Macrocarpas, Waipapa Point
Of late my photographs have come as stories I write to myself (but then they always have). Of late those stories take some time to walk in the door, often trailing the image by weeks or even months. I will make the photograph, usually from a non-place, what Miyamoto Musashi refers to in his book The Book of Five Rings as the Void, that place where one lets go, where one photographs from intuition, where one allows all the years of training and practice to work from the subconscious, so that one is clear to respond to whatever presents itself, to whatever speaks. To be able to do that, it is important to put in the time, to practice until the mechanical aspects become unconscious, so that the soul is free to listen to whatever is asking to be heard.
A similar thing happens whenever we walk a labyrinth; not one of those places which deliberately seek to confuse, to impose a feeling of being lost. I fail to understand why anybody would want to walk a maze, to find fun in being dislocated and confused. Goodness knows, there is enough of that in everyday life. No, the labyrinth to which I refer is a very old tool/phenomenon, based upon sacred geometry. There is one set into the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France. It was originally put there, I believe, to give priests the opportunity to draw closer to God. The geometry upon which it is based is much, much older than the Christian Church, having its roots, so I am told, in ancient Egypt, if not before. Nowadays it is difficult to walk that particular labyrinth, since it is covered with pews, all facing the high altar. I cannot help wondering why a tool of such value has been so carefully concealed. But I can certainly guess.
A labyrinth works like this: as we trace the path into the centre (into our own centres), we focus upon the sheer difficulty of staying on the path. In doing so, the left side of our brain, our rational mind, is fully occupied with mastering the journey, and so gets out of the way of the intuitive/unconscious right side of our brain, our True Self, where 99% of us lives; our soul, which is continually talking to us but usually shouted down by all the apparent importance of day-to-day existence. As we walk the labyrinth, lessons which our soul has been trying to teach us are able to get by this channel, rise to the surface, and speak to us so we can learn from them. In doing so, and by facing the lessons we are here to learn, we are able to grow and move on. So often the most valuable parts of our existence, the lessons from the individual life in which we find ourselves, are suppressed by this hard shell of illusion, by the apparent importance of quotidian existence. However, walking the labyrinth implies a certain acceptance, a certain belief, a certain willingness to be open to what comes, what presents itself. In doing so, we have the opportunity to get out of our own way, to learn and therefore grow. It is interesting to note that some people simply cannot walk a labyrinth. It is not because they are physically unable; rather it is because they are so enmeshed in the day-to-day that, when faced (at the subconscious level) by unravelling and discarding their chains, their body takes over and puts them off-balance. To be restored to the state of true balance, it is often necessary to firstly discard the old sense of false balance, and replace it with a new one. The transition can be difficult and unpleasant, but the rewards can be glorious indeed.
So, let me share the making of this photograph.
I was in my own way (as I often am). It was a dull, murky, grey day in Southland, and I was feeling cold and tired from several days of intensive teaching, of being present to students, of trying to be there for all of them on an individual basis. It is not easy teaching 10 classes of one rather than one class of 10. It takes skill (which I sometimes have) and patience and sensitivity to where each of them is at. So, after several days of cold wet weather, with my energy drained by being present to them, I wasn’t in the best of moods. As a consequence I was leaning heavily towards the judgemental, to making judgement calls without thinking about them. I had fallen heavily in front of myself.
When we arrived at Waipapa Point, there was every sign that it was going to rain. I gloomily remembered something one of them had said to me about the weather in Southland: when you can see Bluff from Invercargill, it’s going to rain; when you can’t see it, then it is raining. You can tell I was feeling distinctly jaundiced and out-of-sorts. It didn’t help when Rodney said: we have maybe half an hour before it begins to rain. We had gone there to see the macrocarpas, about which I’d heard a lot, and pictures of whom (I use the word whom rather than which because trees have always seemed to me to be sentient) I had seen from time to time. The others in the group were far more enthusiastic, bailing out of the vehicles, grabbing their equipment, and galloping over the horizon. So, instead of joining their glee, I opted to leave my camera behind, follow along, to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to see the trees for themselves, to wander amongst them without any imperatives about making photographs.
Waipapa Point has to be one of the bleakest places in the South island. In the rain, with a storm blowing through, you wonder how anything could possibly survive there. But survive people did, and perhaps even flourished. The Dept of Conservation Information Centre has boards with text and pictures, describing the lives of the early lighthouse keepers there. Not only were they expected to look after the lighthouse 24/7, but they were expected to provide for themselves. The houses stood out there on the spare, sere landscape without any form of protection around. Up behind where the lighthouse keeper’s home used to be,I could see evidence of the garden planted, intended to supply vegetables for the families who lived there. They protected it by planting macrocarpas around the edges, to hold the winds at bay. Presumably it worked, because there were still people living there well into the late 20th century.
Macrocarpa trees (Cupressus Macrocarpa) have always fascinated me. Even though they have remarkably shallow rooting systems, they seem able to grow in places where other trees throw up their hands in horror and give up. You will find them along the edges of cliffs, along windswept ridges and forming protective shelter belts around farmhouses all over New Zealand. They are durable, amazingly hardy, and seemingly able to cope with the worst of environmental conditions. In many ways they have become an iconic part of the New Zealand landscape. Not only that, but they make wonderful furniture, and burn superbly on the fire. They just aren’t very pretty.
So, wrapped tightly in the warm comfortable mantle of my own grumpiness, I wandered around amongst them, utterly underwhelmed by the grey, spare landscape, and not at all enthusiastic about photography. Then I walked through a gap, away from the tourists, whose presence I was finding irritating, and on to the windward side of the hedge. As I moved back from them, and began to study them, the mask of my discontent dropped, and I became entranced by what more than a century of storms had done to them. They were gnarled, twisted, blasted and bleached, but still standing. Somehow they had held together, supported each other, and in some special way retained their own macrocarpa-ness. I sensed a lesson here.
It was as if I was looking at a lecture in life, as if I was seeing the visual representation of the life journey of every person on the planet. Someone, late in the 19th century, had planted a whole row of macrocarpa seedlings, had birthed new lives and brought the hedge into being. I could almost imagine those small seedlings, taken from their protective wrappings and dug into the ground. I could imagine their childlike innocence and expectation that they were going to have a comfortable life. And the reverse had happened. Over the subsequent 120 years, as far as I could tell, the weather had thrown itself at them, throwing lesson after lesson at them in a relentless and an ending series of experiences. Bit by bit, as they grew, each of these lessons had had a cumulative effect upon them. Bit by bit, as they grew, each of those seminars had affected them in the way they developed. But they had survived, they were still healthy, bowed, perhaps a little cowed, but still there, strong and resolute. They were macrocarpas, the survivors of the plant kingdom.
So, humbled by their tenacity and courage, I trudged back to the car under the gloom of the incipient rain, in search of my camera. Sneakily, I had borrowed a camera from one of the others and checked the exposure settings, so I didn’t expect to have to use my tripod. Anyway, there was a new technique I wanted to try out.
By the time I got back, it was starting to spit, and I knew the rain proper was not far away. I had a window of perhaps 10 minutes. And I began to photograph the backs of the macrocarpas, with their bleached spines and bare tails pointing out into the wind.
And then the rain came. But I was done. I knew that what I had seen and felt was in-camera. I just did not know its significance. But I knew it would come. Resolving the picture later that day came rather easily, as I suspected it would. The lesson took much longer.
It has taken until Easter, this weekend, to finally get it. And on Easter Sunday, as I sat in church, thinking about the Resurrection, about the way in which The Light of the World, the Lord of Karma, died more than 2000 years ago, the way in which he put himself on the line in the most terrible way possible, to demonstrate that enlightenment is available to all of us, that the message really is that simple, I thought back to the macrocarpa hedge. And then, as I thought about the significance of the Easter egg, about what it really represents for us in terms of our own spiritual journeys, and about the labyrinth, these three things began to make sense, to connect. I was joining some dots.
We are born into the world, naked (physically, mentally and spiritually) and alone. We are a new life which has formed, which has begun a long and potentially dangerous journey. We opt into Life, with all the wisdom we might have brought left behind. We cannot see the future (which some consider an illusion anyway), and we have no idea of what Life is about to deal us. But we do it anyway. Then, as life experiences pile themselves upon us over time, much as the Southland storms have piled themselves on the macrocarpa hedge for over a century, we are gradually shaped and formed by those experiences. Bit by bit they layer themselves in a hard shell around us, and bit by bit we come to see that shell as reality. Over time, with the reinforcement of our family and peers, their own journeys, we come to assume that the surface is who we really are. We become separated from the glorious radiant being within each of us, the essential innocence of soul with which we were born.
Like the Easter egg, itself a metaphor for life, and for the egg which surrounds each chicken when it is born, we move out to the surface. Consider an Easter egg: what do we see? We see an egg-shaped object, usually made of chocolate. We see the surface. We know that it has an interior, which may be solid, or filled with creamy confectionery, or even hollow. We really do not know what we will find until we strip away the shell, usually by biting into it. Then, we will have some idea of its contents.
The same goes for an egg laid by a chicken. It protects the contents for just long enough, but eventually the life within it will stir and attempt to get out. Sooner or later the chicken inside knows that it has to get out through the walls of its prison or perish. And so it marshals its resources and sets to work, pecking a hole in the shell until eventually it emerges into the Light. And so, I believe, it is with Life. Many of us mistake the shell of our daily lives as being reality. Many of us assume that what we see with our eyes, that what we have been taught to see with our eyes is ‘Reality’. We mistake our pain as being the Truth. As we grow, and Life layers its experiences upon us, each of them a lesson to be overcome, it is very easy for us to mistake that for the way things are.
But deep down inside is the chicken of our innocence. It wants to get out, it wants to reach the Light and live fully. And, because chickens need shells on their eggs to both protect them, and give them the challenge they need to grow, so it is with us. It might be said that our subconscious, where we truly live, is the chicken inside each of us (I know the analogy is rather forced) which dictates the path of our lives. And so, whether we like it or not (usually we do not), we are the authors and directors of our own lives. We write our own script and then act it out. Blame it on the chicken in each of us. Or allow it. The chicken is enlightened, and it lives within each of us. The chicken is who we really are, childlike and innocent, our True Self there for our entire life. Our architect and guide. And every day the opportunity to break free, the opportunity for resurrection and rebirth is there, ready whenever we are.
The macrocarpas began their lives full of expectation that everything was going to work out just fine, that their lives were going to be comfortable and serene. But it did not turn out that way. Storm after storm has thrown itself at them for over a century, shaping them, twisting them, deforming and re-forming them, changing them and making each one a unique being. Each of them has been moulded by the elements into a singular shape.
And each one, for all its apparent world-weariness, contains its own Chicken Innocent inside.
As do we all.
Comments