THREADING THE NEEDLE

THREADING THE NEEDLE

Foreword:

You Vs. A PIZZA

“What’s the difference between an Artist and a pizza?”

“Dunno”

“You can feed a family of four on a pizza!”

PROLOGUE

JOY

Do you know that feeling of joy from creation?

That feeling of joy when you create something. something from your soul, something you can share.

The feeling that, in a quiet moment, you might even find yourself thanking some higher power for.

In that moment, you might even shed an honest tear for that feeling of joy, the feeling of connectedness to self, of connectedness with creation.

A tear, perhaps upon the realization of the immense power generated through and by your creative soul. The understanding that the ability to be able to share your re-engaged creative power with others is the absolute key to happiness.

That feeling is a power that is in all of us, all of the time, especially strong and accessible when we are young.

We’re told often, and then, forcibly made to, put the pursuit of that feeling of joy and oneness and power, away with a tinge of embarrassment that we even considered it a power. "Artist?! Bullshit artist!" my father used to say.

Most of us do. We put it away in a heavy, locked, metaphoric box. We mark the box: Censored, Redacted, Inadmissible, Invalid and Void!

No matter your age, the box, the one you put all that power in. It’s still there.

Sure, pretend it’s hard to find. That dusty, heavy, old locked box, hidden deliberately in a dark corner, just out of the discernible daily purview of the soul.

There’s no trickin’ the soul though, with searchlights for eyes, once you give it the green light.

Wipe away the dust, crack the frail, fake lock, open the box.

It is gleaming! Gleaming and sparkling and throbbing with power, you have to shield your eyes! And your heart.

As strong and as powerful as the day you put it away. You’re gonna need a tune-up to really learn how to use it, but that’s really half the fun.

Things seem smaller when grown-ups revisit their childhood, the buildings, the roads, even the people.

This thing you put away, that creative power, those feelings, all those years ago now seems somehow, bigger. Much bigger. It’s so big you don’t even know how to fit it back in you. But don’t worry, it fits like a charm and it sort of “grows on you.”

Here’s a true story about deciding to thread the needle… a standard sewing needle, with a thread the size of you, aimed from the top of a great circus ladder, one hundred meters high.

Take a deep breath!

Believe it can happen, you can thread the needle. Dive.

CHAPTER 1

Hot On The Hill

On a warm summer day, you can fry an egg on a piece of sheet metal.

It was hot that day at the large steel recycling operation. The smell of old burnt steel and oil everywhere. Shredded rubber tires wafting their toxic fumes across fields of debris. The noise and the metal laden dust did little to distract the flies from our noses. They came, mostly from the glass recycling operation next door. The mountain of glass had traces of left-over alcohol and sweet drinks in them that drenched the air with a sweet, alcoholic’s breath smell, strong undertones of stagnant urine and mould were woven in. The flies loved the area, they showed it through frequent and attentive, nostril-probing visitations, they were especially vigorous on a hot day. Like today.

I stood there with the owner of the business, Steve, swatting away flies.

The two of us stood on a seemingly natural, small hill at the edge of the big operations’ property. The hill, made of wires, rubber and plastic was yet to be sold; output from the shredding of millions of cars and trucks, cut into tiny little, sortable, ultimately saleable pieces.

Twenty meters down the hill was a concrete pad, 50m x 50m. The pad was enclosed on one side by a large concrete structure with bays used to sort metals. On top of the structure, clad in a giant steel shed, sat a huge, silent machine. The machine had been turned off to accommodate the potential realization of an idea; The needle can be threaded.

To the right of the pad, sat an 80-ton crane and a 25 Ton bucket loader, Idling and eagerly awaiting orders. Big machines, more suited to a mining site than a city. These machines are big and expensive to run. But were they big enough to handle the steel dragon sitting in the middle of the pad though?

Steve’s younger brother Mitch made it up the small hill to join us.

The three of us looked down at the scene.

Everyone was anticipating the boss’s reaction to the thing that had been a major cost and unnecessary distraction to the operation and staff over the past three months.

Imagine, flying through the air, from the 100m circus ladder, speeding head first towards the eye of that standard sewing needle, half way down. It is probably a bit too late to ask; “Do I fit through the eye of that needle?” Breathe, believe.

CHAPTER 2

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There’s usually a time during the creative process where one gets the opportunity to completely dissolve themselves. Into nothing. A worthless, try hard, no talent, bad ideared, loony tunes that should put their feet on the ground, come back to reality, get back to work and get a real job. Without trying to sound trite; Just like they all say, all the time.

Ohhh, real jobs….see; DROOLING Zombie arms outstretched towards you.. “join us… join uss…JOIN USSS”

The time of dissolution is usually after the thinkin’ is done and you’ve put pen to paper, paint to canvas, pixels to screens, ghee to pan or weld to steel. You’ve just begun, maybe the basic structure, the foundation and layout and feeling. The idea, the thought, has begun to take physical form, you have begun to show your spirit power. And it looks like crap!

The doubters will be happy to chime in right about then. The naysayers were always there. The “oh wellers” later secretly confess to never believing. Pile these roughneck opinions on top of the issues that are accompanied with a family struggling to survive based on a decision to dive out of the corporate world, through the needle, 100%. Now you’ve got more than enough socially augmented emotional baggage to have to pay excess as you scurry on early to the pearly gates. Unless you believe though.

CHAPTER 3

Earlier, on that Hot Hill

Two months ago, when we stood here in the same position, the three of us. When Steve had asked the universe in general;

“well, wadda ya reckon?”

Mitch had replied, with more than a hint of schadenfreude;

“Whatever floats your boat mate…”

Adjusting his hard hat and, with a knowing, scoff of distain, began to hurry back to down the hill to his office.

Mitch’s office was on top of the canteen and men's changerooms for the massive steel recycling plants’ 80 employees. The office, with its industrial grade grey vinyl floor, a window with a view over the in-and-out roads to the massive site. There was the dusty fax machine and dirty computer keyboard, with its soiled plastic protective sheet that had a hole over the ESC key. Grey laminate chipboard desk with plastic edging complimented by a messy whiteboard with dirty sticky notes. The office was your typical industrial, on site affair, replete with black boot skid marks on the floors and architraves, it carried the indelible odour of sweat, week-old men’s work pants, tiger balm and stale instant coffee.

Mitch was right though.

What a freakin’ ugly mess!

Six weeks of work.

Plant and machinery had been delivering loads of hand chosen piles of scrap steel to the concrete pad. Every load costing valuable operational time for man and machine, off their usual, highly regimented, performance-based jobs. The loads of steel themselves had value. In Mitchs' eyes, this was recoverable, at least.

Six weeks in.

Mitch is convinced, its a joke.

Nodding along are 90 percent of the hard, dirty, unforgiving men working in this post-apocalyptic wasteland of huge machines throwing around mountains of steel. Steel that society used to call life. The cars, clasped and crushed together two or three at a time by huge steel hands. Every brand, model and age, bent and smashed. Street maps, spanners, dolls, things of life that exist in a family car, spilling from them as if from some grotesque dash cam footage of a multi car pileup.

Twisted structural steel from buildings, massive iron forging offcuts, washing machines, fridges, buses, trucks, shipping containers, anything with steel in it. They were mountains. Mountains 80 meters high made completely of this scrap. Oozing oils, smells and acrid old water, the piles would readjust themselves with small avalanches of three or four cars followed then by a bent-up trampoline, and finally by an imploded bar fridge.

Perched, like vultures on huge steel and concrete pillars, giant, silent electric machines, each with a huge articulated arm. On the end of the arm they have a massive three-fingered grab hand. They would reach into the mountain. With the high-pitched screams of steel on steel, being ripped, reluctantly apart. The hands pull and tug at the mountain until they release their prize; a giant, fistful of scrap.

This is almost thrown, as the operators deftly do, into the waiting, hungry, massive conveyor belt feeder. Destination: the monstrous and insatiable 10,000 horsepower shredder.

CHAPTER 4

What a Waste

This was obviously a massive waste of company resources, time and energy.

It was an easy target, as it was the bosses waste and he was a man known for not letting anybody waste anything. For brother Mitch and the other employees, making sure they were efficient was a matter of keeping their employment with this, the hardest of men. A man starting up his machine on the work site at 3.05AM had better have a damned fine reason for being 5 minutes late. He’d better have that reason ready at 3:06AM, because when he turns around, the boss is standing there in the doorway with a finished cup of coffee, standing there with that look. The look pretty much says “you’re fired, right now!” Good luck getting out of that!

Here he was, the owner of the most efficient steel recycling plant on the planet, according to the industry magazine.

He was an easy target for this deliciously obvious and woefully made mistake!

Although without financial, physical or even moral reward, the (perversely) spiritual victory for the employees, especially brother Mitch, would be nothing shy of delicious. Even in the ammonia filled air at the long, stainless steel communal urinal, the men will find solace as they lean back and relieve themselves, giggling and cajoling in comradery. In the grimy lunch room, beneath Mitch’s office, over greasy tables, the parable will be told. The teller will demonstrate the pinnacle of intellectual and strategic nuance by tying the jokes and humour of the day and week and month and even year together, in one nice, final, all summizing bundle; Q.E.D. “The Boss IS a Fool!” Yay! Now, back to work!

Looking at the scene, 6 weeks in.

Unorganized piles of steel everywhere. Some had even been delivered by loader to the top of the hill that we were standing on now. Once at the top, the loader had been instructed to “drop it there!” This way the load would tumble down the dusty hill, spreading itself out for easier selection.

Then, if one must draw a bead on the object in question, the cause of all this tension, through the mounds of twisted, rusty scrap steel. In the middle of the concrete pad, poking above the mangled mounds was a; 30 meter long, 5-meter high, welded scrap steel, higgledly piggedly structure approximating the backbone of a giant creature with no clear definition. It certainly was not aesthetically pleasing, with no obvious posture or meaning, intent or power.

Amateurish at best, bewildering to most, progress was not, obviously evident. The condescending phrase “some people just have too much money…” was heard uttered by more than one of the skilled machine operators. In the operators view, they were wasting the bosses measured, monitored and extremely precious time. Wasting time was not how they had earned their stripes at this hard place. Delivering the requested loads of scrap steel was certainly becoming an issue for them.

We had an agreement though, the owner and I. Three months to complete the task. About half way there on the timeline and there was a palpable sense that, should the item not be delivered “fit for purpose, or any bloody good” then it probably wouldn’t require payment. You don’t become this wealthy splurging on whims, giving money away. This man was a billionaire, for a reason.

Life did, really depend on this. The outcome of this, this twisted pile of metal, this undefined heap, determined the answer to the question posed by almost all friends and family.

Is this the right thing to do, have you gone mad?

Put yourself out there. 100% unchartered territory. No determined outcome. The only input is the soul. The Souls input amounts to everything. There is, in society an ingrained, provocative and constantly reinforced fear; that the outcome of such spiritual and soul-searching endeavours will be far less than dreamed and you will be homeless. The fear that keeps us knowingly ignorant of our own power and what it may yield. The fear that shields the spark of the Soul from it’s desired ignition with the cosmic aether and hence it’s explosive, infinite creative power.

Mad? The question was now six years old.

So was our first-born son, six years old. Our second was Four and the third was zero, new-born.

The Pizza was, if not winning, catching up.

It was his fault. My first-born Son.

When my wife announced her first pregnancy, I announced we were leaving Hong Kong!

The shock of the double-barrelled announcement wore off pretty quickly, both happenings not being completely unanticipated nor unrelated. The decision had been made, unconscious as it was, that this would be the trigger. The unwavering impetus to go grab that hidden, dusty box I put away all those years ago. Drop whatever was going on and open it. Believing, 100% that this was going to go right.

CHAPTER 5

Why?

Why? my wife said. Not disheartened, just unknowing, wondering.

"The plug, the one in the huge, marble master bathroom. It says “razor only”"

"Look out the bedroom window, the 34th floor balcony has a great view, right on the water" The other two bedrooms had their own private balconies too. In 2006, this was very expensive Hong Kong Island real estate.

The V8 special edition AWD Jaguar in the basement had barely cracked 120km/h on the hundreds of trips to I made to the airport, if I didn't feel like using the corporate limousine.

The seven-figure package had many enticing perks.

"None of it is really ours though. You only see “razor only” in hotels, not homes. We’re going home to have a family."

"What are you going to do?" Knowing we had enough money to survive for maybe two years.

I’m going to be an artist.

Of course, the test to leave the job became even harder to pass, spiritually anyway.

A board of the company member flew in hurriedly from Australia. A true humanist that I had spent many days travelling around the world with. In the lobby of the Hong Kong Marriot, He said “We want you to stay and run the whole thing”.

I would have been, by far, at 37, the youngest CEO for a; top 10, Blue-chip, listed Company in Australia. Quite the offer. Quite the Willie Wonka moment; being offered the keys to the chocolate factory. Well this Charlie doesn’t fancy the idea of ironing out all your old school headaches and philosophies as a way of enriching my soul, so thanks, graciously, but no thanks, cheers!

CHAPTER 6

Life – Depends on it.

Standing, on the hot hill, waving away the flies.

Three of us look down at the completed dragon.

The silence was opaque, succinct.

The younger brother, Mitch engaged the moment;

“How heavy is it?”

“How the heck should I know?” was the truth

“err.. Cause you made it”

Under his hard hat, Steve privately gave a small, seldom indulged, smile of gratification. He gave a nod to the creator of his new mascot.

Steve bellowed the command the workers had been anticipating and that I had been hoping for;

“Put it out the front!”

Silence broken, Steve looked at me and said;

“I could not do that, not if my life depended on it.”

“Yes, you could. And my life depends on it.” I was somewhat relieved. I ordered pizza, for everyone. Thanks.