New, now and nigh on Great Barrier Island Golden Bay friends, take heart! I can tell you it’s possible to live happily, very happily, without road access. In today’s not-very-self-reliant way of life, reasonably easy ways to resupply are needed, and on the Barrier we get by just fine with a freight ferry twice a week and small planes – from 3 up to 13 passengers! – bringing bits and pieces over in their wee holds. And just like here on Great Barrier, you can use sea and air links if you need to leave the haven of Golden Bay. I found that island life is special, with a feeling of its own. By intention or accident, you can be part of the world while blissfully apart from it. For those elsewhere in the world who don’t know what this is about…. Last week Cyclone Gita came along and wreaked havoc on the Takaka Hill Road, the only way into or out of Golden Bay. The name of the road may sound pretty innocent, but this hill is at an extreme end of the definition of “hill” – the hill is actually the Pikikirunga (“climb to the top”) Range – and the road is famous for its innumerable twists and turns. The storm brought down over a dozen big slips that blocked the road, closing it for nearly a week. Even now, cars can only go over twice a day, in the early morning and later afternoon, in a convoy following a pilot car. https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/confronting-new-helicopter-footage-shows-mammoth-task-ahead-clear-takaka-slips The Hill in winter Life cycles on – where to from here? Our celebration of Ro’s 70th birthday was thoughtful and quiet. Anyone whose numbers are getting up there must wonder how it could have happened so fast and what’s to come. We’ve been together 46 years of Ro’s seven decades. We vowed to continue to keep our lives new and fresh, to savour each moment with pleasure together forever and to grow ever closer in body, mind and soul. For every happy hello there will be good-bye Last time I wrote, we were enjoying a reunion with dear Ashna. We’d taken him on the southern and western island tours, and we soon headed north. Our first viewpoint overlooked Palmer’s Beach, with Kaitoke past the headland (not my photo). The beach at Awana Windy Canyon from the main road Then over the big saddle and down to the valley for the turnoffs to Okiwi Passion market garden, home of Gerald and Caity Endt, the “Endterprising gardeners”. It happens every time – our tours with off-island friends never make it past Okiwi to the road end at Port Fitzroy, because our visits to Gerald and Caity take longer than expected! By now we should expect it! Time slips pleasantly by while we enjoy a swim, a tour and fascinating info from these lovely, knowledgeable, hardworking people who always have time to talk and share. Seedlings for sale at markets and to plant in their gardens The kiwifruit vines seem to be thriving! Gerald and Ashna in one of Okiwi Passion’s many large garden blocks In one of their orchards, Gerald treated us to a taste-bud experiment he calls the Taste Burst. First he offered us each a Cape gooseberry. “Remember its taste,” he instructed. OK, fine, we thought, we know how they taste! Next, a tropical apricot. “How does it taste?” he asked. The adjectives zingy, zesty, sour, tart, sharp and tangy, pungent and mouth-puckering sprang readily to mind. And then the TASTE BURST!!! He handed us the chaser – a second Cape gooseberry. It could have been a different fruit altogether than the first Whoa, did it taste awesome. As the name of the experience promises, it was exploding with powerful flavour! Did you work out what happened? The piquant tropical apricot hyperstimulated our taste sensors so we could really experience what’s inside that seemingly mundane Cape gooseberry! Makes you wonder what you’re missing whenever you eat anything! Taste surprise #2 followed in another block. Can you spot the wee, and I mean wee, coconuts on this feather-leaved palm? Have a closer look. Gerald collected some from the ground and took them into their large shed, which houses the inner workings of their entire operation. EVERTHING goes on in there. In one corner is a workbench with a vise grip, and into this he placed the nuts one by one. Crack! And dee-licious! All too soon our days with Ashna wound down to the last and we were at the airport hugging him goodbye. The wee plane flew him to Whitianga for the drive back to the Waikato. Private lives of the stars The Night Sky group treated keen sky-wonderers to a talk by John Hearnshaw, a New Zealand astronomer who helped establish the Mt John Observatory near Lake Tekapo, southwest of Christchurch, a region he also helped shepherd to Dark Sky Reserve status. When it comes to the faraway stars, mysteries abound. How far away in fact are they? How hot? How massive? What’s their lifespan, from the time they form til the time they die? How fast are they moving? What are they made of? John answered these questions as he traced the history of astronomers’ understandings and breakthrough insights through the centuries to current beliefs based on up-to-the-minute technology, maths, physics and chemistry. How far away are the stars? Method 1 Astronomers of the 1600s observed that stars appear to be in different positions when viewed along different lines of sight. We’ve all probably played around with parallax as kids, when we held up a finger and looked at it with one eye closed and then the other. All that the curious folk had to do was look at a star, wait for the Earth to move around its orbit a bit, and look again. The more the angle increased, the nearer the star. They called this phenomenon parallax, but no one could measure it until 200 years later, when telescopes had advanced enough to make useful measurements possible. Method 2 In the early 1600s, the astromer Kepler applied the inverse-square law, which had been used for all sorts of measurements since the 1400s, to roughly work out relative distances of stars. It’s simple, really: A star twice as far as another seems four times fainter, a star three times as far as another seems nine times fainter, etc. Method 3 No one knew that the sun was a star until 1767! We’ve come a long way. Now that once-ethereal stars have been exhaustively delved into, calibrated, classified, categorised and otherwise quantified and ranked, we know that sun is a dwarf star, the most common type. Giants such as Arcturus, which are about 100 times brighter than dwarves, can be seen from much further away, and supergiants are 10,000 times brighter. Assuming all stars emit the same light as the sun, if you know the brightness of a star, you can work out its distance. Astronomers worked out that of all the 400 million million stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, our nearest star neighbour is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away, or 40 million million kilometres. It would take four million years on Air NZ to get there – a long way to go for half a cup of sugar. Alpha, Beta and Proxima Centauri How hot are the stars? When it comes to star colors and temperatures, the temperature determines the colour and the reality is counterintuitive. Blue stars are hot, red are cool, and white or yellow are intermediate. If we look at the light spectrum, we see that short wavelengths are blue and longer are red. So wavelength correlates with temperature as well, and asronomers classify the stars and their temperatures by their “spectral types”. It was Newton, by the way, who worked out at the end of the seventeenth century that white light contains all the colours. So the intrepid astronomers had solved another mystery. For what it’s worth, we know that Betelgeuse, Aldebaron and Anarres, for example, are red and therefore cool; Rigel and Sirius are whitish-bluish and therefore hot-ish, the sun is white-yellow and in-between, as are Alpha Centauri and Canopus. These are the temperatures on the surface, the only part we can see. These surface temperatures range from 3000 to 5000°C. The stars are much hotter on the inside. The sun is 1,500,000 km across, and at its middle its temperature is about 40,000,000°C. John unpacked four more cosmic questions, but I’ll leave the stars here for now and pick them up again next time. ☆☆☆ The most wonderful book of my editing career I’ve been blessed to have had a hand in helping many authors see their worthy books through to completion,18 books since 2002, and hopefully more to come. I only take on books that contribute in some way to the greater good. A few months ago my daughter-in-law, Mary Gaetjens, and I finished editing her masterpiece, Anse-à-Vodou: A Summer with My Father in Haiti. This is a book like no other. It unites into a moving, cohesive and poetic whole a diversity of themes, experiences, information and emotions, including Mary’s viewpoint as a young Western woman of her father's culture from personal experience with Vodou, a feeling of homecoming with ancestral spirits and an affirmation that others interacted with spirits, aspects of Haitian and American history, the story of her father's family, particularly his own and that of his brother Joe, and her self-healing journey following the murder of her father in the aftermath of the brutal Duvalier dictatorships. Mary is a vulnerable yet confident, vibrant and, above all, heart-and-soul guide through her unusual life and her story of transition from tragedy and grief to infinite human potential and compassion. A vèvè, a sacred symbol of Haitian Vodou that calls the star beings to Earth. Others have written about Mary’s book: “Through her innocent and inquiring connection to spirit, Mary Gaetjens illuminates a side of Haiti that few Westerners know. Anse-à-Vodou: A Summer with My Father in Haiti is a gripping narrative that weaves etheric mystery and earthly reality in a compassionate blanket across cultural boundaries.” “Mary Gaetjens came to Vodou with a beginner’s mind and an open heart. Her focused narration of her experience sheds new light on Vodou and on Haiti. I hope this light reaches many.” “A meticulously detailed account of one woman's journey between countries, cultures, and worlds, and the father who helped her find the way.” “Anse-à-Vodou is a powerful and heart-expanding adventure through the underworld of the human psyche to the realization of the true self. The photographs are a rare glimpse into an extraordinary and little-known world and proof that this world still exists.” Readers of this book will not only be deeply moved, but learn more than they can imagine. Get a copy at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/anse-vodou-mary-antonine-gaetjens/1127908661?ean=9780985753221 * * * Now I’m working on the autobiography of my dear friend Judy, who’s been a pen friend since the the late 1990s when we were all living at the Friends Southwest Centre, a small Quaker community in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona. When I knew her and to this day, in her mid-70s, Judy has been a committed peace activist and all-around hard worker, day in and day out, in support of social justice, political sanity and peace on Earth. I don’t mean just a petition signer and letter writer, though she does those as well, but someone with the courage of her convictions who shows up at the front lines of protests (including several arrests in actions against weapons and war), hearings and meetings with decision makers and action organisers. Once Judy and I have finished, I don’t have another book on my editing horizon. Please get in touch if you need some writing edited or know someone who does. * * * This sweet, day-brightening little fella began life in one of our grow bags. We know not how the seed got there, but one day a wee plant emerged, unmistakably a nascent sunflower! Ro nurtured it and as it grew, brought it inside on windy days. Today the long-awaited flower opened to grace the space just inside the ranch slider. The flower seems to enjoy the view as much as we do! We moved it outside for the photo shoot. Caity and Gerald’s housewarming gift of basil, still going strong several months later. though we use it daily – in cooking, kefir cheese and even in green smoothies!, and I've harvested several hundred leaves for pesto. Ro’s banana box bench Greens in a grow bag New garden bed in the making Misty morning: GBI’s highest peak, Hirakimata, and some lofty companions
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