I have another post almost ready to go, but the closing paragraphs require a little more brainpower than I have available counting down to midnight. And so it will wait until the morning. In the meantime, this little creature settled on the kitchen windowsill this evening and I was struck by the mossy green beauty and delicacy of its wings.

I lingered around them, under the benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

-Bronte«  , EmilyJane
Wuthering Heights, ch.34, closing words.

Only 13 more sleeps until Mr Claus squeezes into his red and white one piece and down the chimney. Although if he’s managed to find flying reindeer, I’m not sure why he can’t just fling a handful of fairy dust at the front door and enter the house that way.

http://vimeo.com/17722892

In an earlier post I made reference to my time at university and how I had no idea what I wanted to do. And that’s true. However, somewhat bizarrely, I did have some sense of what I would do. It was intangible and ephemeral. If I thought about it, it was like catching a glimpse of something fleeting out of the corner of my eye. No identifiable form, just a sense of something existing in time and space.

Not easy to describe in a post on a blogsite, but essentially I had a vision in my mind’s eye of a foundation. Well, when I say I had a vision, what I mean is that when I asked myself what I would do (mirror mirror on the wall, tell me what Tink will do when she grows up) the word that came back was ‘foundation‘. A legal entity? The foundation of a building? I had no idea. Just that I knew I would be involved with building something and be part of a team that would create something pretty darn cool. Innovative. Beautiful. Good for the planet.

While I was at university studying law, I doodled words relating to the foundation in case notes at the edge of the page. When I travelled after graduation, I sketched a three storied building in my journal and in the back of a beautiful little leather bound notebook, I drew a very simple little diagram of the foundation.

I am not a regular journal writer. Over the years I have written in fits and starts. But I kept those fits and starts. Ot at least I did until I moved to Sydney in 1998. At that point, I bundled everything up in a box in the garage and wrote all over it ‘Do not throw out!’ While this may seem a little extreme, I should explain that Dad had a habit of embarking on these massive cleaning sprees, a shock and awe approach to spring cleaning. Nothing was safe. Not even, apparently, boxes belonging to his absent daughter even if they did have instructions written all over them with exclamation marks. So yes, none of the notes I wrote on the foundation survived. Or so I thought…

Just over a year ago, as I was preparing to head of to the United States in search of more pieces of my foundation puzzle, I was flicking through the little leather bound book I’d bought in Italy many years ago. I’ve used very little of it, just a few pages at the front and I had not looked at it in fourteen years. But this time last year, something made me flick to the back pages and lo and behold there I found the little diagram of the foundation. And it was far, far more accurate than I could have ever have imagined, at the time I put pen to paper.

It seems that having faith in a long held vision and a commitment to being in my element, has led to more and more serendipitous and synchronistic meetings of kindred spirits. And within the last seven days, a long held and nurtured vision has begun to feel much, much more tangible.

At our last Onemeall lunch of 2010, eighteen amazing people in their element gathered to connect and collaborate. At a test event for NourisHer (see separate page on this site) twenty wonderful women sat around a work bench at Urban Harvest HQ to learn about olive oil. And just a few nights ago, eight people shared a wickedly good chocolate brownie and discovered that they have for many years shared the same vision, seen from different perspectives, of a foundation and a three storied building.

Hold the vision.

Keep the faith, in yourself and in the mysterious workings of the universe.

And never underestimate the alchemy of eight people sitting around a table, sharing chocolate brownie.

As I run a bath, and think of the conversations I’ve had with people today, I hear the voice of Dory from Finding Nemo, in my head. ‘Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…’

There seem to be so many people in Wellington at the moment, who are just keeping on swimming. After a long winter, as we head into the ‘silly season’ with night after night of end of year events, I’m having numerous conversations with people who are running on empty.

We spend the last month of the year running on empty and then take 2-3 weeks off and Christmas to recharge the batteries and then start all over again. I can’t help but think that there must be a better way.

Work vs life.

Work with life.

I’ve also been having conversations with people about how when you’re ‘working’ in your element, spending your days doing what comes naturally and with ease (which is not too say that it’s not challenging, time consuming etc) work doesn’t feel like work. And in starting to build a business, a way of sustaining myself, which has at its core what is second nature to me, well, it just feels like I’m heading in the right direction.

I don’t have all the answers at the moment, by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m ‘working’ with some wonderful people, and I have a sneaking suspicious that when we start fitting our very own elemental pieces of the puzzle together, they might just form quite an illuminating picture.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this whole work vs life thing.

In the meantime, just keep swimming.

Bear with me, this is an experiment…

Because of the nature of these thoughts, I decided to record a short (less than 5 minutes) vid.

http://vimeo.com/17232831

And much as it’s nice to think that someone might actually watch it, strangely it feels a little beside the point. I had loads of fun doing it and I used my voice.

Hope you’re all well and happy.

Tink

Tonight, I was going to write about letting go. A continuation of an earlier post on perspective, on the conscious act of taking a step backwards, looking at all the pieces of my puzzle and coming to an understanding that perhaps I’m trying too hard to make some of them fit.

But today New Zealand has lost 29 miners at Pike River. And if I’m being honest, I have to say I really haven’t paid a huge amount of attention to this event over the last week. Partly because I am not a fan of mining, but also because for some reason, I just assumed that here in New Zealand, we’d get them out. But we didn’t. And a small town on the rugged West Coast of the South Island is devastated.

I learned of the second explosion and the loss of hope via Twitter. My instinctive reaction was a sinking feeling in my stomach followed by a heaviness of heart. And somehow, in the moment in which I was very conscious of my heart, I felt an almost physical sensation of it ‘going out’ to all of those people who have lost family and friends.

Today, families lost hope that the 29 miners would survive. Today thousands of children will have died from hunger-related causes and preventable diseases.  Women will have died in childbirth. Innocent people caught up in conflict, will have lost their lives. The intention here is not to be depressing, but very simply reflective. Tonight, in the wake of learning about the fate of the men at Pike River, for a few moments, I think of how many people around the world have lost a loved one today and my heart goes out them too.

A couple of weeks ago I visited my old primary school and for the first time in 3o something years, looked over at the trees underneath which I played as a five year old. Standing there, I had a vivid flashback of lying on the ground and drawing, then ‘discovering’, dinosaur footprints in the earth.

When do we lose our childlike sense of wonder in discovering the world? Is it something we grow out of? Or are we taught out of it?

Last year, I spent several days in the Costa Rican rainforest studying biomimicry, the art and science of emulating nature. Each day, our group would set out into the rainforest to explore. Everyday, someone would appear back on the main balcony, eyes sparkling, exclaiming ‘This is so cool! You have to come and have a look! Follow meeeeeeee!’ Like a painting being restored to reveal the jewel underneath, our joyful sense of discovering was being restored. We were rediscovering a childlike (not childish) sense of wonder in the jaw-droppingly amazing natural world of which we are a part.

Apparently at one of the local primary schools here in Wellington, every week the children have discovery time. Maybe this is common, I hope so. But it led me to think, how cool it would be if as adults, we had discovery time? At midday on Wednesday, David the policy analyst sitting in his office in a high rise building, gets to walk away from his desk for a few hours, take of his tie, roll up his sleeves and head out into the world to discover. What might he find? Who might he find? What long lost part of himself might he, with shining eyes, rediscover?

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Anais Nin

Yesterday morning I spent a very happy hour wandering around the European Masters exhibition at Te Papa. A stunning and diverse selection of works, it includes nearly 100 pieces by some of the greatest German, French, Spanish, Belgian, Dutch and Swiss masters of the 19th and 20th centuries. There was a beautiful little Degas which would look gorgeous in my bedroom. I needed Thomas Crown.

When I was a little girl, my father Clive took me to a Monet exhibition. He loved art and he had a particular technique for viewing an exhibition. The first thing he would do was a reconnaissance of all the works. A quick walk around the exhibition to get an overview and to identify those few pieces he wanted to focus his attention on. Then with each of his favourite pieces, he’d begin by standing well back in order to get a sense of perspective, then he’d get in as close as he could to observe the detail. Finally, he’d have a leisurely stroll around the whole exhibition again, as if to put those few works in context.

It is a technique I have adopted. Strangely enough I find it work for buffets too.

As I stood in the gallery at Te Papa, peering at one of the paintings I was most drawn to, I became aware of people standing on either side of me peering at the same painting and I wanted to ask ‘What do you see?’

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about perception. How we see ourselves, how we believe others see us, how others really do see us and how we see the world in very different ways.

One way or another, I seem to have connected with a large number of people over the last few years. The world is a village and many times I’ve been surprised by the few degrees of separation between people. So on numerous occasions I’ve found myself having conversations with someone and it turns out we have a mutual friend or acquaintance. And what I’m fascinated, actually more than that, I’m moved by, is how one person’s perception of another can differ so greatly, depending on their experience and how they see the world.

I know that 38 years of experience and neurobiology shape the way way I see the world. When someone sees something, or someone, in a very different way to me, I try and take a step backwards (or sometimes, one forward) to understand why. To ask myself two questions:

How do you see the world?

How does the world see you?

To be continued...