ho ho hot!
Sunday 18 December, 2005
Ooh..the hot weather is gorgeous. Yesterday we were swimming by 10a.m. and the afternoon saw us eating ice-cream under a tree and then later I gardened wearing not very much at all and while I was doing that one of those luscious Manawatu summer thunderstorms happened and the rain came down, fat and warm...I stayed out there until I was drenched and cool.
The school holidays have begun, we're off to Taupo for a holiday very soon, Christmas chaos is upon us...so I'm going to take a blogging break for a while...its time to get off the computer and out into the fresh air...seize the hot weather while it lasts and refuel my brain with lots of lovely things to write about in 2006.
I hope you all have a delightful Christmas/Holiday and enjoy the sun...or if you are in the Northern Hemisphere the snow and delights of staying inside by the fire...
I'll see you again in mid-January for a hippy, happy new year of stripy sock studio goodness!
Namaste!
Posted on 18 December, 2005 | 7:14am | 6 comments |
season of scatteredness
Tuesday 13 December, 2005
I've been a ball of restless energy lately. Not very centred. I'm posting this photo of the pink rununculas I bought myself for my birthday to remind me that I need to stop flitting and start sitting.
It's suddenly very hot. We've been throwing the kids into the paddling pool after dinner, when the sun loses its burn but the heat sits like a fug.
Lying on the warm grass, watching the boys giggling and splashing, tummy full of wonderful seasonal things like asparagus and tomatoes and strawberries and new potatoes...it feels...
it feels very much like...
(could it possibly BE?)
summer!
Posted on 13 December, 2005 | 7:07am | 3 comments |
uncertain boy
Sunday 11 December, 2005
This street art is in my neighbourhood, so I pass it often.
I find this one almost unbearably poignant. I think it is because I have two little boys of my own and to me, this looks like a wee boy looking into the distance/future and not feeling very sure of what is ahead. The block over his eyes suggests to me that he is supposed to represent "every child".
Possibly that is not at all what the artist intended, but that is what I see. I think this one is (painfully) beautiful.
Posted on 11 December, 2005 | 7:11am | 1 comments |
power of dirt
Thursday 8 December, 2005
Ooh me aching back - I've been getting into the garden over the last few days...trying to reclaim the vegetable patch from the weeds.
"Kiss the ground / stick my fingers in the earth / Ooh - it feels so good to be alive!"
-Lucious Jackson
I'm a bit of a freak in that I don't mind weeding too much. Something about kneeling on the ground, getting real dirty, tuning my brain off worldly stuff and just looking for the next weed to pull...its a kind of meditation.
This morning I bought sugarsnap peas, zucchini, silverbeet and lettuces. In the garden already are beans, corn, pumpkin, chillies, beans, nasturtiums and lush sweet strawberries, which we eat warm off the bushes.
I'm not the most disciplined gardener, but I love it nonetheless.
I don't grow the plants; the garden grows me!
Posted on 08 December, 2005 | 11:33am | 2 comments |
make poverty history day this Saturday
Wednesday 7 December, 2005
I'm taking Willoughby and Magnus on their first protest march! The chance to make a lot of noise (bells, shakers and rattles), walk on the road where the cars normally go, and to see hundreds of helium balloons go up into the sky has got Willoughby excited. I figure the only way to bring them up with a social conscience is to show them that participating in a democracy means a lot more than voting once every three years.
If you're local (Manawatu):
"A bunch of helium-filled balloons will be released in the city as a symbolic gesture on December 10 as part of New Zealand's involvement in the global Make Poverty History campaign.
The peaceful march will start at 2pm outside the i-Site building in The Square and will work its way past McDonald's to the Te Manawa art gallery car park.
Palmerston North MP Steve Maharey, Mayor Heather Tanguay and Swalihu Jusu, from civil war-ravaged Sierra Leone, will talk to the crowd.
The campaign's symbol is a white band, worn around the wrist, arm or as a headband.
Make Poverty History supporters' group leader in Palmerston North, Alyson Chandler, says the march will be open to the public - bystanders can wear white t-shirts and join in.
"Ending absolute poverty should be regarded by all Kiwis as a moral commitment," she says.
In New Zealand, Make Poverty History challenges the Government to deliver trade justice, cancel debt, deliver better aid and end child poverty."
There are events nationally and globally, too. So check out what is happening near you.
Posted on 07 December, 2005 | 7:04am | 1 comments |
flags and skulls
Tuesday 6 December, 2005
This picture is of an installation at a little gallery in Wellington. Unfortunately, it was closed so I had to snap the picture through the window. The whole thing is constructed out of felt and crocheted wool. Isn't it wonderful? Textile art goes macabre.
I've been reading lots of political stuff recently. This week another book of Arundhati Roy's non-fiction called 'The Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire'. I can't reccommend her enough. She makes political writing accessible, passionate, edgy and engaging. So, to go with today's macabre photograph, here is a quotation from the book:
"Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
In India we saw the damage of the yoking of the nation's mind to a flag after the nuclear tests in 1998, and during the Kargil War against Pakistan in 1999. In the USA we saw it during the Gulf War and we see it now, during the War Against Terror. That blizzard of made-in-China American flags."
Posted on 06 December, 2005 | 7:13am | 2 comments |
maybe next year?
Monday 5 December, 2005
The wonderful 'meditating santa' image above is from buy nothing christmas. Check it out.
I do get excited about Christmas...but for me the excitement is about the gathering of family, in summer, towards the end of the year...usually at the beginning or in the middle of a holiday. I hate the rampant consumerism of Christmas. With my side of the family, Fraser and I tried to instigate "homemade Christmas" for the last two years...where all gifts were home made and hand made. My Mum got into it, and we got into it...but the wider family were "too busy" to make their gifts, so it sort of fell over. We made fudge and shortbread and panforte and biscotti, and I made herbal teas and little art works.
This year it was back to buying. I was determined to do all my shopping way before December because the city in the midst of stressed out, hot weather Christmas mania gives me the horrors.
It would take a strong parent to resist the santa claus thing, and I'm not one of them. We have santa stockings...hell, I always did as a kid and it was the highlight of my year until I was about nine. Christmas, like most things in Western society, is a mine-field of ethical contradictions if you are a thinking person. (Or a hand-wringing, guilt-ridden leftie, like me.)
Where possible, I bought second-hand, hand-made, ethically made, fair-traded...but it's difficult to buy "ethical" DVDs, CDs and some kids toys. Hey, I did my best.
I would love to one day have no-gift Christmases, where it is about eating good food with lovely family and less about presents. Or at least, perhaps just gifts for people under the age of 18?
In the meantime, (said the Grinch) my gifts are bought, wrapped and organised into in-law pile and my family pile. I won't be going into town this month unless I want to visit the library or a cafe. Whew!
Posted on 05 December, 2005 | 8:17am | 2 comments |
the blowing of one's own trumpet
Sunday 4 December, 2005
At the risk of seeming like an egotist (I don't usually write about my writing stuff on here, but I'm so delighted about this, I have to share it)...
I have some exciting news!
I co-won the Manawatu Standard/NZSA Short Story competition! You might remember an entry a while back where I recounted the 'drama' of getting my entry in on time (Armed Offenders Squad etc)...well, my prediction that it 'wasn't meant to be' was apparently wrong.
I'm very excited about this, because although I have had work published before, this is the first time I've come somewhere in a competition...and believe me, I have entered dozens of them.
It may seem a small victory...it is 'just' a regional competition, not a national one and all that...but to me, it is a sweet and cheerful thing that has buoyed up my hopes that perhaps...just perhaps...I do have a future as a writer, after all...
My co-winner was Tony Chapelle and the writer who came second was Fiona Mitford.
I'm going to spend the prize money on either art or jewellery, so that I have something enduring to remember this by. There is a local artist who makes beautiful rings out of old typewriter keys...I'm thinking that would be the perfect thing to celebrate a writing prize.
By the way, the judge of the competition was NZ writer Sue McCauley (she of 'Other Halves' notoriety) who, incidentally, also chose one of my short stories for an anothology called 'A Magpie Stole My Heart'...she obviously likes my writing...I wish she was also the editor of Landfall, Sport and the Listener. Heh-heh...ah well...I'll keep on trying for those ones...aim for the moon and all that...
Posted on 04 December, 2005 | 7:47am | 8 comments |
the gleaners and I
Thursday 1 December, 2005
You must see this film. I read about it on Keri Smith's site. I watched it three times in a row - it is magnificent. Deceptively simple, poignant, profound. Agnes, the film-maker, is wonderfully eccentric.
I am a gleaner! I am not afraid to pick things up off the street...out of skip bins...out of the 'free box' outside the op-shop (in fact, yesterday I picked up a beautiful Swiss red wooden pepper grinder!) I spend a lot of time and energy passing things on to friends. I like finding the perfect home for things. I hate waste.
And my collages are gleaning made art! Collages are just gleaned scraps of paper...gleaned images...
Gleaning is everywhere when you start to look...
since watching the film, I have noticed:
-an old lady gathered plastic coat hangers out of some rubbish put on the street by a clothes shop
-a punk boy picked up an unopened bag of vacum cleaner bags from a recycling bin
-a man sorted through the skip outside my local supermarket, picking out magazines with their covers ripped off...and why not? they were probably only a week out of date
-I picked up a bunch of old maps and the excellent red pepper grinder from the free box
-Fraser bought home a stack of cd cases that his work were throwing out to replace our cracked broken cd cases
-my parents sent a box full of birds nests down for Willoughby. They have been picking avacados on an orchard in the Bay of Plenty and found the empty nests in the avacado trees. They also sent me a box of 'gleaned' avacados - they were 'rejects' because they had strange lumps and bumps, but they taste just the same as a 'perfect' avacado
-and on a walk the other day, we went down to the quarry pit nearby and I 'gleaned' two pockets full of old broken crockery which I threw onto my pebble vegetable garden path...
Gleaning is a political act - it says that the gleaner has not swallowed the mass propoganda that everything needs to be 'new' to be useful and the myth that it is fine to fill landfills with our unwanted possessions, or to throw away food when so many people go hungry.
Go and glean something today! Send me your gleaning tales.
Posted on 01 December, 2005 | 10:00am | 1 comments |
obviously not a vegan
Wednesday 30 November, 2005
Another picture from my occasional series of street art/grafitti postings.
I stood in the street and giggled when I clocked this one. The mind boggles, too...why would someone risk arrest for this particular declaration?
Maybe they are a passionate cheese-maker?
Maybe they just gave up ten years of veganism?
Maybe they were stoned and eating a creamy brie on a fit of the munchies?
I like cheese lots, too.
Posted on 30 November, 2005 | 8:09am | 3 comments |