A day's play

In amongst life's muddle, uncertainty and fray, this ever-so-welcome day clambering and cavorting with my barefoot trio. . . It could be years till the next time we're able to do this - so, yes, this small window of time away from it all was a very great gift. . . 

Cathedral Caves & coastline

Lake Wilkie forest walk

McLeans Falls

Tautuku Confidence Course & estuary boardwalk.

XO

New artworks are being added daily to the

MANY AS ONE Artwork for Christchurch page.

Please support this initiative by clicking on the link and having a look-see. . . 

Up, up & away

I'm heading away for a day or two, making a short road trip with my three adult offspring. My youngest son is leaving New Zealand very soon and is likely to be away for a good many years. . . Post-grad. study in the UK is calling him; philosophy, alternative currencies and co-operative financial structures are calling him; engagement with the wider world is calling him. I will write more about this - what it means for him, what it means for me - in the next wee while. I will also write the story of the small boy Tomas with his passion for garden sprinklers and hovercrafts, and his nighttime travels on the back of a magic moss. 

Here now, it's time to finish packing the picnic basket and hunt out my wind-sheeter, camera batteries and sunblock. . . We'll be revisiting some of my trio's childhood spots around the Caitlins coastal native forest reserve. The weather report is fine; the tide will be low at noon. We're planning to make our way over, under, around and through Tautuku's timber orienteering course (first tackled fifteen years ago), will picnic on the beach at Cathedral Caves then meander through lush coastal forest to McLeans Falls. . . Supper will be early at a quaint little place called 'The Whistling Frog.'

It'll be good to get away, to soften a few rough edges. Have yourselves a fine few days, too. . .

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Clock is an enigmatic photographic image (archival pigment ink on hand-coated silver gelatin emulsion; 100% rag paper) gifted to the MANY AS ONE Christchurch appeal by Cape Town artist and friend, Stephen Inggs. Many thanks, Stephen - Big Ben's a beauty.  

VII

Clock - Stephen Inggs (South Africa)

 Archival pigment ink on hand-coated silver gelatin emulsion; 100% rag paper

200 x 200mm

Several new artworks are on their way and will be posted on the MaO page when I return from the Caitlins (Thursday or Friday). 

Tuesday Poem - Mule Heart by Jane Hirshfield

One of the books that lives in the pile on my bedside table is a collection of interviews with poets - Fooling With Words by Bill Moyers (you won't spot it in this pic because right now it's on my bed!). . .

On page 110, Jane Hirshfield introduces her poem Mule Heart with the following story - 

"I was in Greece many years ago and saw how they put pannier baskets on the sides of the mules to carry things up and down the steep coastline. In the poem, the basket placed on the one side of the stubborn heart is filled with all the things you would want to keep: the fragrant lemons, the things you love. The other basket is for holding your griefs, your sorrows, everything that has abandoned you - which of course by the end of our lives will be everything, including our lives themselves. Each of these aspects of life the mule heart must carry: it carries our joys, and it carries our suffering. Maybe the two baskets mean that they balance, somehow. 

Many years passed between my seeing the little mules of Santorini and writing the poem. I wrote it to help me get through a time in my life when I thought a certain stubbornness would help. I told myself, 'Just last out the moment, and rely on the truth that everything changes; if you can simply hang in there, you'll be alright.' And from that feeling, the poem came. A wonderful thing about poetry is that at any moment a poem draws on everything you have ever known, seen, experienced. A poem is like those baskets, needing to be filled, and so your whole life must be available to each poem as you write it. This poem needed those mules, their flies and braided, belled bridles. Sometimes I think that poems use us in order to think, to their own work. You know, most of the time I feel as if I am in service of the poem - a poem isn't something I make, it's something I serve. . . "

              MULE HEART


              On the days when the rest 
              have failed you, 
              let this much be yours - 
              flies, dust, an unnameable odor,
              the two waiting baskets:
              one for the lemons and passion,
              the other for all that you have lost.
              Both empty, 
              it will come to your shoulder,
              breathe slowly against your bare arm.
              If you offer it hay, it will eat.
              Offered nothing,
              it will stand as long as you ask. 
              The little bells of the bridle will hang
              beside you quietly, 
              in the heat and the tree's thin shade.
              Do not let its sparse mane deceive you,
              or the way the left ear swivels into dream.
              This too is a gift of the gods,
              calm and complete.


             Jane Hirshfield 

 For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill. 

Janis Freegard has chosen This new place, a tender poem by Robert McGonigal

Donations for Christchurch - creative & financial - are coming in from near and far. The basket is filling. . . Please click on the MoA link below to view new artworks as they're being added to the Stockroom. THANK YOU XO 

MANY AS ONE

Many as One ii

There will be a second draw for the Christchurch earthquake fund this week, a project that's more-or-less taking shape as we go along. . . 

Please click on the MANY AS ONE tab on the top bar of this page - you will find a growing 'stockroom' of drawings, miniature paintings, hand-crafted jewelry and art objects that will be looking for homes over the coming weeks. In time, the collection will hopefully grow to include items with initials other than CB on them (variety is a spice of life).

This week, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Sydney-based multi-media artist,  Lisa Roberts. Lisa has generously donated her hand-engraved perspex piece titled  Coccoliths, carbon sequesters to this Christchurch fund; she lived in the city some years ago and has retained strong connections to New Zealand. 

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Coccoliths, carbon sequesters - Lisa Roberts (Australia)

Engraved Perspex, 120mm x 65mm

Lisa and I have a number of things in common, amongst these a passion for Antarctica and a peculiar fondness for tiny wee sea creatures. (One day, a poem will take shape in which the words coccolithophor and foraminifera vie for supremacy in the same stanza.). For a rare glimpse into the balletic antics of krill and the intricacies of krill sex, click here and be entranced by Lisa's exquisitely lyrical - and scientifically accurate - animated drawings. 

re; MANY AS ONE, I've been wondering about how best to proceed from here. 


Here's the plan. . . Each artwork will be given a number. At the end of each week, these numbers (written onto black paper) will be placed in the hat along with the names of  donators to the fund (written on white). A friend will draw one of each colour to determine that week's 'match'. (To reiterate what I said in last Monday's post. . . no contribution to this fund could be considered too small. Everyone who donates (button to the right ---- >>>) stands an equal chance of having their name pulled from the hat each week.) The intention is to keep this draw running at least till the end of April, at which point I'll be heading North West for a couple of weeks (more about this sweet development later ; )). . . 

Meantime, here is one of the small ink drawings currently in the 'stockroom' (the details of which can be found here) -

III

Thanks again +++ Lisa - and to all of you for being a part of this. 

Paper Stack

I am happy to announce that last week's Paper Stack* will be soon be on its way to Pasadena in the US. 

I

*Did you know? 

A sea stack is a column of rock standing in the sea, remaining after the erosion of coastline cliffs. Sea stacks are generally comprised of countless generations of - amongst other things - coccolithophors and calcareous foraminifera (see, here they are again. . . these words  belong in the same sentence?). 

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

Tuesday Poem - The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

                       THE LAYERS


                       I have walked through many lives
                       some of them my own,
                       and I am not who I was,
                       though some principle of being
                       abides, from which I struggle
                       not to stray.
                       When I look behind,
                       as I am compelled to look
                       before I can gather on my journey,
                       I see the milestones dwindling
                       toward the horizon
                       and the slow fires trailing
                       from the abandoned camp-sites,
                       over which scavenger angels
                       wheel on heavy wings.
                       Oh, I have made myself a tribe
                       out of my affections,
                       and my tribe is scattered!
                       How shall the heart be reconciled
                       to its feast of losses?
                       In a rising wind
                       the manic dust of my friends,
                       those who fell along the way,
                       bitterly stings my face.
                       Yet I turn, I turn,
                       exulting somewhat,
                       with my will intact to go
                       wherever I need to go,
                       and every stone on the road
                       precious to me.
                       In my darkest night,
                       when the moon was covered
                       and I roamed through wreckage,
                       a nimbus-clouded voice
                       directed me:
                       "Live in the layers,
                       not on the litter."
                       Though I lack the art
                       to decipher it,
                       no doubt the next chapter
                       in my book of transformations
                       is already written.
                       I am not done with my changes.


                       Stanley Kunitz.

". . . People who come to hear poetry are very generous. There's a curious relationship between the poet and his audience. Paul Celan, the great poet of the Holocaust, wrote cryptically that 'a poem is solitary and on its way.' In my interpretation, the poem is on its way in search of people. For its complete fulfillment it has to find an audience, it has to be invited into some other person's mind and heart. Once the poet lets go of his poem, it is no longer his. It belongs to anyone who wants it. It is a gift. . . 

. . . I wrote 'The layers' in my late seventies to conclude a collection of sixty years of my poetry. . .  Through the years I had endured the loss of several of my dearest friends, including Theodore Roethke, Mark Rothko, and - most recently - Robert Lowell. I felt I was near the end of a phase in my life and in my work. The poem began with two lines that came to me in a dream, spoken out of a dark cloud: 'Live in the layers,/not on the litter.'" Stanley Kunitz

excerpt from Fooling With Words - A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft by Bill Moyers: Perennial, An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999 

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the quill. 

Bernadette Keating is this week's TP editor with the poem Excerpt from 15 Flower World Variations by Jerome Rothenberg.

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A friend sent me this photograph from Ireland - 'Remembering those lost, injured, uprooted in Christchurch, NZ. . . ', candles lit in Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin.

Photograph - T. Cahill - Art & Document

Our thoughts continue to be with our Christchurch community - and, too, with those living in darkened circumstances in so many corners of our world. As Mim wrote a few days ago, 'the wick catches - a little flame swells.' Let us focus on love and light and keep our candles burning. . .