In May of this year I was invited to be on a four person panel discussing our autobiographical accounts on the topic: “The Roads Less Travelled”; part of a week long 50th Reunion celebration of the Harvard/Radcliffe class of 1968. It was held in a rather large lecture hall at Harvard’s Science Center with an audience of around 170 people. The best part — from a visual perspective — was the large 10 foot x 14 foot screen where our images were shown.

In a nutshell, I spoke on the journey my life took after graduation: Peace Corps@Korea, Apprenticeship in carpentry and cabinet making @Alaska, Furniture design and fabrication @Penland School/North Carolina, Teaching design @UTas/Tasmania and, for the past 25 years, my life @Windgrove: a Refuge for Learning

The common thread behind all of my life’s choices — besides being “unconventional”— was to be of greater service to the common good of humanity and the wider world. In Alaska I usually worked in the bush building homes, hospitals, schools for the native peoples of the region.

During the last week of 1990 I canoed with friends down the Arthur River in northwest Tasmania. While walking by myself after an evening meal and pondering what New Year’s resolution to make, I spontaneously knelt down and audibly said to the trees and river: “I am ready to be of greater service”. At the time I was living in the house I had designed and was a tenured lecturer at the University of Tasmania.

But a month and a half later a bush fire took out my home. Total destruction.

Inwardly knowing that I was ready for a different life — another road less travelled moment — I quit my lectureship, bought 100 acres of barren, degraded land next to Roaring Beach, and began the 25 yearlong journey to find out what I meant when I said “I wanted to be of greater service”.

The most obvious sign of what I’ve done is plant trees.

After Harvard I gave a slightly longer presentation on a hilltop in North Carolina to a small group of Penland friends. Surrounded by tiki lamps and a mellowing sunset, while the image below of me smiling was up on the desktop screen, I asked the rhetorical question: Why was I happy?

The answer I gave was this passage from the Marge Piercy poem:

If they come in the night

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil
a friend said, Why are you happy?
He explained (we lay together on a hard cold floor) what prison
meant because he had done
time, and I talked of the death
of friends. Why are you happy
then, he asked, close to
angry.

I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me only
not feel I wasted any, let me
not feel I forgot to love anyone
I meant to love, that I forgot
to give what I held in my hands,
that I forgot to do some little
piece of the work that wanted
to come through.

In late 1975, after I decided to quit a well paying job as a foreman on the Alaska pipeline (and a relationship) to study art in Wisconsin, Paul Simon recorded “Still Crazy After All These Years”.

We’re now in the year 2018 and I’m-Still-Planting-After-All-These Years. Another banksia put into the ground three days ago means another flowering delight for someone in ten years time.

The poet Rilke speaks to me when he writes:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

None of the past 50 years has been all sugar and honey. As much as I felt honoured to have been invited to speak at Harvard with the resultant heartfelt applause from the audience after my slide presentation, over the years the multiple personal decisions to walk a path “not the norm” has been full of personal pot holes and is still full of pot holes.

But one thing is certain, and well worth the price:

Perhaps those who find the thought of dangling over the precipice a bit too harrowing, well maybe they aren’t the ones to ever be asked to be on a panel “The Road Less Travelled”.

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It’s that time in my life to now give ample and fearless consideration to what it means when one’s physical capabilities are diminishing, but one still wants to be “in service”.

For inspiration I look to poet Mary Oliver.

Lines Written in the days of Growing Darkness

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?

I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

Mary Oliver

The line most ripe with meaning is: “…the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be.”

The two words that ring out within this line: vivacity and vitality.

In other words, as I approach my 72nd year, I can inspire and impart vitality to the next generation of people following in my footsteps by remaining full of vivacity in my later years to the very end.

I can do this as mentor and elder.

And it is not just young people who, through my vivacity could become vital in their later years. It is the earth itself. Let me continue to plant — literally and figuratively — seeds of growth for future generations of trees and all forms of life forces.

And here’s another Mary Oliver poem that offers encouragement — to anyone of any age — to live a vivacious life.

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measly-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

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