The universe
 " Twenty years from
now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the things you did do, so throw off the bowlines sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore Dream Discover"
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 I see workers in a dream rushing around carrying staircases bringing walls levelling emptiness worried lest God might think them lazy and all he wants them to do is rest and be kind  Ballad of John Macfarlane and the Water Woman
Five hundred feet from the lakebed John Macfarlane sat With a bottle and a transistor In the shepherds hut, With a collie and a rifle And heard as the night came on The wind blow through the tussock And the water-course pour down For a fifty-year-old shepherd A fire of matagouri Whisky, dog and radio, Were too much company, Or so it looked. The music spun Like a rattle of dry bones (It could have been the Beatles Or perhaps the Rolling Stones) And suddenly Macfarlane knocked The noise box to the floor, Trampled it, and kicked [it] Clean out the open door, Finished the fourteenth bottle And let the empty roll And went to get another From the case beside the wall But in the open doorway A naked woman stood With her long hair wrapped around her And a keas’s eye in her head. The collie growled. Macfarlane grabbed The rifle from his coat – “Stand back,” he said ‘I’ll have No woman in this hut’. ‘Oh John,’ she answered, You’re making a mistake. I find it lonely lying On the bare stones of the lake; ‘Even a water goddess Gets tired of eels and gulls, I need a man to comfort me And take away the chills ‘When a boy came here from the Tourist Bureau I raised a flood for him; I dug him out of his camera van But the poor stick could not swim. ‘Then a man of the Ngati-Awa Drove his tractor down my shore. But he fell for a blonde at the Pembroke pub And I saw his face no more. ‘But when you broke the noise-box I knew I found the man To appreciate a woman Who belongs to the water clan. ‘You’re strong enough to lie with me And grip the natural truth; I like the stubble round your jaws, I like your whisky breath.’ She took one step across the room; The old dog howled in dread. Macfarlane raised the gun and put A bullet through her head. One angry cry rang out, and then The wind slammed tight the door And there was nothing in the hut But lake weed on the floor, And while the shepherd lay dead drunk The floor-boards gushed out rills From the water-course that broke its banks From a cloud burst in the hills, And the next day John Macfarlane On the lakeshore with no shirt Frowned at the sun, his hair an beard Loaded with shingle dirt.  "Do you see? It wasn't just the work, though the work was clearly blessed. Nor the rewards, which were none, as far as I knew. It was the life itself - a vocation, like being a hermit or a samurai. A calling. The holiest life that was offered in our world: artist. One that required the purest flame, clear lines of demarcation. Renunciation. 'Sacrifice everything" we would write on apartment walls. "Sacrifice everything to the clean line". Continual offering of our minds and our hearts. Offering impersonally our most personal passion. Most secret vision. What comfort we could give, and give each other. The beauty. Compassion disguised as aesthetics."
 "Judge [people] not by what they are, but by what they strive to become."
"The more incompetent he/she feels, the more eager he/she is to fight." Fear is often a factor False Expectations Appearing Real. "Look at children: they fight precisely at the age when they have not yet learned to express their thoughts" Maybe we should stop and listen and ask the question "what is your passion and what do you want to make of your life? If the answer is "I don't know" then maybe we can help and encourage mindful exploration of possibilities. Yes that's what leaders do!  The fact that we humans have such a notoriously hard time changing our minds undoubtedly has to do with the notion that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” which belies the great robbery of the human experience — by calling ourselves beings, we deny our ever-unfolding becomings. Only in childhood are we afforded the luxury of inhabiting our becoming, but once forced to figure out who we want to be in life, most of us are so anxious about planting that stake of being that we bury the alive, active process of our becoming. In our rush to arrive at who we want to be, we flee from the ceaseless mystery of our becoming.
To show up wholeheartedly for our becoming requires doing one of the hardest things in life — allow the possibility of being wrong and incur the anguish of admitting that error. It requires that we grieve every earlier version of ourselves and endure the implicit accusation that if the way we do a certain thing now is better than before, then the way we did it before is not only worse but possibly — and this is invariably crushing — even wrong. The uncomfortable luxury of changing our mind is thus central to the courage of facing our becoming with our whole being. This constant tussle could be especially difficult for artists, who imbue their creative work with an enormous amount of their being at the point of creation but must also include it in the ongoing record of their becoming. Hardly any figure in creative history has faced that anguishing moment of changing one’s mind for the sake of creative integrity, and faced it publicly, with more courage than John Steinbeck. |
AuthorHamish Ott. I am the Managing Director of Gotham Universal Limited (established 1998). 
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