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Sunday 15 June 2014

Takanini

Have you been to Takanini recently?   If you haven't then it is worth putting it on your weekend must visit list.  Takanini is changing so fast, its unbelievable. When we came here...lets just say a wee while ago... was more rural than anything else. Paddocks full of race horses keeping the race track, that was then, immediately across the road from us, very busy.  5am in the morning you could hear the horses clip clopping in through the gates.  The Auckland Herald amongst others have taken some beautiful images the track on a misty morning, the horses with their mounts going around the track... very special.

Also immediately across from my home is the memorial to the Walsh Brothers; the spot where the first powered controlled and sustained flight took place in New Zealand on the 5th of February 1911.  103 years ago. 

Yeats: the pilgrim soul in you





We do not allow others to control us once we are healthy, but we do understand and feel their pain when we realize that control is a compulsion.  Most controlling people cannot help themselves, they are not in control of the controlling.
   
Yeats the poet wrote about the special person who “loves the pilgrim soul in you.” Mirroring freedom means encouraging the liveliness and passion in others rather than squelching it for our own good or safety.  The “pilgrim soul” also implies going. True allowing also means letting someone go. To allow is to stand aside when someone needs space from us or ever leaves us.  

You instinctively seek the full range of motion and emotion in the course of your development, yet you can feel in the psychological air of your home a heartfelt permission to be yourself, to have your own thoughts and to express them without punishment, to make your own choices, even to step out of line.

Monday 9 June 2014

Lance Morrow



This is an Essay written by Lance Morrow,  Time,  April the 29th. 1991.  I have held on to it since reading it; would have been that weeks issue.  It is a thoughtful and inspiring peace of work....

"We have rafts we cling to in bad weather - consolations, little solidarities, numbers we dial, people we wake up in the middle of the night."  Somehow it is not much fun to wake up to the television set.... the medium is a micro wave.
Television news, when it flies in raw and ragged, can be lacerating.  The medium destroys sequence. Reading restores to the mind a stabilization of linear prose, a bit of the architecture of thought. First one sentence, then another, building paragraphs, whole pages, chapters, books, until eventually something like an attention span returns and perhaps a steadier regard for cause and effect.
War (and television) shatters. Reading, thought reconstructs. The mind is reading is active, not passive - depressive.
Writers make universes. To enter that creation gives the reader some intellectual dignity and a higher sense of his possibilities. The dignity encourages relief and acceptance. I like writers who have struggles with a dark side and persevered. Samuel Johnson, for example; his distinction and his majestic sanity both achieved the hard way. Henry James/Grace Norton wrote, "Remember every life is a special problem which is not yours but anothers and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own...  We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most," he told her. "Even if we don't reach the sun, we shall have at least been up in a balloon."