Posts by Hebe
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Capture: A Place to Stand, in reply to Lilith __,
Hebe, I suggest you try taking the park on a cloudy day. Big trees cast deep shadows and the camera can’t handle the range of light and dark that our eyes can. An overcast day evens things out :-).
Thank you: great advice. I don't think like this (yet).
-
Capture: A Place to Stand, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Here’s where we are.
Hope you are settling in well Chris.
-
Thank you John and David.
-
Capture: A Place to Stand, in reply to Nora Leggs,
The park near home where we walk the dog. (I'm not getting that light right.)
-
My best cornflowers ever: a waist-high clump a metre across that self-seeded for the first time.
-
So many wonderfuls!
Lilith, that bunch of daffodils is the best.
I am feeling at home with the Earth again, and starting to return to gardening. Greg has been working in it constantly, and most of the lushness this year is due to him. The cornflowers self-seeded from my planting last year, like a lot of happenings this year. And the photo is special: the first one I took and loaded into the new system I am learning.
-
Home has become primarily for me a refuge from chaos, a place of safety for this nuclear family. Once – it seems like aeons ago – home was about stripping 14-inch kauri skirting boards and finding the right shade of paint; that is mostly gone. Now it’s about solidity: a roof that will not fall on our heads, land that will not flood in a
storm. An abode with room for all of us, our hopes and dreams and hobbies and pets and forthcoming grandchild. Sunny and warm, light, and cosy nooks. A house for a sustainable future for the whanau and friends, whatever the world throws at us.Home is also the familiar places in this city and this country, the friends, acquaintances and web built up over decades of living here. The internet feels like that now too: layers of familiar sites and people.
Re-establishing the commons that lured me into PAS – the generosity of spirit, respect, openness and play along with robust debate of ideas rather than defending harsh ideological stances – is an inspired action. I need it more than ever.
-
Thank you Claudia.
-
....Blood and tears. Fear and silence. A grave silence, broken only by sirens or the sound of helicopter blades. War had come home....
The victims at Charlie Hebdo and the shop were intentionally targeted as members of specific groups, because of their opinions or religion. This time, it is blind violence against random targets. Paris has discovered something it did not taste 10 months ago, a feeling that belongs to war zones: that violent death could come to anyone, anywhere, at any time.This paragraph from Florence Hartmann to me makes the most sense of why the Paris attacks have so shocked the Western world. There is a loss of innocence that such a calculated campaign of violence can happen in a European city to people like you, rather than to people who live in a different culture in another part of the planet.
Many of us have been repeatedly horrified and disgusted at Beirut, Syria, Gaza, Iraq and the list goes on. It is not a matter of forgetting those events or diminishing them in any way.
The only parallel I can give from my experience is the Christchurch earthquakes: seeing the images of injury and death and destruction, hearing the constant sirens, and trying to wrap my head around the fact those scenes were on my daily routes, within 15 minutes of home. Then the shock and disbelief hardened into an acceptance that "it" - war, terrorism or natural disaster - could happen to our relatively comfortable lives: People's innocence and feeling of safety disappears, and I don't know if it ever returns.
The West must prevent that fear and vulnerability calcifying into hate. Unity and understanding are the only ways out.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/15/paris-attacks-aftermath
-
Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to Bart Janssen,
never mind that the job of PM doesn't have an exclusion clause that allows you to ignore citizens you don't really like.
That's it: John Key is not behaving as a Prime Minister should. The niceties of governance elude him.
