THE EARTHRISE DIARY 7/10 (July, 2010)
Don Diespecker
I went to meditate on the lookout at Double Head this morning and watched the sun rise. The wind was cool but the sun brought her warmth to balance things out. I spotted two loggerhead turtles feeding way down below dangerously close to the whitewash of seawater pounding the headland rocks. They bobbed around grabbing some air when they could then disappeared into the jade opaque waters to surface again unsuspectingly somewhere new! I breathed in deeply and gave thanks for the expansiveness I found there high above the world where the plants cling onto the dry earth and the kestrels call and dive like arrows in search of food.
Petra Meer (July 2010)
Sunday, July 11 2010. It’s been one of those weeks in one of those winter months. There have been (as if I had nothing to do with any of it) computer and printer difficulties and umpteen chores Inside and a myriad of difficulties Outside: off/on nuisance showers with consequent overcast drippy skies, damp cold, mist rising, mud, mud, mud and not enough sunny breaks to enhance my sunny disposition department. Yesterday, for example, after a tricky time (for me, of course, nobody else) and having farewelled my old printer (not a person, but a reliable piece of computer compatible machinery) I brought home a new machine. I was deeply suspicious of this thing because it looked so much like a glass aquarium in places and I was very doubtful about it ever living up to expectations. Fortunately for me, good friend Kerry Smith said he’d help settle my doubts and would telephone the next day, which he did, indicating that a switch to Skype would be helpful and keep down the phone bills. We shared a full screen at K’s suggestion, i.e., down on the coast he could see my moves on his screen while I fumbled at the controls here in the distant bush. He was able to shortcut a way to get the new printer to do its thing and I was grateful and not a little astonished at how efficiently this was achieved (not by myself) at a distance. I was delighted.
I was so pleased that on Saturday morning I looked at the weather, took a chance and hauled out the fire fighter’s pump because my stored water needs replenishing. The pump has a carrying handle but it’s heavy. I opened the tank from the top of my ladder and popped in the inlet pipe then wheelbarrowed the pump over to the riverbank now wet and covered in tradescantia and sundry other weeds. I even used part of a terrazzo ‘pretend marble’ slab (once a coffee table) to set the pump on a level platform in a recess dug on the bank, part primed the inlet pipe through the foot valve, connected the delivery pipe, finished priming by adding water from a watering can, and got the machine going and pumping nicely. If that all looks mundane, it isn’t, quite: it requires some muscle to wrench water-filled pipes on a steep riverbank, to say nothing of carrying the pump riverward without slipping, breaking the anatomy or drowning the carrier before he gets to first base; for old blokes like me, it’s a hot, sweaty tiring exercise—and is sweetly rewarded when the pump runs properly and the river water tumbles noisily into the depleted tank. I was so pleased with myself that I fetched the radio and something to read and sat in the sun (not far from the pump) listening to ABC FM Classics. Very nice, because the weather was not at all wintery and not quite spring-like, but was somewhere between the two seasons, or so it seemed to me. Alas, the pump conked out after an hour and a half. I won’t go any further with that except to say that the micro switch that cuts off the power when the oil level is low has been disconnected and I’ve even changed the oil and cleaned the sparkplug—but gave up (wisely) before going nuts and so ended the operation prematurely; a great disappointment. I switched to other sanity-restoring initiatives (like adding a few more stones to the new anti-flood wall adjacent to the belvedere).
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Windowed Views.
I recently email-invited some of my readers (old friends lifelong friends and new friends) to write a few words—a short par, two or three sentences—describing the view through a window where they write, or where they were reading my message. These are some of their responses:
The bare spindly winter limbs of a liquidambar are the first objects in view from the kitchen window. Behind them: the bifurcated trunk of a large gum, gray in the early evening light. These two superimposed on the bay. The water shows a faint gold tinge and the ripples flow in my direction from a light sou’westerly. Paddling slowly against the breeze is a solitary swan. On the far side of the water, tree-covered hills usually green but now almost black in the fading light, above them a faintly glowing sky and three long strands of mauve and purple clouds.
Bruce Furner. Fennell Bay, Lake Macquarie, NSW.
From my window I can see my 1-acre garden, my lemon tree laden with golden globes of fruit, the three chick mafia, and the stretch of brown lawn sloping down to the boundary wall where trees over 20-metres tall separate my garden from the outer world.
The birds--crested barbet (yellow, black with a blotch of red on his tail), the hoopoes, the louries and weavers building nests in the thorn trees—complete my view.
Julie Craig. Sandton (Johannesburg), RSA.
Looking up from the small dining-room table I see the spreading branches of a date tree bending and swaying over my tiny balcony. The bright orange dates are still not ripe but the birds seem not to mind and pluck them hungrily perching on the edge of the granite veranda nibbling nervously. Here in Tel Aviv it is 3.30pm and the basil that we planted two months ago in boxes beside the sage and verbena is just beginning to droop.
Sharon Snir. Tel Aviv, Israel.
A few lines from the view from where I write:
Frail mesh is a filter
sky arches everything
light bounces
casting negative shapes
that catch my mind.
Lyn Thiry. Valla, NSW.
I am at my desk once more after driving a full circle of 6000-km. Even though my body is now seated in this old cushioned office chair, much of who I am is yet to be reconfigured. I feel as though I have left small pieces of my being scattered all along the way and in addition to this I continue to carry an unsettling sense of motion somewhere within. As I look out this night over the town, I catch my own image reflected in the glass windowpane. The street lamp and the half moon, the tiny house lights glowing in the valley below are patterned over my own familiar form. I am only half here, flat and transparent and floating in a background of night. It’s winter in my room and in the valley, our house lights are also on and glowing yellow but I feel cold. I'm remembering my journey that spanned latitudes and those times where I tasted the warmth of the tropical north...now I am left wanting more. The cold has heightened my longing for the sun, which seems lost to me now in this half state, less light and more melancholy. In this moment my view leaves me steeped in a cold winter’s night with an intense desire for the dawn.
Petra Meer. Warburton, VIC.
Blue-green with white tips—energy on the loose—kinetic as they roll, potential as they hover, kinetic once more as they crash. A transform of light and sound and the ultra violet rockets off the swirling patches as they gain momentum for a repeat. How do I relate to this? Does E =mc squared make it all relevant or do I luxuriate in the quality of the dance? My Buddha says "Ummmm."
John Morris. Looking northeast through my picture windows 60-m above the sea at Kiama, NSW.
July 25 2010. A soft day here: not too cold but much humidity in the cool air and overcast sky. The expression ‘soft day’ isn’t heard much in these parts; I remember often hearing the words during my years in the UK and Eire; it has always seemed an Irish expression to me (if it wasn’t exactly raining in Eire and if there was a glimmer of sunshine or a patch of blue, a ‘soft day’ was an appropriate description of a ‘pleasant’ day). And it seems we have now all grown accustomed to expressions not heard 30, 40 or 50 years ago: climate change, global warming.
On my drives to Bellingen or to Coffs Harbour/Park Beach this month I’ve seen the jacarandas bronzing in the cool air and the yellow flowers of wattles have been prominent for weeks (the scent of wattles can be detected in some places along the highway—even at 100-km/hr). Up here in the Darkwood and Upper Thora, the red cedars are producing new shoots and flowering trees like magnolia are in full bloom. The leggy azaleas in the Cedar Grove have started flowering, too, so there’s more than a hint of spring—in mid-winter. I wanted to clear around the circular wall of the Dog’s Garden and used the mower (in June) to do that: the grass has continued growing all winter (including new kikuyu grown from seed). I’ve seen no frost here (on the ‘home’ paddock near the house: too many trees shade the area all year, but there certainly have been frosty mornings elsewhere in the Valley this season).
As often happens, I’m again surrounded by new and old books most of which I want to read all at the same time, but I’ve hindered my reading this month because I’ve been writing, re-writing, drafting and re-drafting fiction as well as nonfiction narratives for submission to editors and publishers; writers professional as well as amateur have to be in it to win it. A new Alberto Manguel is ordered and on the way (A reader on reading). I’m itching to read The best Australian stories 2009 (Black Inc. (Ed) Delia Falconer—her introduction is as attractive a read as the stories in the anthology, and New Australian stories, Aviva Tuffield’s (Scribe 2009 anthology). A re-read of Annie Proulx’s Postcards is jostling for a place in the queue. I haven’t yet finished the intriguing Reality hunger, a manifesto (David Shields), nor Arundhati Roy’s The god of small things. I’m months behind in reading the Literary Review magazines. I have finished reading Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan army (a good dystopian read but dark, at least for me). And there are recent copies of HEAT and also Griffith Review that that I’ve not completely read. I was at Russell Atkinson’s recent book launch in Bellingen and now have his double (two collections) book of short stories to read. –And I mention another South American-written book, the translation of a Adolfo Bioy Casares novella, The invention of Morel (1964) but more recently published by the NY Review of Books in 2003. There’s a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges who declared [this book] “a masterpiece of plotting comparable to The turn of the screw.” Borges has also described it as a ‘perfect’ novel. It was the model for the film, Last year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961). The Casares book, btw, I bought for a modest price from Clouston and Hall’s Academic Remainders (see their catalogues on line)
I’m reminded of a short vacation I once took in Vanuatu to catch up on my reading. Most of my luggage was books.
July 27 2010. The new stonewall, originally intended as being wider and lower, has ambitions, it seems, to be the same height as it’s adjacent Belvedere wall. Shall I call it: the cormorant’s wall; the river lawn wall; the fern garden wall, the Big Whirlpool Wall? In the centre of this almost-enclosed area stands an old cheese tree, much battered by the debris of logs dumped by high floods (the Big Swirl comes into play here when there’s a flood running: a sometimes very big eddy or whirlpool of destructive debris that generally comes ashore if the river is high enough, smashing its way around the central area of Big Lawn and adjoining gardens). In front of the tree: partly buried big stones that protect the tree, and a thicket of giant maidenhair and bracken covering an understorey of tradescantia that catches loam and raises the area when the flooding river washes through). I’m demolishing the old circular wall immediately in front of the house because it contains many useful building stones and because the old wall serves no useful purpose. Unfortunately it also contains many small stones that have been covered with loam by successive floods: a problem for the mower in spring and summer; some of this material will edge the river lawn and build up the riverbank. Some of the giant maidenhair within this enclosed area is more than 1-m high and there are also some new bleeding heart tree seedlings in there. When logs and other debris come ashore here all the ferns will be crushed and all will regenerate when I have the strength to clear the debris. Which reminds me: the night creatures have been digging all over the lawns, Big Lawn, the new river lawn, the Dog’s Garden and even the recovering Cedar Grove lawn. I suspect bandicoots and/or possums (I must check on their diets) and either the same creatures or some mystery animal has also a taste for young bleeding heart tree seedlings or saplings. What a mess. Clearing debris following floods implies the new wall won’t be substantial enough to repulse the logs (I’ll then have the pleasure of rebuilding this wall in a somewhat different style; the adjacent Belvedere has never been knocked down; being monolithic it contains tonnes of dense river stones beneath a top layer of soil and lawn, i.e., the Belvedere has oodles of structural integrity; the new wall will have little. The log debris comes downstream because property owners dump unwanted material or stack it on river flats where floods will conveniently remove it (at least as far as near neighbour’s riverbanks). There is little I can do about that, but I persevere and enjoy building and rebuilding gravity walls when the debris has been returned to the river…
Another month is waning. I remind myself of how busy a time retirement can be. Not that I mind that. The difficulty lies in struggling to maintain a good work schedule inside, writing, and outside, gardening or wall building. Petra’s epigraph at the beginning of this Diary, Bruce’s and John’s contemplative windowed views also imply that slowing down and simply being present is often the way to go (I suspect I may not be the only person in the world trying to maintain balance and pace). And I remind myself that the three poems I recently sent off to an editor are each about here, Earthrise: one about a perceived cormorant air race that seemingly I was part of; another about the (now dismantled) round stone ‘table’ on the Belvedere that skinks and lizards regarded as their high rise apartments; and one about ‘pictographs’ or silhouettes cast by the setting sun on the flooded gums trunks (shadow pictures showing projections of other trees and sometimes, birds). Meditations on water and in gardens and on riverbanks are good for one’s health.
Time to get some firewood before another shower dampens everything again.
Later: so I got wet and the leeches were barking, but I got the wood and split it. Last Sunday I had the gardener up on the roof to remove the top of the stovepipe then clean the inside, freeing it of a mass of carbon. Inside and downstairs one of the footmen removed the steel deflector from inside the heater and cleaned out the ash and carbon; finally I had the gardener and a gamekeeper sequester the cinders in the area of the new wall. My carbon footprint is taken care of for a few days. The firewood is wet but we’ll get it going, never fear. Not that it’s especially cold today: I like a fire to take the edge off the chill and damp.
Later still: the butler having anticipated my wetness and leech wounds brings me a glass of wine. I sit in front of the slow combustion heater, moodily sipping. Sharon said it’s 40˚ plus in Tel Aviv, but here it’s chilly and misty and the low river is rising in the rain.
Almost all the dahlias are up and snoozing in one of my file cabinets (wrapped in newspaper and used postal packages). There are a few tubers at the back of the Theatre Garden; I’d better get them inside before The Creatures tear them to shreds.
Out there on Big Lawn there’s a big patch of emerald green moss; it looks it’s best in midwinter and it’s recycling exhaust fumes from passing traffic and the wood-smoke from my fire and presumably coughing up oxygen—as do the enormous trees. I can’t quite see the native violets in the grass but they’re there too and flowering. There’s a brown carpet of discarded leaves around the Japanese maple and a collection of yellow grapefruit on the edge of the lawn. Bowerbirds have removed the remaining oranges and left only shells of zest. The downstream view is of a grey river in rain, some mist rises through the high forest, and there are streams within the stream that puzzle the eye on the surface of the river. Winter hinting at spring.
