Words and music: Go East To Your Mountain

Go East of your mountain Where he founded a home Rest there – nothing said Rest there – nothing unsaid Go East beyond the swelling Richness of oil, siphoned To a father of a dying majority You might see the clear water Go east to my fortress There look through my mountain Again see theContinue reading “Words and music: Go East To Your Mountain”

Words and Music: Pets, plants, places and people long for the intimacy of touch

Ka tau te kārohirohi te katoa O te taiao nei I have learned that… Pets, plants and places And people long for The intimacy of the Human touch  Kua rongo ake au… Na, tirotiro ana mō te aroha me te rangimārie Mehe e tirotoro ana kei whea te rangimārie ka kitea e Te aroha eContinue reading “Words and Music: Pets, plants, places and people long for the intimacy of touch”

Ancient Word of the Day: Crudelis

Crudelis: Latin To delight in blood and gore. Over time this word came to mean being vicious and cruel The word Crudelis comes from an even older word in Proto-Indo-European, simply Kru which means blood, gore and viscera. Kru words show up in the English language a lot in association with bloody and awful deaths.Continue reading “Ancient Word of the Day: Crudelis”

10 Interesting Things I Found on the Internet #43

In the areas between the two hemispheres of your brain there is a cloudy twilight zone where weird things hang out, this is where you will find these random things. I hope you enjoy them! Thank you for reading… Sampson is allowed into the lab, so long as he wears full PPE A Golden RetrieverContinue reading “10 Interesting Things I Found on the Internet #43”

Behold the tui: seductive songstress of the shaky isles

This is a bit of a remix. We had a resident tui when we were living in Auckland in 2014 to 2018, she (I prefer to think of her as a she) was very vocal, flirty and beautiful. The Polish Bear got a very impressive Sony camera that was great for these close up shotsContinue reading “Behold the tui: seductive songstress of the shaky isles”

A brief and enchanting history of Australian milk bars

Originally the concept of the milk bar in America was also a spin-off from the ever-popular apotheke-style pharmacists who dispensed medicines and often refreshing milk-infused tinctures to waiting customers. The customers often milled around or sat on bar stools at a long galley-style counter top. Originally, the pharmacists mixed the medicine with their backs turnedContinue reading “A brief and enchanting history of Australian milk bars”

10 Interesting Things I Found on the Internet #42

Yo-ho-ho and a genie bottle filled with Ugandan palm oil. Stick around a bit for some tasty morsels brought out from the back cellar for your perusal, black-label, rare stuff hope you enjoy it. Tulip: A short film by Andrea Love (the genius behind Cooking With Wool) This looks so cute! I have featured theContinue reading “10 Interesting Things I Found on the Internet #42”

Art shows us that not all scars are ugly

Art has a strange negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It create intimacys; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.

Begin with brokenness, begin again

“Stories have endings, that’s why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth. Begin with brokenness, begin again. We are not all, not only, the charactersContinue reading “Begin with brokenness, begin again”

Kaumātua Wisdom: Hawaiki nui Hawaiki roa

Whakarongo ki te Au Our truth is this: We come from the sea this is where our bones lie not on the summits of mountains Hawaiki nui Hawaiki roa Is our ancestral Pacific land and its location in history can only be found in legend yielding only to the sea’s timelessness He Kuaka Mārangaranga KotahiContinue reading “Kaumātua Wisdom: Hawaiki nui Hawaiki roa”