Today's Small Joys

 

Firewood

On of the most satisfying jobs on the land is gathering our own firewood. We have used fallen trees, gorse, the neighbour's felled pines. This year we gathered wood from a fallen tānekaha, dead tagasaste trees, a self-sown pine that we felled as it was too close to the driveway, some chestnut prunings and the remains of a large dead pine that we had felled a couple of years ago.

The tree was next to the drive and we were a bit worried that it would block the driveway, so I parked the car on the gate side of the tree.

But Mac felled it perfectly, with room to drive past if we needed to.

Of course the success was all due to supervision by Bob The Dog.

I did some de-limbing but I really need to do some muscle building - I seem to have lost a lot of strength since the previous summer.

Mac did most of the hard work.....

....while I dragged the waste wood and piled it to decompose.

The creatures living in the tree were not impressed at the disruption, poor things.

The old tree that we've been using for a couple of years now, has so much gum, you don't need anything but a log and a bit of crumpled newspaper to ignite it - it's really amazing.

I gathered flax stalks to dry and use as fire-starters - the outside 'bark' catches alight easily, while the pith inside smoulders for ages.

This is the first year we have had a wood shed to keep it in - our old leaky water tank. Mac cut a door in it, and sealed up the holes. It leaks a bit but the wood will still be drier there than stacked under the eves of the house, as in past years. And it's big enough to store new wood to dry for next winter.

There's still a fair bit to split yet, but there's enough to keep us warm for this year and some of next year. It's very satisfying work, but I'm glad we don't live somewhere that has harsh snowy winters - like my friends in Fairbanks, Alaska - the firewood gathering would be a much bigger job.

Into Winter

Even though the sun's hot today
the breeze has a nip in it.
Last night was First Fire.
It was only just warm enough
to open a door to let out
the smell of summer dust
burning off the flue.

Flies and wasps abound,
frantically feeding
laying eggs
ensuring species continuity
knowing without awareness
that this is their final fling
before the winter die off.

We've had the autumnal winds,
the tail ends of tropical cyclones.
I'm ready for frosts,
good steady rain, hail,
fairtrade hot chocolate
and colourful seed catalogues
read, warmed by the fire.

Time Out for a Walk

When Mac took redundancy in mid-December, one of the things we planned to do was to go for more walks. Ha! We've only made it to the beach for a couple of walks, let alone any where else. But last Tuesday we finally did it. It was so dry, a walk in green bush seemed like a great idea.

 We headed off toward Mt Pirongia after lunch and got to Kaniwhaniwha about 2pm.

 We had decided, somewhat nervously, to do the Nikau Walk, which was said on the DOC website to be a 2.5 hour walk. Nervously because I have little personal history of walking / tramping and have no idea of the accuracy of times, nor of the meaning of the difficulty levels with respect to me!

 The walk from the parking area to the Nikau Loop Walk ran between the stream and farnland, but was planted on each side, so there was shade even there.

 Disused ford.

 Free camp site with sunny dunnies. (Long drop toilets.)

 Finally to the Nikau Loop Walk.

 And it's not just a name - there were nikau everywhere! If a few years, our bush will look like this, as we have so many babies growing now there are no stock eating and trampling them.

 I love all the vines growing up the trees.

 One nikau had flowers, new seed and old seed, all on the one tree.

 New seed.

 Flowers and old seed.

 I love the trunks of the nikau.

 The nikau is the most southern growing palm tree.

 But it's not all nikau - there's kiekie

 and ponga

 and hundreds of other beautiful plants and trees. (Which I either don't know or can't be bothered looking up the spellings for.)

 It was a lovely day, and I felt so lucky to see the nikau flowers and berries. Home to a shower which I  tiled years ago inspired by this very tree. Oh yeah - it took us only 2 hours, despite stopping to take a couple of hundred photos.

February Reading

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (2009 Granta Books) by Barbara Ehrenreich

I reserved this book at the library after hearing Ehrenreich interviewed by Kim Hill on National Radio'sSaturday Morning programme.

Ehrenreich came up with the idea for this book after being diagnosed with breast cancer and finding herself engulfed by insistence on cheerfulness, positive thinking, and on denying any and all 'negative' feelings such as fear or anger.

She explores the way positive thinking has become virtually a new religion. The rise of positive and magical thinking in all its guises - The Secret, Law of Attraction, Norman Vincent Peale, personal coaching, corporate coaching - is explored, along with its origin in the rejection of the dour, fear-filled  Calvinism and protestantism that defined past generations of America.
 
Ehrenreich  examines the science of positive thinking and finds it wanting - there is, for example, some data which shows positive thinking can enhance your immune response to a cold, but none that shows an effect on cancer, despite all the hype.

She has chapters which deal with the way positive thinking has taken over cancer support, churches, business, psychology, and even led to the destruction of the economy in 2008.

She sums up by saying that she is not proposing negative thinking, but realistic thinking, based on science, logic, and indeed, common sense (which in my opinion is not actually very common.)

A quote from the book: It's true that subjective factors like determination are critical to survival and that individuals sometimes triumph over nightmarish levels of adversity. But mind does not automatically prevail over matter, and to ignore the role of difficult circumstances - or worse, attribute them to our own thoughts - is to slide toward the kind of depraved smugness Rhonda Byrne expressed when confronted with the tsunami of 2006. Citing the law of attraction, she stated that disasters like tsunamis can happen only to people who are "on the same frequency as the event."

And a recommendation from Christopher Hitchens from the back cover : Unless you keep on saying that you believe in fairies, Tinker Bell will check out, and what's more, her sad demise will be your fault! Barbara Ehrenreich scores again for the independent-minded in resisting this drool and all those who wallow in it."

I highly recommend this book, which I did not find at all negative, but rather, a relief. Have a listen to the podcast linked above too.