When losing your way is better than finding it ....

The day started with high hopes. We were off at the end of a long hot week on a day that started with mist and rain to go on an " art in the garden " tour.  Sounds like great fun. It is - especially when you get to the Taeiri plains with only a map of Christchurch to guide you. (Of course your failings win again -For me,  I am great with the overall concept and fall short on the details - like knowing where exactly we were supposed to  be going )    So it was a mystery tour through the back streets of Wingatui.  So much to see and do. First stop - the topiary hedge

 

Followed by the good luck of finding chicken manure for just $5 for a hefty sack - ( my compost sighs with relief- now we can get some heat cranked up in there) - then as luck would have it we stumbled across one of the gardens. This is my favourite image from that place. 

 

Not one of the art works - but far more evocative and meaningful at least to me of anything we saw. We slunk in and out of that garden and right there and then ditched the rest of the tour.  

I can tell you are wondering about the apricots  in the first picture?  What? you couldn't care less about them?  Let me show you a thing or two you can do with apricots. 

 

you can take a photo of them...

 

..or you can turn them into jam and chutney. The jam I am especially pleased with because you make it in the microwave.  To be truthful I do not really use my microwave for cooking ,but I was inspired to try this recipe because it promised - full flavour and no possibility of burning the jam. The recipe was as good as its word. The jam is great and so so easy. 

Here is the recipe. 

4cups of cooked apricots. ( put raw and stoned apricots in microwave and cook for20 mins) Then add 4 cups of sugar to apricot pulp. Cook 20 mins in microwave. Bottle in clean jars and cover when cool. The chutney recipe is another gem from the Stewart Island cook book. I was especially happy making it because this week we are going to Stewart Island for one week before Rosie goes back to Wellington. I am looking forward to it. After that it will be back to sending parcels. 

Yours in anticipation 

Marg

600 Minutes of Gratitude.

This summer among others I have been reading "Creative journal writing" by Stephanie Dowrick 
 I've been having a go at some of the exercises and one that I'm persisting with is 600 minutes of gratitude. That means that for 60 days you have to write for ten minutes about things you are grateful or thankful for. Easy peasy right? No, wrong. Day one was pretty easy- could think of lots of things, day two found me being grateful I did not live in London at the time of the bubonic plague, day three I was grateful that I now only have one elderly cat to care for. As you can see quite a challenge in the early stages,  but to my surprise I find myself at now around day 20 being somewhat less superficial. Actually I am using the concept in a far more sensible way.  Friday was a particularly challenging day because I had a very painful and honest conversation with a friend which left me feeling very bruised. later in the day as I was thinking about the epsiode I was thankful that I could see the part I played in it and how my actions had given rise to the misunderstanding. I felt that in writing it I could learn from it and I was thankful for that. Also it has pretty much helped let the whole thing go and so I've enjoyed every minute of this lovely weekend. 

One of the really fun things I did was  a 15km walk called the peninsula challenge. It's a fundraiser for the Otago peninsula trust which seeks to protect the wildlife there. Because the track takes you over 10 private properties you get to see scenery that is otherwise inaccessible. Take a look at these. 

 

the start line is way down the bottom by the trees at the start of the walkway to Allans beach.

 It doesn't look that steep but you can kind of tell that these people are finding it hard. 

we made our way carefully down this hill and were ferried across the estuary in motorboats to get to Victory beach 

There you can see Victory beach in the distance - home to very large sea lions!!

Here's me at the finish line. One of my friends had arranged a bottle of bubbly at the end along with plastic champagne glasses.  Hip hip hooray ,3 cheers to us! What a fun day.

Here's to a fun week. 

Marg

Walks that leave you weary but happy.

Part of me wants to apologise for yet again showing you photos of my garden but the other part just wants you to enjoy the growth that has occurred despite the very indifferent summer we have had and sporadic bursts of input from me.

I love how things grow with or without me and I am amazed at what a constant source of pleasure it is to me as I look out on it as I sit at my dining table. When I look at the garden, I often see my neighbours white cat sitting on top of the fence gazing down  and  I am reminded of Rapunzels mother who looked longingly at the lettuces in the witches garden and sent her poor husband to steal some.

At work I am known for overestimating my capacity to achieve and underestimating the enormity of the task I have set myself. (by contrast I think a definition of anxiety is overestimating the task and underestimating one's ability to achieve the task). At times the same applies to my non work life. Last year I was determined to walk my way entirely through this great book which charts pretty much all of Dunedin's walk ways. Im not sure how many weekends I thought there were in a year but is clear that I miscounted. I think I need about 250 weekends to do all of these. Anyway last week as a preparation for the peninsula challenge this coming weekend I walked one of the very lovely tracks in this book. It was the walk from Henley through to Taeiri Beach. About 10 km in total.  There's quite a lot of going up and down which gives the track a cassification of moderate to hard but it's such an enjoyable walk that it's well worth doing whatever the weather.  I was weary but happy at  the end.

Here's a couple of photos along the way to inspire you.

Have a great inspirational week everyone.

cheers Marg

 

Holidays, Volcanoes and Back to Work.

2010 has started well for me so far. Chiefly because for the first time in what feels like years I've had 3 weeks off all in a row.  I could get used to it so it's just as well I'm back to work tomorrow.

Last week I made sure there was enough food in the house and petrol in the car so Rosie and Tom would not notice my absence and went to spend a week with George and his kids  in Masterton.
                                                        

Having a holiday with a sibling is fun because after so many years of independent living it's like getting to know a new person without all the hard work because there are still so many familiarities. On the day I arrived we went to the latest exhibition at Te Papa.    . " A day in the life of Pompeii".  It was amazing. I would go to Wellington just to see that on it's own. Did you know that before Vesuvius, the Romans had no word for Volcano? They had never experienced one before. So when the mountain was erupting they had no way of knowing what was going to happen next and of course no evacuation plan or disaster relief package. Things don't change much over the years. Look at what has happened this last week in Haiti.

Anyway moving on - the Pompeii exhibition seemed to develop a focus for our holiday because we decided that we would spend a few days checking out some of our own volcanoes. We mapped out a journey that would take us up past Ruapehu, and then include having a go at the Tongariro crossing.   
And finally if time allowed we would look at Mount Egmont. 

For me the highlight of the trip definitely  had to be the day we spent walking up in the mountains although the little boys would disagree. They did well . Reuben is only 7 and that day he walked over 15 kms.

Words often seem to me to be such an inadequate way to communicate the depth of an experience. If only we were more highly evolved creatures we could look into the eyes of another and they would immediately understand how we felt.   Perhaps some photos might do the trick.

 

 

Lastly here's a photo of something we saw at the Turangi national trout centre whcih made me think about how we understand our day to day reality.

We went to the viewing chamber where you can see the trout under the water. It immediately made me think of the Truman Show. Do you think those trout know there is a world that exists above the water? A huge, vast world that is inaccessible to them? What say there is a world just outside our line of sight? What would we think if only we knew how to see it?

Well enough from me I think. Yes it's time I went to work and started thinking sensible thoughts.

Have a great sensible week everyone. Cheers Marg

Imagine ....

Imagine way back at the start of 2009 that you wrote in the journal of sorts that you keep when the mood takes you, that this year you'd like to make a coat.  You thought to yourself that it would be a lovely coat with beautiful lining. You imagined yourself wearing such a coat. You thought it might look a little like this.

The only trouble is that when you imagine something there is frequently a very large gap between what you see in your mind's eye and reality itself.  Somewhere in the imagining the voices of commonsense and reason come knocking at the door.  Of course you don't answer it and certainly don't listen when they ask 


" Excuse me ma'am, do you actually know how to sew a coat?"
" Have you had much sewing experience?" 

So you forge ahead - you attend the course that helps you sort the pattern out.. you buy the fabric... you imagine the coat... you imagine the coat some more. You put the fabric away  so you don't have to look at it any more ... and then your sister Maryanna   

suggests you bring the coat stuff with you when you come up to Miri's for Christmas because she will be there too. 

Here they are the miracle workers. Maryanna who generously gave up 3 days of her holiday to give a personalised sewing tutorial on coat making and Miri (with Jude who slept in the tent so the Aunties could have a room to sleep in) who supplied endless amounts of  home baking, good company and wonderful hospitality.

The gap has been closed. What was imagined became real!  I have a coat with beautiful lining.  It is better than what I imagined.  Thank you everyone.


I wonder what I might imagine for myself in 2010??


Happy wondering and dreaming to you all as we move into 2010.


Cheers Marg

A parcel of my own !!

 

 

 

 

 

 Today something very exciting happened.!! Tom rang me at work to say that a parcel had arrived - it was from America! Who could it be from? Let me tell you - it was from this amazingly talented  artist called Christy.  You can find out all about her here: http://thehouseofnana.blogspot.com/

You know I'm not even supposed to get this parcel yet. I'm paying it off in installments. That's how I buy art. In fact when my hot water cylinder was leaking and close to blowing up I went and made my first deposit on a screen print by Dunedin artist GillianPope.  The woman who let me pay off the painting said she was proud of me for choosing art over hot water.( she is saleswoman through and through) I have never regretted that choice although my power bills were exceedingly high that winter.

I really loved this painting when I saw it on Christy's etsy shop but I can't tell you how lovely it is in real life. The colours have a depth and intensity that you can't really see from the photo and the painting has a prescence that's also hard to describe. What I really love about it is it reminds me of the collection of old irons my dad had scattered round his place - it connects me to times and places I remember from my childhood and I love the domesticity of the iron. ( not that mine gets much use) So thank you Christy - I will get so much pleasure from this painitng.

Finally  and just because it's nearly Christmas - here's my knitted nativity set out on show for the festive season. Did you notice the knitted santa propped drunkenly beside the shepherds. Like he's had too much to drink and fallen out of his sleigh and landed with a thud beside the sacred scene. He was a bargain today for just $2 at the St Vincent de Paul shop. I was ostensibly out on a work based errand and just had to pop in on my way back to work.  Luckily at this time of year my colleagues are willing to be be generous towards my failings. 

So what an exciting day and it's not even Christmas.  Enjoy a light hearted, looking forward to Christmas fun- filled week. Marg

Why are endings always harder ?

Well I just had to show how my garden progresses and I have to say I'm getting more than my share of enjoyment out of my tiny plot. It's over planted and there is no coherent plan or record keeping going on just lot's of planting and some watering. And  I'm proud to say we ate all of the first spinach crop this weekend just gone. Spinach and feta fritters. Very tasty.

This week I've been overwhelmed with trying to finish things and been thinking a bit how often beginnings are spoken of as being difficult but in my experience it's the endings that are messy and hard to navigate. This year I got a small scholarship to find out about the experiences of teachers as they move into late career. While I was on leave for the first 6 months of the year and working for what is known as the "dark side" I got to travel a lot and had plenty of time to think and  read and get onto this study. Since I've been back at my real job  I have found myself so unmotivated and almost at the point of mental paralysis when it comes to writing up my findings. I have not done what I need to and in the process have also not done what I want to do . Now it's crunch time. The report has to be submitted by Friday. Finishing this thing, getting it onto paper and ending it is like a refined form of torture. It's not that the topic hasn't been intriguing and relevant it has - it's just not done. That's the problem.

It reminds me of another form of torture I subjected myself for a lot longer than I ought to have simply because I couldn't bring myself to end it. That was when I used to get a monthly massage from a naturopath who was not only poorly qualified but also terrrible at the art of massage. It was not relaxing, or refreshing. It was awful. The person in question used to talk all the way through the session - there was no soft relaxing mood music , no nice oil burning in the background and no soft lights. No - there were hard hands and  bad monologue. I heard all about the bad mariage, the arsehole of an ex , the troublesome teens and I lay there like a slab of meat being pounded for the barbeque  month afer month. Finally I got stronger in myself to ask the question? Am I enjoying this? Is this fun? Is this in my best interests?   I had my answer and after that I never went back. 

That's another question I've been pondering a lot lately. Asking myself which of all the things I do and agree to do are in my best interests. That is a hard one and one that sometimes people around me resist as I try to do   what is right for me .Recently I have been called selfish and heartless because I declined an invitation to do something with some people. I'm getting better at living with criticism as well. So much so that when the young girl told me recently that the machine had diagnosed my skin age as being that of a 47 year old and how terrible that was and that now I had to buy expensive products to repair the damage I just laughed and told her but of course my skin is 47 years old as am I!! And no thanks to the skin products.  Sunscreen will do the trick.

So make this week one in which you put your own best interests first.  You'll be glad you did. Cheers Marg