Dark and Light Spain

At university I had an emotional art history lecturer. He often told the story of how he wept when he saw Picasso’s Guernica when he went to Spain. When I finally took my own journey to Spain I diligently traipsed round galleries seeing great and not so great art. It was on my last day in the country that I went to see Guernica in the Museo Reini Sofia in Madrid.

It was a cold, wet Saturday morning when I made the trek. With rain sluicing off my umbrella I was daunted by the huge white edifice of the museum. Once inside I walked down long windswept cloisters to the gallery where the famous painting hangs. On the way I got sidetracked by an intriguing exhibition called ‘Dark and Light Spain’ where colourful paintings of the bright, sunny south of the country were juxtaposed with brooding paintings depicting the darker colours and moods of the north. The exhibition helped me understand my own travels around the country where I’d encountered both the dark and light in the country and within myself.

Expecting to be further illuminated I continued on. With great anticipation I entered the gallery where Guernica is hung only to find a television crew were preparing to make a documentary. Thick cables ran across the floor and huge cameras were being rolled into position. The Director paused in her supervision of the crew to bark commands at me. Instructed to stand in only one position for a limited amount of time, I gazed at the painting through a comglomeration of people and equipment. The noise level was excessive and there was no chance for any private contemplation.

Life’s little moments
disrupting my agenda.
Do I laugh or cry?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)

-some photos from my time in Spain

prompt: https://newwhatsgoingon.blogspot.com/2024/05/an-historical-moment.html “Description so we can imagine, description made up of images–this is the challenge this week.  Chose a big moment or a small moment in history, and focus on the specific event rather than on an individual person or on a general idea. Take us there. “

Hmmm…

But on second thoughts and to take the prompt literally – This old guy’s been around a while. I inherited him from my grandma. He looks ancient but I think it was a repro she bought in the 1960s.

prompt: This Puzzler is simple. Here is a song, you supply the obscurest photo to match the songs title or the lyrics. “All the tired horses” https://bushboy.blog/2024/05/04/the-weekend-puzzler-2/

Silent Sunday

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Under Peppercorn Trees

I watched the TV News last night. Later my sleeping was disturbed with tangled dreams and long periods of time when I lay awake grieving for the world.

This morning I took a wrong turn when looking for a place in the city. Turning my car around I found myself beside an old cemetry. I’ve been to this place a couple of times before and found it to be oddly comforting. On the spur of the moment I decided to take a walk there this morning. I set off with the intention to find a section of very old graves and yew trees. Somehow I took another wrong turn and found myself in a wide laneway of graves clustered beneath peppercorn trees.

The first headstone I saw in this section was blank – the name erased by time perhaps.

On the other side of this tree I came to a grave with the word ‘Sacred’ carved into the headstone. At that moment the word summed up the feelings that came over me as I walked through the graveyard.

I passed many graves of people who had died in wars, the graves of children who had died too young and the graves of those who had lived well into their nineties.

Some of the older graves appeared to be becoming one with the peppercorn trees.

All in all, it was a strange way to pass time this morning but by the time I got back to my car I felt a deep, solemn peace that is hard to put into words. Perhaps you can feel something of it when you look at my photos.

All life is sacred.

A day in the bush

Yesterday I went to the You Yangs with some family members. The You Yangs are the blue hills across the bay which feature in many of my photos. The traditional owners of this country are the Waddarung aboriginal people and the name “You Yang” comes from the Waddarung words Wurdi Youang or Ude Youang which mean “big mountain in the middle of a plain”.

Loaded up with cameras, art supplies and food we set off with my daughter drivingand two boys full of excitment in the back seat of her big vehicle. The older one was prepared for any eventuality and had a backpack full of survival gear including a wooden dagger and some string to make a bow if he needed to get a fire going in an emergency. The younger one who aspires to be an artist when he grows up clutched a sketch book and a freshly sharpened pencil.

Our route took us through a grimy busy city and on through the industrialized suburbs on the outskirts. Once we left the ever expanding housing estates behind it was a short trip up into the hills. Turning into the park we were all silenced by the power of ancient writhing trees and huge granite boulders towering up around the narrow bush tracks.

There were a lot people everywhere as it’s school holidays. We drove around for a while looking for a picnic spot. The heavy rain of the past week had wreaked havoc on the dirt roads and I was really glad we were in my daughter’s big car. My little hatchback wouldn’t have been up to the task.

We finally found a picnic spot that was relatively quiet. There were signs that big bushfire had been through there many years ago. We were surrounded by trees with blackened trunks that had survived the fires and other hollowed dead ones that towered like sentinels.

Wandering around with my camera I was struck with the relationship between the grey gnarled trees and the grey granite boulders.

There is a solemnity to this country and an inspirited quality that speaks of endurance and resilience. There is an ancient feel to the place that is stronger than the impact of the roads, walking trails, biking tracks and rubbish left behind by ignorant people. People have walked this land for eons. The aboriginal presence is strong and the trees feel like embodied spirits.

Later in the day we drove a one way road that took us over the ridgetops and around the far eastern flank of the hills.

The road was in a very bad state so once we were down on the flat my daughter pulled over beside a little water hole. Not many people come this far into the park so we had the place to ourselves.

None of us were in any hurry to head back through that busy city so we got out the art supplies and attempted to draw the world around us. The results were highly variable but we had a lot of fun until the late afternoon chill crept into our bones and it was time to head home.

Back to the mundane
after time in wild country
the heart feels lighter.

linked to – https://newwhatsgoingon.blogspot.com/2024/04/april.html

What I saw

In the Magritte Museum you can only go forwards.
You can’t go backwards. It’s not allowed.
There’s no retracing of footsteps to be had.
Just always going on. Like life. On and on.
More mysteries.
More questions.
More disconcerting confrontations with

myself perhaps. In that place,
at that time,
the walls all painted black
and the journey into the mystery.

The gallery climbs up.
You start low down and climb,
or so it I remember it.
Ascending up through the darkness,
the paintings luminous on the walls,
dreamlike and disconcerting
until the end then the emergence
into a Brussels Street,
some kind of rebirth for a traveller
seeking

art works only ever seen in books.
Reproductions long pondered over
suddenly there, the real thing,
so incredibly, indisputably ‘art’
the presence, the essence –
the angel in a business suit,
and the lion lying down beside the master.

Humbled, I journeyed on.
Home an abstract concept.

René Magritte, Homesickness (1940), oil on canvas

prompt: https://dversepoets.com/2024/03/19/everything-we-see/

Journeying West

Time was when I journeyed westward.
Out to Ireland’s far shores
the Blasket Isles basking in the sun.

On the horizon, the Skelligs,
Celtic Christianity promising a salvation
elusive, out of reach,
my Christian faith the stuff of childhood,
those mountains in the sea a step too far.

Or

going west into the desert,
taking roads blazing like scars across the land,
the sun a burning disc,
searing the heart naked in the heat.
Reality, I’ve discovered, leaves no place to hide.

Going west now becomes a metaphor,
the journey inward to the setting sun.
The years spinning onward,
I never thought I’d get this old.
I’d imagined going out in a blaze,
of glory or, at the very least, infamy.
Instead, this passage, this lighting,
this journey into something,
elusive, intangible,
the heart now naked to itself.
Nowhere to go but on,
those western isles –
another journey.

prompt: https://desperatepoets.com/2023/11/27/ghost-tales-from-an-imaginary-western/
“Let’s give a hand to poets who can see such bigger tales behind and beyond our tiny human dramas.”

Connecting to nature

I’m still pondering the quote I posted yesterday:-

“_{We are the land … the Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs … It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is our self …}” _{Paula Gunn Allen, Laguna Pueblo (1979)}

The distance between the way most of us think about what it means to be human and the idea of humans as the mind of the Earth is so vast, I can’t quite imagine how we could ever get to that point. Still, our current way of thinking is just getting us deeper and deeper in the shit so, the way I see it, trying to find alternative ways of thinking is worth attempting.

The anthropologist, Tim Ingold says humans do not live in the world but move through it. He uses the term ‘wayfaring’ to describe the experience of walking through the world in slow, intuitive ways that connect to life. Such experiences broaden our knowledge of the world as we open up to the awareness that we co-exist with other beings, both human and non-human.

Wayfaring through the world also opens up to experiences of awe and wonder. The Australian biologist and TV journalist, Julia Baird says “Awe is something not easy to define, but usually involves stopping in your tracks, being amazed by something and, often, feeling small against the full scale of the universe.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-03/awe-hunters-stunning-secret-solace-wonder-transformation/102755992

Many awesome experiences involve some grand adventure or some out of the ordinary experience like seeing phosphorescence on the sea but is possible to experience moments of awe and wonder within the everyday. The way the light falls across a puddle on the pavement, a sudden unexpected sight of an eagle wheeling in the wind above city buildings, or the simple sight of an ant carrying a crumb three times larger than itself can be moments when we are taken out of ourselves and into the wider world. Opening to these moments and slowing down enough to actually notice them is the challenge.

Another way we can stimulate feelings of connection to the world is through curiosity. Recently I’ve been learning more about the mangrove trees that grow along a riverbank near my house. I was amazed to learn the little trunks sticking up out of the water are actually how the trees breathe. I thought they were simply trunks that hadn’t grown any leaves. Learning that breaking these breathing tubes can kill the trees has made me more aware how I move along the river bank. Now I know one careless step could kill a tree that plays a vital role in capturing carbon out the atmosphere:-

“Blue Carbon is CO₂ that is captured by coastal wetlands mangroves, salt marshes and seagrasses. It can remain in the sediment for thousands of years, making it one of the most powerful natural solutions to climate change.” – The Nature Conservatory, Australia.

Walking meditations, forest bathing and bird watching are all also suggested as ways to connect to nature. I love wandering through the bush or beside the sea enjoying the beauty of the world and sometimes that’s enough –

sometimes it’s necessary to turn of the News, to move away from the social media feed, to unplug the mind and just be in nature.

Today is the equinox – a time of balance when the day and night are of equal length. In the old Earth ways this was always considered a sacred time. A moment when the Earth rests in harmony.

Letting ourselves feel these sacred moments is part of the process towards becoming more attuned to nature – to move towards understanding ourselves as part of nature.

Blogging as Wayfaring

As I wrote in my last post on this blog, I’m trying to find pathways out of the impasse of anthropocentric consciousness. I’m not imagining I can save the world for I am not a world leader. I am simply an older woman trying to weave threads of ideas into a meshwork that will create personal psychological buoyancy. I am not trying to convince others but am merely trying to find my way in these challenging times.

Currently I’m deep into researching ideas and concepts about anthropocentric consciousness. To aid me in this process I’m creating a visual journal (which is getting increasingly messy). I’m now finding that I also need to express my thoughts in writing. Blog posts are the easiest way for me to do this. For the time being I’ve decided to stop linking to other sites unless I come across a prompt which parallels the ideas I’m exploring. As for poetry writing – well, unless it flows spontaneously it probably won’t be my chosen form of creative expression right now.

Journal spread – ‘Exploring ideas along a meshwork of trails’

There are many differing opinions about the Anthropocene but more and more, the idea that the human/nature split lies at the bottom of it is emerging as a dominant theme. Many academics, philosophers, poets and artists are exploring the idea that to move forward we have to move beyond dualistic thinking. Just how we go about that is open to conjecture, but it is here where I find the most creative (and often challenging) ideas.

Journal spread: ‘Exploring Timothy Morton’s dark-sweet concept’

It is these ideas that I am exploring in my writing and visual journal. I’m not following a pre-determined path to a particular destination. Instead, I am wandering, digressing and wayfaring through a raft of ideas of concepts.

Journal spread: ‘Wayfaring as a metaphor for a trail of growth’

Come along for the ride if you are interested or pop in from time to time to see how I’m travelling. Your suggestions and/or questions are very welcome.

Journal spread – ‘Leaving the known, entering the unknown’