Chase butterflies of dream and wonder — Celebrating my father, Count Arthur Tarnowski on his 95th Birthday
I love to write about my father (29.12.1929–30.6.2012). He gifted me with so much of his brilliant writings. It seems too precious not to share. For 12 years now I have maintained a tradition of sharing a favourite tribute to his life and writings on his birthday and death anniversary. Today, he would be 95 although he died back on 30th June 2012.
On the day of my mothers death in 2017 I discovered a 16 page letter that was written 6 years before I was born but seemed to speak directly to me. I have shared some sections from it in the past such as my father’s reflections on language. I often reflect on how my father prepared me in every way he knew how to be serving and creating what I am with United Planet and the UP Game. His gift of expression of language was like nobody I’ve encountered — he spoke 7 languages and had advanced knowledge of mythology and history. I know he would be very happy that my life is dedicated to a purpose beyond myself — on behalf of all life and the planet. He embraced life in a similar manor and I often think of him as a role model of a Great Ancestor to the future and all our decedents. I came back to the letter today to select this passage as his 95th birthday tribute:
“Panache and fantaisie have been foremost in directing my steps across life. To drink deep of the bitter-sweet cup of life. To seek out its challenges and measure oneself against them. To dream its wondrous dreams. To scale its peaks.
To stride through life with eyes of zest and wonder. And youth of heart. Nothing stands ‘larger than life’, for life is as large as one’s urge, vision and daring forge it.
Chase butterflies of dream and wonder. Reach out for the stars. Avec panache et fantaisie. Sunlight in my lungs, marvel in my eyes. It is in this spirit that I went up the Himalayas and thumbed my nose at the wheelchair. Years earlier, shepherded Bedouin goats down the broad vistas of Mesopotamian desert. And lugged an old gramophone far, far into its blistering dunes to play Beethoven’s Fifth. In loud, loud ripples of sound across far, far stretch’t ripples of crimsoned dunes. Shared a broken paving-stone for a pillow with the street-dwellers of Calcutta. Burnus-wrapped in a moonless night, with gun-laden ‘Fellaghas’ slipped from Libya into French-held Tunisia, in the djebel to share their strife-torn days, wary days and quicksilver nights of tense, silent march ~ deadly swoop. Built up a Centre for the disabled in the heart of India. Climbed Mount Parnassus, reading aloud from Theocritus’ ‘Idylls’; and drunk with the scent of thyme, laughed at the blood of my thorn-scratched legs, whooping for joy as I gazed far, far below at the marbled ruins of Delphi where Pythia had mumbled oracles.
But I don’t make myself clear. I quest not time off from life’s tedium to climb a distant mountain or sail solo the seven seas. That is but a grand fling, vain respite, brief escape. In essence no different to picking up a volume of poetry at the end of a dayful of care and chore; — and relax down its couplets; No, what I seek is not such escapades, but, to live every day, each second and act of my life a poem. Heart awonder, plunge into this fount-head of mysterious glory which pervades all Creation. And consecrates each Life with uniqueness, miracle of infinite wonder. Limpid surge the Pierian Springs, by tedium unsullied. Not at the rainbow’s end but here and now. Infinite unfolds the panoply of life and nature, and if its vistas pall or seem hackneyed, ’tis when one’s spirit sickens, the inner eye shrinks jaded into ruts of the habitual.
And I wake up unto mornings, mists of slumber gently stirring over consciousness. And my eyes tightly closed, I tell myself: — “Now — any moment now! You shall open eyes alive to a wondrous marvel, miracle beyond ken.
For the first time in all Time — any moment now!” And I catch my breath, my soul vibrant in awed anticipation.
Outside a laurel. Green, green fleshy leaves holding pearls of dew. Rocked by breeze into flashes of glistening light, cascading symphonies of iridescence. A maze of tawny branches stretching seeking, stretching stretching down down, up up towards the blue — blue. A thrush restless in the foliage. Inside the room a spider’s web, suspended gossamer, yet murmuring permanence in its motionless fixity, a whisper of eternity from beyond the behind of time.
A shaft of sunlight, oblique across the room, lending stage to opalescent specks pirouetting down paths of whimsey.
My senses aglow, my eyes wide receptacles to the wonder flooding flooding, suffusing my soul, at one at one with the speck dancing dancing, with the lustrous leaf. Ah you, sun-dappled mite of graceful eddy. I thirst thy secrets.
You random alloy of atoms, witness to Eternity in whose serried ranks beyond number you have danced the cosmic dance. You partook in that astral blast which sired this universe. Through countless avatars you transmogrified, in transient garb of sea and pumice, of beasts long extinct, of plants Pleistocene, meadow flowers and men of flesh and bone who loved, strove and yearned but to shed their lives onto the dust that pirouettes iridescent before my eyes.
Ah, you envied puny mite, thou art a window unto God.
The infinite, holding an infinity of potential manifestation, never rests in its play. A brook might seem changeless in its flow. But the waters it emits at any point in time are never the same waters, its volume, the trajectories of its spray, the particles of life and matter borne on its flow, the banks it laves, the timbre of its purl 一 that never rests selfsame.”
