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Follow your dreams.
I know that is very easy for me to say. I am a middle aged eccentric who is living her dream. It hasn’t been easy, in fact it has been very hard, but last night driving home from Chris Jordan’s lecture I knew that the spouse and I had made the right decision all those years ago, when we decided to live an alternate lifestyle and live as greenly as we possibly could.
Confused?
Here is the back story. A very,very condensed back story.
Twenty odd years ago Mum gave me a piece of land, this piece of land. The spouse and I decided that we couldn’t commit to a bank loan as his work was too unreliable, he was a professional fisherman at that stage. So we decided to build our home room by room as we could afford it.
It was a very,very conservative rural area then and I was quite a radical greenie. We were living in a converted bus, with a small shed that served as a kitchen and bathroom combined. Our electricity came from a series of extension cords connected to a temporary power pole and we didn’t have running water inside.
We very quickly earned the nickname “those ferals up the hill.” For us, the local tip was an open face treasure trove of building materials. If you didn’t mind sorting through the mounds of rubbish to get to them there was treasure galore. Huon pine windows and convict bricks, baltic pine planks and velvet armchairs all mixed in with dead sheep and disposable nappies. Of course the locals noticed that we were at the tip a lot and they shunned us.
If we ran over a wallaby we would stop and pick it up and so we also gained the cruel reputation of “eating road-kill”.
I was obsessive about the fact that the children were always spotlessly clean and immaculately dressed out in public.I didn’t care how I looked, odd socks and mismatched hippy/punk/thrift shop was my style of dress but the children were always dressed ultra conservatively. I was terrified that child protection would take them away because we were living in a bus and a shed.
Primary school was difficult for the children as they were regularly harassed because we didn’t have the latest gadgets and weren’t up to our eyeballs in debt like everyone else. The fact that the spouse didn’t have a regular job was also a heinous crime apparently.I also had some strange ideas about only eating ethically produced meat and horror of horrors I taught my children to loathe Macdonalds.
Now looking back I don’t regret any of the choices that I made. The house is nearly finished and it is built from 90% recycled materials. I have raised two strong willed children who are independant free-thinkers. Though raising your children to question authority and to not believe what they are told, made for some interesting discussions when it was my authority they were questioning.
Which brings me back to the lecture last night.
Chris Jordan’s message of sustainability was made even more compelling with the addition of his powerful images. Plastic is killing us. Our mass consumption is killing the planet. It is that simple. The buck stops here with me. Right now.I am going to reduce the amount of plastic I use. Starting today.
I could waffle on for ever but today I have written enough. I will continue this story in the next few days. Chris Jordan has given me permission to use his images, here on my blog. So as you watch this clip remember that it it is our plastic that is in the belly of these birds .
Yours and mine.
My plastic is killing the planet.
All jumbled up together.
I accepted an offer for mum’s house on Thursday and all my words have vanished again.
When I was trying to decide whether or not to accept the offer, I rang my daughter to see what she thought. Together we decided to sell the house. We two alone, where once it had been we three together.
The circle is broken. I have lost my words.
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In one of life’s lucky coincidences Chris Jordan is giving a lecture in Hobart on Tuesday evening. The lecture is titled “Wasting Away” and he will be talking about the massive waste generated by our throw away society as well as showing the photographs of the albatrosses. For anyone interested out there the lecture is 5.45 – 7 pm at the Stanley Burbury theatre at the uni campus in Sandy Bay.
God is now following me on twitter. Great. Thanks to the evil Sister Paschal and her cane of doom, it has taken me years to shake the spooky sensation that God is watching me and there he is on bloody twitter.Stalking me just like the bloody nun’s said he would. Gah.
The invitations for the exhibition have been printed and I will be posting them off this week. That is my plate in the bottom left hand corner.
I will be back later when I have found my words again.
Plastic rubbish kills baby albatrosses.
I was reading this article this morning.
The photos will make you stop what you are doing and have a really good think about where the plastic that we throw away ends up.
I followed the links in the article and ended up here.
The clip is only 42 seconds long. Please watch it.
Assorted non-specific stuff.
Try saying that title without any teeth,heh. My mouth is healing up nicely and I have been able to wear my teeth for 3-4 hours at a time now. The small steps are working for me and my natural confidence is slowly returning, as is my tendency to make fun of myself. I didn’t realize how much I had missed those two qualities of mine, until I had to face the world toothless without them.
The date for the exhibition has been set, yay. It will be held at Eco Haven’s Gallery 71, which is in Murray street, near the corner of Liverpool street, right in the middle of Hobart. The opening will be on Wednesday the 25th of November. I will publish a copy of the invite closer to the date and of course you are all invited to the opening.
I should be well and truly used to my teeth by then, so I dont think my sleep will be too disturbed by nightmare visions of me trying to intelligently discuss my work and my teeth flying out mid sentence.I don’t think I could really disguise something like that as performance art either, do you?
Two words have been going around and around in my head for a couple of days now and they are Useless Residue. These words were used to describe some leatherwood trees and other minor species that were recently logged on Bruny island. Leatherwoods only grow in Tasmania and are responsible for the state’s iconic leatherwood honey. I am sure the beekeepers wouldn’t describe them as useless residue.*sigh*
Useless residue, useless residue, I just cant get them out of my head as those two words seem to me, to epitomise, the slash and burn attitude that is prevalent here in Tasmania. It is a crime against humanity that magnificent, pristine ancient forests are woodchipped and the obviously not useless residue is then set on fire by helicopters dropping napalm in a so-called regeneration burn.
The total devastation of vast tracts of native Tasmanian bush makes my soul bleed and I fully support these young people who are protesting against the destruction on my behalf and on behalf of my grandchildren.
So with the words useless residue spinning around in my head I made another large bowl yesterday and wrote on it. I think my handbuilt work that I exhibit in November will have a very strong environmental theme. It wont be as “in your face” as Boganvillainy was last year, but there will be a strong environmental message in there nevertheless.
