Life on the Edge

“As the Philosopher says,
He who contemplates a statue
Shares the thought of the artist;
The statue itself does not.
As the soul contemplates nature,
The spirit the light, and the mind
The stars, every eye sees into
The matrix from which it was born.”
Kenneth Rexroth

Wild Roaring Beach faces south towards the great Southern Ocean. If one walks north over the sand dunes and forested hills, one drops down about five miles later to the northern side of the Tasman Peninsula and the serene waters of Norfolk Bay. Surfers find this calm section of the peninsula dead boring, but kayaking across these waters over to the Forestier Peninsula is a sublime experience. Once there, it is only a couple of miles overland to the home of Jerzy Michalski, a painter of extraordinary skill and depth whose urban existential motifs contrast sharply with his studio nestled into the natural landscape.

Sally took one of her mandala paintings over to Jerry this past Sunday for some technical advice and, while seeing the two of them converse over some of the alchemical processes of painting, I was struck by the power of Jerry’s paintings—seen strewn about the walls of his studio in the above photo—to convey the utter desperate quality of the human experience when it is confined to the urban prison edifices of corporate temples of power. 

The matrix from which I was born allows me to empathise with the desperateness of Jerzy’s solitary male figures. This very personal matrix of mine, however, also allows me an “exit strategy”, so to speak, down the fire escape, out onto the road, out of the city and into the very real healing community of wild nature. From this vantage point, I am more likely to achieve a more capable compassion and touch the outskirts, at least, of poet Kenneth Rexroth’s other words:

“Ultimately the fulfillment
Of reality demands that
Each person in the universe
Realize every one of the
Others in the fullness of love.”

Both above quotes excerpted from the epic poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn. 

Sally paints, I carve. But of what? And, why?

Hard questions to answer even though we both constantly pursue answers.

Speaking for myself, I suppose that, if anything, I am trying to make visible the numinous quality of nature; at least give hints of it. But it is so complex that I sometimes tire of asking the questions. What helps, though, is thumbing through the well worn pages of any of my poet’s books. Today, it’s Rilke’s “Book of Hours: Love Poems to God” (translation: Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy).

Wir durfen dich nicht eigenmachtig malen

Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.

Writing in Germany about the Italian artists, Rilke also said:

Ich habe viele Bruder in Sutanen

More I don’t know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

Just maybe I shouldn’t spend so much time trying to figure things out. Just maybe I should just keep carving and let what flows out of my hands speak what needs to be spoken.

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

The above photo of Wedge island, which is just off the southern end of Windgrove, conveys nature as a multiple of dualisms: beautiful and sinister, foreboding and enticing, stormy and calm. There is no one description of nature that fits. The flip side of today’s description will be tomorrow’s reality. Similar, I suppose (if memory serves me correct), to what Tom Robbins wrote about in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues when he said: Everything is beautiful; nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred; nothing is beautiful.

The only issue subject to debate with any of the several qualities of nature is their relative weighting or frequency of occurrence. 

I say this because of a comment by an art critic who, in his review last year of an “ephemeral” art exhibition of site specific sculpture, wrote: Anyone who has watched a David Attenborough documentary will know that peace, tranquility and spiritual renewal are entirely foreign to the natural world. Tennyson’s nature red in tooth and claw is much closer to reality.

Peace, tranquility and spiritual renewal—entirely foreign to the natural world? Give me a break.

My immediate response is to say that the reviewer has been watching too much TV and that he should leave the city and try living surrounded by nature for a period of time. If so, he would come to know that the operative word for nature is “benign”; that, if action and drama are to be filmed, hours of waiting are the norm. Certainly, there is a violent aspect surrounding territorial squabbles and the acquisition of food, but after 15 years of watching the eagles float endlessly for hours at a time, I have only seen an eagle red in tooth and claw twice. 

When I encounter a snake along a Windgrove path, I always manage to levitate higher than I can when meditating, but these encounters are a sum total of 15 seconds per year. Compare this with the countless hours of walking I do on these paths and my point is made: if drama is what one is after, then be prepared to wait. Peace and tranquility are the rule rather than the exception.

Capturing Wedge Island in the right light has taken years.

The storms that bend and shape the trees happen only infrequently.

Last week I talked about preparedness and patience as being attributes to making the most of opportunities when they come knocking.  I suppose I could have also mentioned: being in the right place at the right time.

I was walking through the sun shower towards the Peace Fire and just as the light rain stopped, this hugh shaft of multi-colored light was brushed into existence. Surely, there must be a pot of gold at the end of this, I thought. In the end, the rainbow, itself, was the gold.

On more than one occasion I have been told that art is irrelevant; that the real work of the world is found elsewhere. Whenever I see a rainbow, it tells me that the world is nothing, if not one big art work.

Who has not looked at a rainbow and felt its magic? It doesn’t serve any economic purpose or any biologic purpose either. It is just there, beautiful. If it brings joy, how could such an encounter with this beauty be deemed irrelvant?

Two dimensional or three dimensional works of art can also serve as vehicles of beauty. Does this make them irrelevant?  In my eye, the more beauty surrounds me, the better and wealthier my life becomes.

These photos are four years apart with the most recent taken just yesterday evening. The Drop Stone’s ageing over the intervening years is clearly evident with the freshly oiled, brightly vibrant, sandy yellow of newly finished huon pine contrasting sharply with the grey, weathered look of today’s bench.

Change is seen elsewhere. 

Looking at the angle of shadow cast by the two bases of the bench, the time of day might be the same, but the larger shadow now darkening the left end of the bench deck comes from the she-oak tree grown taller.

Looking at the beach, four years ago there was a lot more sand to be seen. Over the past year this sand has been washed away by a series of strong storms and now the underling stones have been exposed. I am intrigued by this shift and find a fascination in examining the long term cyclic nature of the coming and going of sand on the beach. However, I will admit to liking the sand more than the stones.

More of a daily change, and probably not so easily grasped, is the direction of the wind. In the above photo the wind would have been “off shore”, resulting in a clearer, more defined background. The bottom photo is of an “on shore” breeze, resulting in a brighter, more cloudy looking background because of the salt spray being carried inland and the sunlight being bounced off of it and directed back to the camera. Even the sky appears cloudy.

Coming back to the bench, the big question I always face is whether or not to accept the process of change time and weather bring. Do I leave them to age gracefully or do I constantly sand them back to a more youthful finish? Certainly, the stony look of the aged bench has a softer quality and blends in nicely with its surrounding environment (especially, with the stony grey beach). I approach it as one does a well worn pair of favourite shoes. Better for wear and loaded with memories.

Yet, looking back at how the bench presented itself on the day it was first placed in its commanding position on top of the cliff above the surf, I recall a “freshness” that was exciting to behold, and, like any finely dressed, good looking stranger strutting into town, it commanded attention. 

To bring the bench back to its former “newness” would only take a days work to undo four years of “ageing”.  It does cross my mind. But there I leave it. Not out of laziness, but because I live at Roaring Beach, not Los Angeles.

Today in Tasmania and elsewhere around the world, the movie, The Da Vinci Code, opens in countless theatres. I haven’t read Dan Brown’s book, but numerous friends have and I’ve decided to use one of the symbols written about within the book as part of a major landscape feature.

The Pentagram is a five pointed star that must be drawn with five lines to create the interior pentagon. Long associated with the planet Venus and the worship of the goddess Venus, it is thought to have originated from the observations of prehistoric astronomers. When viewed from Earth, successive inferior conjunctions of Venus plot a nearly perfect pentagram shape around the Sun every eight years.

Although historically used in many religious faiths including Christian, it is most commonly used today as a Neopagan symbol to represent earth, air, fire and water plus the fifth element of quintessence of Spirit.

My kind of symbol. Especially as there have been fundamentalist Christian attempts to ban its being worn on clothing in American schools.

I will use a surveyor to plot out Windgrove’s pentagram within an existing circle established a few years ago on the hill behind the Peace Garden. This circle’s diameter is 500feet/150 meters. Nice and large. The pentagon, itself, within the pentagram, will measure 100 feet/30 meters across. Try to visualize the drawing of the pentagram (first image) being laid down onto this hillside circle. 

To fill in the star’s form, I will plant 3000 dagger hakeas. (The photo above shows a similar type of hakea growing next to my house.) This is a rather dense small tree and, because they will be planted just one metre/three feet apart, they will be impenetrable to all but wombats and rabbits. The best part is that in May of each year, this neddle sharp hakea bursts into white flowers.

Obviously, not an easy task. My friends, Dave and Zoe, who run the Frog Hollow native plant nursery, will be gathering seed and germinating the tiny plants. They will be ready next year at this time. Then, somehow, we’ll figure out how to put this many seedlings into the ground.

In around five years time, the first white blossoming pentagram will occur. How magical. I wonder if it will attract three wise women?

The birth of Venus, as delicately painted by Botticelli over five hundred years ago, portrays the myth of how Beauty “supposedly” came into the world. Beauty, in this instance, being portrayed as a woman.

But aren’t we short changing nature’s role in all this? By making humans the symbol (albeit a good looking one), isn’t this “a maiming of beauty when it is made personal” (to paraphrase D.H. Lawrence)? 

Let’s correct this anthropocentric error. Since the human has emerged from the sea on a vessel of the sea, let’s dedicate and delegate the sea shell as the most potent symbol to represent beauty. Marvellous idea, yes?

The important next question is: Where are sea shells born?

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the shells found at Roaring Beach seem to be born on the backs of the rare bull kelp species, kelpus submarinphilia elongi gigantica.

A few years ago active volcanic sea mounts were discovered off the coast of Tasmania. This year advanced scientific research voyages by CISRO accurately identified and mapped tall, undulating forests of the above rare kelp along the warming ridges of the volcano’s vents. What is most exciting, however, is that they found hidden throughout these dense kelp forests many hundreds of sea shell nurseries with the most common shell being the screw shell. The odd, fascinating twist in all this is that it appears that a fish is necessary for the propagation of the shell. For screw shells to come into existence, screw fish are required. And, as mysterious as what drives the salmon and eels, screw fish from the north Atlantic are guided through the oceans by an ancient homing device to find their way to these forests of kelp in the Southern Ocean. Once into the forest, the undulating kelp acts like multiple oiled hands and excites the swimming screw fish. Eventually, the movings and the rubbings bring forth a release of seed that is deposited along the slippery, fingering kelp.

How long the gestation period is, is still open to conjecture, but eventually bulges begin to form beneath the skin of the kelp. Shortly after this, the taut, bulbous top skin of the kelp bursts open and the fully sized, spiralling sea shell floats away to find its way to a Tasmanian beach.

Isn’t the world of nature a totally amazing, wow place?

Here at Roaring Beach screw shells are found in abundance, but occasionally, the more rare remnant of the shell’s afterbirth washes ashore. This week, I found one. And, as luck would have it, I was able to match it up with a screw shell that had arrived on the beach months earlier.

Speaking of month, what is today’s date?  Gosh, another April Fool’s Day.

Today’s blog has been written by Sally Horne, Windgrove artist-in-residence from December till the end of February.

My quiet activism: Chinese Medicine and mandalas as a means of creating harmony.

We learn to speak a language. And then within that language many of us, perhaps on a spiritual journey or a journey of seeking meaning and a deeper sense of connection, try to find a language that better articulates and deepens our experience of communication about the world and its inner workings. I am learning the language of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It is all together an art, a science and a spiritual path, and likewise painting mandalas is an art, science and spiritual pathway. Both are intricately intertwined in my life. In many ways learning the language of Chinese Medicine is enabling me more and more to comprehend and to translate the silent language of mandalas and their significance in the healing arts.

As the world of natural therapies grows, the concept of wholistic medicine—the consideration and treatment of healing of a disharmony on physical, mental and spiritual levels—has become well known. It is the deeper aspects of medicine, disharmony of the psycho-emotional and spiritual planes that truly interest me. This is where, I believe, most of our problems reside and where our destructive relationship with the world stems from. Part of what attracts me so much to Chinese Medicine and what I connect with through mandala painting is the grounding in interconnectedness and interdependence that both offer. Chinese medicine communicates a complex system of interactions that does not begin or end with self. Likewise the journey of painting a mandala links into the web that moves beyond self. Both aim to deconstruct notions of self and separation from other through a realigning of the subtlest levels of one’s energetic web of interactions.
 
Chinese medicine speaks of the five aspects of spirit as the energetics that give life to form. These spirit aspects connect with the primordial (Tao, connective unconscious, Buddha nature) and have their grounding in the physical. Being closest to the primordial they are the storehouse of our own personal destiny/pathway and act us guides or conduits of our greater plan. This is expressed in an inspiring interpretation of an ancient Chinese text called Rooted in Spirit: the Heart of Chinese Medicine. The author states that the most significant part of needling when acupuncturing is ensuring that there is a “rooting in the spirits”. By this he means accessing the spirit level of medicine. Loss of communication with oneself leads to loss of communication with others and one’s environment. A closer communication with our spirits leads to a richer, more meaningful, more connected and peace-centered life.

 

So what exactly are mandalas? To me they are visual representations of earthly/heavenly vibrations. They are energetic mappings of the silent underlying rhythms within self and beyond self.

The Process of painting mandalas:
It all begins with an empty circle. This is the beginning of all the mandalas. Sometimes it remains an integral part of the painting, sometimes it loses visibility, but it is ever-present in the foundation.

The empty circle is most significant in that it is a sacred circle that gives birth to intention and endless potential. This sacred circle provides the space for the initial image that comes to me most often during meditation. This image is the key that unlocks the artwork; it is the nucleus from which the layers of imagery unfold. And from there, I disappear into another world of colour, image and vibration. Each layer emerges from the previous and gradually the mandala sprouts into life, fruition and maturation.

The significance of the journey is darkly visible along the way, insight comes in little bursts yet clarity comes in strongly towards the end. Along the way I notice my often tumultuous thoughts and emotions that arise and know that as I paint I am both the receiver and creator of healing vibrations. The act of creating also embodies re-creation, the re-creation of self. I evolve as the mandala evolves. And in turn, as interdependence dictates, this influences the evolution of the earth in its small yet significant way.
 

The Windgrove paintings:
 
The trilogy of paintings that I completed at Windgrove represent a single journey. The only initial intention was that they facilitate in some way the resurrection of a fragmented self, of darning my frayed edges. And that harmonising of self would link into the web of interconnectedness and have a positive influence on the frayed edges and fragmentation of the world.

Initially, I began with two paintings: The Moving Away and The Return. These I worked on simultaneously, all the while dealing with the clashing energetics of the two paintings.
 
#1. The Moving Away: yang in nature, hot, expansive and outward moving; vivid, hard-edged and angular, robust and powerful.
 
#2. The Return: yin in nature, inward and downward spiralling; cooling, shadowy, reflective, circular, soft and quietly powerful.
 
On a personal level the tale is apparent, two opposing forces that were having trouble integrating. Going Away came out strong and with ease while The Return was a personal battle. (Perhaps a struggle to manifest my inner vision, a preference to hold it quietly inside, a fear of displaying my quiet vulnerable feminine side on canvas or fear of expressing the softer emotions.)
 
My struggles are your struggles are the world’s struggles.
 
We see these two opposing energetics at the foundation of Chinese Medicine; the interplay of yin and yang. In the deeper energetics of ourselves, within our yin aspect, we hold our arcane visions, our innate selves, our true pathways. It is the outward and upward moving yang that lifts the energies stored in the yin crevices of our being up and out into the world. Yin is storage, yang is action. In the perfect harmonious interaction of these two opposing forces are the holding and manifestation of the individual and the greater vision. It is hard for me to believe that the greater plan would be one of discord and worldly destruction. The seeds of perfect harmony must be within each of us.
 
#3. The Axis: grounding, unity, centering, interconnection.
 
The Axis represents the meeting point of two fundamental interdependent forces. It aims to facilitate and strengthen the return to a relative state of harmony so that spiritual growth and positive reconnection with all other beings and our environment may flourish.
 
It is difficult to articulate and summarise what my paintings are about because they seem to sit between contradictions. They are both simple and complex. They represent the fragment “and” the whole. They are the mending of self, the mending of other.

They are about nothing and, yet, everything.   
 
 

In order to help fund the Windgrove artist-in-residence program, Sally Horne has kindly agreed to put these three oil paintings up for sale with a third of the sale price of each painting ($1,500) going to the residency program.

Price each: Aus$ 4,500. 
Price includes all taxes, packaging and air freight.

Size: 2ft 6in square / 760mm square

Please contact me for further details:

Up to date info:  the painting “Axis” has been sold.