In this issue

1. My image of the week

2. Frontispiece

3. A Wisdom of owls and other birds

4. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

5. Bookends

My image of the week

Frontispiece

Apologies

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Good morning everybody:

If this week’s edition of the newsletter appears a little truncated and brief, I apologise.

There are reasons.

I’ve been having some me-time, spending the last week with my Significant Other, Sarah, who has managed to escape from Northland and make it down here to Southland. We haven’t seen each other for four months, so this has been a very special time for both of us. As you can well imagine, my mind really hasn’t been on the newsletter, however, as the American poet Robert Frost puts it in his glorious little poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:

On Thursday we were working in the garden, and I was moving a newly planted pot, and a heavy one at that, when I suddenly collapsed and smashed my right hand in the fall. That meant spending time at the local health centre, while they x-rayed the damage and then sent me home. Typing has suddenly become somewhat of a mission.

Balanced against that is the fact that the readership of this newsletter has continued to climb (rather wonderfully in fact!), and I am very conscious of the commitment and obligation to make the Sunday morning deadline. Now I know how newspaper journalists feel. In the back of my mind, I see Clark Kent arguing with Perry Mason.

Anyway, the newsletter has begun to write itself, and it has its own imperatives to be followed. I’m just content to wander along behind and allow it to happen.

This week's newsletter seems to have taken a particularly avian direction.

So I hope that you find stuff in here that will be of value to you.

A wisdom of owls and other birds

Photography is rather like Dr Caligari's Cabinet of Infinite Curiosities in many ways.

Imagine one of those beautiful old wooden cabinets beloved of homoeopaths or practitioners of natural medicine. The cabinet is richly-timbered and beautifully made, with every joint a work of art. It contains many drawers, each carefully labelled, each with a different solution or remedy therein. It is a place for perusing and careful storage.

In many ways, photography is like that. Each of the drawers contains a specialised subset of the whole. We can choose to be generalists, taking a little from each one, or we can choose to open one entirely and immerse ourselves in its contents.

The choice is ours.

I often meet photographers who have yet to choose into which drawer they will dive. They will often say to me:

"I'm just having so much fun trying out different sorts of photography. But I have still haven't decided which one I really want to go with."

That tells me a lot about what point on the road they have reached. And I know that they will find which drawer they want to open and immerse themselves one day.

Bird photography or the photography of birds is one such. Birders, as they like to be known, are a very specialised subset. You can see them out there with their super-lenses, or not see them, because they are spending long hours skulking in a camouflaged hide. Birders seem to be a particularly tenacious and passionate group. They are happy to spend long hours sitting, waiting for almost nothing to happen.

Photographing birds isn't easy. However, this is one area where gear does matter, along with enormous patience and an impeccable sense of timing.

Doing it well is far from easy. Yet, every so often, I see something that is truly extraordinary.

Graham Dainty is one of Te Anau's remarkably-skilled group of photographers. Graham has been in the amateur photography scene for many years and is one of the country's senior practitioners. He has more letters to his name than a packet of alphabet soup.

I never really thought of him as a bird photographer until I visited him and saw his picture of a native New Zealand falcon, a karearea, staring at me ferociously out of a picture frame on his wall.

Then he showed me his ruru, our small native New Zealand owl, and I was blown away. It is as if each of these birds is staring deep into our heart and soul; as if it knows us better than we know ourselves, and it is asking uncomfortable questions of us.

It's a tradition within bird photography (or that is the way it seems to me) that it is essential to show the bird doing what it does (i.e. fly) or give some sense of its natural habitat. Unfortunately, all forms of photography contain a great deal of plagiarism and cliché: the albatross cuts the water with the edge of one wingtip, or the gannet flies in to land amongst its colony.

I get that.

However, what do you do once you've made the perfect homage to the ideal(ised) bird photograph?

You communicate with the bird itself rather than the consummatel bird photograph that will win awards.

Remember, all photographs are not photographs of something.

They are beautiful records of the space between the conversation between you and your subject.

They emerge in the Void between the two communicants.

This brings me back to Graham's pictures.

He has been in Fiordland for more than two decades, and is deeply, passionately in love with the place and all the creatures that live here.

And it shows.

I look at the two pictures of the birds, each one staring deep into my soul, and I'm in absolute awe of what he has achieved.

He has taken the photography of birds to an entirely new level, somehow blending portraiture and bird photography.

These pictures break the mould of the bird photography convention. Instead, they sit in a space closer to great portraiture.

There are very few bird photographs I would happily hang on my wall and add to my small collection of art treasures, but either of these I would consider pinnacles, works that would offer me something new each day.

Great pictures are like that.

They are the blessings that keep on blessing.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

David Whyte on Vulnerability, Presence, and How We Enlarge Ourselves by Surrendering to the Uncontrollable — www.brainpickings.org

“Vulnerability is a guardian of integrity,” artist and unheralded philosopher Anne Truitt wrote as she contemplated what sustains the creative spirit.

When the song dies — psyche.co

Beautiful!

Freshlyground - Nomvula (After The Rain) — music.youtube.com

Music video by Freshlyground performing Nomvula (After The Rain).

Poulet au Vinaigre (Chicken in Vinegar) — www.eatingwell.com

This classic French dish is typically made with a cut-up whole chicken. But using just one part of the bird, in this case thighs, ensures that the pieces are done at the same time. Serve this saucy braise with mashed potatoes. Pat chicken dry and season with 1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper.

Collective Nouns For Birds — www.birdspot.co.uk

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A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James Baldwin on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe — www.brainpickings.org

“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour.

End Papers

The joy of the morning

I think I’ve written this before.

I get up very early most mornings. Some of my best thinking comes in the sacred space between 3 and 5 am, when the walls between the worlds are thin. I wait for that delicate moment when the tightly-closed door of the night cracks open ever so slightly and allows the entrance of the day.

If I am lucky, I will make it outside before the birds clear their throats and begin their morning ritual.

Each morning the parliament of blackbirds assembles. The Speaker of the House usually appears on the peak of the roof of the house next door. He calls the House to order and clearly, he has a long line of instructions to recite because he goes on for quite some time.

Then after he has finished, other birds stand to speak. First, there is the bird a few metres away in the sycamore, followed by the blackbird in the kōwhai tree down the street. Then, bit by bit, others join in until a glorious layered web of sound and communication has formed. I have no idea what they are saying, but they all appear to know what they are on about.

Every day there is a wondrous ritual as the web forms and the debating chamber fills until the air is vibrating with a spidery sonal network. (Apparently, the collective noun for blackbirds is a grind, but I wonder if parliament is a better word, or perhaps a politician of blackbirds…)

And it happens every day.

Without fail.

Perhaps it is a reminder that our human woes and worries will not change anything and that life in all its wonder will go on.

With or without us.

He mihimihi nunui arohaa ki a koe. Kia pai tou raa.

Much love to you all.

And have a wonderful day.

Afterthought (PS)

Clinomania (n.)

Excessive desire to stay in bed.

Example: I definitely have clinomania; I love sleeping, making mornings a struggle for me.

(Not me, of course. I am up waay too early).