This is Swiss artist Mädir Eugster performing an incredible balance piece. More about him at Rigolo, his circus company.
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Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~ Lisel Mueller
found at the excellent panhala
My eyes are getting worse. Not just the worse that comes with age but the worse that comes with a degenerative eye disease called keratoconus. I have had keratoconus since I was a teenager, and I’ve become well used to seeing the halos and double images, blurring and other illusions. My eyesight varies with weather and rest and a multitude of other factors but unless I’m wearing my hard, gas permeable contact lenses, my eyesight is pretty bad. Not debilitating, but far from good.. At a distance, even with glasses, I can’t make out faces, and that combined with my aging memory serves to create weird situations, when I call one person by another name and so on. I’m not that old, only 42, but old enough to notice how things have changed.
As my memory gets worse, I can reframe it as living more in the present, but until I found this poem, I had no way of reframing the decline of my eyesight, which is not serious yet by the way, but bad enough that I get sad about it from time to time. I recently had a consultation to see if there was any chance at a new procedure called cross-linking, which is an alternative to an eventual corneal transplant, but the verdict was that I don’t have enough cornea left to make such a procedure possible. Science and technology are constantly advancing though, so perhaps in the future things will change. But for now, I take a lot from this poem, from Monet’s protestations in this poem and especially “I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see.”
Stunning.
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I see it all the time, where cultivated and well-raised people stumble in the wild land of chaos and open space. Whether it is the tourist in the forest who complains against the mud or the leader in an organization, community or country (like Egypt) who clings to the illusion of confidence and control and who cannot make friends with the wild and the chaotic.
Thoreau:
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
Are you friends with the wild within you? Do you cultivate that characteristic as a mould against the uncertain future? How do you prepare to welcome surprises of all kinds?
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I am just returning from a memorial service for my friend and colleague John McBride. John and I worked on a number of Aboriginal economic development projects over the years and he died in October from pancreatic cancer.
Today at his memorial his wife Val read some selections from his journals. One insight that really stuck with me was written in his final days as he was making sense of his death. He wrote that the end is about peeling back all the layers of who we have been to discover who we really are at our core. And he named his core as that of a man who lives with joy and revelled in having just enough.