mountain masala

the great procrastinator

i can't hold time
it races or oozes
i can't quite grasp it

when I was younger
time was a honey drop
golden, viscous
gravity-defying
oozing in slow motion

syrup time
lying in bed on saturday morning
lazing on the swing chair in the sun
the late brunch. the long lunch
the long now

syrup time is sweet
it drips and drizzles
one thing, one sensation
wallowing, basking
succulent time
suckling time
savouring time
too much of a good thing
a newly opened bottle
of late harvest riesling
my cup overflows

in-between time
sleepy-dream time
warm bath time
womb time
moon-bright
candle-light

but the other time
is salsa time
tabasco tempo
sharp, spicy, bitey
blue cheese time
time with tang
a bowlful of flavours
tossed salad of time

throat-grabbing moments
charred chilli
choking, coughing
water! water!
fire hose time
cleansing your gut
searing your soul
melting your brain
change time

chronos time
- tick tick tick
kairos time
- pop the cork
but in between
there's syrup time
and salsa time
marsala and masala

and at times
the big bang
that explosive sauce
habanero-molasses-mango chutney
fire-sweet
smokey-smooth
long now: right now!
big here: right here!
outflowing, inbreaking
safe and dangerous
smooth your skin
and cut your lip
"ah" and "ouch"
make and break
breathe and gasp
live and die
die and live
time beyond time
time out of time
time for all time
all time

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I've spent the evening exploring time - hence the above.

Thanks to jonny I've recently come across the remarkable jordon cooper.

Jordon has an immeasurably valuable Quotes directory. So I've been able to look up "Time" for our forthcoming worship gigs and found many, many wonderful quotes.

Then I went to my shelves, and have to recommend The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations by Robert Andrews. (ISBN 0140293078) What other book has quotes by Saddam Hussein, Buckminster Fuller, Clint Eastwood, Douglas Coupland, Evlis Costello, Madonna, Monica Lewinsky, C.S. Lewis, Shirley Temple, James Cameron, Mahalia Jackson and Isabella Allende?

So many excellent time quotes in there as I discovered. I'm in the process of typing them up.

And I love this quote:

"More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now" - Brian Eno

G-Force upgraded

Sound Spectrum have upgraded G-Force, their excellent sound visualisation program for Mac and PC. It now comes in Gold and Platinum versionss, but if you already own Gold you get a free upgrade to Platinum, which adds a screensaver and a standalone player. The package also includes Darkroom which allows you to create/export a Quicktime movie. (Note though that you need a special license for public screening.)

digital orthodoxy

I'm happy to help announce the birth of Digital Orthodoxy, an Australian youth ministry website/blog that darren has developed with the web and design skills of Mike, Claire and Rodd at redfishbluefish.

Darren has designed this as a very 'open source' repository and clearinghouse for youth ministry. So from now it needs content and at this stage you can submit be emailing Darren. (that should be "darren", only his parents use uppercase.)

A big Kenny Everett hand from me to darren for doing all of this!

kenny who? where did that come from?

Spirituality and Health Conference

The first Australian National Conference on Spirituality and Health will be held at the University of Adelaide on 28-29 July. With a range of speakers from Australia and overseas, the conference includes a focus on young people and the part that spirituality plays in resilience, health and well-being. Speakers include Richard Eckerlsey, Peter Landless (US), David Tacey, Gary Hopkins (USA), and Graeme Martin.

Details here. I can't wait to hear some of this great range of people. (The tragedy is that I have two courses starting that afternoon/evening!)

The attendees will be having lunch at Scots Church each day, and Geoff has managed to arrange permission for some installations in the venue. So he and I and Jason and whoever else will be putting some things together. Since Geoff and I are part of the Winter School of Prayer a few weeks later, we're talking about using some of the same "time" pieces. as the conference is not tied to any specific religious tradition, "time" seems to be a good focus. It's a good challenge and opportunity, given the broad appeal of the event and its nature.

It's got me thinking about what creates a sense of time and space in a cluttered schedule and facilities. I love the Images for Worship video sequence from the One Small Barking Dog worship clips that show a person in slow motion while others move quickly around them. OSBD have made lots of nice stuff, and the In Motion DVD has some stunning material.

Very much like Geoff's White Lady video (low res sample here).

I am thinking not only about visuals but also smell, sight and touch. In my new office I've started burning aromatic oil for the first time ever in my life, and I am amazed how you can walk in the door after lunch and go 'aaah'. (at the same time I am killing the plants for unknown yet common reasons)

I'll keep you posted.

lay ministry teams

Not long ago I spent almost 5 years working with rural churches. At the time, quite a number were losing their ministers for financial reasons (there's a whole can of worms there...) So they were sorting through ministry options and often moving to lay ministry teams. Across Australia and New Zealand, quite a lot has happened in this area over the last 10 years, in terms of exploring options and rationales and models of 'oversight' (scary term).

At the time I prepared this booklet as a starting point for new lay ministry teams. It was originally designed as the first of three booklets. However, the feedback from the first booklet was that a booklet was not the best thing for rural people, so the next booklet became a workshop session with handouts and overhead transparencies. I might post that sometime.

This is from the archives - 1998, but people still want to find and use it, so I'm posting it. However I cant explain or defend the use of clip art... except that it was 1998 and I was obviously in a very different expressive space!

Download team.pdf 470 kb PDF file.

cookbooks

I've added a cookbooks list on the right...

and making duck pasta for tea... yep, that's her on the right - not quite done yet.

Doesn't this photo remind you of "Men in Black"?

when we lived in western Victoria, one of the churches/towns that I worked with was Nhill, home of "Luv-a-Duck" which as far as I know is Australia's biggest duck producer. So despite the fact that the local supermarkets didn't carry most of the exotic spices that I was after, it was always easy to buy a duck! Since moving to the outskirts of a capital city, duck has been hard to find, so when I saw this at the supermarket I jumped on it.

I don't ever recall eating duck growing up. Only very occasionally at a restaurant.

It's only the third time I've cooked duck. The very first time I used a recipe where you cut the carcass out of the inside of the bird. Yes, the outside remains intact. Very tedious. And then you stuff the duck. It looked like a football with wings and legs! I have a photo somewhere...

The second time was my wife's birthday and i must have been stressed because I went mental - a 7 course meal - chicken & corn soup, sea scallops, quail, duck..... I tried the chinese method of cooking the duck and quail where you boil it and then dry it and then fry it. So we had a headless duck hanging in the kitchen to dry for a day! It swung in the breeze and the neck seemed to follow you around the room. Very spooky. Not to mention the quail with toothpicks holding their little wings out from the body so the skin could dry.

Anyway, we only got through 3 1/2 courses. But the leftover duck was brilliant in pasta. I think I had a recipe but I don't know where it came from so I'm making it up tonight. It's a creamy mushroom, leek saucy thing.

And we just bought some quail for our new aviary.... I've named them "Soy" and "Plum" but the kids had other ideas.

Thriving Youth Australia

Well, Thriving Youth Australia is finally up and running. This is a collective of people invoved in youth work and education who are seeking to introduce the Search Institute's developmental assets for young people and communities in this country. After having told people about the Search Institute material for about 10 years, it is great to finally be able to go the next step.

The developmental assets are based on research with now over 2 million young people. The major research finding was that building young people's strengths (or assets) reduced their incidence of a wide range of risk factors. ie. it focuses on building the positives. Search Institute identified 40 "assets", half of them internal (attitudes, values, expectations, etc) and half of them external (home, school, community environment). Both the framework and the survey instrument give communities a way to understand their young people, but more importantly, a community development tool that allows young people, parents, schools, local government and community groups including churches to work together to create a healthier community and healthier young people, in the best sense.

Thriving Youth Australia is being auspiced by St. Luke's Bendigo, an Anglican community service agency in rural Victoria with a long and strong focus on strength-based community development. Andrew Fuller is one the steering group which is brilliant because of his work in resilience, and because he's an all round nice guy too!

Last November, six of us went to the Search Intitute national training event and conference in the US to be trained as trainers. I have to say that being at a national conference with 1500 people from all sectors focused on the health and well-being of young people was very inspiring, and particularly to see the churches involved and get a reinvigorated sense of mission within the wider community.

The fledgling blogsite is here.

Search Institute evolved from what was initially a Lutheran social research body into what is now a "non-sectarian" body, but still with good links to religious bodies. They do an enormous amount of research and publishing, now available in Australia through Innovative Resources, who also publish the brilliant Signposts Spirituality cards and loads of other good things. I'd better blog on Signposts.

Anyway, if you're an Aussie and want to know more, here's the brochure.

Download brochure (145 kb PDF).

St. Luke's have just mailed out 8,000 of these brochures and have heaps of communities around Australia interested already.

simmering as we speak

If I ever write a cookbook, it will be called "It Tastes Better Than It Looks". Either that or "Dear, could you just go down to the shop and get me some....." or "It'll be ready sooooon! Is the table set yet????" (the latter a frequent stalling mechanism).

With food looking this good I should be making Macbeth movies.

This started as a recipe from the award-winning Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers.

I wasnt sure whether to use the chicken meat for soup or pasta (vegetarians can stop reading now...). Then the supermarket had asparagus on sale (given that its winter and the asparagus was imported and not that great).

So I started with the Zuni "Asparagus & Rice Soup with Pancetta and Black Pepper" (page 166). But i also bought a fennel bulb and we had bacon and leeks in the fridge. So it has ended up like this.

Chop a leek and a fennel bulb and fry in oil and/or butter.
Chop a few chicken breasts or thighs and fry them in there too.
Fry some bacon rashers in a separate pan and then dice them.
Go for a run to reduce your cholesterol levels before you eat.
Add 1/4 cup white wine and 5-6 cups chicken stock and lots of black pepper and bring to the boil.
Meanwhile break off the woody bits of the asparagus and slice them at a fancy angle. About 42 degrees...
Add the bacon and asparagus and salt and pepper or whatever and simmer it while you go and write a blog about your fabulous new recipe. You might even have time to take a photo or two.

Taste it. Brilliant!

THEN, remember that your spouse/partner said she/he liked corn in chicken soup. Open the can of creamed corn that someone bought by mistake. Put half of it in and taste it. Not bad! Then put the other half in. Whoah! Far too much corn and you've totally changed the character of the soup. But it still tastes pretty reasonable.

Then ask spouse/partner to go to the shop to buy margarine to put on the bread because you've run out of it.

Ask a random daughter to taste the said 'corny' soup. She says "nice". I can relax. Dinner is 2 hours late as usual.

The other part of the meal is nice bread. Our college gets free leftover bread weekly from a bakery and we give it to students because their allowances are so pathetically low. But this week the students are on holidays!

extra time

I meant to add some more "Time" stuff.

One of the most fascinating time pieces is the 10,000 year clock at The Long Now Project, a multi-disciplinary project designed to help humanity focus on the long-term rather than the short term. The project encompasses music, culture, literature, science and more.

One of the offshoots is The Rosetta Project which aims to document all human languages!

The remarkable Brian Eno is a collaborator in the project and has relased a CD for the project.

He also features in the "Time" segment on the 1 Giant Leap DVD. An excellent resource.

I was going to start musing about time - about cyclical and linear time, about journey time vs. moment time, about chronos and kairos... but ... maybe next time...

free at last

I sent off my second essay this morning and got them both back this afternoon. Nailed them both! Yes!! Now I can put public policy on telecommunications and the like behind me! (Actually, the unit was called "Chips with Everything". Quite clever.)

I'm doing a Grad. Dip. in Professional Communication (Multimedia) through the University of Southern Queensland. It leads into a Masters if I feel like it. All of the study is online, and its been fascinating to learn about new media while using it from a student's perspective. One class had a tutor in Jamaica, and students in Australia, New Zealand, Cambodia, Switzerland and Japan! Amazing.

It's also been good to study again in a non-church environment, but also bring my "religious" interests into essay topics. And come across heaps of good reading matter that I might not have otherwise.

I wish I could get over the anxiety that you feel when you hand in an essay that you think is a crap last minute rush but then find out it was OK after all.

On another note, I just got official lecturer status at Flinder's Uni with my new job. The BEST thing about that is discount software!!!