Mid-Autumn Festival
Mid-Autumn Festival
If you don’t enlarge this week’s image using the Slideshow mode in the Gallery, you may think you are having trouble focussing your eyes. Indeed, if you cannot see this week’s image in its entirety, in all its detail, you will never understand its message, its intricacy or its beauty.
The parallel I want to highlight this week - and I hope I can make this clear - is our environment. If we fail to understand the whole, detailed picture of the fragile yet resilient ecosystems and biomes that support life on our planet, then we can never understand their intricacy, their beauty or their importance.
On Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission (Bill Anders) snapped the first photo of earth from space - the first time humans had seen a photograph of their entire planet. Called “Earth Rise”, it transformed humanity’s perception of Earth as we actually saw ourselves in a finite environment for the first time.
In the words of Archibald MacLeish the day after the photo was taken: “To see Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now that they are truly brothers”.
Every week or two, a microcosm of the Earth’s brothers and sisters - the members of my tutor group - come into our home for a meal, or supper, or just to chat. At the College, all teachers have a tutor group, which is a bit like like our family away from home. This year I have ten tutees from six countries - Bahamas, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Macedonia and Mexico. When we came together for supper last Wednesday evening, the red lantern that is this week’s image hung above our table. That was because this week’s supper was a bit different - we were celebrating mid-autumn festival. Over a meal of moon cakes, green tea, toffee walnuts and pomelo, we enjoyed each other’s company and learnt something about the Chinese mid-autumn festival traditions.
So why have I presented the red lantern as a tapestry rather than as a straight photographic picture? Okay, I accept that this may a bit obscure, but I see it is another link with the “big picture” of our environment. I am still in awe of the images contained in Don McLean’s song “Tapestry” that was released way back in 1969. The late sixties saw the genesis of the environmental movement, and with it, some brilliant music that passionately highlighted environmental themes emerged, including Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”, Cat Stevens’ “Where do the Children Play?” and Don McLean’s “Tapestry”.
Don McLean saw the environment as being like a picture on a huge interwoven tapestry. If we remove a thread or two, no-one notices. If we remove some more, the picture becomes a bit distorted, but it still hangs together. The more threads we remove, the more distortion occurs as the inter-relationships become harder to support and sustain. If we remove too many threads, the whole tapestry collapses.
That’s the way it is with our environment. Don McLean wrote his song almost 40 years ago. You can listen to it by clicking the link at the end of this blog. Just reflect on the words from this powerful song which shout at us through the deceptive gentleness of the melody, and understand why the image of the tapestry is so strong in my personal environmental understanding:
Every thread of creation is held in position
By still other strands of things living
In an earthly tapestry hung from the skyline
Of smouldering cities, so grey and so vulgar,
As not to be satisfied with their own negativity,
But needing to touch all the living as well.
Every breeze that blows kindly is one crystal breath
We exhale on the blue diamond heaven:
As gentle to touch as the hands of the healer,
As soft as farewells whispered over the coffin.
We’re poisoned by venom with each breath we take
From the brown sulphur chimney and the black highway snake.
Every dawn that breaks golden is held in suspension
Like the yolk of the egg in albumen.
Where the birth and the death of unseen generations
Are interdependent in vast orchestration,
And painted in colours of tapestry thread
Where the dying are born and the living are dead.
Every pulse of your heartbeat is one liquid moment
That flows through the veins of your being.
Like a river of life flowing on since creation
Approaching the sea with each new generation,
You’re now just a stagnant and rancid disgrace
That is rapidly drowning the whole human race.
Every fish that swims silent, every bird that flies freely
Every doe that steps softly,
Every crisp leaf that falls, all the flowers that grow,
On this colourful tapestry, somehow they know
That if man is allowed to destroy all we need
He will soon have to pay with his life for his greed.
We are all products of our upbringing. Many hours of my formative years were spent listening to ground-breaking, perceptive music with profound, poetic, prophetic lyrics like this; music by genii (geniuses?) such as Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and so on. It is said that music and the Vietnam war shaped my generation. If that is so, then I hope that today’s generation is also being shaped by some powerfully profound forces that might outweigh the materialism, the aggression and the superficiality that I see being pushed incessantly by the seemingly all-powerful global media networks.
After all, I am an educationalist, and my dream is for a better world - one where the tapestry is vibrant, intact and sustainable.
To hear Don McLean’s ‘Tapestry”, click >>> Tapestry.m4a.
Lyrics from http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/don+mclean/tapestry_20042104.html
Sunday, 1 October 2006