It’s my mum’s birthday, also there are Kandinsky paintings in town so, my parents are here. As a part of the visit Dad and I went to see Dune 2. Afterwards mum asked me if I liked it. I said “I don’t know, maybe not. But only because it’s so good.” I’ve been thinking about the movie since. It’s a science fiction story based on a book from 1965. There are lasers and spaceships, super powered space cults with the ability to control people and sculpt the genetics of generations. There are mighty sand worms, a religious war and gravity defying space technology. It’s beautiful and violent and hard. Despite all that, it really felt familiar to our time and place. To a disturbing level in some ways; uncomfortably real. In our world right now we’ve got war and suffering, we’ve got fanatical nationalism, we’ve got massive piles of resources that are not distributed equally, we have social manipulation. So now I’ve been going through my day (making dinner, building lego, washing babies) while puzzling on the human condition. I have no expertise in the area, however I think I can see that people and groups make choices out of fear, and choices out of care, among other motivations. Fear of the other, the unknown, shortage and pain. These fears drive people to act to defend and to attack. It seems primal. People also have a primal urge to care, nurture, support and elevate others. When others hurt, there is a drive to help, sometimes it’s buried under other concerns, but sometimes it comes flowing freely and kindness thrives. Both of these drivers are a part of survival; defend and care. Defend: protect the tribe, gather the group’s resources against the stranger. Care: support for those in the tribe, build up the people around you to be strong and able to share the burden. It’s survival. From a time of roaming the land searching for food and huddling against the dangers of the dark, through to the age of the nation state and the capitalist dominance of our society. Defend and care for the tribe. I suppose one key question is how big are you able to see your tribe? If it’s just your family, then there are a lot of ‘others’ out there. Is your tribe the local community? Your country certainly? Can you see your tribe as bigger still? Your region or heritage group? Could the tribe actually be everyone? Fear and care. The tribe. It’s survival. Anyway… happy birthday mum.
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At gate 33 the tension is high, the flight isn’t flying and we want to know why?
At gate 33 the people are grumbling, our first flight was cancelled, the airline is fumbling. At gate 33 I can see a man twitch, he’s rebooked for 9:30 and not pleased with the switch. At gate 33 we’re tired and sleepy, it’s getting quite late and that kid’s growing weepy. At gate 33 they’ve delayed it again, I hear people murmur, I see someone complain. At gate 33 we’re now at 10:30, I write to my friend and I feel a bit dirty. At gate 33 I think of my mate, he’ll get me in Melbourne, he’ll be staying up late. At gate 33 we’re starting to worry, Sydney curfew is coming, they just have to hurry. At gate 33 there’s a bubbling fever, 2 police amble past to make sure people stay clever. At gate 34: “CANCELLED, no way!” Those people are stranded with nowhere to stay. At gate 33 we’re really quite grateful, you’ve done a great job team, we’re pleased, we’re thankful. At gate 33 I’m feeling reflective, all thanks to a long wait and a little perspective. Some beaches have quite thin lines of sand between the foaming waterline and the grassy verge. It’s not always a verge of course, sometimes it’s a dune or a rocky face, an artificial path or town esplanade. And it is not always a thin line of sand, sometimes it’s a sweep of super smooth pebbles, or a mass of roots, dirt and leaves or occasionally an angular concrete projection that stops sharp at the heaving ocean.
Yesterday evening though it was fine white sand, and it was a grassy verge up to the surf club. But it was not a thin line of sand, it was a great crescent of shifting and shimmering golden powder for hundreds of meters along the waterline. The beach rose and rose in a mountainous cascade of sand that required hundreds of short stabbing steps to ascend. I set out to climb this proud edifice at 5:45pm on Sunday at the end of two 30 degree days and 6 games of competitive frisbee with one 2 year old in my arms. As I stabbed each fatigued foot into the mighty sand slope, my muscles protested and my mind spasmed. One particular spasmodic thought came very clear: “Well I’m really glad I can still walk.” I thought this thought in earnest and after the exertions of the weekend it seemed legitimate. Then I thought, “well that is a fairly intense thought to have after a weekend of discretionary fun.” Anyway, that was my weekend, hard work, a bit of suffering and a range of thoughts and feelings at the NSW regional championships. I can still walk, and we won. Yeah. Last night I stood in my kitchen cutting a relaxed yet caviller silhouette. With one foot jauntily hoisted across the other I leant against the kitchen bench, a warm mug in one hand and my daughter’s fresh hospital discharge papers in the other.*
As I curiously cruised the columns of numbers and letters, my wife crossed the room and said “everything alright in there?” I produced my best attempt at an irreverent smile and said “well it’s great to see the Carboxyhaemoglobin at 0.7%”. Fuelled by a sharp wit, and 36 recent hours in the children’s ward, she replied “yeah it’s a long way from your Exercise Physiology degree to an MD hey Mike?” That it is, that it is indeed. Still, it’s great to see everything all-clear in the numbers. *everything is ok by the way. Well, everyone is out training at the moment. It’s the middle of the Australian frisbee season, State Champs this month, Nationals in April. Concurrently the national teams have been picked and for those players it’s the long charge to the World Champs in September. Everyone is out there running. For years I’ve had a mental image that has returned and returned to me about training. It’s a long clear path that leads out in front and slowly makes its way up and around a staggering peak. Sometime I see it in map view and can trace the path as it wraps around and around this mighty mountain all the way to the summit. Sometimes I see the path like I’m in it and the track leads away from my charging feet and steadily, relentlessly up and around the hill, up and around. Every gym session is a few strides, every skills clinic takes a player further up and around, every run moves you up towards the summit. At the end of the path is of course, perfect athletic preparation. When I get there I’ll be the best possible player and competitor that I can be. The only issue is, will I get there in time or will the tournament arrive before I’ve climbed the mountain? The nuance in this visual training analogy which has made it stick over the years is that it’s not just about doing enough sessions, enough time on the path. It’s actually about what you do when your on the path. Often when I’m out running the path rears up in my mind’s eye, I can see it curving and climbing towards my goal. However it is not the only path. At every moment of my training there is also a path that just goes around the mountain, around and around instead of up and around. There is also a path that goes down and around. Every time before I start a sprint at training the choice has to be made again, the path up and around, or just around. Each morning when the program says “gym”, the multiple paths lay splitting off across and down the mountain. The thing about it is no one else knows if you’re making the up and around, or just the around choice (until the tournament of course - then it’s pretty clear), but before that it’s just you, the path and the choice. For me, the only way to get near the best possible preparation for the tournament/race/interview/recital is to hang onto the path that climbs for as long as possible. It’s choosing over and over again, every session and more than once each session to lean over and go up and around, up and around. For those interested, the path featured above was from a mountain in Switzerland that Colony went to in 2014 on the way to World Clubs. We climbed all the way to finish 4th in the world at that tournament. I sometimes wonder if we could have done better. Thousands of small choices. En… …joy… …a… …ble. The time between the first image and the fourth image is almost 2.5 years. Enjoyable completion. When the chin growth gets closer to a beard than stubble.
When I find myself lying in bed with creative ideas keeping me up. When some of the holiday jobs have been started. When the messages start to roll on the staff room WhatsApp. When the streets start to fill up with people back from their beach holidays. When my hair nearly touches the car ceiling. It’s time to go back to school. This story comes with an audio soundscape recommended. You should open Spotify or another music steaming service and begin this album: https://open.spotify.com/album/2noRn2Aes5aoNVsU6iWThc OR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2VpR8HahKc&list=PLSdoVPM5WnndSQEXRz704yQkKwx76GvPV OR Search Discovery by Daft Punk. Then come back and read the story. When I worked at a summer camp in New York I owned part of a real dodgy van - a 1987 Dodge Ram 7 seater, it was 3 tone colour: Grey, Silver and Orange (the orange was rust). I was a 1/8th partner the first year, but eventually everyone went home and my share octupled through pure endurance. The next year I went back and then I owned a whole dodgy van. It suddenly became a bit less dodgy as I was given a brand new car CD player as a present, and Chris, the brilliant summer camp maintenance man, helped me* put it in.
*By ‘helped me’, I mean I got out of the way while he put it in. In 2001 this CD player was cutting edge cool. It had a blue luminescent screen that could display both the track number and a scrolling banner of the song title. Also, the whole face plate could clip off. I mean 'off' so you could hold it in your hand and hide it under the seat, a rectangle of digital brilliance about the size of a TV remote. It was an anti-theft measure I suppose, and rightly so. There was a small mechanical button in the corner that when pressed, a catch would release and the face would kind of spring part of the way off. This is an important detail of the story, the button was mechanical not electrical. I loved that van and I loved that CD player. I drove all over the US for 2 more summers with the Dodge Ram conveying my person and the music transporting my spirit. When I left for the last time I extracted the CD player and brought it home, then I got someone else competent to install it into the hand-me-down Ford Falcon station wagon I drove around Brisbane. I loved that station wagon and I still loved that CD player. I drove through my University years with those twin titans at my side. Sometimes I slept in the back after parties in the suburbs, sometimes I drove a bit too fast back from work. In the summer I rolled the front windows down (by hand) and felt the humid air fly past me. The CD player was turned up loud and the clamour of it all was wonderful. I got into a Daft Punk phase and one of the CDs on regular rotation was Discovery from 2001. This is a mighty electronic anthem of an album from a couple of French geniuses. Harder, Better, Faster. Again, the audio soundscape is recommended for the full enjoyment of this story. Often on the way to frisbee practice I would choose the Daft Punk album as a pumped up. Sometimes I listened to it on 24 volume. For reference, 12 was a comfortable volume, 20 was a lot, it only went up to 30. The drive to training on a hot Sunday afternoon, by yourself, with the windows down was a 24 situation. Yeah! For a time I drove around changing CDs from day to day. To work, to uni, to frisbee, to see friends. I turned it up, I turned it down, I clipped the face off and hid it under my seat. I remembered driving around America, it was a link to adventure. I was happy. Then one day the CD player broke. It was not a complete failure, but something had gone wrong with the electrics of the face. All the buttons instantly and terminally failed. The volume wouldn’t change, the eject wouldn’t eject, the skip forward or back were completely unresponsive. However, it still played music. From the beginning of a CD to the end and then back to the beginning again, it would play unobstructed. It was stuck. Stuck on Daft Punk. At volume 24. Feel free to turn up the music to a suitable level for the last 4 paragraphs if your circumstance allows it. The only mitigation I had available to me was the mechanical release button in the bottom right corner. I could clip the face off and the car would fall into silence. If I clipped the face back on Daft Punk would instantly rock my world with electronic power. For nearly 2 years I existed in this state of power all on or power all off. At times it was excellent and I loved the blast, at other times it was pretty poor and I would have enjoyed a change of pace. I gave a lot of people rides during this time and there were a range of reactions to the silence and even more reactions to the cacophony. Still, I persisted until the car fell apart and I sold it to a wreckers for $50. While I didn’t witness the final moments of the car, nor do I really understand wreckers, I did like to imagine the music blasting at full 24 as the car was crushed into a cube or mangled into a trench. I don’t know what this all means. It’s some kind of statement about inertia, resilience, stubbornness or malaise I suppose. This week, I listened to Discovery and I still love it. So there is that. One more time, Oh Yeah! I’ll have good moments as a parent, and I’ll have some bad ones. It’s been six years so far and both types have piled up already. This week I had a good one. Well it came to fruition this week, however more accurately speaking it’s been a culmination of 6 years of planning, protection, strategic thinking and insulation.
There is a lot of information in the world, and some of it you’d like to keep separate for your children until they’re ready. Some truths need to be learnt at the right time in the right way. Some secrets are special. The main secret reality of life I wanted to insulate my 6 year old from, was the true identity of Luke’s father. One of the great joys of Western cinema and film adventure is the shock ending to the 1980 classic, The Empire Strikes Back. The arch villain and brooding menace of 2 movies is climatically revealed to be the young protagonist Luke’s father. It’s an amazing moment and one that is all too easily dashed prematurely by the pervasive free-flowing information of modern society. Guard your offspring people, protect your children, insulate your progeny. The truth is out there: In the local supermarket toy promotion, in the funny comic book for adult Star Wars nerds ‘Vader and Son’, in the Disney channel kids section and in the Star Wars prequels themselves. The world is out there just poised to ruin a special movie twist. “Take you to Yoda I will.” Not this citizen though. I managed to get the boy through kindergarten, through a Star Wars Lego filled Christmas and passed older cousins who’ve seen the movies - without the secret revealed. Then this week we watched both episode IV and V, my boy and me. He looked at me with surprise, delight and a little horror when Vader said “Luke, I am your father.” I was his father this week, and in one pretty niche and, seriously speaking fairly inconsequential way, I had a good parenting moment. If you love gardening, and you care for your plants then you may not love caterpillars. Caterpillars love your plants in a different, more predatory, fashion. They’ve got to go, before they eat the lot. But, caterpillars are simply a stage on a beautiful journey. As we speak, at the turn of the new year, with change, promise, transition and new birth swirling in the very air, there is a glimmering symbol of possibility hanging under my parents deck. It’s a chrysalis of the Oleander Butterfly and it is sensational. Two weeks ago a tiny little multi-legged eating machine started working on a hanging plant under the deck. It systematically consumed 70% of the young plant’s leaves down to the absolute nub. Swollen and enormous, compared to the tiny egg it started as, it marched down the plant stem and selected a quiet spot under a leaf. Then it set about its metamorphosis. The incredible element of the whole journey is neither the caterpillar or the butterfly, but the chrysalis in-between. After a day of construction the pupa takes on the appearance of a high tech silver and gold metallic space craft. It gleams. It shines. It seems to vibrate with energy. It is incredible. The old year is over - achievement and struggle.
The new year has begun - challenge and opportunity. The transition itself gleaming and special. Happy New Year people. |
AuthorHigh school teacher Archives
September 2023
CategoriesThemes |