Life on the Edge

I first met the iron worker/ sculptor, Bill Brown, when he was a hell raising 19 year old chasing, in equal measure, women and the demons within himself. This year, turning 50, he reckoned that a good way to celebrate both his birthday and his 25 years of being totally committed to Alcoholics Anonymous would be to come to Windgrove from his mountain home in North Carolina, hang out as an artist-in-residence for a few weeks and chew the fat with me.

For a week now, Bill and I, along with his travelling buddy, the energetic, younger Pino, have been having the equivalent of a “boy’s night out” with great peals of laughter and lots of food accompanying the recounting of our times together at the Penland School of Crafts in the late 70’s and early 80’s. This “catch up” has been tremendously rewarding as all three of our hearts have been massaged. And, even though Bill and Pino bemoan the lack of their womenfolk (Liz and Annie) partaking in our joy, we are also appreciative of this opportunity to “just be guys” together.

Any of us who have met up with friends from years past understand the bittersweet quality of such a meeting. Sprinkled into the good natured humor and telling of stories are those accounts of deaths, trials and tribulations. Over the years we have all experienced the full gamut of emotions and somehow we have survived.

What is tremendously rewarding for me is to see how Bill’s passage through life has left him a truly caring, compassionate and generous person. He demonstrates this in many ways, but what is most impressive to me is his weekly role as an AA sponsor in a North Carolina state prison. That’s courageous work. It is also creative work. Bill doesn’t separate this aspect of his life from his studio art. One feeds the other.

Bill demonstrates that talent as an artist is not a birthright. It comes with living.

I salute you, Bill Brown, for the life you have carved out of the material given you.

"In imagination is the preservation of wilderness.”

This is my corollary to Thoreau’s more famous quote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world”.

By this I mean, no matter where we are living, we can, through our imaginations, conjure up the earth in all its splendid glory. By so doing, we keep alive within us the “spirit of place” wherever we are.

Likewise, by keeping the earth wild, we are then able to maintain the wild within ourselves.

Imaginative stories can assist us in maintaining both our connection to the earth and to our personal “wildness”. As Stafford says: feeling “your whiskers wider than your mind, away out over everything.”

Below are three linked photos. No words. Use your imagination to create your own story about the preservation of wilderness.

If any reader would like, email stories to me at:

Just after 8 AM. My walk to the Peace Fire to replenish the eternal flame and shake out my bones to wake up sleepy muscles has been done. I now sit in one corner of the house in my favourite cushioned breakfast seat quietly munching toast. To my left are French doors that open to the wide outside, but my focus is not there just yet.

Inside, directly across, over the top of the dining table, a dramatic shaft of light points to, highlights and entices my gaze to rest upon my “wall friends”, Melanie, Paulus and Louise. These (and others) are people outside of Tasmania taking up residence here in the form of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and bowls.

“Good morning”, I say to them and my heart bounces up with the joy of knowing them and having their goodness in my life.

On one hand, they are sentries. They guard this house from the demons of loneliness that, if allowed, would come marching through, whenever. On the other hand, they are jovial sprites bouncing around the room dancing jigs of merriment.

Today, especially today, like little laughing Buddha’s, they make me smile.

So, to them and to all the other “house friends” hanging about, I want to share a William Stafford poem written as a dedication to a book of his poems.

Smoke Signals

There are people on a parallel way. We do not
see them often, or even think of them often,
but it is precious to us that they are sharing
the world. Something about how they have accepted
their lives, or how the sunlight happens to them,
helps us to hold the strange, enigmatic days
in line for our own living. It is important
that these people know this recognition, but
it is also important that no purpose or obligation
related to this be intruded into their lives.

This book intends to be for anyone, but especially
for those on that parallel way:  here is a smoke
signal, unmistakable but unobtrusive—we are
following what comes, going through the world,
knowing each other, building our little fires. 

For three years, the waters of Roaring Beach have been my daily companion. For three years, I have immersed myself into her various moods and, only once, when the waters were a maelstrom of madness, was there a more ritualistic swim when the water was simply scooped up and splashed unto my face as the churning waves sped through my legs on their way up the side of a dune. 

For three years, under all conditions I have maintained the discipline to walk the kilometre down to the beach and throw myself into the waves of the day. Waves that were sometimes languid, sometimes breaking out of reach. In this discipline, I have achieved something.

But although words “discipline”, “commitment” and “goal oriented” might float easily to the surface as descriptors of the third year mark, they are only the envelope from which spring the more full flavoured qualities of this time.

Being as it is that my chosen career is that of an artist, discipline comes naturally, yet it only serves “staying in the process”; something I am much more involved with than product or outcome.

Consistently going to the beach daily is how a potter goes to his wheel with a ball of clay and turns, yet again, towards perfection. I am as a weaver at her loom, daily threading gold into another prayer shawl. I am the poet seated patiently at the desk waiting for the words to spill mysteriously onto the page. I am the Sufi dancer spinning, spinning, spinning out of control in the embrace of God.

And what marks my three year dance?  For me, I partnered and swung most often between “pain” and “gratitude”.

Gratitude for being fortunate enough to toss myself into the shimmering beauty of wave, cloud, sand, salt and wind on a daily basis. Imagine it.

In today’s modern, hectic pace, it all seems so impossible. Did I really manage to be here everyday for three whole years? Did I really manage to organise my life so that schedules and appointments and meetings were so arranged that, for an hour at least within each day, I would be out in the water? Imagine it.

There was no sickness severe enough to keep me in bed (although, during the second winter when I had the flu for three days, I fairly crawled down to the beach). There was nothing that kept me away from Roaring Beach even for a day out of the last 1,096 days. Imagine it.

For this I am grateful. Even in the beginning after just one month of consecutive daily swims, I was grateful. The intensity of gratitude is what has kept growing.

And the pain? No, it is not associated with the numbing cold of the winter months, the dumping off a wave or pulled muscles and cramped legs. It stems from the knowing that my deepening physical and spiritual connection to this earth will have its inevitable separation. It has taken so long to fall in love with this, my existence, and with what surrounds me here on this earth that, although wrapped in gratitude, the pain of losing this gift comes sharp and harsh.

The earth is so much more “home” now. I dwell in it easily, have come to love it deeply and intimately and, especially while in the water, know that I am truly present at the meeting place where spirit and the sensual flesh of the earth reside.

With an embodied understanding I hold up my hand, my beautiful carving hand, and say, “Part of me”.

Likewise, I can now “hold” the wave and call out, “Part of me”.

I am grateful for this awareness and only too aware of its ending.

Then again, as I soar off on the back of heaven’s eagle, just possibly, eternity might be wet.