Monday - Wednesday March 16 - 18, 2009 (diary)

Monday is still a warm day with sun and a blue sky, but in the evening we get a thunderstorm. I still stay away from the water but enjoy my usual lunch at the Surf Club.
I am franticly reading the last few books I borrowed from the Library (trying to finish them before I leave for the Northern Territory) : "A Most Wanted Man", the latest spy novel by John Le Carré and "a Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway. I enjoy both.

I read "A Moveable Feast" before. It are stories of Hemingway's life in Paris as a young man in the 1920s. It is one of his few novels ("Fiesta" is another one) without bloodshed and death. The book's happy mood is in stark contrast with the gloom and foreboding depicted in Némirovsky's works of the same period.

Tuesday is overcast with occasional showers, but the temperature is pleasant. We have a birthday party for two of the ladies at the bridge club with lots of food and champagne.
Wednesday the weather stays overcast. After my lunch I pick up Babette from the Airport who has returned from Sydney. Shortly after that Doug's sister Kate and her hubby arrive at ThreePonds for a brief overnight visit.

In the evening I take my young friend Mel to 'The Spirit House' for dinner. The ambiance, and the quality and imagination of the food are once again superb and we both enjoy the evening immensely. Mel had never been here before and of course neither had I until only a few months ago. A definite must for whoever visits our Sunshine Coast.

Thursday March 19, 2009 (diary)

I have almost finished reading A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré. I really enjoy this book. As with most of his spy novels there is not a great deal of action but a lot of interesting and insightful dialogue.
Checking out the online reviews of Carré's book I notice that some of the American ones are not all that favourable. Perhaps because the Yank investigators are portrayed as being the badies (overruling the British and double crossing the German spys) in respect of their gung ho attitude and superficial approach to post 9/11 investigations of Islamic terrorists. But I believe Carré probably has it right. He certainly did a fair bit of research on it all.

Awareness 29 continues from March 6
As a young boy I was always very scared of thunder storms. I used to count the seconds between seeing the light of the lightning strike and the sound of the thunder. Every second delay means that you are about 400 metres farther away from where the lightning strikes.
We are all familiar with this of course. On the land you may see a farmer hammering a fence pole into the ground across a paddock 200 metres away, and there is a distinct time delay between you actually seeing him hitting the post and hearing the sound of his hammer blow.

But of course light too takes time to reach our eyes. It is very very fast. Nothing in fact travels faster than it, but there is always an ever so small time laps between something happening and you actually seeing it. When you look at a tree with its twigs and leaves swaying in the breeze, what you see actually happened a fraction of a millisecond ago. The time laps is of course irrelevant for the things we observe around us on earth itself, but farther afield it becomes an entirely different matter, although we are not conscious of it.
Looking at the moon for example we see its image as it was about 2 seconds ago. The image we have of the sun is a full 8 minutes back into the past, and some of the galaxies and stars are millions of light years away and may actually have ceased to exists altogether without us knowing it.

So what am I trying to convey to you here ?
The reality we live in is an apparent reality only. Most of what we think of as our "NOW moment" at any point in time predominantly consists of events that have already happened. The farther we look away from us the deeper we look into our (relative) past.
We are conditioned throughout our lives to believe that things are as we see them and accept that as the true reality. This however is not correct. It is acceptable and fine as a practical guide for running our lives. But I strongly believe that when considering ourselves within the larger scheme of the development and evolution of the universe, our present naive flawed conception of "reality" prevents us from gleaming the real truth.

I don't believe that the human race will ever be able to fully grasp the true reality of life and the universe, but I personally feel it important to at least be aware of our flawed image of it.
This is why I for example reject concepts like predestination or determinism, reincarnation, a life hereafter, etc. They are all based on a flawed human perception of time and space. They are fussy "feel good" ideas which may make us feel safe, provide us with an illusionary deeper meaning of our life, but they are (as I see it) simply not compatible with the (present scientific) notion we now have of the concept of spacetime.
Searching for the deeper reality of life means stepping out off our comfort zone, letting go of old perceptions generated from our past ignorance, and entering new unknown territory. A little scary perhaps, but very exciting and liberating too.
Awareness continues on March 25, 2010

Fridayday March 20, 2009 (diary, interior decorating, personal growth)

My mother had many artistic talents, one of which was interior decorating. My father used to marvel at the sight of my mother entering the room. She would, almost unconsciously, shift a bowl on a table a fraction here, nudge a decoration on a shelf there, and, as my father observed, "at once the whole room would look perfect again."
Us children too inherited a touch from her magic, and being the oldest I soon (in my teens) teamed up with my mother in this interesting pursuit.

At regular intervals we went through the entire house white washing the walls, while the furniture and decorations in the lounge and dining room were almost constantly on the move. At the end of a long week on the road my father would return home to find that his favourite chair had again moved to another location. Sitting down observing the landscape from this new perspective we would excitedly point out to him the huge improvement it was to the previous week's setup.

I maintained my passion for interior decorating throughout my married life and I was always the one to carry this out every time we moved into a new home. As I was a geologist on the move we rarely stayed longer than two years in the same house, so I got many opportunities to indulge in this task. I loved putting up suspended shelves across the room above our heads or in window sills on which I placed pot flowers, especially climbers, books, bottles, ornaments. It provided both space and interest.
In our first home in Australia I discovered, while knocking down an internal wall between two rooms, the interesting pattern of support beams. I polished, then stained them and left them in position as a special feature of interest. Our Aussie friends thought we were mad of course, but Antien and I felt it was wonderful.

After we split up in 1980 Antien finally got the opportunity to decorate her own home in Adelaide herself and she did a very good job on it too. She must have enjoyed it enormously.
I by that time (and during most of my years studying at the Jazz College) lived in a small 2 bedroom unit right on the beach in Glenelg with large windows overlooking the sea. For a few years my brother Claus (also single again by that time) moved into the unit next door and we outdid each other in making our new homes a magical wonderland.

When I moved to Nambour in the Queensland Sunshine Coast (1991) my long held passion for interior decorating finally came to an end. Why ? Partly because I wanted my eyes to focus on the lovely nature outside (visible through large windows in kitchen, dining room and lounge) and not distract them by decorations inside the house. I just plonked the TV, chair, reading lamp, dining table in functional positions and that was it.

But there was also an other, more significant, element which caused this change : personal growth !
The ultimate cause of death is birth itself. Between these two fixed points in life our physical development follows a parabolic path of growth, then decline. Our mental (and if you like spiritual) development however (I believe) continues to grow until the very end, only provided the physical condition of our brain remains sound.

Especially since my 40s I have been acutely aware of this, and I marvel at the changes in all sorts of different ways this manifests itself in me. In a general sense it has at first been the gradual retreat from materialistic things.
And now, especially since entering into the 70s, it is the reducing interest in the short term common humdrum human interests. It is as if I feel my self gradually moving farther and farther away from the day to day life on earth, "zooming" away from it and observing everything from a distant and more broader perspective. An increased feeling of being part of the universe, not just of the earth. It is a process of gradual liberation from the restricting culture and social structure of human life on earth. Where will this fascinating journey end ?   Or lead to ?