In this issue

1. Image of the Week

2. Front End-on Plans and Not-plans

3. On Mono No Aware- The Impermanence of Being

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

5. Backend

Image of the week

Front end

On Plans and Not-Plans

I know something about being homeless.

I have slept on park benches, in shelters and my car.

It isn't fun.

It isn't romantic.

Actually, it is horrible.

And so, last week, as I put out the last newsletter, I was in a state of panic.

Then things turned around.

An angel appeared from the darkness and offered me a wee place to live in for the near future. So this week I am moving. About a kilometre away from where I am now. Ha.

There is a lot to do in the next week.

It is quiet, private and will enable me to stay for some time while I work on the project I described last week. Unfortunately (and excitingly), what seemed to be a simple renovation of the house of cards is turning into a major rebuild that will take some time.

However, for now, I am thrilled and grateful.

I can sit here a while longer in Te Anau on the edge of Fiordland, in the shadow of Te Puhi a Noa, the Murchison Mountains.

Sometimes, for a treat (and to get out of my head), I will stop by the local service station, buy a large latte, and then drive down to the edge of the lake and be with the water and the soft, pure winds whispering across the mountains.

Te taiao. Te tai-a IO. Nature.

It is enough. It is more than enough.

My father would often say:

"Today is tomorrow's yesterday."

It took me a long time to understand that.

This leads me to the next section...

On Mono No Aware- The Impermanence of Being

Over the years, I have become more and more interested in Eastern Art and philosophy, particularly how it contrasts with Western thought, which underlies Western Art and art practice.

Until Eastern belief and practice came to the West in the 1960s, bringing meditation, Buddhism and yoga ( and Dong Bao Chicken!), the western world had been heavily influenced by two millennia of Christian thought.

In many ways, a fundamental pillar of our western culture has been concerned with duality, the contrast/battle between good and evil, while in the East, it has been about the "is-ness" of life and existence.

The western mind sits at the centre and looks outwards for understanding, while the eastern mind seeks inwards to the centre. So the Western mind acts from the inside out, while the Eastern works from the outside in.

The western mind seeks to understand while the eastern mind seeks to inner-stand.

Lately, I have been visiting Japanese concepts and how they express themselves in art. And in my art.

And one, in particular, has struck a chord.

Mono no Aware. The sadness of the impermanence of Being.

It began with a conversation.

"It is great where you live. You get four seasons. Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. You can set your life by those."

Really? Can anyone do that in these C-19 days?

"Yes. Now we have Spring. Spring has come."

And when does that happen? How do I know? Is it the appearance of daffodils? Is it the sakura (cherry blossom) flowers? Does a single blossom signal a definitive moment to mark the arrival of Spring? Is it daffodil #1? Is it a shift in the light, in the weather? Is Spring a definable reality or just a convenient bookmark in the Julian calendar?

Or is it a natural flow, an overlap between Winter and Spring? Maybe the seasons overlap in a continuously smooth progression? Maybe seasons are the product of the dualistic western mind, which needs to package everything conveniently?

Anyway, Spring is an ever-shifting definition, not a prepackaged convenience product. So every year, this ephemeral concept labelled Spring comes, yet it is quite different from the year before.

In what passes for a vegetable patch beside my back door, the docks have been sitting, waiting. Their stalks are festooned with dark gnarled seed, waiting for the moment when the wind will sweep up the seed, gather it into its diaphanous hands, and then scatter it far and wide into the field behind my home. They have become a kind of metronome for me; a tick-tock to mark the passing of the year.

How to show that transition from one season to another, from life to death and rebirth.

Perhaps it is not about labels, for labels are too easy.

Perhaps it is about a change in the energy of Nature.

I plucked a couple of stalks ( I apologised to the docks for interrupting their purpose) and then put them in the ice freezer in my fridge.

After a couple of days, I took out the frozen slab, rested it on the windowsill in my kitchen, allowed it to melt a little, and then shone my small LED light onto it. Then made images.

And, after a time, there it was.

Mono no aware.

The melancholy of the impermanence of Being.

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

For 24 years, he couldn’t access his own garden. Lockdown changed that — www.stuff.co.nz

Dion Seeling has owned the Tauranga home he is living in for 25 years, but for the first 24 of those, he never went into the garden. “I wasn’t a gardener because of the access issues,” says the wheelchair user. “I had never been in the garden until this was done.”

Animals ‘shapeshifting’ in response to climate crisis, research finds

Animals are increasingly “shapeshifting” because of the climate crisis, researchers have said. Warm-blooded animals are changing their physiology to adapt to a hotter climate, the scientists found. This includes getting larger beaks, legs and ears to better regulate their body temperature.

Look into the secret world of numerology and puzzles in Bach — aeon.co

One elegant method of how this might be possible is through the medium of music, which – aside from lyrical content – has the advantages of neither needing visual representation nor a lexicon of phonic objects.

No Laughing Matter? What the Romans Found Funny — antigonejournal.com

Cicero advises that explaining a joke kills it.

How Computationally Complex Is a Single Neuron? — www.quantamagazine.org

Computational neuroscientists taught an artificial neural network to imitate a biological neuron. The result offers a new way to think about the complexity of single brain cells.

A Ghost of Evolution: The Curious Case of the Avocado, Which Should Be Extinct But Still Exists — www.brainpickings.org

In any market economy, it’s common sense that as soon as the consumer for a certain product ceases to exist, the product itself becomes moot and soon vanishes from stores. In nature, however — or market ecology, if you will — that need not necessarily be the case.

Why Whales Got So Big — www.theatlantic.com

It’s often said that the ocean releases them from the constraints of life on land. It’s actually the opposite. The first time I came face to face with a sea lion, I nearly screamed.

Backend

As I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter, the coming week will be busy and, I have no doubt, rather chaotic.

So, if I do not make it to the start line next Sunday, please forgive me.

I will be back the following week.

Mai te arohaa nunui ki a koutou

Much love to you all