Month: December 2024
-
Time-travelling with my eyes closed
Okay, okay you’re right: I close my eyes a lot, especially when I don’t need them (sleep springs to mind). I think the practice started many years ago as a bet with my wife, though: she challenged me to sign up with her for a Transcendental Meditation (TM) seminar in Vancouver. TM was all the…
-
Touring New Zealand on Airplane Mode
I sometimes have difficulty knowing whether describing the end of a journey should be classed as an epilogue, or a eulogy. Both signal an end of a sort: both are recapitulations, although of different significance, perhaps; and yet both are kind of schadenfreudish as well, don’t you think…? I mean we cannot repeat the past-…
-
I am the Tumbleweed
I am the tumbleweed; I realized it I when I saw the lonely little thing blowing across the dawn sand in Gisborne. Its arms, for all the good they did, were extended like an inquisitive octopus feeling for its way; not lost, exactly, but indifferent about where it ended up. Anywhere is as good as…
-
The Town I hate to love
Ever since my metaphoric disposal of a generic holiday town, I have to confess I have been beset with guilt. Did I succumb to the trap of judging without sufficient knowledge; judging without hearing the rebuttal; being trapped in a net of my own making? I suspect I may have been guilty of that not…
-
The mind shows us what we want to see…
I don’t know why I come to Taupo. The lake is beautiful, I guess -it’s the largest freshwater lake in New Zealand, for those who measure these things- but I feel uneasy here. Lake Taupo is a caldera: a volcanic crater, in other words. It was apparently first formed from a massive eruption from the…
-
Living with the Phoenix
There are two sides to boredom, I think: one is looking for new things to do -new challenges; the other is succumbing to indolence and, because it takes less effort, do something you’ve done a hundred times before, hoping that maybe -just maybe- something new will arise. It’s Phoenix-thinking: believing something exciting will emerge even…
-
The Roads Just Taken
I know we should be thankful for what we have, and not be upset about what we don’t, but sometimes these things arrive as gifts: wind rustling through the leaves on a hot summer day, or creeks babbling like children playing behind a thicket of bushes just off the trail. It’s things like this, for…
-
The Fall of Man
I feel I should tell you about falling on the Whanganui River -only metaphorically speaking, of course: one happens on a river, or less romantically, falls in; falling on is different. Very different. Falling, of course is not as easy as it looks; one has to forget about things to fall: the roughness of the…
-
Searching for Muesli
Muesli. There was a time when I didn’t know what it was; maybe nobody did. But then they did, and I was caught unawares. Those were innocent times, to be sure, and yet I suppose I was raised that way: be aware of what’s around you, but don’t poke at it; never disturb anything that…
-
Life in the endgame
I guess I’m up for it; I mean things have been working out for me for too long on this trip, and change is always therapeutic, eh? You can’t live forever in a candy store without getting some cavities along the way, I suppose. I was looking forward to this part of the trip at…
musingsonwomenshealth.com 