IIt's been 37 days since I broke my leg. A lot of time for musings...

I grew in a world where people didn’t talk of sex, religion or politics.

I grew in a world where men were in charge.
I grew in a world where adults told children what to do
I grew in a world where I was told I didn’t appreciate what I had
I grew in a world where I was supposed to see a concrete box as a bonus
I grew in a world where construction and concrete were seen as progress
I grew in a world where our planet's health was irrelevant
and
not a single adult told me they could learn a single thing from me.


I also grew in a world
swathed in love
cradled in care
protected and prompted
supported
loved
loved
loved.

Back in the dark ages, in a small village in the north-west of England, I took some sort of secretarial course after university-before-work-limbo-land.


The course included shorthand and touch-typing, something I’m practicing now albeit rather erroneously. At that time I think all the machines were large electric typewriters with exotic revolving balls and shiny right arms, put to bed at night with heavy plasticized covers of drab grey-green. The classroom was upstairs in a building veneered with dirty once-white stucco on the upper story, the lower sank below the level of the adjacent road as it swept down and around a curve at the west end of the village.


Other components I vaguely remember are something along the lines of where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-ten-fifteen-years? Forward planning at which I was completely hopeless and whatever mad plans I set down on paper couldn’t have been further from the truth of what was to come. At the age of 21 I was still stuck at a desk staring out of the window trying to find the answers. The course also included, across the way in a rather dingy old one-storey brick building...


Programming. Reading holes punched in cards, index cards in long trays. Dark green cardboard, brass reinforcements on the corners of things and around holes. Writing programs as flow charts – ‘if this, then that. If that, then this...’ I think I understand the basic concept of every thing (there’s a statement!) - zeros and ones, offs and ons, nos and yeses, that’s all computing is. In the decades that follow like lightning and treacle, every nuance of colour, movement, shade, tone, hue... it’s all a combination of gazillions of yeses and noes that add up to maybes and just abouts to give the semblance of depth of reality.


I saw a few clips of ‘VR fails’ yesterday. My visceral reaction might be labelled as shock and avoidance, why? Why would one put oneself in such a divorced state? To completely sever visual, audio input and override it with something else... BUT while ambulatory in the world. I watched people masked in VR goggles launch themselves into space at whatever they were experiencing in VR, but in reality, they plunged head-first through the screen of a 44” TV, or into the wall, or ricochet off various hard-edged pieces of furniture. I guess this is the Darwin awards in full play.


I was thinking of the plumbing setup beneath my house which I can’t pop down to check on with my brokebackleg. A simple alarm in the barrels for the water treatment could be installed to trip when the level gets low enough for a restock reminder. Would a visual alarm be sufficient or should it be aural too? Or maybe, yes, we live in a fabulous digital world and I now have brilliant wifi in my home thanks to Starlink – I saw Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2022 photos of Elon Musk’s mum yesterday too. Talk about six degrees...


Anyhoo, so we can install a simple trigger in the barrels... to a wifi app of course. Since we can do that, we can install a ladder trigger that measures how much media has been used over time and send predictive shopping reminders or alerts for sudden increases in usage and all those fun kind of things. The installers/manufacturers will eventually include such things with the original installation and information will feed back to them to enhance development for future revisions. That would make sense wouldn’t it?


So the computer needed to effect that kind of response to a simple trigger... would be...
the size of a couple of small houses with a lot of cogs and wheels and interesting things turning and intermittently clicking and occasionally whirring and sometimes chuntering along... flickering reams of cardboard directives fanning past reading teeth and disappearing into a dark collection tray sucked deep into the maw of the brass-trimmed dark green Dream Team Most Progressive Modern Home Efficacy Butlering Automatrom.
This handy home-monitoring system can be efficiently operated by a mere six servants, four at slow time or when away from home. For operating purposes, it requires, per day, one ton of coal to feed a large furnace to power a small electrical generator to drive the various wheels and cogs and gyres and pipes and rods that constitute the functional guts of the aforementioned Automatrom. A large stock of goose grease and pig fat to keep the various moving parts moving freely, a bathtub of water to cool overheating elements, and a large stock of card with which to replace and add additional directives on a go-forward basis.
A blessed and inexpensive solution to the question of when to refill ones’ water softener or filter reservoir at home.


Or, a nano-chip less than a sixth the size of my little fingernail, plugged into a solar panel 6x6” 5min per day.


Or, an able body and a memory so I go take a look at things on a regular basis and act accordingly.


Such is life. Or is it?

Recorded with the fabulous Fantuzzi at Kamalaya, Koh Samui. I am forever thankful that someone was recording this night. So often these small miracles happened on the road, only to be shared by those present at the time. Most often I have no lasting memory of the words that leave my lips in these trance-like situations.

A spontaneous spoken word moment drawing on images and memories from a sleepless night at The Sanctuary, Koh Phangan earlier that month.

Sketch of Wat Lam Chang, Moonmuang, Soi 7, viewed from my window...

It's raining. (It was when I began. Now it's turned to snow!) Blessed life-giving rain. I lived the first third of my life under dreary skies much of the time, also beautiful sun-kissed days that ran for ever in my dreams, but now it's different. After almost thirty years in Alberta, in a particularly peculiar and endlessly interesting place, the lack of rain is the norm. Blessed are we who are fortunate to call this our home; crystal-clear air, sweeping heart-pounding grandeur of the Rockies, backed by blisteringly blue sky, girdled by endlessly morphing landscapes.

As the climate change progresses, changes here are dramatic. In the first ten years I could set my calendar by the winter weather  - New Year's Eve marked the change year after year. A cold clear New Year's Evening to end a cold clear Fall transformed into a raging blizzard leaving behind a New Morning layered with a new landscape of thick white snow. This seasonal blanketing buffered the land beneath, offering protection from the phenomenal Chinook winds blasting through this south-western corner of the province. Winds that whip the moisture from ground to air evaporating as it blows far, far away on the teeth of mighty gales in search of a distant solution. The percentage of water that makes it deep into the ground to feed the tall trees and deepest roots is only moderate. Flora and fauna hereabouts have species-specific idiosyncrasies unique for survival in our wild Alberta climate.

As the years pass and our winters become noticeably drier, the desertification of the landscape continues to creep onward with such subtle creativity that the vast majority of human doings fail to notice a thing.

Meanwhile, amid all angst or chaos, love reigns supreme. Call upon Rumi at times, call upon my inner bard at others.

Practising yoga since the 70s! As a child I learned with my Mum from a book... Richard Hittleman’s Yoga For Health. Over the years, squirming around on the floor came naturally to me, I only had to see a yoga pose and I was in it. I usually sit on the floor in preference to a chair. As an antidote to the IT job I found myself in for 10 years, I practised Hatha yoga in Priddis, Kundalini yoga in Calgary, Multi-faceted Iyengar-influenced yoga in Bragg Creek... and began to build my Thai Massage practice.