conversations about medicine and life

On Pride

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Ella Robinson and Hahna Briggs

Dunedin Pride 2018This week – 7-15 April – is Dunedin Pride Week. Every year, during Pride celebrations across New Zealand, people ask why we still need Pride. Why do we still celebrate it after marriage equality? Why be so loud? What does Pride even mean? There isn’t a straightforward answer.

Pride means different things to different people. For some, it’s a time for finding or discovering representation. For others it’s about commemorating all those who actively fought (and still fight) for LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual) people to be recognized as citizens with equal rights in New Zealand and around the world.

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An apple fall: Easter downunder

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Sue Wootton

Corpus is taking a bit of an Easter break. We’ll be back next week with three fresh articles. Meanwhile…

Easter: whatever your stance on the religious reason for the season, it’s hard to miss the spring-associated symbolism in all those foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and bunnies. Which is a bit weird, really, for those of us in Aotearoa/New Zealand, for whom Easter marks the turn towards winter. It’s the end of daylight saving; it’s goodbye to a long hot summer and (speaking from Dunedin) those lovely lengthy southern evenings. For us downunder, it’s autumn and it’s harvest time. Open the Corpus Easter egg to read a poem by the aptly named Robert Frost that celebrates nature’s abundance and that also says: sometimes, hands off – just let be.

Laughter is the best medicine

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Liz Breslin

And, hot off the press, the scorching new wellness trend set to take 2018 by storm is – drumroll, please –  choreographed group laughter.

I made that up, of course. It’s not nearly gobbledy-gooky enough to pass for a wellness trend. But it has been said since Proverbs 17:22 that laughter is the best medicine. Well, what Proverbs 17:22 actually says is:

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

But ‘laughter is the best medicine’ has a better ring to it and it’s the sort of quasi-medical common sense that I’m absolutely inclined to believe.

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Rhododendron Day

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Sue Wootton and Doug Lilly

2017_10_15 Botanical Gardens 01

Tick tock, tick tock. Ours is a busy culture built on clock time. With so much to do and only 24 hours a day in which to do it, no wonder sleeplessness, anxiety and overwhelm are some of the signature complaints of, well, our times. But there are other ways of living in time. There is seasonal time, for example.

Thus I could tell you it’s October in Dunedin, or I can throw a blanket over that clockwork time-bird ticking in its cage and go outside. What’s the time? Here it is: it’s seven-tui-in-the-kōwhai. It’s the time of the full-blown orange poppies, the time of pear-blossom-like-snow, the moment of wisteria-begins-to-purple. It’s the era of the slightly tattered tulips and the wind-blown dilapidated daffodils.

And most vividly of all, it is the time of the rhododendrons, a city-wide seasonal blaze of beauty, celebrated annually at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens (home of the world-renowned Rhododendron Dell) as Rhododendron Day. Season’s tidings, then, from the colour-full, spring-full south.

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Celebrating the turning points: solstice in the south

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Sue Wootton

Portholes to the PastAt 99, Sir Lloyd Geering (thinker, theologian, mathematician) has published a new book, Portholes to the Past. In May, he appeared at the Auckland Writers’ Festival, interviewed by John Campbell. I was lucky enough to be present in the audience, and highly recommend listening to the podcast of their conversation here. Towards the end of the interview, commenting on the current state of the world,  Geering said:

I have lately sensed a widespread apprehension for the future … We’ve lost that feeling of safety in the world… [and now with terrorism] there’s a feeling of insecurity that was not there at the beginning of the 20th century.”

In Geering’s view this wobble stems from losing, in the transition to a post-Christian secular worldview, a vital framework for supporting meaning in our lives. Geering suggests that one way we can begin to heal this loss is through establishing new rituals through which we can express our values and reconnect as a community. Geering said:

I think we’ve got to return to some festivals of nature. I think it would it be a good thing to celebrate the shortest day of the year, for example, as a turning point.”

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