Life on the Edge

A Christmas walk through the wet, eventually snowy, alpine rainforest of Mt. Field was a real holiday treat. To have opened up in front of our eyes the beauty of blossoming red waratah, wet barked snow gums, ancient pencil pines and numerous pandani in a dense carpet of understory was a gift wrapped present of pure Zen. Summer in Tasmania is certainly a wild mixture of weather.

Good cheers to All
May Peace prevail on Earth

Twenty years ago my optometrist told me that because of a mild astigmatism in each of my two eyes I should wear glasses to correct both the near and far “imperfections” of my sight. I took his advice for reading and sculpting, but didn’t care to increase the focal length of “perfect” vision beyond reading because of the hassle of dealing with glasses while being outdoors. Besides, it wasn’t such a big issue in that even with my diminished focusability I could still enjoy all that passed before me. All, that is, except the stars. They just weren’t crisp and pinpoint sharp as in my youth. Nightly I yearned to gaze upon them with focused clarity and marvel once again at their scintillating brilliance where each distinct star was full of planetary potential capable of being home to untold numbers of exquisite life forms.

Yesterday I picked up my new “star gazing” glasses and when I first put them on back at Windgrove to look into the huddle of trees near the house, well, it was nothing short of a miracle. Such clarity. The peelings of bark and each individual twig with each individual leaf stood out clearly in all their radiant selfness as though a dirty window had been washed clean. I could see more “into” the tree than ever before and I felt like a scientist with some giant high resolution microscope able to differentiate the numerable parts of the whole. All afternoon I stared in awe at the squeeky clean highly defined world before my eyes.

Slowly, though, I began to feel like some sort of peeping Tom peering into the inner workings of the more secret private life of the tree. The increased clarity was certainly welcome, but thinking about it now, maybe I don’t need to see so clearly and with such individuation each of the component parts that make up the whole. Maybe I only need to wear my new miracle glasses just occasionally like on cold nights to view a pointillist Milky Way. Maybe I bit of fuzziness to fuse the world back together into a single tapestry of color and light is okay. Like a Monet painting. Like the following poem:

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the street lights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affection.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: Fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the houses of parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that do not know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, liles on water
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

...... Lisel Mueller

A couple of years ago (16 December 2005) I ran the above photo along with a Mary Oliver poem “Pink Pond”. What I didn’t mention then, but will do so now, is that the pink leafy Duck Weed, although beautiful in its colouring of greens and reds, is considered a pest in most ponds because of its ability to spread over the entire surface of the water and choke out any sunlight getting past this barrier to plants below. The usual method of dealing with this is to periodically rake the pond and keep the percentage of surface area covered by the plant below about 5% because, as it grows exponentially, once it reaches 30% or more of the pond’s surface, it is only a matter of days before the whole pond is covered.

For years I have been diligent in keeping the ponds relative clear of duck weed. This year, however, in a personal attempt to do something positive in dealing with climate warming I have allowed the duck weed to run rampant on the pond. Purpose: to allow the plants to achieve as much carbon capture as possible. Once the pond is covered I rake off a portion to use as mulch and compost in Sally’s and my vegetable garden (a form of carbon sequestration). Nothing fancy, mind you, but it seems to me that this approach is achieving more practical results than all the fancy talk in Bali where, once again, America, Canada, Japan and Australia balk at becoming serious in dealing with climate change. These countries are all obstructionist talk and no action. They keep worrying about “the economy” without seriously understanding the dire economic future of this world if minimal targets are not set now.

Harvesting the duck weed is symbolic of taking a negative situation and turning it into something positive and useful. The garden will certainly benefit and surprisingly, the hundreds of tadpoles feeding leisurely off the roots of the “protective” duck weed not having to worry about Mr. Snake and Miss Heron are enjoying a field day (or should I say “pond day”?)

It is generally assumed that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions, but a study published this week in “Current Biology” provides proof that chimpanzees are better than humans at basic numeric memory. In a simple mathematical test devised by Kyoto University cognitive scientist Tetsuro Matsuzawa, “Ayumu” (the most prodigious of the six chimps who trained for the “exam") consistently beat three of the nine college students even after the students were themselves trained for half a year. This doesn’t prove that chimpanzees are better at all maths, but it does offer compelling, scientific proof that the human “animal” and all the other animals found on the great web of life are not all that different. Basically, we are all one. There is no human—animal divide.

Let’s take the test one step further and see if “Nature” is better at mathematics that humans.

The test is to see whether or not a human can build—quickly, easily and with no fuss—a three dimensional spiral phyllotaxis pattern that demonstrates the “golden proportion” and the Fibonacci sequence.

Just outside my kitchen window grows a “saw tooth” Banksia and it is producing—quickly, easily and with no fuss—several winning examples of the above test question. It seems to me that even plants can beat humans in the mathematics game. Proof that the notion of a human—nature divide is as fallacious as the human—animal divide.

Boy, do we humans have to learn to eat humble pie.