A whisper of hair across a pensive look whilst a whisp of wind guides tomorrow through the air.
Long time friend and colleague, Alexandra deBlas, has just resigned from her job as an environmental journalist with the ABC. And, no wonder. A few months earlier “the board” axed her highly rated and highly successful Earth Beat program; a program that she had presented for over seven years. (With a conservative government in power it seems that environmental news and reporting is not deemed a worthwhile subject for the public to have any intelligent awareness about.) Not wanting to keep her talents on the back burner until there was a shift in priorities at the ABC, when the Australian Bush Heritage Fund approached Ali to become their communications strategist, she accepted.
All of us who have ever made major changes in our lives, would understand the feelings of butterflies in the stomach and the middle-of-the night questions of indecision that come to anyone about to embark on a new career. Winds of Change always come with a little something extra, it seems.
As we sat in a little sheltered rock garden at the Point looking out over the vastness of the sea and pondering many of life’s questions, Ali quietly recited portions of a David Whyte poem. The full poem reads:
Song For the Salmon
For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands
For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn
I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.
I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.
I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.
But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.
And, may Ali be blessed on this, her new great journey.
Posted by Peter Adams at 06:31 PM.
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I have lost track of how many times I get asked, “Living as you do, where you do, are you happy?”
The inference is that by living alone on 100 acres of land in a, sometimes, harsh environment, and by living away from the city lights of cafes, theatres, pubs and daily social interaction, I have brought upon myself an existence where aloneness, being such a constant companion, pushes away any possibility for true happiness. I might be a man of the trees, but can I be a smiling man of the trees? The implication is “no, you cannot”.
Friends and visitors mean well when they ask such a question, because they would want for me what even I would wish for them. However, I have no real answer to their question other than to say, “Is the rainbow but one colour?
Although important, happiness is a secondary consideration to how I am living my life.
Read the following poem by Mary Oliver and then consider whether it is worth asking her if she is happy or not.
Lead
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one
of nothing we could see.
A friend told
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the strong, elegant beak
and cried out
in the long, sweet, savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon—speckled,
irredescent, with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake --
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart --
by which I mean only
that it breaks open, and never closes again,
to the rest of the world.
Posted by Peter Adams at 10:11 PM.
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It’s been a Clint Eastwood sort of week with plenty of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good
Last Friday and I should have known that, as the sea had remained mirrored calm for five straight days, something was afoot. On Saturday clouds moved in slowly like heavy fog and banked up out in Storm Bay. Thunder rolled every now and then. At night, a flash of light.
Sunday, and the sky became increasingly dark and wild with curtains of rain finally sweeping the landscape. That night I awoke in the dark, not because of any noise or out of a bad dream, but because of the smoke. Never before had the wind been so great as to cause a downdraft in the wood heater and it pushed puffs of smoke in reverse to pervade the house.
By Monday morning the property was awash with sheets of water running everywhere. And I mean everywhere. With the ground squishing underfoot and all five dams full to overflowing, it all looked fantastic with a vibrancy in the landscape that only moisture can bring.
The Bad
But then, the more destructive aspects of such intense wind and rain began to reveal themselves. Anything and everything loose in the studio, wood shed or around the house was strewn who knows where. The three visitor tents, that had stood standing for nearly two years in very sheltered locations admidst trees and thick shrubbery, were flattened, literally ripped from their stakes and domed supporting rods and hammered into the ground. The worse, though, was seeing whole swaths of newly planted areas stripped of their protective plastic bags and seriously damaged. Six weeks of work undone in a night.
Panic set in because these little seedling trees would be very vulnerable to any passing hungry wallaby. A quick calculation estimated around 400, possibly 500 trees were in immediate need of being re-bagged and re-staked, otherwise, they would be nibbled down to nothing or, worse still, pulled out by their roots.
However, the continuing strong winds and rains meant that I couldn’t begin this task until the weather abated. All day Monday and Tuesday I waited. I fretted. I tried to read, but felt like I had abandoned an orphanage and left 400 babies to the marauding wolves. My only consolation was that as long as the weather was this wet, windy and cold, just possibly the wallabies might not venture out too far from their protective habitats.
Wednesday morning arrived clear and I was soon at “the front” working furiously against time knowing that by nightfall there would be no keeping the critters away. It had to be done. I left a telephone message at the local medical clinic cancelling my appointment saying that my health had to take 2nd place to the health of the trees. By four in the afternoon my body, especially the knees and legs, said “let’s quit”. But I had to keep going because, for every tree left exposed to the approaching night, it meant one more facing the chop.
A wedge tailed eagle glided past and, as it took a hovering position at the top of the hill, I pledged to work until the eagle went home. (Damn, if the eagle didn’t stay until nearly dark.) As I began the long hobble back to the house, I looked back in the moonlight at the remaining 200 or so unprotected seedling trees and my heart was touched by their plight. Would they sense the animals approach?
An hour later I lay soaking in the hot bath easing the pain in my muscles, but the pain in my heart still suffered for the trees. They had only just been planted out a few weeks ago and tonight their brief existence in this world as trees might be ending. Even though I had done nearly everything I could, I truly felt bad.
Two days later and the pain has eased because the majority of the seedlings should survive. Most of those “left standing” Wednesday night were chewed to the ground, but enough was left promising growth. Great. I’ll be having a beer for them tonight.
The Ugly
See the color separation? The brown is top soil washed into Roaring Beach by the storm. It came from land clearfelled for a pulp plantation and left exposed. Such a waste. Every good farmer understands the importance of retaining top soil. To see it all needlessly in the ocean is to see a future farmer short-changed. This is far worse than “bad”. This is ugly.
For three days I have been repairing my trees. I can accept this as part of the cycle of living on the land. But it is really hard to have to look up between trees and out over the water and see years and years of top soil accumulation being senselessly wasted.
Posted by Peter Adams at 07:09 PM.
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On the Monday morning of last week as I was driving off the Tasman Peninsula taking resident artist, Melanie, to the airport to fly back to the other side of the world (and over hurricane Katrina), our dear Margaret Scott departed as well; aged 71. Not, however, to another world. Her spirit and body will remain here, in and of this earth. It was only a few months ago that I presented Margaret with her portion of the Windgrove Peace Mandala and officially dubbed her a Windgrove Laureate (by kissing her twice on each marvelous cheek).
On a hillside cemetery near her home yesterday, son Marcus and daughter Sarah met with a Tasman Council officer to discuss her burial. I was present because the family had asked me to design a memorial—something subtle, something subversive—and I wanted to get a feel of where her physical remains would rest for the next long while, undisturbed except by time itself.
The design will come. The task now is to plant thoughts and ideas like seeds into my heart and mind and allow them to do their thing and blossom when ready. Part of this preparation has been to go back through some of Margaret’s books of prose and poetry and re-familarize myself with her work.
Out of these readings I am particularily drawn to this poem Margaret wrote for her beloved second husband Michael Scott when he died.
“Elegies M.F.C.S. 1928 -1984”
1
At ten to twelve by the grandfather clock
in the hall you stopped breathing in your sleep.
I put down the telephone and came back
to the study door—as I’d come for years
with questions, news and jokes --
meaning, I think, to tell you you were dead,
but the light of the lamp beat down
on the arm and seat of your chair
and the darkness filled with glimmering books
reeled and shook with your absence as though
from the long stroke of a black bell.
The cat was mewing, mewing down in the kitchen
and I went as on ordinary nights to open a door
but this was the first meeting with life
from the new world in which no search
could find you, so I watched wary of strangeness
as the pleased arch of its back wound round
my legs, and it strolled, taking breath for granted,
down the path. There was no wind.
Nothing but garden trees rising against
the glow of Saturday night and the pulse of silence.
2.
Friends who mean to be kind speak of a happy release
and it’s true that in the week before you died
you couldn’t eat or walk, your mind was going.
You spoke of prisons and woke at night from
tormenting dreams of actions for negligence.
Between sips of Sustagen made at three in the
morning you called for documents, gave contrary
directions concerning capital trials and execution.
On the day of your death, your compassionate
philosopher’s face broke in chaotic fragments --
a nose sharp as a fin, a flake of dark moustache,
ulcers, a tooth, a harsh bubbling snore.
But time like your bones collapsed in on itself.
Your waking eyes were blue. You said, ‘Dear love,
dear love’ as tenderly as on that summer night
in the dunes beyond the yacht club.
Holding your hand, I remembered how you sat
by my bed on the day our child was born and,
to take my mind off the pain, gave a most lucid elegant
disquisition on contingent and necessary statements.
The hearing’s over now, the case is lost,
our past locked up beyond the reach of proof.
----- from “The Black Swans”; published 1988
----- portrait photo of Margaret Scott by Alan Moyle for the book “Margaret Scott: a little more”
Look carefully at the above photo (especially the shadow area beneath the feet) and it appears that Melanie Mowinski is flying, paper in hand, going from tree to tree, drawing, drawing, drawing. Charcoal brought from America was soon used up. Charcoal from the Peace Fire, charcoal from elsewhere. Everywhere, broken, worn bits of charcoal littered the ground as Melanie tried to capture the essence of “tree” onto paper.
Urgency?
You bet. And not just because Melanie only had a month at Windgrove as the resident artist. She, like all environmentally aware people intuitively knows that messing with the environment gets one into a mess of trouble.
Like hurricane Katrina.
Any mention of global warming behind the fate of New Orleans?
How many will suffer because of a lack of commitment to tackle this issue? Bush might continually state that “the American way of life is not negotiable”. He may live in denial about weather patterns changing because of America’s prodigious appetite to consume. But the handwriting is on more than one wall and what happened to New Orleans is about to happen more frequently and with more devastation to rich and poor alike regardless of Wall Street.
And this brings us back to Melanie climbing trees. She does so, not literally to escape the rising flood waters, but in a metaphoric way to search out, through drawings, how humans might connect with “tree”. In this way we humans can regard trees as our kin, if not our kind, and learn to live in a way that is protective, rather than destructive, not only of trees, but of all of life. Not to do so imperils the whole family tree.
Melanie, as a visual artist, wants all of us to look at trees the way the poet, William Stafford, did when he exclaimed: “Part of me.”
My advice. Either start protecting the environment or install an inflatable raft in your attic.