Skedaddle

It's been a Big Week. (When is a week not big these days, I ask you?) Suffice to say, this morning's quiet is welcome after a run of higgeldy-piggedly days and a night of unexpected shenanigans. I'm home alone for the first time in ages and was woken from deep sleep at midnight - outside, the leer of sirens, throbbing truck engines and loud shouting. A sojourn into the garden (don't you love being outdoors at night; bare feet on damp grass; stars ablaze in the deep, deep dark?) revealed a blazing fire on the scrubby footpath just below my house. Thankfully, the fire service was there, taking charge with their fire-quenching hoses and a certain boisterous efficiency.

I stood under the arch of my old wooden side-gate, watching proceedings from the hedge, a safe distance away. The patterns created by the luminous stripes on the firemen's jacket's took me back to my walk along the beach at Aramoana this time last week. There was plenty of evidence of 'boisterous efficiency' there, too - nature's artistry everywhere I looked; her handwriting authoritative; her rhythms lyrical, playful, insistent. I never cease to be surprised by her tenderness and force, by the beauty she offers up even in things fragmented or worn. I was struck then - as I am in this moment - by the way nothing is ever lost, every thing we encounter seems to be an echo-expression of some other thing that precedes it or postdates it. Everything's in a state of forming and reforming. . . even when it may seem otherwise? 

This sea lettuce (as weightless and soft as a damp silk handkerchief) particularly entrances me - how is it possible that flotsam so light can leave so determined a track in its wake? It looks to me as though it seized a moment when no one was looking, careened across the sand and skidded to a halt a split second before I happened upon it. (Sitting there quietly - innocence personified - you'd think we don't know it has willpower and wheels secreted below its green skirt? Ice and mushrooms play these tricks on us, too - have you ever seen a frozen wave form, or caught a mushroom in the act of rising up out of the earth?). 

Sea lettuce skedaddles

Sea leather

and a whiskery old man of the sea

Beach(ed) offerings

May we each day wake 

undaunted by the endless possibilities of colour. . . 

Happy 1 August everyone - wishing you balm and calm. 

And the Sea. . . how it murmurs, how it murmurs

 

". . . Look how upright they are these three; how their faces shine even while the light is dimming. Hear their voices, the lilt and lift, the tumble of words. Watch their stride all in keeping; see how the sand flicks and settles with each one’s footfall. And the sea at their right hand, how it murmurs, how it murmurs. . . " Pam Morrison

Sand and salt waters' edge

astonish |əˈstäni sh |verb [ trans. ]surprise or impress (someone) greatly : you never fail to astonish me | [ trans. ] it astonished her that Mrs. Browing could seem so anxious | [as adj. ] ( astonishing) an astonishing achievement.DERIVATIVESastonishingly |əˈstɑnɪʃɪŋli| adverb : [as submodifier ] an astonishingly successful program.ORIGIN early 16th cent. (as astonished, in the sense [stunned, bewildered, dismayed] ): from obsolete astone [stun, stupefy,] from Old French estoner, based on Latin ex- ‘out’ + tonare ‘to thunder.’

Some years ago, in a moment of glowing idealism, a dear friend sent these words in a letter "When in doubt, opt for the astonishing". With what I see now as a combination of naivete, youth, foolishness and good faith, I adopted this phrase as a kind of 'live-by' mantra. We have since talked about the paradox inherent in this statement - its weight and promise  -  arriving at what feels like a deeper reading and fuller understanding of both.  The dictionary definition for 'astonish', pasted at the top of this entry, took me a little by surprise. It makes frequent mention of the word 'success' which seems to me incongruous, a miss fit/mis-fit/misfit.  I wonder what associations the word 'astonish' awakens in you? 


On 13 October 2009, I posted the 'astonishing' phrase on my blog here. Mary McCallum (TP curator who blogs at O Audacious Book) put forward a challenging comment for which I was grateful; she asked, 'what if opting for the astonishing is not an option?' A brief but worthwhile discussion ensued. 


To 'opt for the astonishing' - as far as I understand these words today - speaks to me about 'staying open' and present, awake to life in a state of alertness and anticipation.  This can be easier said than done, of course. Sometimes prevailing circumstances - our own and others' - are shocking, bewildering, 'whelming, seemingly impossible or insurmountable. What then? 


Who amongst us is not living with an ever-increasing raft of uncertainty and questions? I know I am. And I cannot profess to have answers to very many of them. I do know that when I feel perplexed, mystified or tossed about, I find it helpful to bundle the questions - both those I am able to give shape to, and those I'm not - into a metaphorical knapsack, and to take them down to sand and salt waters' edge... 

On Tuesday, when I walked the Aramoana coastline with my daughter, it seemed  The Astonishing had run up ahead of us, was there on the beach, waiting to meet us. The Astonishing can, it seems to me, reside in unexpected places, regardless of whether or not that leads us to flashes of insight or neatly-outlined conclusions.


Sometimes it turns up unexpectedly, as a haphazard arrangement - 

and sometimes in a more considered and organized fashion -  

Ali and I walked and talked and talked and walked, amongst red-billed oyster catchers, strutting gulls, muscular kelp, driftwood sculpture - this temporary screen, vulnerable to weather - spiral shells, a decaying seal. On our return home, I was prompted to go on-line to re-read Scott London's interview with ecologist/philosopher David Abram.  I warmly recommend their subtly-nuanced conversation and, too, suggest you allow a goodly chunk of time to explore Scott London's generous and wide-ranging website. In this particular interview, Abram said ". . . so many of the ways we speak in our culture continually deny the reciprocity between our senses and the rest of the sensuous world, between our bodies and the vast body of the earth. When we speak of the earth as an object, we are denying our relationship with the earth. When we speak of nature as a set of objects, rather than a community of subjects, we basically close our senses to all of the other voices that surround us. . . "

And then of course, there's Rainer Maria Rilke who offers us his particular wisdom -


           LIVE THE QUESTION


           Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
           and try to love the questions themselves,
           like locked rooms and like books that are written
           in a foreign tongue.
           Do not now seek the answers, which cannot yet be given you
           because you would not yet be able to live them.
           And the point is, to live everything.
           Live the questions now. 
           Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
           live along some distant day into the answer.


              Rainer Maria Rilke


                    

Aramoana - Open Heart for Christchurch xo

The sea offers up orange

One of my favourite beaches, Aramoana - 'gateway to the sea' - is about half an hour's drive from my front door. I walk there often. Each time I go there, the ocean expresses a different side of her personality. Perhaps my perception is affected by whether I'm alone or with someone, what mood I'm in or who it is I might be walking with. Whatever it is, there's something about the ocean that has me imagining we're in conversation together; we take turns to reveal something new about each other each time we meet. 

Several months ago, I drew a circle in my diary around two weeks in September. Earlier in the year, my very dear old (though not so in age!) Cape Town friend, Nan, expressed a full-hearted wish to come to Dunedin. We agreed to hold the idea in light hands, since life is full and unpredictable, but I wanted to make sure that whatever happened, she and I would have an uncluttered, undistracted time together should she go ahead and decide to buy an air ticket. Well, she did! She's here! Sharing time, space and new/old friendships with her in this place I love is deep joy.

Yesterday, we went for a walk out at Aramoana (Nan in the bright orange windproof jacket her daughter bought her specially for this trip). 

It was a moody day; the sea, not exactly tempestuous so much as agitated, as though she's doing what she must to shake off the energy of Saturday's earthquake (there was another unnervingly big jolt - 5.6 - yesterday morning)...

I really don't know what we can do over distance to be of practical help to our friends up in Christchurch but one of my strongest impulses is to turn to the Earth, not away from her. It seems to me that times like these call us to more nurture - to nurture more. Each other. And the Earth. Perhaps if we all put our hands into her soil, dig and plant and express our appreciation of her, she - mother earth - will feel affirmed, valued, tended. Perhaps it will help her settle back down? When someone we love - brother, sister, friend, child, parent - is in the grip of trauma or a violent seizure, is not our instinct is to hold them, to stroke their forehead, to speak soothing, loving words to them? We want to be in physical contact, to reassure them this too will pass, that everything will be alright, calm will be restored? Apparently the plants Rue and Witch Hazel have healing properties that would nourish both the planter and the 'plantee'? (Rue is considered an effective antispasmodic; Witch Hazel helps with bleeding and reduces swelling in knotty veins.) I don't know... am thinking aloud here. 

The passage down to the beach has elements of a birth canal... a walk over tussock-covered dunes, through a narrow gap then out onto a whole other landscape. As if she knew a lovely woman in  an orange jacket would be visiting her for the first time that day, the sea offered up a collection of beautiful orange treasures. . .     

On our way back to the car, the sea's signature - also in orange. . . kelp script, written casually onto the flank of a dune.

~~~ I'm sorry I've not left many comments on your blogs over the past few days. I've been reading your posts - your wonderful, enlivening posts - but I just haven't had a lot of words to put out. Thanks for popping in here. Your presence means a lot. I'll be out and about more soon. xx ~~~