Music For Trees

A friend of mine heads up Music For Trees, a Non-Profit Initiative that invites people to plant trees, by enjoying music. To celebrate their first year of gigs and over 60,000 trees in the ground, they're throwing a bit of a party for World Enviro Day this Sunday 05 June arvo + eve. I checked out the last Music For Trees gig. So if you're looking for something to do on Sunday go enjoy 'Dance a little, live a little'

Whitley Wisdom

I'm gonna' take my time for her riches
Wait for the diamonds to ripen in the ditches of love around here
Things are never as they appear 

Got a natural pearl in my calloused hand
Saved for the girl who could really understand what it takes to see
The gold from the alchemy.

Chris Whitley, Scrapyard Lullaby, Dirt Floor


Having a CW moment, it's not the greatest but i sketched this cover shot many many many moons ago.

Learning to fly

Delight

This afternoon's brief exploring lent itself to capturing some fairytale light, fresh warm air, sounds of two oceans on either side of the headland, plans for sunrises and campfires. Fleeting and momentary, but refreshing and delightful.  Whilst playing with the still frames of the day, I smell lamb shanks in the oven, and hum along to M&S 'With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair'.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

'If', by Rudyard Kipling

This poem hung on the back of the bathroom door in the home where my father and his two brothers grew up. It became a mantra for their lives, instilled in them by their mother, and now it is my very big prayer for two very little precious men, who are learning about broken things, and finding their place in this world. 

'Hold on', it's a faint whisper, that today the tips of my fingers are grasping at, and only just clinging on to.

Fortress

Stumbled across this fortress of sorts, it simply appeared in M.B. Bouddi NP sometime ago, then the next time I visited, it had simply gone. Sometimes we all need a fortress of sorts, to fling our bleeding wounded weary souls behind, while worldly battle rage and surround us, and the threat of capture, slavery and defeat torment. Sometimes fortress' take form in many things. Mums. Pillows. Driftwood walls. Solitude. A good nights sleep. An early morning saltwater bath. An afternoon nap. An evening bicycle ride. A deep breath. A very long quiet prayer. A desperate plea in need of a Redeemer.

Fire time

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall never see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Old School Four

Early Tilt Shift-ers, almost.

Fine Folk Indeed

The cheekiest postie I ever knew, would have been 64 today.
Rodney Joel Oldfield. A mighty seafarer.

F.Rights

Marathon Man and Stormrider: Clarke McClymont perfecting his saturday nite stance.

Dean & Clarke. Heading home, after a slow paddle in from a big and messy Forries Rights this morning.

The seas have lifted up, O Lord,

the seas have lifted up their voice,

the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.

Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,

mightier than the breakers of the sea—

the Lord on high is mighty. 

psalm 93,  
This was the first thing I read this morning, it seemed fitting.

33° 32.69' S 151° 20.633' E

33° 32.69' S 151° 20.633' E, you do the math. Some one had a fun monday arvo out at what can be one of the biggest lefts in the southern hemisphere, or so I am told.  Not that it was huge today, but it was working and joyous. Not an incredible pic but I was sitting at chonga's (at least 2.5-3kms away) from where this shot was taken so you can appreciate the distance, even using a 300mm, much to the humor of passerbyers, or at least my friend soda and his lovely wife, who quite literally and quite randomly were strolling on by. Consequently we enjoyed drinking it all in for another hour.

Soaking up all of Life

Soaking up some little rays of sunshine. Cheering ourselves up from the dread that had sank in, and the dread that was to become. Pondering pensive moods and the meaning of life. Laughing away the pain and sillyness, whilst spotting pictures in the clouds. This was the beautiful midday hours I spent with my all time sister of my heart yesterday. I wanna say this is at one of our favourite secret spots, but its a not so secret spot, and favourite doesn't do it justice. Its a very sacred dear to our heart kind of place, hence the need to retreat and visit.

Sometimes its best to look at life through a different lens, from a different angle, for a greater perspective and a deeper understanding. Sometimes it helps just to have a sister to hold your hand.

Exploring

My very favorite thing to do.
Hipstamatic of young JROT collecting a shoebox of treasures at LB, BNP.
Carried them all the way home too, as you do for all good keepers.

Last Light

Last light this evening served for some pretty pictures, and some lovely scores for the avoca lads. My camera bag and I nearly got washed away while I was too busy peering down a lens. Not a single skerrick of editing to these babies, the evening light was truely too innocent.

The wrong side of the door

Werri Beach, South Coast NSW    ....last winter I visited here to do some soul searching.




Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object. And this, I think, is just what we find… If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy. ...

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. ...

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache…At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door.The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.


Jack CS Lewis. 
The Weight of Glory: And other addresses.

Some more old school Avoca (No3.)

Probably still 1930-40s. This little shack in focus in the bottom left hand quadrant of the frame still stands proud, tall and true, well maybe not so tall anymore. I walk past her on an almost daily basis. Oh what secrets she would share.

1950-60s T-Fords and camping under the pines...

Tawnyness

We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.

Saint Augustine

In the spirit of two other like minded birdnerders I know, although I don't claim to have taken this actual photograph, I was, however, present for the moment, and he did use my camera! Two shacked up Tawny Frogmouths taking shelter at the home of a very pretty lady and her two perfectly gallant sons, while they graciously allowed me to also take residence there for four weeks of this recently past summer. A certain 6 year old even generously gave up his bedroom for me.

Home

Joel V, this one is for you. Hope you come back home to us soon old friend.

Leftovers

Leftovers from the weekend, Avoca Point.

Billy Goat Tales

Cullens Road Billy Goats. Cape Three Points.