“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, May 22, 2011

The Best Time


It's just a good time, period, when you sit in an armchair in a quiet cottage in rural New Zealand being quizzed gently yet incisively on object-oriented ontology.

Met a farmer today, a heavy duty guy, a seer of big pictures. I'm sure we're quite different in many ways but we really hit it off. His house (five generations old) was so reminiscent of my grandparents' house in the northern Lake District. The quiet ticking of the clock, the scones and cream, the metal objects on the gravel in front. Only my grandparents had tank shells (grandfather was a tank designer!) and these guys had farm equipment.

My hosts, Sophie Jerram and others, are top humans. She's the sort of very creative person who is able to be a catalyst for all kinds of actions and events. We need Sophie Jerrams. I'm just a strategically shaved monkey who sits in armchairs and waffles on...

Good feng shui here. If I were a Taoist I'd admire the rock dragons that line the ridges here—very auspicious. Strangely the Maori word for them also means skink (a kind of reptile) and shaman healer...

1 comment:

Kate said...

Very nice Tim. Hope to hear more about it soon.