Life on the Edge

For the past two months—or ever since the last piece of wood was put onto the Peace Fire on April 6, thereby allowing it to come to an end after six continuous years of burning— a sense of “empty anticipation” has been a constant companion. Empty in the sense that what I most desire right now is to simply empty myself out, sit still and listen. Anticipation, in the sense that the next important phase of my life is arriving and I want to be ready for this encounter; uncluttered and free of excessive constraints whether physical, emotional or even spiritual.

There Is a Place Beyond Ambition

Mary Oliver


Alice Walker dedicated the following poem, “Light Baggage”, to Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, and Jean Toomer; all writers who, at some point in their careers, left the “career” of writing and went off seeking writing’s very heart: life itself. Zora went back to her native Florida where she lived in a one-room cabin and raised her own food; Jean Toomer became a Quaker and country philosopher in Bucks Counth, Pennsylvania; and Nella Larson became a nurse.

Light Baggage

there is a magic
lingering after people
to whom success is merely personal.
who, when the public prepares a feast
for their belated acceptance parties,
pack it up like light baggage
and disappear into the swamps of Florida
or go looking for newer Gods
in the Oak tree country
of Pennsylvania.
or decide, quite suddenly, to try nursing,
midwifery, anonymous among the sick and the poor.
stories about such people
tell us little;
and if a hundred photographs survive
each one will show a different face.
someone out of step. alone out there, absorbed;
fishing in the waters of experience
a slouched back against the shoulders
of the world.

I, like Zora, Nella and Jean, feel the need to leave the public’s gaze, close the gates of Windgrove and turn the energy of my emerging elder years towards a new, as yet unknown, direction. These next months are to be a period of emptying myself of ritualized duties, writing weeky blogs and laying down the banners, so to speak, to find more time in the day to just listen. To be like the empty Tibetan temple bowl that resonants clearly and beautifully when hit, this is my present goal.

As patterns emerge, I’ll blog them. If nothing else, there will be the occasional post on whatever artistic endeavors I am undertaking. 

So, for now, after five and a half years of weekly blogs, goodbye.

Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes—all those things you learned about in school biology—but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterwards so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, you brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defence the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you—billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. So let us take a moment now to regard them with the wonder and appreciation they deserve.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

A week ago, last Wednesday, I went into surgery for a definite “inguinal hernia” operation on the right side of my groin with the possibility of a second one on the left side. Opening my eyes after the anaesthetic wore off, the surgeon said that he had actually performed a triple hernia operation with the third one being an “umbilical hernia”.

Initially, I was glad that all the holes had been patched and sewn up, but, as the invasive nature of the operation covered a wider than normal section of my belly, the pain associated with “one” hernia operation was multiplied by three, and, as the morphine’s soporific effect diminished, I more than once cursed the frailty of my body as I attempted to walk from the bed to the toilet; as, I attempted, even to pee. 

However (and here is why I started off with the Bill Bryson quote), as the days moved along and I could ease into the comfort of the fireside sofa more freely, I was able to look down onto my belly and not just see an ugly wound. Rather, it became an area of marvellous magic; a continuous healing machine working 24 hours, seven days a week to keep itself whole. The bruise, whilst seemingly not the prettiest thing to look at, is actually a very visual indication of the cells Bryson talks about doing their work. Isolating the bruise, as in the above photo, reveals a beautifully abstract “live” color-field painting that daily takes on different hues and patterns. The little wisps of black brush strokes are the re-emerging belly hairs; not yet curly, but definitely well on their way. The first days of anguish are now gone and I watch in fascination, and gratitude, as this vastly complex system rearranges itself back into health.

So, a round of applause to all those involved in this great group effort. First, to the billions of cells doing their thing so that I can continue doing my thing. Second, to the very skilful surgeon, Rob Bohmer, and the many nurses who took care of me while in hospital.  And, thirdly, to my partner, Sally, who not only has had the sole task of feeding and looking after my comfort levels here at Windgrove, but has also had to do all the daily chores around the place, including splitting two wheelbarrow loads of wood each day to keep the house fires burning these wintry days and nights.

Come to think of it, I’m beginning to like the cosiness of the sofa and all the attendant services. Maybe, I’ll fake the pain a bit, just to have one more tea and cake served with, yet another, kiss on the forehead. 

Winter solstice eve in the southern hemisphere. The sun sets early; too early. Pushes the man, who has been outside sculptling, inside to find the hearth’s warmth. Pushes him inward, into himself, to fathom this longest passage of dark time. By fireside, as a second, tinier “winter sun” heats up both the soup and those great paws of hands that have fondled tree and stone some 60 odd years, the man wonders just how many more of these great turnings of the earth and sun he will witness before becoming too witless to know what it was ever all about.

He thinks of what still needs to be done on the land upon which he dwells. He thinks of his teacher, Wendell Berry, and a line from this farmer’s poem, A Vision: ... a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here...

On this winter solstice eve, a chilling winter rain is blown through the dark. As the ground moistens and softens up for tree planting, a possibility is nurtured and a calculation is made on how many more trees need still be planted before “an old forest will stand”. Fifteen thousand. On average, he puts in 400 per year. Looks like he’ll be putting in the last trees on his 100th birthday. Looks like he needs to keep his wits about in order to be around to witness forty more winter solstices.

A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our season welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
along the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windrows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

Wendell Berry

To carry on from last week’s discussion on the need to unite science and religion, rather than each of them disparaging the other, here are two simple, yet clear poems that address this unification.

Both by Kabir (1440--1518)

1

Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put
up a swing:
all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these
two trees,
and it never winds down.

Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant
for life.

2

Inside this clay jar there are meadows and groves and the One
who made them.

Kabir says: Listen, friend! My beloved Master lives inside.

Oh, Lord.

Life has tumbled me in so many harsh ways that, now, the bones of this scrubbed body lie clean and free of the last resistance to Love.

Take these then,

And, at cliff’s edge, place in a nest of she-oak needles, lichen and bedfordia.

Softly,

Your heart flies in on dimming light. Touches down, caresses. Makes me feel finally whole.

After complaining at the local medical clinic this week that my right testicle was constantly sore, the doctor prescribed Voltaren, a strong anti-inflammatory. Well, the drug didn’t do much for my balls, but it sure did wonders for my knees. For the first time in years, I felt totally free and fleet of foot (like when I was a teenager). No joint pain at night, none while working, none hiking with a heavy pack (carrying stones) and none running. Fantastic. What a thrill.

Remember the 1990 movie, Awakenings, where a man (played by Robert De Niro) is brought out of a decades-long, trance like sleep through the use of the drug L-DOPA?  Loosely based on a true story by neurologist Oliver Sacks, De Niro’s character is exuberant with his new found freedom, but eventually realises that the drug that brought him out of his long term semi-coma is not long lasting enough to permanently keep him “awake” and that, slowly, once again, he will slide back into his isolated world. I will admit to crying when he asks one of the nurses to have a last dance with him. Can anyone even begin to imagine what anguish this man would have felt knowing that soon he would no longer be able to hold onto a woman and move freely, confidently across the dance floor?

Certainly not as dramatic as the movie, but my magic pills put me between a rock and a hard spot, as well. You see, the tiny writing on the package warned that I could take the pills for five days only because of the possible adverse affect on my liver and kidneys with prolonged usage. Aware that my testicular pain is tied in with a kidney that has passed kidney stones and that extra precaution has to be exercised when taking drugs, I knew that my knee’s new found freedom would be short lived.

Sadly, reluctantly, I popped one, last pill, did a little jog on the beach, danced a sweet dance on the lawn and then waited for the return of the ongoing daily ache of arthritic knees.

But...... not before I was able to experience once again what William Stafford wrote:

Most mornings I get away, slip out
the door before light, set forth on the dim, gray
road, letting my feet find a cadence
that softly carries me on. Nobody
is up--all alone my journey begins.

(from the poem, Run before Dawn)

Or..... what Marge Piercy writes: 

It is not the running I love, thump
thump with my leaden feet that only
infrequently are winged and prancing,
but the light that glints off the cattails
as the wind furrows them, the rum cherries
reddening leaf and fruit, the way the pines
blacken the sunlight on their bristles,
the hawk circling, stooping, floating
low over beige grasses,....

(from the poem, Morning athletes)

I’m now back to a slower, more careful walk through life’s wonders. Still, it was a blessing of sorts, those few days when I was transported to a time when the body had no wounds and knew no pain. 

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.

On Tuesday I went down to the beach early in the day to sit and watch my Melbourne friend and his son catch some surf. They were excited.

Now, a couple of days later, Craig and Ben and the rest of their family have continued their journey up the east coast of Tasmania. And me? I am still sitting by the the beach watching wave after wave continue their steady march onto the sands of time.

Today, being the equinox when supposedly all light falls equally everywhere around the globe, I am wondering whether or not a father and son can ever reach any sort of equanimity with each other? 

As children, do we ever grow up in the eyes of our parents no matter what our age?

Once, when I was 42 years old and visiting my father, I ordered a coffee at the local cafe we had gone to for breakfast. “What? Are you drinking coffee now?”, he asked in a tone just short of reprimanding, as though I was still the 17 year old athlete preparing for the state swimming championships.

Do we ever forget being the child?

In the following poem Stanley Kunitz has this reflection:

The Portrait