Available Light

On St Clair beach is a group of old pilings. When I first bought a decent (for the time) digital camera I photographed them and made a picture I was happy with. Way back then,  I took the picture at dusk, used a tripod, set the lens to a narrow aperture to get as much depth of field as possible, and used a slow shutter speed (around 20 seconds) to smooth out the water.  I've visited the pilings many times, and made much the same shot. Last night I realised that the tide and the light were appropriate for yet another iteration, and took the picture above. Same settings, though the old wooden logs have aged a bit. We revisit our past. It's not now as we imagined it. Things that seemed so strong and straight are succumbing to the tides of the universe, as everything does.  The piles have suffered the indignities of all that is constant in their environment. They are still lovely in their decline, though, and make their own statement about impermanence and the movement...

Clemency and I got home about 5 yesterday afternoon, and although we had been away for only a little over 24 hours it felt longer. We had left at 5.30 am the previous day, towing the caravan  through thick fog in order to be at a meeting in Wanaka at 10. We had breakfast at the Tin Goose Cafe in Alexandra before I dropped the caravan off  at Clyde and Clemency and her schoolbooks at a lakeside table at Wanaka and headed off to sit round a huge table with a lot of highly motivated people. The morning was intense, but satisfactory, and in the middle of the day it was back to Clyde ready for a Michaelmass service in the little retreat house being developed in St. Michael's Church. There were conversations and negotiations and preparations all accomplished on the sofa of the caravan, which does pretty well as a hospitality space, albeit a small one. I preached and celebrated eucharist and had a few significant conversations and drove home through Lawrence and Milton, having put...

It was E-Day today. All over the country collection points were set up for gathering old bits of electronic junk together so that they can be recycled. So I gathered my bits of electronic junk. I laid the back seats of the car flat, opened the basement doors and began to move back and forward like an ant at a picnic carrying treasures from one spot to another. I filled the car. Filled it! It was piled to the roof and I had four large banana boxes on the front seat beside me. There were four Commodore 64s and three Atari STs dating from the mid 1980s. There were monitors and PCs and bags of old, nameless cables and power supplies. There were boxes and boxes and boxes of floppy disks. The people at the recycling station were fairly impressed with the quantity and mystified by the machinery; after all, they were mostly students doing a day's worth of community service and some of the stuff I gave them was manufactured before they were born. Today I dumped stuff that I had once year...

The stories we find compelling reveal something to us of the tensions in our lives. Perhaps even more revealing are the stories we ourselves tell. Think of the incidents that happen to us in the course of an ordinary day - there will be dozens and dozens of them. Most of these will pass into oblivion but some we will pass on to others in the form of the stories we tell when asked "how was your day?" We won't tell everything that happened to us, but a carefully selected sample. Why these few? And the incidents we choose to tell are never reported exactly as they happened: we select details, emphasising some parts and ignoring others. We minimise, or even omit entirely some of the characters present and play up others. We expand the timescale in parts of the story and contract it in others. Think for example of what is meant in the middle of a story by the phrase, "and then..." (or such similar phrases as "what happened next" or "next thing I knew...