Essay – Page 3

“That other anatomy”: how can spirituality sit alongside science?

1 October 2018 4 Comments

Kirstie McKinnon

Mindfulness teaches us to notice our thoughts. Recently I read Switch on Your Brain by Dr Caroline Leaf. She proposes a step by step scenario in which we notice, yes, our thoughts, but go further, to notice the attitude of our thoughts, and then go further, to change the thoughts. Radical stuff, she calls it DIY neurosurgery.

It’s a difficult book for me to endorse because it’s not secular. Caroline Leaf quotes the Bible throughout and is very sure. I’m wary of anyone who’s sure of anything. Yet I learnt from engagement with the deep focused thinking programme she outlines. I’ve puzzled over this, a lot.

A Box of Bones (part 1)

1 October 2018 8 Comments

Sue Wootton

Searching recently for a good read-aloud children’s story, I pulled from the bottom of the bookshelf How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban. Young Tom lives with his aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She’s no soft-hearted dearest Auntie Fidge. She is aways, strictly, Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, a woman who “wore an iron hat, and took no nonsense from anyone.” In Quentin Blake’s illustrations she’s a big-beamed human battleship wearing a rivetted-on grey dress and a high grey helmet. Tom – colourful, cheeky, cheerful – is clearly dancing circles around her. Readers naturally side with Tom. He’s all risk and movement. He’s teetering and testing, nimble, flexible, curious and persistent. He’s full of life. Poor old Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong makes flowers droop and trees shiver. Ridiculous in her rigid posture, bound tight by her unbending rules, she represents a fatal stillness of the soul, a kind of living death.

When I was eighteen, I found myself in the presence of a someone very like Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She taught anatomy at the school of physiotherapy where I was enrolled as a first year student. Wide-hipped and waistless, with an imposing ledge of a bosom, whenever she walked into the room we tender blossoms drooped. She stomped, each footstep an insult to the floor. I would eventually learn to figure out where a person was hurting by watching them walk: low back, tummy, ribcage, shoulder, neck, head, hip, knee, archilles tendon – the site of pain always lends a signature adjustment to the gait. But even as-yet untrained, I could tell that Ms Anatomy Wonkham-Strong was through-and-through sore. Some long-ago irritation had lodged within her, had spread through her entire body, and vibrated out into any environment through which she moved.

Smoke in the head

17 September 2018 3 Comments

Grace Carlyle

I have an elderly neighbour. We have a signal: each morning I look to see whether she has pulled her curtains. Then I know she is all right. This became less important after she had three falls followed by two operations and acquired a St John alarm, as well as home help to call in three times daily. Still, every morning I look to see the curtains are pulled. I go across whenever I am able and we have a cup of coffee. Often I cannot walk that far but I try to manage at least once a week.

She arrived in New Zealand with her eldest daughter sixty-five years ago, soon after the New Zealand government allowed Chinese wives to immigrate. She speaks a Chinese dialect and her English is limited but her ability to capture difficult concepts with the words she does know frequently takes my breath away, they are so poetic. What a poet she would have made had she only learnt to read and write. My only language is English but we mime at times and laugh a lot. She gave birth to twelve more children and worked in her husband’s market garden. She cannot manage the garden she has now, but for years I would see her out there for hours – small wonder her garden and house were immaculate. They put mine to shame. Once house-proud, now I value poetry above dust.

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Depression: back from the dead and celebrating life

10 September 2018 2 Comments

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. The following article is an updated version of one originally posted on this day in 2016.

Mark Thomas

Like a shorter, slower version of the great All Black John Kirwan, I have decided to speak up about depression. My life is fantastic and I get immense pleasure from my love of sport, travel and the amazing people around me. But here’s a simple statement of medical fact: I have experienced major episodes of clinical depression since the age of 18. I don’t know how that works, how the same mind that allows me to drink in life like an intoxicating nectar can also turn dog on me and drag me to the depths of emotional hell, but that is the truth of it. I do know that depression can afflict anyone, regardless of how good or seemingly enviable their life is, just as cancer, heart disease or any other illness can strike anybody, regardless of how happy, famous or wealthy they are.

Women in adventure sports: why it matters

3 September 2018 3 Comments

Nicola Wilson-Jones

Emma Pegg surfing Schnappers Point. Photo courtesy of Bill Evans.

As a teenager in the 1980s, my first experience of surfing was on a giant woodchip pile at Port Nelson. While I was welcome to hurl my body down a pseudo-wave, the boys never invited me into the ocean. Most often I’d watch them hightail away to the surf, wedged in their rusty Datsun, with that high beam of adventure thick as thieves between them.

Likewise, a friend told me that when she was growing up on a Central Otago farm she dearly wanted to go mountaineering with her father and brothers. “They climbed to the top of Mount Aspiring and I was left to be allowed to drive the tractor around the farm and have a holiday job teaching disabled skiing,” my friend recalled. It was apparent to us that free will was encouraged only between the men and boys.

A book that changed my life: “Our bodies, Ourselves”

13 August 2018 1 Comment

Laurence Fearnley

As a child and younger teenager I had never taken much interest in my body. I remember my first period because I told my mother about it. Her response was very matter-of-fact. Sanitary pads, she said, were a waste of time. Only fussy, immature girls who couldn’t cope with tampons used them. There was no reason for me to try them because I could go straight to the adult solution: tampons. However, tampons were a gross waste of money and there was no need to buy them. Instead, she took me to the bathroom, ripped off 8 sheets of toilet paper, and placed one sheet on top of the other to make a pad. Next she rolled the wad of paper into a tube, and then folded it in half. This is all you need, she said passing me the roll-your-own tampon. And that was pretty much it. Over the years I perfected her version by making the fold first, then rolling — it was much neater.