In this issue

1. My print of the week

2. Frontispiece

3. On the arrival of autumn

4. Eating And Drinking Chapter Vi Poem by Khalil Gibran

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

6. Endpapers

My print of the week

Deep, deep down to the south of the West Coast of the South Island, about as far as you can drive before you run out of road, is the small fishing village of Jackson's Bay.

The government of the 1800s, flushed with self-importance and colonial hubris, decided to establish a settlement there. They found people willing to go and settle it. To make it easy for the new settlers, they drew out a map of the town from a comfortable office in Wellington, not realising that most roads and streets would be virtually vertical and climb the cliff sides.

When the new settlers arrived, they offloaded the cattle into the water and left them to swim for the shore. Then they unloaded the settlers and left them to it.

After two years of relentless rain, sandflies and mosquitoes, most of the settlers had had enough. Their food supplies were gone, and they were resorting to eating their seed potatoes. Then, finally, the Italians in the party shook their heads in disgust and moved away north towards Greymouth. Only the Irish settlers, notably the Nolan family, were stubborn enough to dig in and make a go of it.

They survived and even flourished. Then, in the 1960s, with the building of the Haast pass highway, civilisation finally came within a car's reach.

Not long after I quit my day job, I live down there for six months. It was wild, beautiful-and wet. I was, after all, living in a temperate rainforest.

One evening I drove down to the mouth of the Arawhata River, looking for photographs. There, on the beach, a piece of driftwood gazed out to sea, squinting inscrutably as the sun lowered itself over the edge of the horizon. It was as if it remembered those hopeful souls who came to make a new life for themselves one hundred and fifty years before.

If this scene resonates with you, please consider securing your own copy.

Five only prints. A2. Printed, signed and shipped to anywhere in Aotearoa.

Usually $600, $400 for this week only.

Oh, and there is a secret bonus for the next six people who order. Ring, message or email me ([email protected])

Frontispiece

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Living where I live, tucked away in a back-section off a cul-de-sac off a cul-de-sac off a side street, I am pretty much hidden, and, as a consequence, visitors are few and far between.

However, things being what they are these days, that's not necessarily a bad thing. And anyway, I'm pretty happy with my own company. I never cease to be amazed at how few arguments I have with myself and that, no matter which side I am taking, I am always correct.

The only regular visitors I have are Karl and Michelle, a husband-and-wife team who called by every fortnight to mow my lawns. They are a bright, breezy couple who whizz around and get the job done almost before they have arrived.

On Thursday just gone, Karl stopped for a chat. It turns out he was a farmer for twenty years, so he knows a lot about grass and how to get the best out of it. He commented that the grass tells him when it is autumn. According to him, there may not be much vertical growth because the grass is busy bulking out, greedily sucking up all the early-morning moisture and dew, and putting its energy into growing sideways rather than vertically.

I never knew that.

I spent the rest of the day peering suspiciously down at the lawn, admiring its subtle subterfuge.

Who would have thought that grass had a plan so cunning that a lawnmower wouldn't catch on?

I've decided that lawn grass is not to be trusted.

On the arrival of autumn

Technically, according to the Rataka, the solar calendar, this is the last weekend of summer. Somehow, if this is believed, summer ends today and autumn will magically appear tomorrow.

As if.

In fact-and in observation, over the last couple of weeks, I have been watching summer slowly and slyly passing the baton of the seasons to autumn behind its back. How do I know this? For several reasons.

About a fortnight ago, realising I needed something for dinner, I made my way down to the supermarket. It was a lovely warm afternoon with no wind, and it might as well have been summer-apart from the light. Nevertheless, there was a subtle shift in the energy and a slight change in the contrast between shadows and bright areas. The blue shadows of high summer were beginning to blush with a yellow-tinged warmth, and their angles had shifted and elongated.

When I looked around my garden, especially at my vegetables, I noticed that they seemed somehow different, as if they were relaxing after enduring the frenetic, crystalline vibration of summer. But, instead, there was a sense of them settling down on their haunches and waiting for the fulfilment of harvest time when their cycle would be complete.

I suddenly noticed a rime of dew delicately frosting the windscreen of my car first thing in the morning. And, when the sun clambers above the roof of the house next door, I can see the silver filigree of spider's webs knitting the morning air together.

Then the cherry tree at the front of my property, which has chimed the metronome of the seasons ever since I moved into this place last year, told me in no uncertain terms that autumn had arrived, and it was preparing for the deep slumber of winter. I happened to glance up into the cavern of green and suddenly saw several leaves tucked away, like yellow Post-it notes pinned to the branches.

Yesterday morning, when I walked to my front door to greet the day, a few had fallen onto the newly-mown grass. They lay there like resignation letters written on a yellow legal pad. Yet another reminder that the cycle of the year is nearly complete. This morning there were even more.

Then, when I went out to check my zucchini plant, which waits until my back is turned to morph its offspring from courgettes to marrows, there before me on the grass was a single brown leaf, forlorn, desiccated and metallic.

I love autumn. As the French author Albert Camus puts it:

So rather than dreading the imminent deep sleep of winter, I'm going to spend the next couple of months watching the splendour of yellowing leaves, the subtle song of softly sinking sap and the pungent aroma of damp decay.

It will soon be time enough to wrap myself in the white shroud of winter. However, for the next few weeks, I intend to put on the Technicolor dream coat of autumn and dance among the colours of falling and fallen leaves.

Eating Eating And Drinking Chapter Vi Poem by Khalil Gibran

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

John Muir on the Calm Assurance of Autumn as a Time of Renewal and Nature as a Tonic for Mental and Physical Health — www.themarginalian.org

In the final year of his twenties, penniless and hungry for meaning, John Muir (April 21, 1838–December 24, 1914) left the Wisconsin frontier, where his family had emigrated from Scotland two decades earlier in search of a better life, to wander across the wilderness of his new homeland.

Australia's X-rated underwater show — www.bbc.com

As owner of Whyalla Diving Services and a decades-long advocate for the Giant Australian cuttlefish, Bramley has observed the frenzied and colourful cuttlefish mating that occurs in South Australia's Upper Spencer Marine Gulf Park for years.

In Kashmir, indigenous Muslim healers cure broken bones with spirituality — and science — www.inverse.com

Ali Muhammad Chopan has been cracking other people’s bones back into place since he was 15 years old.

How chocolate went from exotic curiosity to worldwide commodity — aeon.co

At the end of the 17th century, Madrid started to be populated, especially around Calle de Postas and Plaza Mayor, by kiosks, stores and street vendors selling chocolate.

The Pablo Neruda Quote that Helps Me Understand Darkness.

This week I wanted to quit. The world simply felt like too much. And it felt like it was all mine to carry. No break, no respite. No one else to lighten my load and share the burden.

The Bauhaus Has Shaped Our World for 100 Years — www.artsy.net

The members of the Bauhaus coined a nickname for architect Walter Gropius, the idealistic founder and longtime director of their avant-garde school: Pius.

Reclaiming Friendship: A Visual Taxonomy of Platonic Relationships to Counter the Commodification of the Word “Friend” — www.brainpickings.org

Friendship, C.S. Lewis believed, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself … has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Spain's ingenious water maze — www.bbc.com

It's early. Fingers of sunlight are only just starting to creep along the streets of Valencia's Old Town, but the stalls inside the city's Mercado Central are doing a brisk trade already.

In Search of Troy — www.smithsonianmag.com

The last stretch of my journey began in a traffic-snarled resort town by the name of Canakkale, on the eastern shore of the Dardanelles Strait in northwestern Turkey.

End Papers

Well.

Each Saturday morning, when I get up and move into my day, there is really only one thought on my mind.

It is newsletter day.

It is a day on which I become a kind of virtual boatbuilder. While I can imagine myself creating a Viking longship or a trireme or a waka haurua, I doubt that it's anything quite that grand. So I've decided that it's probably one of those little paper boats with a candle inside.

And that is enough. Well, for me, at least.

So I try to use my talents for words and pictures to create something beautiful, of value, and perhaps to make as much of a difference in the world as one person sitting on the bottom end of the planet can.

Then, having done the best I can, I like the candle and cast it out into the current. Let the river take it where it will.

Of course, it is a labour of love and done for just that reason. I want to think that, in some way, it fulfils the three core values by which I try to live my life.

Arohaa

Whakapono

Rangimarie

Love

Truth

Peace

today's newsletter is my small way of trying to make a difference.

I hope you see it the same way.

These are terribly dark times, and this week they just got darker. Yet, I firmly believe that, however small our contribution may seem to us, it can be one paving stone on a path to making the world a better place.

So please, if you found this of value, and it brought you some joy, then please, please share it widely and freely. And perhaps invite the person you shared it with to join the community here at Breathing Light. That would mean a lot to me.

There are other things you can do. For example, you can order one of my limited-addition prints (you know I love making prints for people), or you might even consider gifting back the cost of a bag of coffee (my favourite is Jed's #4 espresso grind).

You can do it here.

Kiwibank

A.C Bridge

38-9022-0737143-01

Enough.

I was going to try to write something about what is happening in the world at the moment and Aotearoa New Zealand in particular; however, I'm going to leave the last word to the beautiful poet John Roedel, whose output is astonishingly prolific. He says it far better than I ever could.

E te whaanau, love light and blessings to all of you. Stay safe and stay positive.

Ka mihi nunui arohaa ki a koe

Much love to you all