I am not sure where this post is going to go, but I’ll follow my normal process for these more thought-based posts rather than quick updates. I generally start putting ideas together on the page, add a few photographs, then revisit over a couple of days before I post the final version. Often the post looks quite different after a couple of days, and may have gone in a different direction.

However, a key issue for me is not to rework the post too much, and if it gets to a point that seems right, publish ! Going by the 80/20 rule, I’ll spend a couple of days but then there is little benefit to spending many more days, the immediacy of the feeling or thought or situation is lost and the post less relevant.

Geographical opposites ( location not climate)

Tuesday evening Andy and I went to see the film Arctic, with a review and some details here. It’s a beautifully filmed story of survival, which turns to resilience and determination through the course of the movie. Simple, in some ways austere, but with an uplifting theme throughout and while there is one gruesome moment, it’s well handled and largely hidden from view. The ending … I know how I feel it ended ( showing my endless optimism) but that is up to each viewer.

Today we saw a virtual reality short film about Antarctica, the scientists who work there, and the work they are doing on climate change, by correlating the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere with the temperature of the planet, by taking ice cores spanning back many thousands of years. In short, we are on an extremely dangerous path the climate calamity.

Both of these very different visual pieces showed awesome views of nature and resilience, but also the fragility of human life on this planet.

I then compare these images and concepts to the forecast extremely hot summer here in Perth and Western Australia, and the rapidity with which we switch on our air conditioning or just go to the cinema in the middle of the day.

We are privileged here in this affluent country to be able to put the inconveniences of global warming to the back of our minds.

Personally, I’d be ecstatic to find my job in oil and gas become redundant, and have to retrain in renewables, or recycling, or some more planet-friendly profession.

This graph, and a really good article about weather, climate change and how it is measured, can be found here.

Middle path

This post was going to go in a very different direction, but I’ll leave the quotation, as it captures well my current open questioning. I am not sure for what answer I am looking, but plan to enjoy the journey.

“Live everything. Live the questions now”

By Maria Rainer Rilke;

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

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