Rowing our boat gently on Great Barrier Island You wouldn’t think that on days of extreme wind, the beach is the best place to be. But so it’s been! When the westerlies howl and just about push you along the path to Medlands beach, once you’re at the foot of the dunes, all is warm, calm and heavenly, and the gently lapping sea beckons, while some days on the Gulf side the water’s so rough the ferry’s been cancelled! Our oystercatcher avatars, Rigg and Maggie, also enjoy the serenity of their beachfront home. One day before leaving for the placid beach, we watched a plane try to land in the wicked wind, its wings tilting 45°. The pilot reconsidered just before touching down, flew up, circled around and tried again. Second try, even worse – the plane was rocking front to back! I felt almost as scared as the passengers no doubt were – not long ago I was in one of those tiny planes in dodgy conditions. They made it on the third try. Sentences can be fun One day we were singing “Ro, Ro, Ro your boat” and all of a sudden it hit me! It had taken a lifetime to realise that hidden within this children’s ditty is a deep philosophy of living as well as the spiritual or quantum physics view that life is an illusion or perhaps a hologram. Maybe my changed circumstances brought the realisation. Folks, I’ve been largely homebound for over two months, though thankfully, I’m still swimming, dealing with the reason I went to Auckland. I’ll just say this to my women friends: To avoid my fate, please do your pelvic floor exercises, tell all your female friends and family members to do them, and tell them to tell theirs. I wish someone had told me! Leave a comment if you need instructions. To cheer ourselves up, we found we can’t resist laughing uncontrollably at dangling modifiers and such, even when they reverberate in our minds long after reading them. It all started with a sentence in a book I was editing. The author had never heard of dangling participles. I sent him some funny examples and we had a grand time sharing new ones back and forth! If you’re like us and can’t get enough, an endless supply can be found online. Here are the best from my collection. * Oozing slowly across the floor, Marvin watched the salad dressing. * I smelled the oysters coming down the stairs for dinner. * With his tail held high, my father led his prize poodle around the arena. * Emitting thick black smoke from the midsection, I realized something was wrong. * I saw an accident walking down the street. * Drinking beer at a bar, the car would not start. * Although exhausted and weary, the coach kept yelling, “Another lap!” * Freshly painted, Jim left the room to dry. * He wore a straw hat on his head, which was obviously too small. * After drinking too much, the toilet kept moving. * Flying south for the winter, I saw a huge flock of swallows. * Speeding through the tunnel, the station came into view. * Covered in mustard and relish, I enjoyed the hot dog. * Mrs. Shirley Baxter, who went deer hunting with her husband, is very proud that she was able to shoot a fine buck as well as her husband. * The dog was hungry and made the mistake of nipping a 2-year-old that was trying to force feed it in his ear. * We spent most of our time sitting on the back porch watching the cows playing Scrabble and reading. * Hunting can also be dangerous, as in the case of pygmies hunting elephants armed only with spears. * After eating all their food, we put the dogs outside. * I found a huge boulder taking a walk in the woods. * We saw cotton growing from our car window. * Dipped in chocolate, my kids love pretzels. * Tired of cleaning yourself? Let Merry Maids do it. * The mayor discussed the high cost of living with several women. * Kids Make Nutritious Snacks * Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax * Local High School Dropouts Cut In Half * Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant * We saw dinosaurs on a field trip to the natural history museum. * Having gathered dust in the storage room for years, I finally got to use my croquet set. * Dressed in a diaper and drooling, Grandpa read a book to his granddaughter. * Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. I’d love to enjoy knowing that these unintended images bring uncontrollable laughter to you as well. Aotea Great Barrier: Land and People So Ro went on his own to the Claris Club as a roving photographer for my update and blog. The event was the launch of this sumptuous new book. In honour of a dear friend in Golden Bay, I didn’t want both Ro and me to miss the launch. I thought she might be acknowledged along with the author and photographer, but no one seemed aware that without her, there would have been NO BOOK! Can you guess?! She’s been a book designer for years at Potton and Burton (formerly Craig Potton Publishing) and my collaborator on the H.A.N.D.S. newsletter, Get a HANDle on H.A.N.D.S. and other projects, who did the layout of every square centimetre of this most beautiful of books. As the title indicates, the book weaves the land and people of the island. Each of its landscapes – sea, beach, land, bush and mountains – is explored not only through spectacular photographs but through the eyes of 12 different locals, who each describe a favourite part of the island and its meaning for them. The launch was elegant, said Ro, and further deepened our conviction that we live in the best place in New Zealand and probably the world! Not only is it peaceful and beautiful, but those who live here have chosen it because they know it’s special and want to be here, loving it! Like the book, the launch captured the essence of our unique community. Ro returned home quite moved, as people reportedly are while reading the book. After music and karakia by tāngata whenua, Leonie Howie spoke. She’s the long-term island nurse who not too long ago launched the book Island Nurses with co-nurse/co-author Adele Robertson. Leave it to the amazing Leonie to be the organiser of the whole project, and the one to suggest 12 perfect people of different ethnicity, background and location to represent the island’s community. The photographer, Chris Morton, had a great range of images of the island. He realised that the photos combined with text about locals’ relationship to the land could result in a worthwhile book. True! He and his chosen author, Peter Malcouronne, are award winners in their fields (and my friend’s at the top of her field too!). Each presented a copy to six of the twelve people, or surrogates for those who couldn't attend, such as Eloise Blackwell, Winnie and Charlie’s Black Ferns rugby star granddaughter, who was on her way to games in Chicago (she scored two tries!) and France. (Forget the planet, sport must go on!) Ro found everyone’s words heartfelt and in keeping with the spirit of the book and its beautiful production. A hongi instead of a handshake or hug – the author and Leone’s husband, Ivan Howie. Ivan retired several years ago after doctoring here for decades. Another recipient expresses her delight! Note the dartboard, pool table where the Community Board chair has her stuff, and Sports Club notices on the blackboard! I love the informality! A copy had been offered to the first person to identify a photo from the book of a lesser-known spot on the island, that had been published in the Barrier Bulletin. This choice prize was won by “our” dear Winnie (in glasses, with her sister Catherine), the only one to get it right! Her book is open to a photo of her granddaughter Eloise at the Mermaid Pool. The event was catered by Taste Aotea, the cooking, catering and treats-for-sale brainchild of our friend Jeanne and her whānau, as organic as possible, with some ingredients from their home garden and Okiwi Passion. We meet our 500th person! The excitement always mounts as we near our next hundredth person! The closer we get the more we know we can do it! The time it takes has varied from seven months to a year. Just a few more hundreds to go. How long for the next 100? The 500th was Jake, hitching home from a day’s work as an apprentice chippy in Medlands. We didn’t have our choccy heart prize in the car, so we gave it to the lucky 501st, Flint, the son of Jess, the coop member who dropped off our order. Who will be next? What is Time? Continuing with the third speaker from this year’s “Small Island, Big Ideas”…. Sleep, light and biological time Professor Philippa Gander is director of the Sleep/Wake Research Centre at Massey University. Her interest in all aspects of sleep and its effects on wellbeing and safety have led to work with pilot fatigue, road crash risk, sleep rhythms in space, effects of shift work, sleep deprivation among physicians in training and more. Philippa’s talk opened our eyes to sleep! You wake up from a good night’s sleep as an updated version of yourself. Your brain’s had the night off from its usual duties to carry out essential maintenance on the rest of your body. It’s gone through cycles of dreaming and non-dreaming sleep and had a chance to regroup, store the day’s memories and integrate its panoply of emotions. So far, so good, but sorry to say I didn’t realise that the rest of Philippa’s talk was bad news, or at least a cautionary tale, until I started writing about it! We all know how lousy we feel when we don’t get the sleep we need, but maybe you’re too sleepy to notice you’re also not as aware of what’s going on, you’re thinking and reacting more slowly, and you’re clumsier and less creative. Not to cause you to lose sleep, but in fact recovery of full waking function after a bad night takes at least two full nights of blissful sleep. Even worse, studies show that getting less than seven hours of sleep long-term has dire health consequences – most prominently premature death. Prior to that you may be dealing with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and obesity. It’s true – a decrease in sleep time = more fat = one cause of the obesity epidemic. Even a week or two of restricted sleep won’t do wonders for your health. Most of us believe that the more hours straight through the better, but pre-industrial revolution, people slept from sun to sun in a three-part cycle: first (dead) sleep, then “watch” – a few hours of quiet time awake, and finally morning sleep. Not only is it perfectly natural to be awake in the middle of the night, but Philippa advised us that it’s a good time to catch up on chores around the house! This is the ideal: The situation of teens nowadays is unhealthy indeed. Sleep is essential for them, but later bedtimes and “social jet lag”, with too little sleep on school nights and too much on weekends, causes a raft of problems including bad grades, depression, substance abuse, overweight and fatigue-related crashes. Chronobiology explains the brain’s circadian body clock, a master pacemaker that drives circadian rhythms, your daily cycles of hormones, heart rate, disgestion, brain function, fatigue, mood and all the rest. The graph shows the ideal times for natural sleep in tune with nature’s intended rhythm and the planet’s geophysical cycles. The retina is directly connected to the circadian clock, even through closed eyes. It can’t adapt to sleep/wake patterns outside of these natural rhythms, and big problems arise. Jet lag and social jet lag are disruptive and unhealthy, but shift work is worst of all, even three nights a month. Because the circadian clock is driven not only by light, but also by food, shift work with its bizarre mealtimes is so harmful it’s actually classified as a carcinogen! We also have clocks in our organs, glands, tissues and cells. The body clock is a wholistic coordinated system that humans have done a brilliant job of disrupting with artificial light (especially blue light and in particular the omnipresent handheld blue light screens) and 24/7 living. You can imagine the havoc wreaked on the long-suffering body clocks of people traveling to Mars. Philippa advocates a wide, informed debate about the costs of 24/7 living. It comes down to this: we need unrestricted sleep at night to get the most out of life. Dolphins, though, as we increasingly suspect, are more intelligent (and even wise) than humans. They sleep with one eye open and remain constantly vigilant for days by resting half their brain while the other half remains conscious. “What is Time” to be concluded next “time”. Back to waking life…. Kauri dieback Several tracks have been closed in the central mountains of the island in the effort to slow the spread of kauri dieback disease, the cureless infection threatening the upper North Island's treasured forest giants with extinction. The microscopic pathogen can be spread by just a pinhead of soil and you can’t tell by looking if a tree is infected. Some say kauri dieback is spread more by wild pigs than by humans, and pigs pay no attention to track closures or boot-cleaning stations. Kauri have been regenerating all over Great Barrier Island after the ravages of logging and gum digging ended 100 years ago, but now their survival is under serious threat. Kauri on Blind Bay Road - - - - - - - - - Ro and Sam continue to extend the bamboo windbreak – one more section to go. Ro enjoys my most recent edited book, the story of the interesting and purposeful life of our long-time Iowan friend Judy Plank, who for decades has been a committed activist and all-around hard worker in support of social justice, political sanity and peace on Earth. Judy is donating all profits from the sale of Paradise Still Has Snakes to organisations she’s been active in: American Friends (Quaker) Service Committee, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Alternatives to Violence Project, New Roads Reentry Team (assists people as they come out of prison to help them transform their lives so they stay out), and the Frontera de Christo, Douglas, Arizona (for the Agua Prieta Migrant Center, Sonora, Mexico). Need something edited – book, brochure, blog, any words at all? Please leave a comment! Nettles, chives and lemon balm on the deck Morning rainbow over Pitokuku At the end of the Puriri Bay Road in Tryphena is this small sheltered “miracle" beach that’s swimmable in most winds and tides.
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