Life on the Edge

Apologies for not putting up a blog last week. It’s just that I couldn’t find the motivation.

In his book, The Devil in Tim, author Tim Bowden has written: If there is a piece of paradise on this earth, Peter Adams has come close to finding it with his coastal property Windgrove…

No, my motivation did not fall asleep in a gently swaying hammock whilst drinking rum. Living in paradise can be exhilarating, but it is not always a shield from depression, or more exactly, depressing news.

A couple of months ago, the environmental movement had a terrific day when Australia’s Green Senator, Bob Brown, won a landmark court case against Forestry Tasmania. The federal court decision found that logging of the Wielangta Forest in Tasmania’s east coast was illegal because the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was not being adhered to. By implication, this could be applied to the present logging practices in all of the old growth forests of Tasmania including the Upper Florentine.

Last week, however, the state Labor government joined forces with the federal Liberal government to change the existing laws governing threatened species thereby making any and all logging operations “legal”.

At the same time, the brave protesters trying to stop the destructive logging practices in the Upper Florentine continued to be harassed and arrested. Their actions were deemed “illegal” and they were hauled off to jail.

So much for the workings of democracy.

Climate change and the environment are certainly off the back burner in political and corporate circles around the globe, but Tasmania and Australia are still ruled by people who wouldn’t have a clue in understanding Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the preservation of the world.

And so I lost a bit of steam last week as I got caught up in my own and other’s despair over the blatant unethical behaviour of the two major political parties to “legally” find a way to circumvent the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

An ear of corn, however, showed me a way back into thinking positively. 

For several months I watched as five seedlings grew into tall green stalks with each bearing one bulging ear of corn. Whether by myself or others, they were daily watered and nurtured. Everyday, that is, except last week when I lost interest and a bit of motivation.

Today, when I peeled back the leaves of one of the ears of corn expecting to find a nice juicy golden explosion of kernels ready to steam and butter, I found an inedible ear of corn, dry and starchy; the result of not being watered. I dropped my guard for just three days and all the good work gone into the cultivation and growing of the corn came undone.

Looking at the ear with its deflated kernels could have been depressing. Instead, I saw it as a lesson that when taking on a project, any project, to see it through to fruition, the garden, so to speak, must be diligently guarded. Nurturing becomes a constant responsibility.

We all want a more peaceful, sustainable world. To achieve such an end requires a sustained effort. Let’s not let the bastards diminish our resolve to make such a world a reality.

(Forest photo: Matthew Newton)

Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Laurie Duesing has a line in a poem that reads: Now I am rapt and looking for the still point between earth and air.

There is also the line: I want to drive spirit into flesh, a desire often confused with sex.

To me, living at Windgrove is an excercise in doing what Duesing writes about. Whether working on the land or simply meditating on the Breakfast deck, there is a felt energy associated with being “amongst the trees” on a daily basis that aids in this endeavour. The land is infused with spirit. The sacred and the profane mingle easily here. My role is to open myself up to all that is present. Some days this is easy.

However, there are those days when engaging is hard. It was only a few days ago that I went for my first swim since returning three weeks earlier from China. Something held me back from even walking down to the beach and mingling my toes with the sand. (The wave photo of two weeks ago was taken from the cliff top while sitting at the Drop Stone bench.) Considering I recently surfed at Roaring Beach everyday, rain or shine, for over three years, I’m certain Freud or Jung would have a word or two to say about this. For me, though, the timing just didn’t seem right and it wasn’t until after Sally had arrived and settled in that the desire to enter those sometimes languid, sometimes turbulent waters of Roaring Beach returned. Now I am rapt once again.

Roll on life, roll on.

*********************

Wild and Blue

I want to be lifted, to meet the air
halfway—two reasons I can’t forget
that gospel singer in her sassy
middle age. The way she mixed
everything up: black hair, bleached
red; tacky expensive dress; that muddle
of church and sex. But when the voice
of the Lord said, Throw yourself into it,
she did: jumped right into the air
and screamed. I didn’t think a heavy woman
could get so far off the ground.

I want to rise under my own power
but the closest I’ve come
is the afternoon I threw myself
down on the ground and wept.
The scene was the woods and a person I loved.
That day, that place, that man
were not repeatable. Why wait, I thought
and gave into grief.
The ground folded around me. I could not talk
but as I listened,
the earth began to stutter.

Perhaps direction does not matter
but before a woman can descend or rise,
before the universe can move her,
she must show she can pick up
the beat, the way people speaking
in tongues allow another voice to move
through their mouths while their lips
keep time. When I get the blues,
I am trying to show the earth I can reflect
her deepest colors, that I will take
whatever she sends through me.

I want to drive spirit into flesh,
a desire often confused with sex.
I once made love to a man
who had lost the woman he loved.
He sobbed and sobbed but I kept on
to show that when grieving stopped,
he would have something to look forward to.
If we are broken or forcefully
opened, it is only to get our attention.

Now I am rapt and looking for the still point
between earth and air. I am willing
to wait while the world turns red,
to watch while everything comes at me.

Laurie Duesing

Sally moved to Windgrove this week. After returning from China, she packed up her Melbourne belongings into her little red car, took the overnight ferry across Bass Straight, drove six hours down the middle of Tasmania and then arrived at Windgrove for the start of an uninterrupted year long stay before she returns to Melbourne to finish her fifth year at medical school.

Nothing overly unusual about such a move except this: at sixty years of age and, for the first time in my life, a woman is moving into a committed, serious partnership with me. Excited and nervous, I have put a lot of time lately into sprucing up the house and yard in preparation for Sally’s arrival. New rock stepping stones to her studio along with a raised garden bed of kangaroo paws beneath her studio window are an attempt to demonstrate my desire to create a home where beauty resides along with love.

I know that what I have done is just window dressing, so to speak, and that the real tests of living together will soon bare their teeth, but my hands have always been creative at expressing what my heart feels and I have liked the building of our nest.

Anyway, several days after re-sowing several sections of lawn, I noticed little piles of grass seed beginning to appear like white mounds of rice over the areas of sown lawn. Closer examination revealed all the grass seed I had sown earlier was being removed by teams of ants to their individual homes in the ground.

My first reaction was to mutter a few swear words and to curse the ants from undoing the work I had done for Sally’s homecoming. But, then, I realised that what the ants were doing was no different than what I was doing: working industriously to create a home that sustains life. 

In a way, it is all about a love of sorts. Bringing in the seed to nourish those with whom we live.

I set up a lady’s writing desk to create a space that might nourish the imagination. I thinned out the garden, replanted seedlings and watered them carefully, so that upon her return, my love, like the busy ants, would have food to munch on with contentment as the days drift past.