Arts in Transition
At various transition times in my life, arts have visited me "out of the blue" when I needed them, to help me deal with difficult experiences and express my feelings. On this page I'd like to share some of these with you.
Rosemary Faire
Rosemary Faire
The Leftovers
A poem that came to me during the first half of 2020
The old bushes,
Left over from bygone days
Of cottages with tiny white-flowered greenery
Lining the wood-paling fences
Over which yarns were had from washing lines between mums
While kids played with balls on lawns and then
Table-tennis on the back verandah.
The Mock Orange and the May Bush,
Now thinning and leaves browning,
Had to make way for more sustainable plans
Of a food forest and native shrubs
To fulfill survival needs and
Reinforce the boundary, high and steel,
Between the Us and Them.
Standing on the roadside, branches cut
And roots dug out from ancient connections,
Waiting in my hopeful fantasy for
Someone to notice them,
Appreciate their former beauty,
And perhaps take some cuttings
So all’s not lost.
Just like the elderly, the frail-aged
Being now culled in thousands,
Long lines of coffins,
Discarded as collateral damage
To satisfy the hunger
Of Business-as-Usual enthusiasts,
Who say “They’ve had their day”,
“They must die for their country”, or
“They would have died soon anyway”.
I weep for both, for all, the dispensable leftovers.
For I am one of them,
In danger of the Reaper,
Lungs exhausted from years of
Attempts to warn, efforts to mobilize
Our sleeping citizens,
Who now suddenly awaken, momentarily,
As we go over the bump in the road.
Some entertain hopes that
Things will never be the same,
That once awake,
They cannot go back to their
Comfortable slumber,
Leaving their democracy
To the lunatics again.
But I see signs already of the
Comfort Zone’s magnetic pull
The eyes glaze over in shopping frenzies
The over enthusiastic re-embrace
Of the fossilized machinery
That feeds our rapacious
World-cancer.
We are all uprooted bushes
Ripped from our ancestral and ecological webs
Doomed to be discarded
In the waste heaps left behind
By the monsters of avarice
When we no longer serve
Their growth economy.
I pray for
Some healthy
Green cuttings
To survive
The coming
Deep excision.
A poem that came to me during the first half of 2020
The old bushes,
Left over from bygone days
Of cottages with tiny white-flowered greenery
Lining the wood-paling fences
Over which yarns were had from washing lines between mums
While kids played with balls on lawns and then
Table-tennis on the back verandah.
The Mock Orange and the May Bush,
Now thinning and leaves browning,
Had to make way for more sustainable plans
Of a food forest and native shrubs
To fulfill survival needs and
Reinforce the boundary, high and steel,
Between the Us and Them.
Standing on the roadside, branches cut
And roots dug out from ancient connections,
Waiting in my hopeful fantasy for
Someone to notice them,
Appreciate their former beauty,
And perhaps take some cuttings
So all’s not lost.
Just like the elderly, the frail-aged
Being now culled in thousands,
Long lines of coffins,
Discarded as collateral damage
To satisfy the hunger
Of Business-as-Usual enthusiasts,
Who say “They’ve had their day”,
“They must die for their country”, or
“They would have died soon anyway”.
I weep for both, for all, the dispensable leftovers.
For I am one of them,
In danger of the Reaper,
Lungs exhausted from years of
Attempts to warn, efforts to mobilize
Our sleeping citizens,
Who now suddenly awaken, momentarily,
As we go over the bump in the road.
Some entertain hopes that
Things will never be the same,
That once awake,
They cannot go back to their
Comfortable slumber,
Leaving their democracy
To the lunatics again.
But I see signs already of the
Comfort Zone’s magnetic pull
The eyes glaze over in shopping frenzies
The over enthusiastic re-embrace
Of the fossilized machinery
That feeds our rapacious
World-cancer.
We are all uprooted bushes
Ripped from our ancestral and ecological webs
Doomed to be discarded
In the waste heaps left behind
By the monsters of avarice
When we no longer serve
Their growth economy.
I pray for
Some healthy
Green cuttings
To survive
The coming
Deep excision.
Hold on Gaia
These are the lyrics of a song I wrote in 1989 while studying in the USA.
Thirty years later they seem poignantly as relevant as ever...
Winter draws near in this new country
But home is no longer a place far away
Instead of dividing me from my land
The oceans and mountains speak to me of
Gaia, with your multicoloured coat of freshly fallen leaves,
Do you feel me? Are you brooding? Or are you bleeding?
Bleeding from the scars of man that try to heal?
Hold on Gaia
Hold on Gaia
Hold on Gaia
We're coming home.
Eons have passed, our selves divided -
Forgotten our origins, forgotten our wholeness -
One among millions speaks your truth
But words divide us from knowing you.
Fear helps build our armour
As we cling to the safe and the small,
Using you, abusing you - is it too late?
No! Please don't give up!
Hold on Gaia
Hold on Gaia
Hold on Gaia
We're coming home!
Awakening to your pulse inside us
We're rising from our slumber one by one,
Emerging into the light with open faces,
Hearts and minds united, taking hands,
Daring to turn and embrace our shadows,
Buoyant and tall on our feet,
We can feel your magic renewing us with each moment.
We love you.
Hold on Gaia!
Hold on Gaia!
Hold on Gaia!
We're coming home!
Earth Lovers
This song was inspired by Homage to the Elements 1990, a community arts performance held in a natural amphitheatre by the ocean in Terrigal, and it is dedicated to all those who let their love for the Earth move them to action.
"Let us begin"
Silence follows
Above us the stars
The air is still
We lie and merge
With the rocks by the water
This moment fills the universe.
Then one by one the magic takes us
Into a dance that's made of love
Love
For the Earth.
We dance our protest
We dance together
We dance for hope
It's in our hands
We can do it
And each in our own way
United in Gaia herself.
On and on our dance is woven
Into a web that's made of love
Love
For the Earth.
Spoken:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; "Myself" it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came".
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
We have come here to pay homage
All future life depends on love
Love
For the Earth.
Repeating Refrain: "We are the Earth lovers."
Spoken:
All the tears that I have shed
Thinking I'm alone
I give them to you, Gaia
I give them to you.
All the times I gave up hope
Abdicated, said
"Just let it be... What can I do?
...Not my responsibility...it's not up to me..."
In denying my Self
In stopping the flow
Conforming
I abandoned you
But no more. No more.
I am moved,
I am moving to your rhythm
Gaia
Live in me...
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew -
Hack and rack the growing green!
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
(Earth), spoken:
My body resonating with your deep pulsation
I immerse myself in your nurturing embrace
Suckling on the sweet molten richness which,
By some magic, becomes my being.
This song was inspired by Homage to the Elements 1990, a community arts performance held in a natural amphitheatre by the ocean in Terrigal, and it is dedicated to all those who let their love for the Earth move them to action.
"Let us begin"
Silence follows
Above us the stars
The air is still
We lie and merge
With the rocks by the water
This moment fills the universe.
Then one by one the magic takes us
Into a dance that's made of love
Love
For the Earth.
We dance our protest
We dance together
We dance for hope
It's in our hands
We can do it
And each in our own way
United in Gaia herself.
On and on our dance is woven
Into a web that's made of love
Love
For the Earth.
Spoken:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; "Myself" it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came".
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
We have come here to pay homage
All future life depends on love
Love
For the Earth.
Repeating Refrain: "We are the Earth lovers."
Spoken:
All the tears that I have shed
Thinking I'm alone
I give them to you, Gaia
I give them to you.
All the times I gave up hope
Abdicated, said
"Just let it be... What can I do?
...Not my responsibility...it's not up to me..."
In denying my Self
In stopping the flow
Conforming
I abandoned you
But no more. No more.
I am moved,
I am moving to your rhythm
Gaia
Live in me...
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew -
Hack and rack the growing green!
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)
(Earth), spoken:
My body resonating with your deep pulsation
I immerse myself in your nurturing embrace
Suckling on the sweet molten richness which,
By some magic, becomes my being.
Burning Questions
A little girl caught fire tonight
Before my eyes
In a room full of partying adults.
Now, in the quiet of the still-dark morning,
I have questions, questions that extinguish sleep.
How could this happen?
How DID this happen, that three little children
Were allowed to make fire a game,
Flaunting their power to blow out and relight
A room of 35 candles?
How is it - did no-one but me see the
Insanely inflammable pyjamas?
Did parents not hear the polite warnings
Of other adults to change the game?
How did we all make it OK
For such a game to go on and on and on until...
And then, after she had been whisked away
Into the shower and off to hospital,
How on Earth was it that the party
Continued, almost as if it hadn’t happened?
How is it, I ask, that we
Completely ignored the seriousness
Of what had just occurred in our midst?
How is it that we didn’t gather around
To be together in a circle
And honestly look at what had
Just happened under our noses?
Instead, it was almost instantly
Dismissed as just an accident
And promptly submerged in the sea
Of party-mode denial.
Some of us in that room
Spend our days trying
To save the Earth.
Can we save ourselves?
How is it possible that we
Have learned so well
To subvert our inner knowing
That this game was craziness?
To block our healthy impulses
To stand up and dare to say
STOP!
ENOUGH!
It dawns on me now
That this crazy learning,
Culturally entrenched,
This same denial
That almost killed a child tonight,
Is just as surely, but more slowly,
Killing our children’s future on this Earth.
How long will we continue
Our party of growth and consumption
Across the planet?
The insidious power of the status quo,
Laissez-faire-she’ll-be-right denial,
Sucks us in at every turn.
While the victims of our party -
The images of third-world poverty and unrest,
Of disappearing rain-forests, of polluted air and water,
Of youth suicide and violence -
Are whisked off
To make way for the
Obligatory feel-good ending
To the nightly news.
Perhaps it is not too late
To gather in circles
To talk about what needs to change?
Gather in circles
To support one another
To say
STOP!
ENOUGH!
A little girl caught fire tonight
Before my eyes
In a room full of partying adults.
Now, in the quiet of the still-dark morning,
I have questions, questions that extinguish sleep.
How could this happen?
How DID this happen, that three little children
Were allowed to make fire a game,
Flaunting their power to blow out and relight
A room of 35 candles?
How is it - did no-one but me see the
Insanely inflammable pyjamas?
Did parents not hear the polite warnings
Of other adults to change the game?
How did we all make it OK
For such a game to go on and on and on until...
And then, after she had been whisked away
Into the shower and off to hospital,
How on Earth was it that the party
Continued, almost as if it hadn’t happened?
How is it, I ask, that we
Completely ignored the seriousness
Of what had just occurred in our midst?
How is it that we didn’t gather around
To be together in a circle
And honestly look at what had
Just happened under our noses?
Instead, it was almost instantly
Dismissed as just an accident
And promptly submerged in the sea
Of party-mode denial.
Some of us in that room
Spend our days trying
To save the Earth.
Can we save ourselves?
How is it possible that we
Have learned so well
To subvert our inner knowing
That this game was craziness?
To block our healthy impulses
To stand up and dare to say
STOP!
ENOUGH!
It dawns on me now
That this crazy learning,
Culturally entrenched,
This same denial
That almost killed a child tonight,
Is just as surely, but more slowly,
Killing our children’s future on this Earth.
How long will we continue
Our party of growth and consumption
Across the planet?
The insidious power of the status quo,
Laissez-faire-she’ll-be-right denial,
Sucks us in at every turn.
While the victims of our party -
The images of third-world poverty and unrest,
Of disappearing rain-forests, of polluted air and water,
Of youth suicide and violence -
Are whisked off
To make way for the
Obligatory feel-good ending
To the nightly news.
Perhaps it is not too late
To gather in circles
To talk about what needs to change?
Gather in circles
To support one another
To say
STOP!
ENOUGH!
Emerging
I, blossoming in beauty,
Rooted in richness of the Earth,
Meet the bleakness,
The choking blackness,
And hope, for what?
For the other buds
And succulent shoots
Which burst forth in tiny
Patches of brilliance.
Dew-drenched, we intertwine
And create a delicate
Spongy ground-mesh.
Then, weedlike among the
Thorny deadwood,
We creep upward unnoticed,
Ignored, tolerated by the Indifferent;
And slowly...
The grey is greening!
My Prayer
Fill me with your magic breath
I will let it moisten my dry places.
I will taste and savour
Where and who you have been,
Who I am becoming.
I devour you.
And through me you have a Voice,
Can return to yourself
Through the waves that I send forth.
Some notes are rough:
Blow harder - gently...