Loss and the sea

Does the sky weep tears for the earth and the sea knowing what humans do to the three of them? My friend Peter is a man of the sea, a writer and a mark maker. He gives me permission to be better at being all three. Here I write to him about the business of living:

The large part of me that is cliche likes the moment in 'Strictly Ballroom' where the Roma grandmother says "A life lived in fear is a life half-lived" and she dances a Passo Doble (?) that makes a short, stout slow moving older woman into an elegant graceful passionate beauty - her son transforms from a Gypsy bum into a matador the instant his heels stamp on the floor and a cluttered backyard in working class Melbourne becomes a bullring, the stage at a grand opera house - in a hand gesture, a glance, a foot movement we are reminded of all that is noble and passionate about being human, about working out what it is to be human, to risk loving and risk being loved

now I've gone off - I'm thinking about your marriage and how very very lucky you were and how very very unlucky - I'm thinking also of my friend Richard where similar kinds of luck applies

you'll surf again and it may not be in the sea but you are surfing, it is you, you write on a sea of words and you draw on and of a sea of images and words - I realise you're not a painter you're a mark maker and sometimes brushes and paints are the medium that chooses you and sometimes not - and the possiblity arises that even if you were not physically capable of moving you'd still be drawing, carving a track through the sea, on the page, on the canvas, on the wall and in the marks left - maybe a wake, maybe a poem, maybe an image - we'd read "Peter was here - and it was good" and if he was here, and good so too can I be, can we all be - and the world of possibility of all the good that humans do and all the good they can do gets larger and more expansive - and the world of hurt and pain and damage gets smaller and less powerful - the dark creatures become less threatening - they are muzzled by glory, chained by possiblity, their dark bad balanced by a shimmering good

and when I go to Coogee and am mystified by the movement of the waves and the changing shape of the beach and I see the distant dawn breaking I feel you there and the people we have loved and lost there too and it is very sad and very good and beneath the tears there is a warm glow, a celestial humming that comforts the bestial howling and we sob and laugh and throw our heads back in the wind and our tears are flicked away to wet the ground and we are not alone and we howl as if the moon is our mother or a memory of an older mother as we sit and the sky and the sea and the earth are our mother and our father both and we lie back and look at the sky anger and pain drain from us into the cold sand and hot tears flow into our ears and we're very sad and very happy and poems and paintings hover around us like bats or butterflies waiting to be plucked from the air and pinned to the page and we are not alone

July steaming to a close

Things are steaming along - the new pottery tutor is great - I'm encountering some excellent music some creative projects and family life is purring along - fingers crossed.

The shop is settling down into a routine though volunteer staffing is stretched thin.

I've been invited to talk about my friend and mentor Richard Quinn at an exhibition in Auckland later this year. The show is based around a small portion of a large research collection he'd amassed while trying to record a history of fired clay in New Zealand. There are also ancillary collections of popular areas of Crown Lynn collecting - something that has blossomed over the last ten or so years. Richard's Crown Lynn collection, now under the custodianship of the Portage Ceramic Heritage Trust, should allow informed reasearchers the chance to balance some of the dubious claims made about Crown Lynn over the last quarter of a century - let the objects speak I say.

Kirtan Yoga with Sri Prahlada @ Yoga in Daily Life Kensignton

we went to this event - it was lovely - this man shone - if you think you can't sing and you think you can't dance then you're right and if you think you can sing and dance without being able to you're right - at some point my chest started vibrating with aum and the sound was me but not made by me - had become a conduit for something that was uniquely me and also part of something else -and in a week that had been about disappointment and conflict and loss the well of sadness I was often tipped into became surrounded by a bigger warmer blanket of happiness - by the time we left everyone was so beautiful - we glowed

I usually use the apparent beauty or ugliness of strangers to judge where I am on the bi-polar spectrum continuum but an evening of kirtan freed me from this - there was just me, us, and the universe of possibility.

Moanaroa Krysia Zagrobelna

Fifi Colston drew my attention to Matariki and I found there's a kapa haka concert/competition in QLD later in the month but no local celebration that I've discovered yet. Now some mornings I take my putorino down to Coogee for dawn but when I think about doing it this Sunday - ie 24 hours away - all I can think of is that two of the people who got it for me are dead.

And this Saturday was the unveiling for one of them in Petone. And her sister suggested I write something to be read out at the unveiling. And I all I can think of doing is screaming out "I wish you were'nt dead" which might sound better in Te Reo but still doesn't need to be said. And I don't want to think remember hearing father at the Tangi crying in the rain and saying over and over "this is wrong - you shouldn't bury your children". And he is right - it is wrong. And the sheer bloody wrongness of it all tears at me.

And the madness of it all, and the memories of her, and her family, and where we worked, and parties, and a clever little daughter - and finding her again via the net 17 years after we last spoke and emailing her new work place to find she'd died the week before, on holiday in Malaysia, after cut-price cosmetic surgery and a whole world of wrongness opened up to me then.

I realised too late that I've been thinking that the unveiling was planned for Sunday. I sent my message to Ewa too late - about the time she would have been heading to the urupa arther than the day before. This is what Ewa might have read:

"I miss Krysia.

When I met her and soon afterwards Moanaroa and Eddie and Ewa and Keri-Mei I was very lost.

I'd talked myself into a job I couldn't really do properly at the Shop at the National Museum.

I was Krysia's boss.

Yeah right!

While I wandered around for three years

pretty much not being able to find my butt without using both hands

Krysia ran the Museum Shop,

and me,

and bought up Keri-Mei,

was a daughter

a sister

a friend

and did all the many other things that she is loved for.

When Taonga Maori opened at the museum Alan Baker the Director was sidelined by a mob of new middle managers

- he was a marine biologist and out of his depth amongst sharks in three piece suits.

He gave a brief speech and as it finished a quiet mumbled waiata began in Kiwi-reo

and then from the kitchen came this huge voice and through the entrance came Krysia

- like a yacht in full sail

- and she sang and strode towards the Director

- and everyone who knew the waiata joined in behind her

- and everyone who respected, Alan, the Museum and the taonga also joined in

- and suddenly this awkward Department of Internal Affairs off the shelf - paint by numbers powhiri became magnificent.

The Museum became magnificent,

Alan Baker became magnificent,

the air was electric with the staffs' respect for Alan,

words like aroha and tautoko became feelings not ideas

and the world was a better place.

Krysia knew that what was happening was wrong and she stepped out to change it

- not caring about how others reacted.

And we all got behind her

so pleased

and so proud to be part of what she'd started.

When Ewa suggested she could read out some words from me all I could think was:

"I wish you weren't dead - this is wrong"

but now I'm also thinking

"Krysia you were always beautiful,

you were often so strong,

you often knew what was right

and what was good

and you made a difference to the people around you.

and you made a difference for the people around you.

The world is a better place

because of who you were

who you are

And I am a better person

because of who you were

who you are

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you""

Go West

I've been spending a lot of time at Parramatta lately working on our PCAI shop across Church Street from St John's church - in the Connections Arcade. Nearly there despite some road blocks both human and practical.

We're hoping eventually to build our studio/workshop at a site across the river from Rangihou Reserve. This park was recently renamed to recognise links going back to 1814 when the first CMS settlement was established at Oihi or Rangihoua in the Bay of Islands.

Marsden's Maori Seminary (also named Rangihu) was located here. It's sometimes described as New Zealand's first school and New Zealand's first brickmakers were trained here. Young Maori men, the sons of chiefs, were trained in a range of mechanical arts. This could be seen as Marsden spreading his version of the Word through demonstrating superior technology or more simply as the holding of hostages to ensure the safety of the CMS personnel in New Zealand. Typically Marsden assumed a superiority of intelligence and ability to strategise that was to later see many British soldiers and carpetbaggers fall in to traps in New Zealand. As Marsden went about gathering his Maori flock iwi acquired tame Missionaries for the access to guns, iron and other European goods that came along with the CMS settlements. I think more Pakeha-Maori were converted to heathen ways than Maori people were converted to Marsden's version of Christianity. It was clear early on who were the more sophisticated and who were the more naive.

I always get lost in Parramatta - I don't know where or what the landmarks are and my inability to relate what's around me to maps I've seen leads to chaos. I get lost finding the Westfield carpark, I get lost in the Westfield carpark, I get lost in Westfield and can't find my way out or my way back to the right floor of the right carpark.

A state of irritated frustration. of being lost, out of my depth helps me blend in with the locals as I make my way to the Connection Arcade.

On Friday I got lost driving back to Sydney. Just where I was expecting Jame Ruse Drive I found a suburb I'd never been in before. I stopped realising I needed sustenance and saw ahead of me the Tres Bien Fresh Coffee and Nuts Shop in Good Street. Call me a gubba or a skip if you like but I saw the name and thought "That's French - it must be Vietnamese - I'll get some rice paper rolls".

Turns out I'd found a very good Lebanese grocery store quite by chance. It looked good and smelled better, and the people working there or just dropping in were funny, friendly and helpful. 600 ml of Al-Rabih pomegranate molasse for $6.80!!!!! A 1.9kg jar of gherkins, a can of houmos, and one of okra in brine, foodie heaven at local prices.

I started off back to the big stinky eating sweets as I drove and almost turned the car around at 90kmh they were so good. There was a roll with apricot paste around it that was almost to die for at high speed on the M4.

The next day I was talking to the people who run the new local coffee bar. They're Lebanese and I could sense them struggle not to laugh out loud or seem patronising as I described my exotic adventures in Granville. They used to be amazed to see Australians buying groceries in single items, two apples, one banana, a can of tomatoes etc they always bought in bulk. At the moment buying bananas in bulk seems an act of stupidity - or showing off at $A14.99 a kg (or $A11.99 at Parramatta!).

When I was at Tres Bien the owner was negotiating the purchase of something - dried goods, fruit, spices, I don't know what but he settled for an order of a ton of it/them if the price stayed at $6.

Sometimes having no sense of direction and getting lost is a good thing.

Coogee mourning

On Sunday morning I heard that Gil Scott-Heron had died on Friday. He hadn't had an easy life but has produced some of the pivotal music of the last twenty five or so years.

Later that day I got an email telling me that a female relative, one I have only a vague and unreliable memory of having met, had died after a three year battle. Her children are 13 and ten - too young to be mourning your parents.

Mooring posts disappear and we are left adrift.

Life doesn't frighten me at all

When very little sometimes I was so scared and so lonely that I'd scream, for company. The echoes of those screams accompany me still.

They waken me in the night and delay my return to sleep. I realise quickly that the scream, my scream didn't happen in the now, the echoes troubled no other in the now, and the reverberations have died out - leaving a trace of a memory of a half forgotten....something. I know that now is OK and that then was then.

I think on Roy Williamson's words:

Those days are passed now
And in the past they must remain
But we can still rise now
And be the nation again
And stood against him
Proud Edward's army
And sent him homeward
Tae think again

For me this is not only about Proud Edward's army but about every tyrant., every bully.

And we are an army, the bullied. And we are not alone. And sometimes before we die, either the living death of those that have lost hope, or the slow death of those whose bodies turn against them, we recognise each other. Sometimes in that recognition there is succour and at others fear and contempt. In our mutual acknowledgement of the terror we do risk disappearing, we do risk losing sight of all that is good and noble and joyous about being human but when we're lucky we embrace in the warming, calming, energising pulse of survival.

Alone we are born

and die alone

Yet see the red-gold cirrus

over snow-mountain shine

upon the upland road

ride easy stranger

Surrender to the sky

your heart of anger.

Sometimes in the high country we'll pause briefly and glimpse a distant stranger. We see in the set of his shoulders and the palpitating jaw muscles that his big anger, his old anger remains. But as our eyes meet over an impassable gorge there will be a brief flick upwards of both eyebrows. I know you we'll not say. You're going to be all right. It's OK - life doesn't frighten us anymore. You are OK and You am I. And the anger will dissipate into the glowering sky and dusk will become dawn.

We nod an embrace of departure and move on homewards. Alone but not lonely. Seen and heard.

And with each meeting on the high road the screams lose volume, intensity and frequency until finally....there is but one finally. The more scarred fellow travellers we share a story with the freer life becomes as if in acknowledging the many small deaths we defuse the the power of the spectre.

Other times - as close to never as we're strong enough to manage we slide into the maw and become the bully ourselves - so in our bond with the bullied is also our knowing that the easy choice is to bully - understandable but not excusable.

Meeting the shadow is the start not the end.