Waist line expansion

About a guy who settled...

 

I ate the salted caramel cheesecake, set free the belching groaning despair of aching.

Shut off the rattling in my guts of unfulfilled desire, frustration and boredom.

I laid back in the satisfied saturation of confectionery bliss.

The temporary high delivered by a single slice, delicious flavours, sugar and fat.

Stoned

More! It’s never enough!

Youth fleeting, gut extended, tooth rot, knees knock and buckle when crossed, fire kindled, regrets mingled, in the company of chances not taken, now lost.

Hope’s drive sated by the spoon or the fork. Something better can get back in it’s box. Cheese cake is gone and the spirit is beaten. Sleep it off!

Wake!

On this day we live!

Bird in a cage

Last year a friend asked if my kids would like to take care of his 2 budgies Kelvin and... I forgot the other birds name, she's gone now.

We were reluctant to take the birds but wanted to help him out and I thought it would be good for the kids to have first hand experience of taking care of a bird.

As a teenager I didn't really relate to people very well and preferred to spend time in the wild, watching birds, fishing and that sort of thing. At some point I managed to convince my parents to let me keep some birds and before long I had completely overwhelmed them. From the age of about 14 I started to breed various species of birds, then by the time I was 20 I'd practically turned half my parents back yard into a network of aviaries and cages. I always wanted to create as close to as natural and diverse space as possible... but in fact all I did was keep a whole lot of birds in a big cage! 

I preferred native species but I remember having a pair of Cuban finches which were so small the male would continually get out of the aviary, but his bond was so strong to the female that he'd always stick around and fly back into the aviary when I opened the door. In my fantasy world this is exactly how it would be. I would keep the birds but they'd be free to fly around the unfenced boundary of our yard... I remember at the beginning of High School I read a book called Birdy by William Wharton (A good read for a maladjusted teen)....  The main character in the story, who had been kind of obsessed with birds, became psychologically unhinged when he served in the second world war and regressed into an imaginary world. Some how I related to this kind of disturbing story and have to admit I often retreated into a similar fantasy world with the birds.

Calvin and Crystal in a cage

When I left home my parents gave the birds away and had the aviaries removed. I didn't mind, it was a hobby which got out of control and actually at the time I was kind of ambivalent about keeping the birds locked up but had not devised an exit plan and the poor creatures just kept breeding.

Something inside me knew it wasn't right but I just kept making the space bigger and the birds kept breeding and so on. I never really got that much appreciation of just sitting and watching the birds. I had 'collected'.

These days I have no interest in keeping any creature in a cage! I can't stand it on multiple levels. Firstly to see an animal reduced to complete dependance on human beings for their basic survival is not at all inspiring to me. Maybe when I was younger I liked the idea of them relying on me, at least in the life of a budgie or cockatiel waiting to be fed my life had some bearing. Maybe it helped me through a difficult time in my life or even taught me some lessons about responsibility etc...

I won't go into the trials and dramas of keeping the birds, but we did lose one bird and ended up replacing her with another from the pet shop rather than see Kelvin be completely lonely. Then Yesterday the Krystal (Kelvin's new partner) got out of the cage while I was trying to transfer her. That's when I realized I actually can't do this. I have no business keeping these creatures in cages! I'm feeling like to keep animals now is just a bit too close to playing God right now it's not something I really want to be playing at.

 

If you have a bird in a cage I bet you've got a few photos of the bird. Have you ever wondered why the photos look so drab? I was looking at Calvin alone in his cage and it dawned on me. We love these animals, we are fascinated by their antics and watching them go about just being themselves, inside the cage... But when we watch them we rarely consider their containment, only the joy we get from watching them and we like to think they are happy. But the camera catches the moment without the subjective lens of the human imagination, often focusing on the wire rather than the bird.

When Crystal got out she flew away, she would have had no idea where she was going, how to find food or even how to get back to the 'safety of her cage'.

Wild birds I sometimes see

These days I hate visiting zoos or places where animals are held on display. I am surrounded by wild creatures and love to watch them in their natural habitat, fully alive and free.

Wishing I was somewhere else!

Tuesday is kayak day. But today I did not go on the water. I am working (pretty much round the clock) and stuck in meetings, enduring gammon talk, false rhetoric and empty promises. It enrages me... I am right now taking a deep breath and thinking of the peace that comes to me on the water.

PEACE - Magaya

 Blessing and relief on the water
I pray today for Grace.

Let freedom reign!

More on Hodgkinson, Tom, How to be free (London. Hamish and Hamilton. 2006)

"...absolutely everything - these days appears to be made of plastic. It's just as Woody Guthrie predicted in his song 'Talking Columbia', trains, clothes, furniture. White plastic is the triumph of quantity over quality, of factory over handwork. Plastic is cold, sterile, humourless, poisonous, ugly, wasteful, unrottable, unburnable; it is a stinking nothing made of oil and money. Plastic drips greed..."
(Tom Hodgkinson, How to be Free, p.287)

Right on Tom!

Hail the spade, the horse and the quill! Let's make music and quit moaning! Thrift is freedom, play is natural, compost is sweet nourishment for our gardens of fruit. I will gladly shovel my own shit. Supermarkets will fall and ugliness vanish as quickly as we can realize the fact, and the enlightened ones would agree. "Life is Absurd, We are Free".

On The Home Front

All the extra travel we've done this year was a deliberate attempt to break free of a Rut. Taking our holiday to Bali and down the Centre was basically an attempt to break free of the rut, of stress, pressure, disharmony and monotony that our family had fallen into over the past few years.

Things were actually getting pretty grim at home and a fair measure of intolerance and aggravation at each other's idiosyncrasies was leading us down a path of despair! We thought, it's time to hit the road! We'll try it together before circumstances lead us into taking completely different paths... (Which would be a disastrous prospect for our little family). So we planned and booked a trip to Bali, Sam booked tickets for her and the kids to visit her mother for a period when I would be busy at work and we planned our Christmas break. Then there was the recent drive down through the Red Centre which just had to happen, (even though our credit card was already overloaded with debt and the bank account was empty) because neither of us could imagine life at home during school holidays with a couple of hyperactive kids! Thus to prevent the family imploding we resolved to get out of Dodge (Darwin/or at least our flat) at every opportunity to prevent a domestic Apocalypse!

The problems that besieged us appeared to be the result of what happens when two people, who have been living together for more than 10 years, move in two philosophically opposed directions. Or at least when their ideals appear to become incompatible.
My focus had been to reduce my impact on the Earth and live in the most sustainable manner I possibly can. My wife's approach had been totally focused on providing for our kids. (Not a bad objective in itself) Unfortunately though, contrary to what the TV adds tell us, consumer desires can never be satisfied by any quantity of junk purchased from Big W or Kmart! Happiness can not be found inside the plastic wrapper of a McDonald's Happy Meal treat! (Sorry but that stuff really peeves me!). Although we usually only watched ABC and SBS the amount of TV hours in our house was far too high!

We decided that allowing child no. 1 to watch videos on her own TV at night was counteractive to her sleep, play, reading, socialization needs. So we got rid of one TV, introduced a bed time routine and read stories at night and stopped watching Teley between the hours of 6pm and 8:30pm ourselves.

Not long after this we made our trip to Bali, and found the experience kind of stressful, especially at meal times and in restaurants, but the family was together and we managed to have some pretty special experiences.

Some time not long after returning from Bali our 10 year old family TV fizzed out and ceased to work... I drew a sigh of relief and asked Sam what she wanted to do. Knowing that we were already overdrawn on the credit card she looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. Taking the prompt I immediately said, "I don't if we have no TV!" She agreed and we have now gone about two months or so without at TV. Our only regret is that SBS have been screening the second series of Flight of the Conchords!
The benefits of living without a TV have been too numerous to count but basically we now read more, and argue less, the kids get more attention and our power bill has dropped... stuff like that.

We learned somewhere along the way that our youngest has an unusual bone condition and will require specialized surgery later this month! He is likely to be off his feet for at least 3 months and will require a great deal of attention. This made the holiday to Alice Springs an absolute must! We had to get the kids out and have a good time together before the pressures of immobility and full time care take their toll on us all.

The getaway was great. Our little fella ran around everywhere with the kids we met along the way, the place we stayed at in Alice had these enormous jumping pillows that he bounced on every day. On the way home we stopped in Mataranka and watched a local singer perform at the Homestead. Our little bloke danced and danced all night and had the crowd in stitches of laughter and joy!
As we traveled along the Stuart Highway we all had a wonderful time, camping, walking, playing. The desert can be a restorative place and I think we all came back to Darwin with a certain feeling of calm and contentedness. Along the way Sam and I got right into reading a book called How to Be Free. The book is written by an Anarchist who believes life would be so much better if we took on values more like they had in the Middle Ages! Somehow he struck a chord with me and I found the first half of the book absolutely inspirational! It was an affirmation of so much of how I've been trying to change my own life. What was more miraculous was that Sam and I found we shared a lot of the same ideas! Although we'd been struggling to agree on anything previously the simple act of reading the book out loud as we drove brought us closer together. Amazing. The Author Tom Hodgkinson often runs of on flights of fancy and makes some pretty hefty judgements, generalizations and occasionally, omits important facts when accusing others, however he is enormously entertaining and often hits the nail right on the "... F-cking Head." (Damien Hirst).
I don't care if he gets his facts slightly distorted. Just because I don't agree with him advocating smoking in community halls where there are children, or I can't stand the way he raves incessantly about the joys of drinking Ale doesn't alter my acceptance of his basic argument. Even though he makes a few misinformed and obviously antagonistic attacks on Alcoholics Anonymous, the first half of the book has been great! (I'm only now growing weary as I attempt to finish reading it on my own). If you want to make a leap out of the consumer trap give it a go. Along the way I also read Henry Reynolds book 'Why Weren't we told'.
A great read and once again reminding me of the need to live an authentic life, not accept the status quo and always question anything presented to me as "The Truth".


Youtube review here


Our trip down the center has prompted us to make positive changes in our lives. Since returning two weeks ago I have collected 4 bags of horse manure on my Xtracycle, prepared some of the garden for sheet mulching and have been watering our little herb garden every morning and in the evenings with the kids!

Yesterday while at the tip shop I discovered a copy of "Introduction to Permaculture" by Bill Mollison. This book is: ***GOLD***

Life is taking a turn for the better things are looking better every day! Who cares that we spent all our cash and available credit? Soon our second car will burn it's clutch out and we will go back to being a one car family! Who knows what opportunities that will bring with it? Maybe we'll travel by horse??? Or at least give more incentive for cycling?

So all that travel used up quite a bit of carbon, I know! However it may have saved us all our sanity and brought us one step closer to a more satisfying future with less.
Freedom is just around the corner!