I know that I’ve recently written about the struggles encountered when planting trees, but don’t get the impression that Windgrove is a barren landscape. Yes, there are former pasture areas that need replanting, but there are other areas that are pretty well full of trees. Walking around the property at any time of the year is a joyfull experience, during late August/early September it is an experience in yellow. And not just “yellow”. I’m talking about “pale yellow”, “green yellow”, “yellow yellow”, “white yellow”; you name it, it is here in abundance.
The top photographs give a hint of the blackwood tree with its masses of very soft, lightly delicate, almost deceptive yellow. I say “hint” because there are hundreds of these trees in blossom now and it is next to impossible to convey the full magic of their presence. To stand next to them or under them or within them is pure delight.
And in cahoots with the blackwood tree there is the coastal wattle. Both belong to the acacia family with distinctive prominent longitudinal veins on their leaves, but their blossoms are definitely different.
The eyes certainly have a field day, but....
The sound.
Hundreds of little wings are busy propelling bee bodies from flower to flower.
And the fragrance.
Close your eyes and slowly fill your nostrils up with honey butter.
It is all a sensory extravaganza.
Posted by Peter Adams at 02:09 AM.
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My little red wheelbarrow. Over the past several years I have used it to haul many things. Needless to say, it has lightened my load considerably.
On Monday, however, as I was cleaning the ashes out of the pit containing the Peace Fire, an ember fell next to the wheelbarrow’s tire and “pshsssss” the tire blew. Try as I might to continue to use the wheelbarrow (to finish the job at hand), it couldn’t be done. The barrow held the ash, I held the barrow, but the little wheel was flat, thereby, throwing the whole operation out the window (so to speak).
It got me thinking. Isn’t a chain only as strong as its weakest link? Doesn’t life itself require all its various components to be well oiled and well maintained to function properly? Neglect any one part and the ability to move from A to B is decidedly more difficult.
The question I want to ask is: How do we move the world towards peaceful coexistence when the spiritual wheel needed to carry us there is flat? Politicians and world leaders seem to be more “religious” these days, but, gosh, their religion seems debased.
Bush Administration’s “pro-life” stance appears to be limited to the unborn and the brain-dead. Despite being panned by critics everywhere, the Iraqi Horror Picture Show continues its run, as thousands and thousands of born foetuses - ours and theirs—lose their right to life.
It’s true, many people still feel that the affairs of the world should be left to the bolder and badder among us. But look what that leaves us with: Are you satisfied choosing between Saddam Hussein and George Who’s-Not-Sane? Now I know those “God, guns and guts” Old Testament Christians might have forgotten, but Jesus did say that the meek shall inherit the earth. In all undue immodesty, maybe it’s time for us meek folks to boldly step forth and accept our inheritance.
For just as 2000 years ago Jesus stood up to a class that placed the rule of gold above the Golden Rule, today we face the modern version of the Pharisees—the Phallusees, I think they are called. They cynically cloak themselves in religious robes, but the only power they trust is the power of the stick. Well, there’s another old saying: It doesn’t matter how big your stick is, if you stick your stick where it doesn’t belong, you’re stuck.
Another sign of the up-wising and coming evolution is that people are growing dissatisfied with the positionality of “my side vs. your side,” and are seeing the whole issue of sides from a new angle: Maybe we’re all on the same side. For example, this argument between creationism and evolution is just another way for duelling dualisms to steal our energy. I believe in both. I believe the Creator created us to evolve, otherwise Jesus would have said, “Now don’t do a thing till I return.” I have it on good authority that the Creator is pulling for us: “Come on, you children of God. Time to grow up and become adults of God instead.”
You are probably familiar with the story of the Native American grandfather who tells his grandson that there are two wolves fighting inside all of us: The wolf of fear and anger, and the wolf of love and peace.
“Which wolf will win?” asks the young boy.
“Whichever one we feed,” replies the grandfather.
As my guru Harry Cohen Baba has said, “Life is like a good deli. Even if something isn’t on the menu, if enough people order it they have to make it.” So what kind of new world order are we ordering up? Do we feed the wolf of fear and buy into the “it’s every man for himself” story? Or do we nourish the wolf of love and evolve into the “we’re all in it together” story?
Release the old story—been there, done that—and speak the new story into the world. Dare to imagine what we could be doing if we weren’t spending so much of our livelihood on weapons of deadlihood. Think about it ... think tanks where they think about something other than tanks. Young people living for their country instead of dying for it. Health and education fully funded, and the Air Force having to run a bake sale so they can buy a new bomber.
I don’t know who actually wrote the above italicised section, but I like it. He/she goes by the name of Swami Beyondananda.
Time for me to patch the tire (tyre, elsewhere).
Posted by Peter Adams at 02:25 AM.
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Earlier in the week as I was repairing several hundred damaged seedling trees that were planted last year and the year before and the year before that, there was a moment when exhaustion overcame me and I lay on the ground to recover both my physical strength and the emotional resolve to finish the task at hand. The extended drought had diminished fodder for the wallabies and, in their desperation to find food, they pushed and trampled the bags surrounding the seedlings in order to nibble on the succulent young foliage.
Everywhere I looked, the wounded.
For fourteen years now I have looked upon the destruction caused by fierce, drying winds and the numerous starving wallabies. While wanting the animals to survive, I also want the young trees to survive. Looking at the continuous devastation can, at times, drop me. Coming across a tree striped of all its leaves, when only a month ago it was nearly three feet tall and bursting to reach the sky, forces me to take a breath and find that deep reserve of energy to, once again, re-stake, re-mat and re-bag what is left. Sometimes it is only a stubble, smaller than when it was planted. Though many trees have been planted, each is as a child to me and all their collective tiny hurts can add up to something overwhelming.
Somehow, I get through the day and walk home knowing that I did the only thing I could do: fix the wounded one by one and hope.
Hope for their survival. Hope that they’ll sprout new leaves, new branches and make it through the coming year without being trampled down yet again.
In an odd way, their struggle is my struggle. Their survival is my survival; our survival. Our little group’s survival is the world’s survival.
With the recent war in Lebanon in mind and while pondering how to write the above story of the trees into today’s blog, I came across this Viet Nam war poem by John Balaban. I can’t quite articulate how it relates, but there is a connection here somewhere between the lines and between the lives of the trees, the wallabies, myself and the human family of people in the poem.
WORDS FOR MY DAUGHTER
About eight of us were nailing up forts
in the mulberry grove behind Reds’ house
when his mother started screeching and
all of us froze except Reds—fourteen, huge
as a hippo—who sprang out of the tree so fast
the branch nearly bobbed me off. So fast,
he hit the ground running, hammer in hand,
and seconds after he got in the house
we heard thumps like someone beating a tire
off a rim.....his dad’s howls the screen door
banging open....Saw....Reds barreling out
through the tall weeds towards the highway
the father stumbling after his fat son
who never looked back across the thick swale
of teasel and black-eyed Susans until it was safe
to yell fuck you at the skinny drunk
stamping around barefoot and holding his ribs.
Another time, the Connelly kid came home to find
his alcoholic mother getting fucked by the milkman.
Bobby broke a milk bottle and jabbed the guy
humping on his mom. I think it really happened
because none of us would loosely mention that
wraith of a woman who slippered around her house
and never talked to anyone, not even her kids.
Once a girl ran past my porch
with a dart in her back, her open mouth
pumping like a guppy’s, her eyes wild.
Later that summer, or maybe the next,
the kids hung her brother from an oak.
Before they hoisted him, yowling and heavy
on the clothesline, they made him claw the creekbank
and eat worms. I don’t know why his neck didn’t snap.
Reds had another nickname you couldn’t say
or he’d beat you up: “Honeybun.”
His dad called him that when Reds was little.
So, these were my playmates. I love them still
for their justice and valor and desperate loves
twisted in shapes of hammer and shard.
I want you to know about their pain
and about the pain they could loose on others.
If you’re reading this, I hope you will think,
Well, my dad had it rough as a kid, so what?
If you’re reading this, you can read the news
and you know that children suffer worse.
Worse for me is a cloud of memories
still drifting off the South China Sea,
like the nine-year-old boy, naked and lacerated,
thrashing in his pee on a steel operating table
and yelling “Dau. Dau,” while I , trying to translate
in the mayhem of Tet for surgeons who didn’t know
who this boy was or what happened to him, kept asking
“Where? Where’s the pain?” until a surgeon
said “Forget it. His ears are blown.”
I remember your first Halloween
when I held you on my chest and rocked you,
so small your toes didn’t touch my lap
as I smelled your fragrant peony head
and cried because I was so happy and because
I heard, in no metaphorical way, the awful chorus
of Soeur Anicet’s orphans writhing in their cribs.
Then the doorbell rang and a tiny Green Beret
was saying trick or treat and I thought “oh oh”
but remembered it was Halloween and where I was.
I smiled at the evil midget, his map light and night
paint, his toy knife for slitting throats, said,
“How ya doin’, soldier?” and, still holding you asleep
in my arms, gave him a Mars bar. To his father
waiting outside in fatigues I hissed, “You shit,”
and saw us, child, in a pose I know too well.
I want you to know the worst and be free from it.
I want you to know the worst and still find good.
Day by day, as you play nearby or laugh
with the ladies at People’s Bank as we go around town
and I find myself beaming like a fool,
I suspect I am here less for your protection
than you are here for mine, as if you were sent
to call me back into our helpless tribe.
Posted by Peter Adams at 10:42 PM.
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Although true, it is too easy to say that the shadow figures nudging up to the Peace Pole are myself and my girlfriend, Sally.
Although true, it is too easy to talk only about the love that spirals up between the two of us and abandon the rest of the world.
What I want to say, what I would rather say, is that the shadow figures are two people who, though once full of enmity for each other, had a conversion somehow, somewhere and were finally able to humble themselves before the face of love.
Such a trite word these days, “love”. Sometimes almost as banal—or as silly—as “peace”.
What I want to say, what I would rather say about love is that it is nothing if not powerful.
If our imagination is courageous enough, powerful enough, the two shadow figures holding hands are a Lebanese Muslim and an Israeli Jew.
Imagine it. Imagine it happening. Imagine it happening and we can change the world.
**************
The US serviceman who bombed children with napalm during the Vietnam war eventually met with the grown Vietnamese woman who was the naked, fleeing, scorched child captured in a photo at the time.
Karen Eberhardt Shelton writes of this 2nd meeting.
Making Amends
He has closed her horrified mouth
With a kiss of apology,
His own suffering
A bridge between them.
He is a rare gift:
To heal with an embrace
So many years after burning off her flesh
In a hateful war;
Having forgiveness come back to him
Was the closure of a century.
That she survived to face him,
That he lived to grow into compassion;
One of those perfect miracles
You can’t explain, yet it is so beautiful,
It illuminates everyone.
(from Resurgence magazine #219)
Posted by Peter Adams at 07:06 PM.
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Slight-of-hand magician, David Abram, said this about the photo below after I sent an email copy of it to him earlier in the week.
What a great shot. Indicating that what speaks to us, ultimately, secretly,
through all the books we read, are the living trees from which they are
made…
On Sunday past, I was practising the Five Element Qi Gong with eyes half closed; mind half focused, half in trance.
Gazing out the window I saw a hand floating in the air, pointing towards a row of books girdled around the massive eucalypt tree in the back yard. There, as though painted with the poet’s brush of magical realism, the tree and books hovered silently, yet poignantly. Oddly enough, I didn’t bat an eyelash as it all made “sense”, appeared logical, even ordinary.
I was witness to the quintessential Tree of Knowledge.
All knowledge, as the hand pointed out and the books made reference to, emanates from tree. What has been written in and on books, came first from tree. (Shakespeare wrote about “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in babbling brooks”. Susceptible to alliteration, he misplaced books and tongues.)
Ultimately, Tree speaks for us (secretly, even, as David Abram writes). Tree works for us. Tree is us.
A magician works a spell to make something “impossible” happen. A magician works ....to create an impossible experience, an experience that is so shot through with mystery that it startles people out of all of their preconceptions. When a magician is successful making a stone vanish, and then plucking it back into thin air, or making a coin float from one hand to the other hand, it leaves us without any framework of explanation. We are suddenly floating in that open space of direct sensory experience, actually encountering the world without preconceptions, even if just for a moment. The magician is one who frees the senses from the static holding patterns that are held in by assumptions, by outmoded ways of thinking, and by the styles of speech and discourse. (David Abram)
For a moment, my preconceptions of what was reality were lifted to a different dimension. In this temporary space the physical union of hand, book and tree were presented as fact and I had no doubt that what I was seeing and comprehending was true.
Yes, the trance broke within seconds and I catapulted back into a western, scientific paradigm where what I had ?really? seen was Sally’s hand and a row of books from the bookshelf reflected in the window. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Maybe no longer magical, but the magic of that brief moment definitely stayed with me.
And still does, even today, four days later. One reason is knowing that the etymology of the word “book” comes from boka—Germanic for beech tree; the wood of such tree being the material of the tablets on which runes were inscribed with marks having mysterious or magical powers attributed to them.
No matter how fleeting, there is always something within each day to bring wonder back into our lives. Cast any runes lately?
*****************
PostScript: At 4:25PM Australian Eastern Standard Time, Thursday, 3rd of August, this blog registered its 200,000 “page visit”. The count started 15 months ago; there are 1.6 pages visited per person coming on line. This translates to approximately 2,000 people per week reading “Life at the Edge”. Fantastic, I say. Tonight, the world seems rather close and friendly. My thanks to all who enjoy reading what gets written about.