Life on the Edge

The “giant squid” egg on the beach didn’t actually arrive on the rising tide. That was just me having fun trying to get an interesting photo. Instead, it was sent in a padded box by young fourth grader Patrick Kammar from the Jemicy School near Baltimore, Maryland as part of a “migration project’ that is looking at the survival rate of those species that migrate through the seasons.

The teacher initially wrote: “We’ve had some trouble in the past getting our eggs through Australian Customs intact, but we thought we’d try.”

Well, the egg did make the 25,000 mile journey all in one piece. No Humpty Dumpty here. Not so lucky, though, (and this is what the school’s experiment is looking into) are the dead blue-bottle jelly fish and the never-to-hatch fish eggs seen in the photo alongside Patrick’s egg. Migration is a tricky business. Whether one is a bird, fish or human refugee, moving around the globe trying to survive is fraught with plenty of danger.

PS. For us surfers, seeing blue-bottle jellyfish is both good and bad. They have a nasty sting, but are an unfailing indication of warmer water as they come down to Tasmania on the warm currents from eastern Australia.

Last night I slept 12 hours. Bone tired, I was. Not to say that I wasn’t content in my tiredness, because I was. You see, the past two weeks have been spent preparing for and executing a site specific sculpture at the Friendly Beaches Eco-Lodge on the east coast of Tasmania. The only requirements were that the sculpture was to be “ephemeral”, be comprised of natural materials and relate to the surrounding environment before degrading back into nature. (My last blog of two weeks ago—apologies for missing last week—had two photos of the full scale model I had assembled here before I went as an experiment into whether or not I could create a three dimensional model of the phyllotaxis pattern found in a sunflower.) The photos below are of the actual “sand galaxy” mandala constructed over the past week at the lodge.

My tiredness was mainly a result of the huge physical effort needed to haul several tons of sand and dirt to the site to build the 460 individual “seed” mounds that graduated in size from two feet in diameter down to three inches in diameter. The overall diameter of the piece was just under 20 feet or 6.5 meters. Without the help of Oliver, Ron and Sally, it would not have been completed on time. To them I owe a heap of thanks.

As for the ephemeral quality of the piece, within an hour of “finishing” it a gale force storm roared in and lashed the area with wind and rain. At the time it hit, I was on the way to a local restaurant to celebrate the completion of the sculpture. As I sat at the dining table looking out through the gigantic plate glass window that framed the beautiful Mt. Hazards, I was doing anything but celebrating. Too bad about it only lasting an hour, I thought. My only consolation was that I had at least made it ephemeral; sort of like the sand mandalas the Gyoto monks create and then cast away off the mountain or into the sea. In bed that night the rain drumming on the roof constantly belted out the refrain of temporality to all existence.

The following morning my fears proved groundless. The rain did change the sculpture, but not in a destructive manner. In fact, the effect of the hitting rain drops was to create a beautiful hammered look, much like a stone sculptor would impart on granite. Yes, it lost the smooth, pristine quality of fine, dry sand slowly drizzled, but it’s new appearance was—as in the changing of all life forms—just an ageing process that could be looked at with either awe or a sense of loss. I choose the former.