Life on the Edge

Lifer

Hunched over hard white bread
and plastic soup bowl filled with gruel,
he looked like a stork, a silly angel,
all neck and bony shoulder-wings
and awkward beak.

His head lifted, then fell
in a slow deliberate dance,
three, four times, dough-skinned
in a gray room sickened by yellow light.
He kept his eyes shut tight.

Outside the prison dining hall,
a turnkey slammed and locked
the heavy iron gate. The old man placed
his palms together softly, raised
them to his stubbled chin,

crossed himself, and ate.

—Sam Hamill

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

—Mary Oliver

Forget your life. Say “God is Great”. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray.
You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?”
and no one says “How aren’t you?”

Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there’s an artist you don’t know about.
This artist is not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
you’re helping people you don’t know
and have never seen.

Is what I say true? Say “yes” quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.

—Rumi

We were never told it would be easy. What we were told was that it would be worth it. 

After all the trials and tribulations that go into both the painting of the paintings and the hanging of the paintings, Sally’s exhibition opening was nothing less than a stunning success. The joyful party atmosphere throughout the packed crowd of around 100 at the Eucalypt Gallery cafe, where an electric enthusiasm continually bubbled up in excited conversation, was one of those rewarding moments in every artist’s life that somehow makes it all worthwhile. 

Heather Rose, Tasmanian business woman of the year, novelist and environmental activist, officially opened the exhibition with a speech that was touching and passionate in its heartfelt response to both Sally and her paintings. A few excerpts follow:

Sally’s work is extraordinarily accomplished, rich with not only the technical skill it takes to bring these paintings into being – but with a spiritual wisdom and an ability to tune herself in to frequencies not many of us choose to listen to – let alone harness for artistic purpose.

Sally’s paintings are not for the faint-hearted. They are for the adventurous, the seeker, the observer.  They demand a level of interaction from the viewer. They can be unsettling, inspiring, eerie, unbalancing and balancing. ... they speak to those who are ready to hear.

The exhibition opening was on Sunday. After a day off on Monday catching up on needed sleep, by Tuesday Sally was back at work. Not in the studio, but down at her Moonstone Mandala temple putting the finishing touches on its construction. Another adventurous project in an artist’s sometimes uneasy, but always worthy life.

All too often people think that being an artist is a care free, no stress, easy going way to make a living that just touches on being a serious, worthy occupation. Our office (our studios) can be visited, it seems, at any time of the week because we’re not really doing anything that requires a schedule or appointment. For us to close the gate three days a week creates more offense than respect of the need for us to protect our privacy in order to create the work we do.

A look behind the scenes, however, reveals many a stressful day that requires an artist to have the patience of Job and the resilience of an enlightened yoga master to avoid going nuts as the once neat and tidy living room—and dining room table—become staging grounds and work stations for weeks on end for an upcoming exhibition or the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere while on the way to Hobart to photograph the paintings for such an exhibition.

We actually took two cars (mine could only hold five of the seven paintings plus my own sculpture, “Birth of Beauty") so, in a way, we were lucky as I was able to get to the photographer on time with most of the work while Sally limped back to Roaring Beach. Having left half an hour earlier, I had no idea that Sally’s car decided to call it quits until the kind waiter (this is Hobart where a “kind waiter” is not an oxymoron) at the restaurant we had agreed to meet at for breakfast handed me his mobile phone. It also happened to be a day when the temperature rose to 100 degrees on the drive home as I nervously transported $100,000 worth of uninsured art with all the windows rolled down.

All said and done, though, it still was a good day. The photographer, Peter Whyte, is a skilled master at documenting art work and it was a pleasure to watch him work. His $25,000 camera was needed to get the necessary 80mp for a future poster of “The Birth of Beauty” (see below) as well as fine art reproductions of the paintings. The two paintings that didn’t get photographed are being shot today as Peter was kind enough to reschedule Sally ahead of her exhibition opening this coming Sunday .

Now, with just five days to go there is only the house to get transformed with the living room tided up, the dining room table cleared of hammer, screw drivers, pliers, gold leaf, pots of glue, staple gun, electric drill various jars of varnish, shellac and thinners, and, the beds made up for visiting parents, relatives and friends flying in for the weekend to celebrate the launch of the Moonstone Mandala paintings (http://www.moonstonemandala.com). All this plus continually working on my own ideas for a site specific sculpture for the Friendly Beaches Lodge in less than a month.

Life’s a party if you’re an artist.

Just last week Sally’s and my kayaks cruised languidly along the sandstone shoreline in the relatively protected waters of Norfolk Bay (as opposed to “Storm Bay” where we live). Looking at the below photo where she is lulling about at the entrance to a shallow cave got me thinking about how every new artistic endeavour requires paddling into the dark unknown and having a peek and poke at what might lie within. Whether holding a palette in the painting studio or, more simply, an omelette pan in the kitchen, creativity demands it. 

Embroidered onto the heart and stitched into the fabric of body and mind is all of our life’s history and it aches for inspired expression. Inspiration doesn’t just happen though. It is nurtured and coddled into being through the tiniest acts of bravery to overcome inertia, fear and the risk of failure. (Success, by the way, is going from failure to failure with enthusiasm.) Chance and luck play a part, but first and foremost, inspiration needs one to be an intrepid explorer, willing to enter into the mysterious, darker recesses of the many interior or exterior landscapes that lurk everywhere. 

Today’s burnt offering inevitably leads to tomorrow’s gourmet sensation.

January 2, 2008. Here we all are at the start of another year. Each one of us on our individual journeys doing the best we can dealing with the winds and currents that buffet our boats as they course their way through life. May we all have a safe passage to whatever awaits us.

To represent this life journey, three years ago I carved a fleet of nine boats with a total of 34 occupants who had set out on “uncharted” waters. After finishing the initial carvings, the boats were then placed outside to weather over the ensuing years. For the past two months I have been laboriously refitting the stones, re-sanding the boats and oiling everything. Although the top “boat” section looks to be separate from the darker “base”, they are actually carved from one single piece of wood. By not re-sanding the bottom section and leaving it completely weathered, a darkened and more aged patina is achieved.

Five years ago yesterday in 2003 I put up the first entry on this blog, Life at the Edge, and have written weekly since. A long journey indeed with lots of words and photos detailing what goes on at Windgrove and, hopefully, linking these stories with some sort of universal truths on how the world and all its inhabitants could coexist more peacefully. I doubt that I have always walked my talk and have probably sought safe anchorage in too many safe harbours instead of venturing out into the wilder unknown to either find myself or actively seek change. If the truth be known, I get seasick really quickly. Still, though, for those readers that have been with me since the beginning, there has been plenty of excitement to write home about. Thanks for sailing along with me. I look forward to the next five years.

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”?)