The silly season

In a less navel gazing tone, how very very sad is this: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/29/2433277.htm?section=justin

When we get to the point that we will literally KILL each other to get a bargain, I hang my head in shame. Consumerism has consumed us.

Being back home

It's a strange thing, getting back home after so long away.

Initially you still feel like a tourist as all the little old sounds, sights and smells you had forgotten about come flooding over you as though new. The wonderfully laid-back Australian accent with its rough edges saying words like "g'day", "mate", and "no worries". The birds. Oh my god, the birds! How I missed them and didn't even realise. So many birds making so many sounds and splashing the sky and ground and trees with so much colour! Driving on the left hand side of the road. The beaches with their beautiful stretches of either white or golden sand, depending on which bit of the coast you are on. The wild dancing grey-green Eucalypt trees. The cicada's. The smell of tea tree blossom. The flies. The heat. The storms. Coopers beer. The intensity of the light. The surf and the breeze that carries the promise of surf and the surfers. Kangaroos. Echidnas. Snakes and spiders and insects... all these things have a beautiful familiarity and novelty at the same time.

As the world economy is collapsing around my ears and I find myself without a job or a house surrounded by questions, do I have any regrets?... NUP. Wouldn't change a thing.

fire in the belly

I have fire in the belly. Perhaps it is something I ate. Acid. But it feels more like a butterfly. A butterfly of fire flapping its wings to keep the fire going going going. I feel like I need to be doing something with all of this energy though or it will burn me up.

Today, my smile is real. My energy is not forced, and I have to make an affort to not launch off the ground with every step. I love feeling this way, and I don´t think it has happened for a while. I feel like my travel has finally breathed life into the smouldering coals of me.

Life is such an adventure. Every day we wake up not knowing what we will be doing, how we will be doing it, who we will meet, what we will say, what we will learn, or think or eat or hear... even if we plan, we will not know the details. We will wake up not knowing how we will feel. Not knowing who we will be. Every day I am myself, but every day I am different. I love to be surprised, though sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be the same every day. Is it possible? Can anyone be the same every day? Philosophy aside, as I know all the arguamnets that you can never step into the same river twice, that we are made up of molecules that are forever moving in and out of us, that every second we are a second older etc etc. BUT there are some people who SEEM like they feel the same about life every day. Not too happy not too sad, maybe they say just right but to me it is just wrong. You need to have up and down to have motion and you need motion to get to new places. Boats bob up and down but have balance. I love it I love it I love it.

Ode to the road

Ah, the sweetness of travelling and unravelling. While my clothes ravel up in my packpack, I unravel. People say that when you are addicted to travel, you are running away, but I don´t feel that way. I think you learn more about yourself when on the road. When in a rut, it is easy to develop tunnel vision. A rat in a rut, running a race for someone else, chasing a light that will never be. By removing yourself from your comfort zone, and placing yourself in a foreign surrounding, you see the contrast instead of the grey.

But I guess some time I will have to return, just hopefully not to grey.

Not a game

Someone that I worked with at MEC died on the weekend, from an ice climbing accident. I am wondering whether writing it will make it seem more real. At the moment, I just can’t make it real in my head. He was there one day, healthy, young, happy… and now he is not. The human mind really has a hard time registering this kind of news. We somehow seem to fool each other and ourselves that everything is permanent, and it is not. Paul’s death is definitely a reality check. It is also a reminder of the dangers that exist in climbing. A reminder that it is not a game. But then again, neither is life.

Thoughts are words that define worlds

I was wondering the other day. Is it wondering or wandering? I never know. To wander is to walk about and to wonder is to ponder, I think. But each is a bit of the other. Anyhow, I was wondering how I would describe my job to someone who, not only had no concept of IT, but had no language. I would try to say that I fill up blank space with words, symbols and code. But that the space is not physical space, but temporal and made of bits and bytes. Dots and dashes. Blanks and solids. Two contradictory opposing opposite entities bound together to make something that is nothing...

But then, how would I even get that far without language. Not just without the English language, but without any known language for the purpose of communication.

Imagine being the sole survivor of a lost and finished tribe, with no language. No peers. No family. Nothing and no one to serve as points of reference. Nothing to define, limit or outline you.No parameters. No boundaries. Nothing to show time passing, moving, shaping...

what would that be like? I can't even begin to imagine, as all my thoughts are words.