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  • Breathing Light - Issue #8-Of Change, Projects and the Importance of Moment

Breathing Light - Issue #8-Of Change, Projects and the Importance of Moment

September 5th, 2021

In this issue

  1. Image of the Week

  2. Front End

  3. What I am working on at the moment

  4. The Importance of Moment

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

  6. Backend Bookends

Image of the week

“You are not separate from the whole.

You are one with the sun, the earth, the air.

You don’t have a life.

You are life.”

― Eckhart Tolle

Front end

I nearly didn't make it to the publish line today.

Again.

I have a bit (Kiwi understatement for a lot) on at the moment (don't we all?)

I have less than a fortnight to find somewhere to live, along with packing up and getting out of the place which has been my home for the last three years.

Doing this in a pandemic and lockdown makes it even more problematic. My deepest wish is to go north and be with my Sarah; however, I can't see that happening any time soon with the country in lockdown. The interisland ferries aren't running for passengers, and there is a border in the way called Auckland.

So, for now, it would seem I will hunker down here in Te Anau, on the edge of Fiordland. If I miss the next couple of issues, please forgive me. I will be back.

I have been walking around my home, mentally cataloguing what will stay and what I will take with me. This has led to considering how much stuff we really need and what we can discard to lighten our lives and hearts. Perhaps it is because this is a focus for me at this time. Still, lately, I seem to be having many conversations with people who are also lightening their load, dumping unnecessary possessions and decluttering.

I think that the pandemic is having a profound effect on the way we live our lives and how we interact with each other.

Perhaps for the better.

And I am fascinated by how many people seem to have disrupted and/or strange sleep patterns. Is it me or many of you doing sleep in patches?

I would love to know.

What I am working on at the moment

He Haerenga | A Journey

As a few of you know, I have another kaupapa ( mission). About 30 years ago, I met a tohunga from Ngāi Tuhoe, the Māori tribe whose land is Central North Island. He spent a little time introducing me to IO Matua Kore, the old spiritual ways and worldview preceding European colonisation.

Seventeen years later, he took me under his wing and taught me more. A lot more. And then he gave me the kaupapa to encode these learnings into a form accessible to everyone, regardless of ethnicity or belief.

It took me seven years of work to do this. But, first, I had to find a way, learn how to do it, and finally bring them into concrete reality.

In 2017 I released an initial run of 200 sets, which sold out quickly.

Each card in the deck has its own ahua (face) on one side and, on the back, an explanation, life lesson and affirmation.

There were 78 of these in the initial deck.

Until now.

Lately, I have been feeling pulled back to work on them again, refining many and bringing new ones into being and incorporating wisdoms I have learned along the way.

I do not know where the deck will settle in terms of total numbers at this time, but I have a sense of 108 being the new destination.

For those of you dear readers wondering how I do it, I use fractal generation software with a final polish in PhotoShop. As a result, each image can have up to 15 layers before it finally resolves itself. It is really intense work, requiring focus and concentration as I feel/intuit my way with them.

What is a fractal? Put one way, a repeating pattern in Nature or pure mathematics, the language of the Universe (you can read more about fractals in the link section below).

The header image for this section is a composite of three, from left to right,

  1. Ngaa Hau e Wha |The Four Winds,

  2. Rehua | the God(ess) of Infinite Peace, and

  3. Māui | the Archetypal Trickster.

And below, an example of one card, both face and back.

The importance of Moment (or the moment between)

Things to mess with your mind

I guess each of us has an image that talks to us for years and constantly asks us questions.

Allow me to share one of mine.

Somewhere back down the years, I was standing out on the land, making likenesses of it (my waffly way of saying I was photographing the landscape), and a thought came to me.

What is happening inside my camera while my mirror is up?

Is there something mysterious going on?

If time is continuous, perhaps something is going on that I cannot see while my viewfinder is blacked out?

Will the exposure show me what happened/passed by in that moment of blindness?

That has no relevance for those born to the mirrorless system because you are photographing without a viewfinder blackout. Those of us who have been around and grew up on D(S)LRs, know that when you press the shutter, the mirror gets up out of the way to allow light to reach the sensor/film. So, for a time, you cannot see the scene through the viewfinder. A certain amount of trust and hope is needed.

One day, this worm of thought found its way above ground into reality.

I was wandering around Bo Kaap, the Malay quarter of Capetown, famous for its brightly painted houses, looking to make photographs. As you do,

I climbed some stairs into a courtyard/parking lot when I saw this bright orange facade. And, since the art of photography lies in framing, I was lining everything up in my viewfinder, so it was rectilinear (the result of years of painstakingly working with a view camera) to make the picture just so.

The sun was high in the sky and above my left shoulder.

Satisfied with the design, I pressed the shutter. The viewfinder blacked out, and for a moment, I was blind.

Then normal transmission resumed.

It was only later while studying the file on my laptop, that I saw the shadow on the wall.

In that timeless moment of exposure, while I was blind, a bird had flown across the sun and cast its shadow on the wall.

And I have often wondered how many other things across the years have passed unnoticed while my viewfinder was blacked out.

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

On a sweltering summer’s day five years ago, as I returned to my rented home in the holy city of Varanasi in India, I was greeted by an astonishing sight: a blue-eyed white man, dressed only in a thin orange cloth knotted around his waist – the garb of a baba or holy man.

Laura Beloff's plant seemed to be clicking. She had rigged its roots up to a contact microphone in order to detect faint, high-pitched clicks in the soil.

I am a born executive. I am obsessed with efficiency and detached from my emotions. I share similarities with Margaret Thatcher and Harrison Ford. I am among 2% of the general population, and 1% of women.

“Against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic, unexampled 1937 essay Undersea...

A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.

On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) delivered one of the most extraordinary speeches of all time — a sweeping meditation on the life of the mind, the purpose of education, the art of creative reading, and the building blocks of of genius.

With the rise of increasingly convenient features such as street-level 360º photos available on Google Maps and other competing mapping services, there’s always a risk your personal data will be captured in a publicly available photo in a way you’d rather avoid—whether than means the outside

Backend

When I was writing my book Raahui last year, a prayer came to me in the early hours of one morning. So it seems appropriate to share it again now. It may be of help in these troubled times.

Ngaa mihi ki a koutou

Much love to you all

Prayer of Weaving

Let us weave a prayer of light

Let us weave a prayer of night

Let us weave a prayer of water

Let us weave a prayer of all that is blue

Let us weave a prayer of trees

Let us weave a prayer of all that is green

Let us weave a prayer of earth

Let us weave a prayer of all that is red

Let us weave a prayer of breathing

Let us weave a prayer of all that is air

Let us weave a prayer of gold

Let us weave a prayer of all that is Love

Let us weave a prayer of threads without ends or beginnings

Let us weave a prayer of connection

With, from, and to

The Ground of All Being.

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