Trees

Tall and magnificent
small and wizened,
everything in-between;
More than an oxygen pump,
not only a carbon sink,
More than beauty to the eye
or shade and shelter
and bringer of rain, 
Greater than
its gift to ecology,
A tree
- gift of Life to life.


Copyright © Kayleen White, 2020 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)

Mallacoota

As the devastating fires rage and those there shelter on the beach, here are some photos from 2006 when I was working near Mallacoota. The first photo is actually from the road to the town of Cann River - lovely, but you can see why the fires are so devastating, and how dangerous it would be for people there.

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2020 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)

Summer in our garden

 The "north paddock" is a little more overgrown than I like, the butterfly bush needs a massive prune, and some of the plants are suffering from the heat, but it's been a while since I posted any photos, so here goes . . .

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2019 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)

The start of people

A raw world

 - untamed, full of threats

but full of potential.

A new species

 - untamed, full of threats

but full of potential,

Competing

 - potential and threat

vying for dominion,

vying still,

albeit

with wisdom gained

at hard cost

to people and place

alike.

 


Copyright © Kayleen White, 2019 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)

A partial cross post: change - including a bit on sailing :)

This was originally published at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2010/07/transformation-and-change.html.

In seeking to accomplish this, I am very much aware that change is inevitable - it is one of the best lessons I learned from being Buddhist. It probably helps that I've seen so much change in my life. As a few of the smaller examples:

• As a kid, from before I was old enough to go to school and for my first years of school, we lived in a place called Syndal (it is now part of Glen Waverley). In those days, it was on the outskirts of Melbourne, and we used to walk to a State forest at the bottom of the hill, and find all sorts of fascinating things like discarded snake skins. Now, it is not too far from the geographic centre of the population distribution of Melbourne. I went back there when I came back to Melbourne, many years later, and could not even recognise where our house used to be - all the houses had been developed, rebuilt, and retaining walls put in. The magnificent forest was, sadly, long gone ... I did buy a set of tuning forks, though, at a music shop, which I used for many years while meditating on sound and vibration.
• After Syndal, we moved to Parkdale (I still support the Parkdale Seagulls [I signed the petition not to change the name of the women's team from the Seagulls to the vultures when the men's Parkdale Seagulls and Mentone Vultures combined to form the Parkdale Vultures, so I'm stickin' to that :) ] in the VWFL), where I had my first "first day" at high school [4]. I also went back there when I returned, as an adult, and was struck by the fact that the streets were half the size I recalled. (I was also struck by the fact that someone who had subsequently owned the house we had lived in had concreted over the front lawn and painted it green! Uuughh! Vandal - ENVIRONMENTAL vandal!)
• After we moved back to Queensland (I was actually born in Brisbane, but was adopted at three weeks and then flown to Melbourne shortly after, in the back of a DC3; the next few years were, I found out later, a lonely time for my [adoptive] Mum), we wound up involved with the now defunct Mackay Sailing Club because of my interest in sailing (I've mentioned sailing and my love of the sea in passing elsewhere: it kept me going through some personally very challenging times as a teenager, as I came to terms with myself). One of the highlights of the year for me, both sailing and personally, was out two week stint during the August school holidays at Kurrimine Beach [5]. In the few years I went there, I witnessed the coral reef just off the beach being desecrated by tourists taking bits of coral (this was long before anyone had even started talking about Marine Parks), and I also witnessed the change of character of the regatta as it became better known, and we had more skilled but more aggressive sailors come up from down south for a warm winter's holiday. In fact, I have witnessed the changes in a few groups that happens when the groups becomes larger: this was no exception. I haven't been back there for ages, but was still sad to hear of the devastation caused to the area by Cyclone Larry (I am very pleased, though [proud, even], one of my nephews helped with the clean-up effort).
• I have seen lots of changes happen since my return to Melbourne, not all for the better, but dome definite improvements to the physical environment and, above all else, to the psyche of the place and the people. Discrimination against LGBTIQ people is now largely prohibited (see here for a history of the changes, and here for the current legal situation in Victoria), and there are active changes to improve inclusion of a wide range of people - for instance, see here and here.

So, change is inevitable. What we can do, is seek to make the change constructive, rather than destructive. What we can also do is avoid the mistake of "throwing the baby out with the bath water", and see the elements of good that may exist in something that is, overall bad - for example, the teamwork that can be developed within military organisations, and seek to find a way to use that in a constructive way.

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2019 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)

A third yarn (more a note, really) about sailing

In my last "yarn", I mentioned moving to Mackay, and my concern about whether or not they had a sailing club. They did, and I had a stack of experiences - good and bad (and funny, and a mixed bag of insights into people) - there, but the one matter I want to write about now is learning.

I started off crewing for an experienced skipper, and eventually got to the stage where my parents decided to buy me a boat so I could be a skipper myself. One turned up which thought was a great bargain, but they decided to spend a few hundred dollars more and get something that was competitive and less likely to sink :)

Initially, I wasn't very good, until another skipper (from another class) took pity on me and crewed for me for a few weeks, getting me to do things like focus on the telltales on the sails instead of looking round and being distracted. His help worked, and I started improving - and passing on what I was learning and had learned to others, which is another series of posts.

But the value of learning was clear, and it backed up the value what I had started doing as soon as we bought the boat, which was pester - I mean, "respectfully ask" - other skippers for advice: "Mr Turner," I would pester (it was a different era, hence the "mister", but in some ways not so different, hence the "pester") "how do you choose what rake to put on your mast?"

I had a small notebook that I put all these different approaches into - and they were all different. I was going to just try them all out for myself, but was told I should ask them to clarify why they preferred to use their technique when someone else used another.

That challenging went over like a lead zeppelin, and when I heard a comment about everything being taken down as evidence and used against you, I decided to go back to my original approach of gather and then try for myself - which helped emphasise that everyone is unique, and what suits one person will - no matter how good it is - not necessarily suit another, despite NOTHING being wrong with that other person.

Sadly, many people in life (and especially the older - my lot - of engineers) are simplistic or judgemental in their thinking, and assume that, because something worked so well for them it MUST work for others, and accuse others of being defective when that is not the case (often because they WRONGLY feel that they must be defective if something works for them, but not others).

I've also noticed some - not all, by any stretch - younger people are less interested in learning from those who are more experienced, and more interested in pushing their own perceptions of ability and competence. I don't consider that to be an outcome of changed parenting so much as it is an outcome of changed economic and work circumstances. Sadly, we have gone down the US style of living, and are pushing people to be aggressive and self promoting, characteristics I consider utterly detestable, and have been making work so insecure that employees have to be aggressive just to get, let alone keep, a job.

The young people of today reflect the world my generation (pack of idiots we are) made.

Final note: I lost touch with the people in that sailing club a long time ago - partly because of some idiotically insensitive letters I wrote, partly because the club burned down and is no longer there, and partly because of the many changes I have been through. C'est la vie: things change, and, as my partner says, people (and places, and organisations) are in our life for a day, a season or a life. Mackay Sailing Club was in my life for a decade or so (a season of a life), and shaped the whole of it.

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2019 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)

A second yarn about sailing'n'stuff

I learned to sail when I was around 12. The local sailing club put an ad in newsletter of the primary school I went to, and, having recently found Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons” series, I was open to the idea of learning to sail.

A librarian had directed me to that series when I had read all the books on camping in the school library, saying it had sailing and camping – which was true, and I don’t think my parents were going to be too upset that I would stop borrowing a sheet to make a makeshift camp in the backyard. (Later, I would borrow a sheet and two broom to erect make believe sail, mast, and boom or yardarm . . . so maybe it wasn’t quite as good as they hoped :) .)

The conditions included being able to swim, and having been “encouraged” by Mum and Dad to go to the local lifesaving club as well as going through the swimming lessons my school compelled everyone to go through, that wasn’t a problem. I actually hated swimming at the beach though, and it wasn’t until I got to swim around capsized boats in around 50 feet of water (sailing has come along the metrication path a bit more slowly than the rest of Australia) that I really started to relax and enjoy being in the water.

Did I mention my part Irish heritage? Primary school me thought Dad used to get the best jokes from the Irish club – and Dad could appreciate the humour in not being comfortable swimming until I was in water way over my head.

On the Irish connection, a few years later I taught an Irishman to sail, and we used to consider it a fair deal: when we came back into the beach, he knew more about sailing, and I had more of an Irish lilt to my Aussie intonation.

Then again, maybe my accent wasn’t as strong as I assumed. A couple of decades later on my way to commission a treatment plant in China, while the plane was sitting on a tarmac in another city it had been diverted to, waiting for the snow to stop in the city I was heading to or for another plane to leave there so we could slot in, another passenger leaned over, and asked if he could practice his English. I said no problem, and closed the book I had been reading – which was “Lion of Ireland”, about Brian Boru. The other passenger started by saying “I am guessing you are from Ireland”; when I was telling that story to my friends back in Oz, at this point I would say “so much for the Aussie accent”, and was floored when they told me I had more an “international” accent.

Damn I must have watched too much American tellie when I was a kid and had run out of books to read.

Going back to when I was a kid, and was learning to sail, I thought the programme they had set up was quite good, and it guided the series of lessons I subsequently used to teach others how to sail. The lessons included some obvious safety notes, such as staying with the boat, air spaces under capsized boats, jury rigging (at my second sailing club, we towed kids who were had learned to sail 50 m or so off the beach with the elements of their rig, and set a challenge to create a jury rig to get back in to the beach), how to cope with waves breaking on a beach, keeping warm (which used to be a problem for me in that pre-yoga breathing technique part of my life  I was so scrawny that one joke was my arms had the muscles of a chicken leg :) ), etc.

Actually, jumping ahead a bit, what is hot or cold is always a combination of personal preference and what you're used to. Nowadays, I don't like temperatures much over 18, but when I was a kid in Qld (in the 70s, when “air con” [air conditioning] was rare - my adoptive parents didn't like or have air con throughout their lives) I would put a jumper on if it got below 25°C - and I have a friend who doesn't like anything under 28°C :) . However, after a day on a construction site when the unofficial temperature was in the 50s, I decided to move from Queensland back to cooler Melbourne – which it is, most of the time, but the highest official temperature I experienced in Queensland – albeit pre-climate change - was 46°C, whereas here in Melbourne, 2,000 km closer to the pole, the highest official temperature I've experienced was ~47°C.

Being used to temperatures makes a difference, but most people are so out of touch with the effects of their emotions (particularly, some mild version of seasonal affective disorder) and what is happening to their bodies that they rug themselves up so much in winter that their skin temperature is probably higher than in summer, and they think the weather is colder than it is.

I also, as alluded to, found some yogic breathing exercises that were quite effective for me – but not others, especially the sceptically inclined - at staying warmer. (Their effect tended to be accumulative, so I gave them up as it was too difficult to keep fitting in to society.)

So . . . Mackay.

When I first heard we were moving there, my greatest concern was: did they have a sailing club?

Boy, did they ever! However, I’ll keep most of that for another yarn.

 


Copyright © Kayleen White, 2019 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)