In this issue

1. My Print of the Week

2. Frontispiece

3. Moving God's rays-or the flawed nature of memory

4. Summer Rainhawk (a poem)

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

6. Endpapers

My Print of the Week

The snowfall of June 2013 was, according to some of the old-timers who lived in the Maniototo district, the worst they could remember in their lifetimes.

In a district dependent on farming for its income, including all the support industries, this is one of the worst things that could happen.

The snow fell, and it fell, and it fell some more. Then, as if to drive the point home, it continued to fall.

When it finally began to ease off, the landscape had vanished under a deep blanket of white. Fence posts barely protruded above the snow, and all the natural rhythm of the landscape seemed squashed and suppressed.

I was heading down there to run my annual winter workshop. What should have been a five-hour drive turned into a thirteen-hour marathon. We ended up going around the long way, through Dunedin and Alexandra, and, even then, our chances of getting through were minimal. We weren't hopeful.

Finally, we found one route that would work (according to the locals) over Black's Hill and up the Ida Valley. When we finally arrived at Wedderburn, we were both exhausted from a long day on the road, and we tumbled into bed.

We arose the following day to a land blanketed and asleep. It was so quiet it seemed we could hear our breath freezing in soft shards of silence.

The road sweepers had been through in the night, clearing the snow to one side, and we gingerly inched our way into a landscape of white with small patches of darker tones from trees which protruded in staccato fashion it above the sensuous flow of the land.

Picking our way up to Naseby, I looked across into a field at this tree, somehow defiantly resisting being hidden. Somehow I saw a metaphor for courage in the face of adversity.

I waded through waist-deep snow, determined to honour it.

As I climbed back into the vehicle, the snow resumed, and soon the lone tree had disappeared behind a grey veil.

Please consider securing a copy for yourself if this scene resonates with you.

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Frontispiece

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Good morning everybody.

Te Anau has gone very quiet. This week, the word got around that COVID was in the basin. It had to happen. For nearly 2 years there has been none of it here. Now it has finally arrived in our beautiful community. People are isolating and hiding away.

People ask me how I am coping. Well, as a natural hermit, it isn't a big deal. The sun comes up and goes down, the birds come, and my tomatoes insist on growing despite me. This morning Taawhirimaatea has been blowing from the west, following the cycle of warm Northwest winds, still days, and chilly southerlies. The earth tips towards the east and Te Raa, the sun claws its way over the roof of the house next door.

Tenei te ra, o te koa.

This is a day of joy.

If we choose to see it as such.

I seem to have moved into a rhythm of teaching online, mentoring individual students, and running workshops for Fujifilm New Zealand from the comfort of my YouTube studio.

I love it!

It is a real joy to be able to share my knowledge with all of you.

I confess to being a little green-eyed. This week I did a talk to the Auckland Photographic Society, an amazing group of people, many of whom I know. What struck me, and made me a little envious, were the backgrounds, particularly those of you who have extraordinary bookcases groaning with artfully-arranged books. As we have moved to work from home more and more, people have been giving a lot of thought to what is behind them when they talk online.

Isn't it fabulous that we can talk kanohi ki te kanohi (face-to-face)? Once upon a time that would not have been possible. Our only way of communicating would have been by way of letters. And if our Significant Other lived on the other side of the planet, then weeks would have gone by between communications, with us making daily trips to the letterbox in the hope of hearing from them.

Now we can jump online and talk. There's a lot to be said for the Internet, for Zoom, and Teams. And perhaps is a lot to be said against it.

We are all connected more than we ever were.

Each of us is a single knot in the Great Net of Life and Light.

Te Kupenga o te Ao Marama.

The Net of the World of Light.

Moving God's rays or the flawed nature of memory

Some weeks ago, a wonderful friend in Rawene rang me.

"I've been thinking," he said, "about that picture of yours you had in your gallery. I can't get it out of my head. I want to buy a copy of it if at all possible."

For those of you who don't have the back story to my life, in my three years living in Hokianga, I ran a small art gallery for my work. It was in the beautiful Wedge Building at the bottom of the main street near the ferry terminal. It was my gallery, workspace, and home for much of that time. It was a lovely space, and in the evenings, when everybody else had gone home or caught the ferry back across the water, I would take one of my chairs, place it outside on the footpath, pour myself a glass of wine, and watch the Taheke river on the other side of the road slither slowly past.

Hanging on my window was a picture of the church at Motukaraka on the opposite side of the harbour. So one afternoon, I went out for a short walk to see what was happening. I noticed one of those big busty fronts coming in from the west. It was full of pomp and circumstance, making its presence felt with dark clouds and rays of light shining down on the land. So I rushed away to find my camera, return and make a likeness of it.

Well, you would, wouldn't you?

In 2018 I closed down my gallery, packed up my pictures and came to live at the other end of the country, down here in the Te Anau Basin. The prints I had made languished in a corner because it was simply too much work to get them out and look at them.

Enter John. John and I are good friends and have been since my first half-hour of arriving in Hokianga. John is a retired Dutch engineer and runs a distinctly quirky but unique B&B in Rawene.

So it was lovely to hear from him, and I was thrilled that he wanted a copy of that image. Frankly, I'd forgotten all about it. I wasn't sure where to find it or which one it was, so I promised to look for it and send him a copy to make sure it was the correct one. I did that overnight.

The following day he rang me back.

"No, he said that is not the one. You know I told you that you could sell millions of copies of that print to all the Catholics in the district (he was ever a person to spot an opportunity). But, no, the one I remember had a ray of light shining down upon the church. In fact, I went and talked to Gaynor and David about it (my former landlords), and they remember the light shining upon the church as well."

He was convinced he was right.

I hunted through my image catalogue, looking to see if I'd made another one that did have the ray, but there was only the one completed work, and the beam had missed the church, falling just down and to its right.

I thought about it overnight, got up early the following day and made some adjustments (praise be to Photoshop), so the ray fell directly upon the church.

Then I phoned him back.

"I talked to God last night," I said, "and asked him if he wouldn't mind moving one of the rays of light to shine down upon his house of worship. Of course, he was happy to oblige, and I've sent you through a small image as you remember it."

He phoned me back.

"That is perfect," he said. "I will put the money in your account."

I printed and shipped it.

He now has it beautifully framed, hanging in a place of pride, with a special light to shine upon it.

Win. Win.

Last weekend I caught up with Werner and Ingrid, two dear friends who were forced to leave their home in Russell (visa issues) and move back to Germany.

"You know," Ingrid said, "remember that lovely picture of yours we purchased when you were living in Rawene? The one of the church on the other side of the harbour? Do you remember that we bought it from you? It's now framed and hanging on our wall here in Munich."

Now I remembered who had purchased it. So I told her the story about John and getting God to move the beam of light retrospectively.

"No," she said," the beam is definitely to the right of the church. I remember, when we bought it, how we talked about how perfect it would have been with the light shining down upon the church."

Aha.

I will probably never tell John about my conversation with Ingrid. He loves that work, and it is as he chooses to remember it. And, anyway, I love him dearly. His friendship is more important than some ego-driven self-righteous victory.

And they never are victories.

However, I think there is a lesson here.

It has to do with the nature of memory. It is this:

Memories are so unreliable at best. They are ephemeral, constantly changing and not to be trusted and held as gospel. Our memories are a product of the mind, and they change constantly. Time and time again, I have observed how two people can have a completely different memory of the same event, place and/or time.

Whenever I teach art or photography, I teach the importance of using a journal. It helps to lock memories, thoughts and ideas in space and time. A memory that you have written down becomes somehow concrete. It becomes immutable, and you can always refer back to it whenever you wish.

Using a journal enables you to take what is in your mind and place it out in front of yourself. You can then read, reflect and absorb it back into yourself for further exploration. It becomes a lovely circular process that enables you to build upon that memory or thought.

Memories are really possibilities dressed up as certainties.

Summer Rainhawk (a poem)

From time to time the words I assemble into patterns want to take the form of poetry. Of course, the hidden secret of poetry is that it is made to be read aloud rather than viewed visually.

There is something about a poem that transcends regular prose.

In many ways, it is the richest, most condensed way we can communicate.

If we have the courage to do it.

Summer Rainhawk

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

Whatever next? How plot grips us, from Dickens to Line of Duty

How we love plots – and how we look down our noses at them. Our plot hunger can be measured by the current provision of lavish, plot-heavy TV drama. First there were all those Scandi-noir murder mysteries.

20 Top Artists Reimagine Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe — www.wmagazine.com

Édouard Manet never intended to shock the bourgeoisie when he exhibited what’s now widely considered the world’s first modern painting: Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Every Loss Reveals What We Are Made of: Blue Bananas, Why Leaves Change Color, and the Ongoing Mystery of Chlorophyll — www.themarginalian.org

Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our improbable and finite lives — each yellow burst in the canopy a reminder t

A Largeness of Contemplation: Bertrand Russell on Intuition, the Intellect, and the Nature of Time — www.brainpickings.org

Albert Einstein, in contemplating the human “passion for comprehension,” asserted that every true theoretical physicist is “is a kind of tamed metaphysicist” — a rather controversial statement amid a culture increasingly bent on disentangling science and philosophy (which used to be called

This Village in Sicily Is Shaped Like a Human Being — mymodernmet.com

One of the beauties of aerial photography is the ability to see what's familiar in a whole new way. That was certainly true for photographer Pio Andrea Peri, who used his drone to photograph his hometown on the Italian island of Sicily.

Photographer Captures the Candy-Colored Beauty of a Pink Lagoon in Australia — mymodernmet.com

We're used to seeing sparkling blue, green, and crystal waters, but sometimes, nature throws a curveball. Located on the west coast of Australia is a candy-colored body of water called Hutt Lagoon.

It’s not science vs religion but each one via the other — aeon.co

To riff on the opening lines of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution (1996), there is no such thing as a science-religion conflict, and this is an essay about it.

Pierre Bonnard at the Tate: the surprising reasons we love art — theconversation.com

“Why do people love Pierre Bonnard so much?” asks The Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle in his review of the painter’s current show at London’s Tate Modern. There are obvious reasons: his rich colour, his warm light, his human intimacy.

Lovemaking for longevity : a recipe from Tokyo’s imperial archives — aeon.co

For more than 1,000 years, the Imperial Family of Japan and its physicians have preserved a treasure of oriental medicine: the complete 30 scrolls of the Ishinhō, or the ‘heart of medical prescription’.

Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece — www.theatlantic.com

In his 2-million-word journal, the transcendentalist discovered how to balance poetic wonder and scientific rigor as he explored the natural world.

End Papers

Some thoughts on reef fish

Many years ago (perhaps even a lifetime), when I was a modern parent, Saturdays were about taking children to sport. We would usually split up, with my wife taking our daughter swimming and me taking my son to whatever sport he was doing at the time.

We enrolled him with the local rugby club in their Under-eight category one winter. This meant practices on Wednesday nights and games on Saturday mornings.

Ah yes, Saturday morning sport. Parents who secretly wished they had been considered for the All Blacks and were convinced their child had what it took to become one all lined up shoulder to shoulder to become an All Black by proxy.

The boys would come together, led by their coach and trained by their parents (who knew all there was to know about rugby!), and trot out onto the field.

Once things got underway, the boys would run around chasing the ball, reef fish rushing this way and that, or desperate to get their hands on the ball. Despite their best attempts, they completely forgot the instructions of their parent coaches about positional play and the positions they were supposed to be playing. As the game went on, the shouting from the sideline rose tinged with not a little frustration.

And my own son dutifully followed along. I strongly suspect he had no idea what was going on.

One day he was dribbling along at the back of the pack when a seagull flew overhead. He came to a halt, looked up at it, waved happily, and shouted in a small boy voice:

"Hello, Seagale."

He stared at it for a time, lost in wonder, then seemed to remember why he was out there on the field and wandered back to join the reef fish chasing the bait.

It occurred to me this week that, in many ways, what is going on in the world at the moment is rather like all those small boys chasing a rugby ball, which bounces this way and that and has everybody's attention.

perhaps we are all reef fish, following Our bait lai us.

Perhaps the answer is to follow our own joy.

Perhaps we should all wave at seagales.

A request

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 to help. 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.

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

Ka mihi nunui arohaa ki a koutou

Much love to you all