Life on the Edge

This week a jaunty forest raven dropped down off a branch to pick up a piece of stale bread. As I watched his “on guard” antics of always checking out where danger might be lurking, my own gaze moved past the bird and on down the path that leads to the Peace Fire. Seeing its smoke drifting lazily in the air, and, with the raven and bread in the periphery of my vision, I was reminded of an encounter with a similar sort of bird, a black currawong (the main difference between the two being their eyes, with the raven’s white whilst the currawong’s are a disturbingly piercing bright yellow). The encounter took place some five years ago and was a key factor (along with constant pestering by my webmaster, Allan Moult) in cracking my resistance to setting up this blog, Life at the Edge.

The time I speak of was a few months after the establishment of the Peace Fire (April, 2002) and a few weeks into my three year daily surf, but not yet into the weekly writing of Life at the Edge which started in January, 2003 Now, the blog is an established practice, but five years ago, although managing somehow to self publish Earth Links, a small monograph of sculpture and Roaring Beach Stories, I only dabbled in the occasional bit of writing. However, with the advent of the Peace Fire and The Swim, I was tinkering with the thought of doing another small, little book publication tentatively titled, Fire and Water. Being the slothful character I am, though, the act of writing remained just that—a thought.

It was around four in the afternoon and I was in my outdoor studio, not only bent over a piece of wood with chisels flailing, but also doing a bit of ruminating about Fire and Water, rolling ideas around and hoping something would hatch. Did I have the talent? Was there a need for more environmental writing?  Should I commit time to doing this little book when I could be carving? Is the book’s title too cheesy, too new-age?  etc., etc...... In other words, procrastinating.

Suddenly, like a meteorite falling out of the sky, a currawong lands on a saw horse just near to where I was working. Besides startling the day dreaming out of me with his totally crazy, unannounced flapping entrance, in his beak was a large rock whelk sea shell that I recognised as having come off my house deck. Once I regained my composure, I said: “You cheeky bird stealing from my collection of shells”. Then, with an exaggerated motion, the currawong spits the shell out onto the ground next to my feet, cocks his head and gives me that sideways look. “Do you expect to exchange this for a piece of bread?” I ask. After a few more cocks of the head with those yellow eyes peering inquisitively at me, the bird jumps off the saw horse, picks up the shell and flies off with it into the trees and out of view.

“Interesting”, I said to myself, then went on quietly carving while pondering the possible significance of the shell. Just a coincidence? Or had this feathered augur come with a plan?

Two hours later, I put on my wet suit, went for a surf and stayed until the sun disappeared behind some very black clouds coming in out of the west. Reaching home, instead of going immediately into the shower, I thought it best to stoke up the Peace Fire before the rain hit. So, I dropped off the boogie board and flippers in the yard and walked up the path to the fire. Half way there and what do I find right in the middle of the path?  You guessed it… that very same rock whelk sea shell. “Yes....” I excitedly screamed, “Fire and Water!” The symbolism was too apparent to ignore.

Well, for an hour anyway, because although impressed at the time with the currawong’s visit, a few days later the initial euphoric impact had lessened to just a “lovely” story, had been pushed to the back of my mind and I refused it entry into motivating me to do anything like actually writing.

Back then, my everyday morning breakfast routine would be to go sit with my toast and triple expresso coffee in a corner of the house next to a pair of French doors that swung open to an outdoor deck that, with windows that went from ceiling height to floor, offered an expansive view to the outside. I had finished breakfast and was slowly, very slowly, doing my best to move from the comfort of the cushioned chair to the hard board I sit on in the studio. Yet, despite the high amount of caffeine buzzing through me, my preference was to sit idly and read what others had written about nature and the elements.

When I came to the Mary Oliver poem, “Raven with Crows”, my attention perked up with her description of the crow as “a corn-meddler” as it brought my attention back to what I had witnessed a few days earlier and made me think of the currawong visitor as “a shell meddler” doing its best to mess with my mind. More importantly, it pricked my conscience sufficiently to want to become more constructive in creating the second “little book”. 

What should happen next? The currawong is on the deck tapping the bottom of the French door window no more than two feet away from my feet. I look through the window amazed at its reappearance. Never before had a bird been on the deck let alone a big black one tapping on a window as though asking permission to come into the house. All I could manage to do was just look at it. Finally, I said: “Okay, I hear you. You’re trying to tell me to get off my butt and get writing. Done deal.” The bird stopped pecking, gave me the yellow eye, proceeded to peck a few more times and then flew off.

That was five years ago. The currawong never returned, either to the studio or to the house. It’s black winged messenger’s presence seems only to have been needed to spur on the creation of Life at the Edge. With 8,000 people a week now reading about the comings and goings at Windgrove, a return flight was never necessary.

We all owe a bit of thanks to this bird.

There is always a bit a solid wisdom coming from the cartoon character Hobbes. Yes, happiness can be found in a sun drenched field.

So why do we keep forgetting this?

This morning was sunny, but it was also a cold day with a stiff breeze blowing in from the southwest. While out and about enjoying its crispness, I came across this Bennett’s wallaby obviously agreeing with Hobbes about where to find happiness. With her back side protected from the wind by the dense foliage of a coastal wattle shrub, she seemed to be definitely enjoying soaking up the warmth of the sun. For long minutes we just shared the same space, happy in the moment, unconcerned about mortgages, car payments, financial success or power positioning.

And, back at the house, guess who I found trapped in the sink again all shivering and cold unable to climb up, out and over the steep stainless steel walls? Must be the tenth time I’ve rescued this tiny Little Pygmy-possum.

Acting like a big, sunny field, the warmth of my stomach and cupped hands provided this happy creature with a few minutes of solid contentment before she decided to scurry home under the stove where, no doubt, a few tasty crumbs awaited her. 

Like many other lucky people, I received Paulus Berensohn’s Valentine card this week. This year, however, his drawing is, at once, more powerful and more pleading.

Opening up the card, Paulus writes on the inside:

“Help”

the cry of the Heart

--- to offer and give

--- to need and receive

--- to each other and our earth

For Paulus, the heart, in all its manifest shapes and sizes, is asking for help. In this time of global chaos, the cry of the heart is not specifically personal or solely human. Gaia also is hurting; anima mundi also is hurting; all creatures great and small are hurting. Love is needed everywhere.

On the morning of this Valentine’s Day, I found, half drowned in the bottom of a water jug, a Little Pygmy-possum desperately trying to stay alive. It had fallen in looking for something to drink, but due to its small size—two inches long, 60 mm—it was unable to climb or jump out of the jug. Boy, did it look miserable.

While resident artist, Sally, cuddled the little guy close to her belly to help lessen any hypothermic conditions, a hot-water bottle was prepared and positioned in the bottom of a box, followed by lots of soft clothing. Here, the pygmy-possum was gently placed in a warming hollow of clothes. Giving us what looked like a heartfelt “sweet thank you”, it then burrowed deep into the fabric and disappeared out of sight.

Nothing could be done now but wait until nightfall and see if this tiny nocturnal marsupial revived enough to climb out of the box and find its way beneath the oven where, I suppose, it feasted nightly on the bits of food and crumbs dropped by the messy chef.

When Sally and I returned late from a trip to Hobart for our own food gathering and a dinner out, we noticed that the box was empty. We went to bed sleepy in the contented knowledge that all had turned out okay.

But, as in all matters of the heart, the doors of compassion, joy and pain keep opening and shutting. The “little guy” turned out to be a mother as, the next morning, I found two dead babies on the kitchen floor, most likely drowned while in the pouch of its mother and subsequently removed when she, herself, recovered. A third was later found by Sally.

All three are now buried under a stone at the base of the ancestral midden. May their little spirits rest in peace. 

What is the natural order of things? Who or what follows whom? Is there a correct sequence to events in the world? Do things move along a prescribed path?

Take, for instance, fruit on a tree. The botany class I had as a youngster taught me that trees flower in spring, get pollinated by bees and other insects, bear fruit as a result of that pollination, and hidden within the fruit is one or more seeds to move the generations along.

Curious this.

Today I stood in front of the cheesewood tree (pittosporum bicolor) and something wasn’t quite jellying with my boyhood lessons because the tree’s fruit was behaving more like a flower.

Let’s go back a few months. In early spring the cheesewood brings forth an abundance of small, yellow, bell shaped flowers. Once pollinated, the mysterious workings of the world set about to transform this sexual encounter into bearing fruit. So far, so good. The laws of nature seem to be on track.

Today, hanging like luscious apricots (but much smaller), one might think that this particular cycle of the story is almost completed with some animal or bird soon to eat the fruit. Later, defecating out the fruit’s seed elsewhere, the seeds will germinate, thus, starting the process all over again.

But something magical happens with the cheesewood. The fruit, it seems, likes remembering when it was a flower and, therefore, splits itself open and turns itself into two flower petals.  Presented on two plates of yellow is a sticky red secondary fruit with seeds within it. Why the extra step? Why the throwback into being a flower? Who knows?

When one begins to look closer into the workings of nature, things just get curiouser and curiouser

Wedge-Tailed Eagle:  Aquila audax; wing span approaching ten feet/ 2.9 meters; female larger than male; nest is a huge pile of sticks lined with fresh eucalypt leaves, often high.

Forest Raven:  Corvus Tasmanicus; wing span approaching three feet/ .9 meters; large stick nest lined with bark, wool, 10m or higher in fork in forest tree.

These two wonderful birds are always hanging around Windgrove; the eagle majestic in flight, the raven cocky and cheeky.

But why can’t they get along? Singly or in groups of up to five, the much tinier raven will harass and dive bomb the eagle until the eagle drifts off slowly. I’ve watched ravens pump their wings furiously for long lengths of time to keep up with an eagle only to have the eagle soar off easily without the pesky raven bothering it. Minutes later the eagle returns and the chase is on again. How much energy is expended in an attempt to protect territory; territory that in the end is not protected. You see, the raven never wins. Somehow, though, it must gain some satisfaction (or entertainment value) from the harassment.

Some days I feel like the eagle, other days the raven.

Recently, I put the large Gunn’s sign back out on the main road as my way of being the raven. The logging can’t legally be stopped, but I sure love harassing the bastards.

Even though I have been planting the equivalent of a tree every day for the past 13 years (4,500 to date), there are still sections of Windgrove that bear the scars of inappropriate land management. This is especially noticeable near the cliff face on the southern side of the property where grazing sheep and the plowing of the infertile top soil 50 years ago led to bare patches still visible today even though the last sheep were taken off the property 30 years ago. Relentless winds and literally tons of salt spray swept up over the cliffs from crashing waves below have made it particularly difficult to re-establish any sort of new growth.

Earlier attempts have failed, but I keep trying to devise new strategies to overcome the past arrogance inflicted on this fragile landscape. What was planted thirteen years ago died. Last year, boobyalla (Tasmanian coastal shrub sometimes wrongly confused with coastal wattle) had mixed results. They survived the wind in their protective plastic bags, but the wallabies learned to reach inside the bags and browse the tender leaves.

Therefore, last week, at one tiny section of the cliff top, a small, woven circle made from entwined tree branches, limbs and logs was built to form a protective barrier from both the wind and the hungry wallabies. For two days I hauled six truck loads from one spot of the property, where I had felled three small trees, to this other location (transfer of wealth?). Besides acting as a circular wind break and small fort from marauding wallabies, the branches will help replenish the soil with nutrients as they decay and they will also act as a net to capture wind-born seed and other debris.

In a way, I sacrificed living trees in order to get something started in this more barren section of property. Whether or not I can “kick start” the regenerative process in this matter or whether or not it is bio-ethically responsible, who knows?

I can only try and do what I feel is best for the health of the whole of Windgrove. Life and death and rebirth issues are always complex. 

Walking along the beach this week, I saw several "creatures" washed ashore. Looking into the eye of the squid, I couldn't help but see a portion of myself. Are we related? When we hear the word "ancestor", who does that bring to mind? It is easy enough to understand that one's grandparents or great, great grandparents are our ancestors. Go back ten, twenty and thirty generations and it is still easy to comprehend that those people born 1000 years ago are biologically linked to us. What gets increasingly more difficult to embody is the notion that our "ancestors" might not look like us in the slightest. I'm not talking about "Cro-Magnon" ancestors; I'm implying someone, something who was our forebear in the very, very, very distant past. Not in the Tertiary time period, nor the Cretaceous or Jurassic. Or even the Devonian. We're looking back 500 million years ago into the Cambrian when the earliest members of our family tree were floating about in sun warmed ponds. In this family, one brother swam off to the right, a sister swam off to the left and your great grandmother (to the 10th power) stayed put and married the boy next door.

The rest they say, is evolutionary history. The ancient brother's fate eventually led to today's Fairy penguin; his sister's fate the Squid; all of us reading this blog arrived as humans, and, somewhere in all this the sea gull flew in.

Bill Bryson, in "A Short History of Nearly Everything", say this: "The tiniest deviation" (i.e. swimming left or right) "and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms." And, for a good reason to wake up with a smile every morning, consider this by Bryson, as well: "Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely -- make that miraculously -- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you." Three cheers for our good fortune. May we do good with the time we have been given.

In our cultural mythology, ants are considered "community minded" and "patient" and "disciplined" builders of their miniaturised, yet vast, highly "militarised" societies. Isn't it marvellous that such tiny creatures could be such good role models for us "advanced" humans?

I'm sure all of us have seen ants moving along a line on the kitchen counter and have observed their antennal communications. What the occasional observer might not see is that, along with "touch", what is more crucial to the ants' organised behaviour is "smell". Depending upon the species, ants produce ten or twenty different pheromones to signal specific requests and warnings, passing them through physical contact or leaving them behind as chemical trails. Being sick last week (sorry about no journal entry), I had some time to read up on ants and follow them around the still green lemons in the atrium. Aside from the numeric information that ant species number over 11,000 and their combined weight equals over half the weight of all insect species (total of 750,000; mostly beetles), it is the ants' etymology of their entomology that most fascinates me. Take their phylum, "Arthropoda". Most of us would look at this and our minds will either go blank or some fearful image of a third grade teacher will bring a sense of dread or panic flooding back into consciousness. However, we all know the word "arthritis" and know that it deals with "joints" (if somewhat swollen or inflamed). We, also, might know that podium, pedestal, pedestrian and podiatrist have something to do with feet. Therefore, ants belong to the phylum that simply means "jointed feet"; a phylum comprising the four classes of Insects, Spiders, Crustacca and Myriapoda. The class of Insects has various orders, one of which is Hymenoptera. This contains ants, as well as their evolutionary cousins, the bees and wasps. The key to understanding why ants are included with bees is found in the breakdown of Hymenoptera. Every teenage boy knows that a Pterodactyl is a "winged" creature from the age of the dinosaurs. This same boy might also have discussed "hymens" with his class mates during lunch time with giggles of assured adult knowledge. "Hymen" is Latin for membrane. "Pter-" is Greek for wing or feather. Hymenoptera is simply a membranous wing; something every queen ant has. Within the order Hymenoptera, one family -- Formicidae -- contains all the true ants. The form of the ants is easy to recognise as compared with many other insects as all are the same basic shape and have a characteristic kink in their ever busy antennae. Of interest here is that "form" in Latin means shape and beauty. It also means "ant". Of further interest is that to "formicate" (as opposed to fornicate) is to crawl like ants and to swarm with moving beings. Just possibly, group sex could be associated with new meaning. And lastly, a person who studies ants is not a formicologist; rather, a myrmecologist, from the Greek "myrmeco-" for ant.