere there was a publisher who would allow the greater world an opportunity to read what I was able to read and found so moving.

The ocean yesterday was relatively quiet. The exposed sand meant an easy walk, once again, to the middle of the beach where I put on my flippers and head into the surf. Last week, storm waves were breaking to the top of the inclined stones as seen in the photo. Although the walking was a little more tricky, the clattering and chattering of the stones as they rolled and tumbled together under the waves brought back a memory of several years ago when a similar sound was heard. I wrote about it in my published monograph, Earth Links, in 1997. Let me share it again.

The Stones I stopped and listened to the stones the other morning. There's a section of beach where tidal currents and wave action have washed away the sand exposing a pile of rounded stones about the size of grapefruit. These aren't spread out level, but incline to the deteriorating top edge of a sand dune. Normally, in my early morning run I would skirt this section, running a bit below it; moving gingerly yet quickly to the other side where the beach once again becomes flat and sandy. However, during a higher king tide, a chance wave hit just as I was in the middle, carrying itself right to the top and causing me to scamper upward to keep my sneakers dry. When the wave rolled in, it had the sound of most waves as they break foaming on the shore. But when it returned as a smooth backwash, it rolled and knocked together all the stones beneath it. Such a wondrous sound. In squatted rapture I waited for several more of the larger waves to repeat this Balinese like clacking of instruments. "Peal me again, again, again", I heard the stones repeatedly ask of the water. It was timeless this sound, as though the beach stones and waves had been rehearsing together for centuries. For a moment the necklace shape of the beach became Earth's rosary and the beads were pressed just once for me. In that moment, I felt holy.

In our cultural mythology, ants are considered "community minded" and "patient" and "disciplined" builders of their miniaturised, yet vast, highly "militarised" societies. Isn't it marvellous that such tiny creatures could be such good role models for us "advanced" humans?

I'm sure all of us have seen ants moving along a line on the kitchen counter and have observed their antennal communications. What the occasional observer might not see is that, along with "touch", what is more crucial to the ants' organised behaviour is "smell". Depending upon the species, ants produce ten or twenty different pheromones to signal specific requests and warnings, passing them through physical contact or leaving them behind as chemical trails. Being sick last week (sorry about no journal entry), I had some time to read up on ants and follow them around the still green lemons in the atrium. Aside from the numeric information that ant species number over 11,000 and their combined weight equals over half the weight of all insect species (total of 750,000; mostly beetles), it is the ants' etymology of their entomology that most fascinates me. Take their phylum, "Arthropoda". Most of us would look at this and our minds will either go blank or some fearful image of a third grade teacher will bring a sense of dread or panic flooding back into consciousness. However, we all know the word "arthritis" and know that it deals with "joints" (if somewhat swollen or inflamed). We, also, might know that podium, pedestal, pedestrian and podiatrist have something to do with feet. Therefore, ants belong to the phylum that simply means "jointed feet"; a phylum comprising the four classes of Insects, Spiders, Crustacca and Myriapoda. The class of Insects has various orders, one of which is Hymenoptera. This contains ants, as well as their evolutionary cousins, the bees and wasps. The key to understanding why ants are included with bees is found in the breakdown of Hymenoptera. Every teenage boy knows that a Pterodactyl is a "winged" creature from the age of the dinosaurs. This same boy might also have discussed "hymens" with his class mates during lunch time with giggles of assured adult knowledge. "Hymen" is Latin for membrane. "Pter-" is Greek for wing or feather. Hymenoptera is simply a membranous wing; something every queen ant has. Within the order Hymenoptera, one family -- Formicidae -- contains all the true ants. The form of the ants is easy to recognise as compared with many other insects as all are the same basic shape and have a characteristic kink in their ever busy antennae. Of interest here is that "form" in Latin means shape and beauty. It also means "ant". Of further interest is that to "formicate" (as opposed to fornicate) is to crawl like ants and to swarm with moving beings. Just possibly, group sex could be associated with new meaning. And lastly, a person who studies ants is not a formicologist; rather, a myrmecologist, from the Greek "myrmeco-" for ant.