On becoming a grandfather and carving a ferrocement fountain

Back from Gisborne where we met a new addition to this plane of being! Anna our daughter had a boy, and we got our first grandchild 🙂 About time. I’ve been feeling quite old… Both birth and becoming a parent or grandparent are thresholds which can open our eyes to the wonder of being here…

The baby (as yet unnamed) cried for the first half hour or so, inconsolably, indignantly, as if protesting the transition into the world. Then he heard Anna’s loving voice and began to calm down, and had his first feed, and began looking around. I stood beside Anna and saw his eyes fixed on her face shift to look at mine, then go back to gazing at her again. So aware, so new, and yet so wise and calm-looking. I thought of the wonderful Wordsworth lines:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

For the full poem see http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html And I ‘told’ him to remember where he came from… We’ll see if he does…

It’s a big responsibility, being a grandparent. So, while staying at Anna and Marco’s nice hilltop home, I made myself as useful as I could while Raewyn of course gardened (and helped with the gourmet cooking), and built a ferro fountain/birdbath to go in the middle of the ferro raised bed circle I built last time I was there.

This is it on the morning we had to go. It’s nearly finished… The rain slowed the painting so I didn’t finish the two-toning. I did the little details at the base for the baby, of course! The gnome ‘wizard’ looks a bit like me, just shorter and no glasses…:) There’s a gnome lady sunbathing on the far side too. Note, if you will, the dwarf from snow white and rose red looking at a fish in the stream… There’s a rabbit, too, on the other side. I hope to be able to do another one up here for sale at Eutopia – and/or do some to order. It will help keep the wolf from the proverbial door, I hope…

So, what does the baby LOOK like?

He is very calm most of the time. He was born about midday, and came back with Anna that afternoon! They don’t keep them in long nowadays. Here are a few images, which of course don’t really capture the 3d reality.

We found a secondhand book on becoming a grandmother and bought it, and it even had a bit about grandfathers too! So it is another tie that binds, though as with all life we are only here as it were passing through, and just do what we can while we are able… My recent ‘here and now’ realisation takes some practicing! Looking at a baby resting could definitely help us remember how it’s done…

And the ebook in question, a week after uploading as a free ebook on smashwords, has had 92 downloads. Not too bad… I hope someone reviews it some time… It is such a ‘black hole’ mostly, the free stuff – almost no one gives feedback. they just take it and who knows? get a fleeting something from it and then forget it. It is depressing sometimes.  The age of surfeit.

Ah well, life itself goes on, and is real.

Happiness – it’s Now or Never. The ebook I wrote at the airport. Hope it takes off!

I am now pretty happy…. Just before leaving for far-away (well 8 hours by car) Gisborne to join Raewyn at our daughter Anna’s place and await her first baby and our first grandchild, I was stressed and not sure I could cope.  But I saw a book lying round and dipped into it. The next morning I read a bit more of it, and had an epiphany.

The book is ‘Happy for No Reason‘ by Marci Shimoff. The epiphany – well read this free ebook I wrote about it while waiting overnight on standby at Auckland International airport. I had three coffees and didn’t sleep a wink, but I wrote a book! That felt good. See it here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/309807

Last night, safely arrived in Gisborne, I did the cover and uploaded the ebook to Smashwords.

Tell me if it’s rubbish, but I at least have vowed to follow this one until I am able to practice the ‘happiness is here and now’ wisdom at all times. The irony is I’ve been holding up the ideal of Eutopia all these years but not practicing the first principle of Eutopia, which is that HERE is a ‘Eutopia’ or Good Place, and we only find happiness Now, and again Now… Then, happy, we can also work to improve the place yet more. But if in our minds it’s always  ‘jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but  never jam today’, we will NEVER have or dwell in Eutopia.  

But do download and read the tract – it’s short and hopefully clear. If you like it, put a star rating on it and propel it to wider readership. That would make me very happy! 🙂