Field Notes

Posted on

The Thaw at Vétheuil: Monet, Māyā, and the Mechanics of the Arrest

How a nineteenth-century masterpiece, an ancient Eastern concept, and a pair of scissors reveal the ultimate manual override for modern static.

The Day the Ego Broke: Monet, Māyā, and the Mechanics of the Arrest

Many years ago—in my early days, though not that early, as I was in my thirties—I found myself back in Dunedin.
What was new about this trip was my accommodation. I was sleeping, likely on the floor, in a flat directly above a public art gallery. The space was occupied by a young man who was a newly appointed curator. At that exact moment, the gallery was in the high-stakes process of hanging a blockbuster international exhibition: classical and modern masterpieces from the superb, world-renowned collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza.

The next morning, driven by casual curiosity, I wandered downstairs and through the gallery doors to see what the layout was all about.

Near the very beginning of my tour, I encountered a canvas that simply changed everything. My burgeoning ego—the part of the mind that constantly seeks to analyze, categorize, and assert its own cleverness—was instantly subdued. I found myself pinned to the floor in the presence of an image for which I had absolutely no logical explanation.

The painting was Claude Monet’s The Thaw at Vétheuil, captured during the brutal, freezing European winter of 1880. It depicted a river breaking free from its icy prison, the surface just starting to churn and come alive after the deep winter freeze.
I spent hours there. In fact, I spent so much time captured by it that I eventually had to sit down just to safely absorb the sheer volume of feelings the image was releasing into me. What utterly fascinated the technician in me was the movement: no matter the angle I chose, or from what distance I measured it, the canvas appeared to actively flow. I found myself viewing it from extreme side angles, head-on, stepping up close to the brushwork, and then backing away to catch the horizon. The composition refused to stand still.

Little did I know it at the time, but I was experiencing my very first live field-test of what the mythologist Joseph Campbell termed Aesthetic Arrest—a concept he beautifully linked to the ancient Eastern mechanics of piercing the veil of Māyā.
In that room, the frantic, transactional static of the everyday world was completely short-circuited. I never even thought to note the artist’s name or read the clinical curatorial details on the wall placard; the sheer velocity of the arrest completely overwhelmed the desire to document it. In that silent gallery, the analytical technician stepped back, and the deep, sub-surface watering of the seeds of self-awareness truly began.

The Architecture of the Veil: Campbell, Joyce, and the Matrix of Māyā

James Joyce wrote several notable books, including “Ulysses,” “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” “Dubliners,” and “Finnegans Wake.” His works are celebrated for their innovative style and deep exploration of human consciousness.

To understand the sudden stillness that occurred on that gallery floor in Dunedin, we have to look through the lens that Joseph Campbell spent his entire lifetime grinding and polishing: the intersection of ancient Eastern myth and Western creative genius.

Campbell’s great illumination was realizing that the ancient Indian concept of Māyā is not merely a philosophical abstraction. It is a psychological reality that governs our everyday, high-RPM existence.

In traditional Sanskrit, Māyā is frequently translated as “illusion,” but its etymological root actually means “to measure.” It is the cosmic system function that takes the vast, unified, silent energy of the universe and fragments it into measurable parts: past vs. future, subject vs. object, desire vs. fear.

Māyā is the ultimate high-resistance circuit. It creates the daily static—the urgent deadlines, the societal expectations, and the constant mental chatter that keeps us running on a perpetual hamster wheel of striving. Under the influence of Māyā, our internal processors are locked in high gear, constantly reacting to external stimuli, leaving zero room for stillness. Just like the marketing paradigm distilled over centuries intended.

The Joycean Circuit Breaker

Campbell’s breakthrough came when he aligned this Eastern concept with James Joyce’s aesthetic theory. Joyce argued that the true purpose of “proper art” is to induce an Aesthetic Arrest.

Most things in the Western world move us kinetically—they either make us want to possess something (the pornographic trap of desire) or push us to fear and judge something (the didactic trap of loathing). Both states keep us firmly bound within the prison of Māyā’s measurements.

The Thaw at Vétheuil

Monet’s Canvas as the “Circuit Breaker”

When I stood in front of The Thaw at Vétheuil, there was no theological script to run. There was no moral lesson being preached, no guilt being triggered, and no historical requirement to remember.

Because the image (as above, not even remotely like the original) was stripped of any “instructive” or “kinetic” baggage, my analytical mind had nothing to do. It couldn’t run a calculation or a memory loop. It had no choice but to blow a fuse and drop into Aesthetic Arrest. I wasn’t being told what to think; the sheer radiance of the light and movement simply forced you to stop thinking.

It represents the sudden breakout—the moment the river thaws, the scripts dissolve, and the absolute stillness of reality takes over.

Image attribution – WikiArt

The Stations of the Cross as a “Kinetic Script”

The Stations of the Cross are, by design, didactic. They were originally created in medieval Europe as a visual tool for a population that couldn’t read the text. Their primary function is to move the viewer through a specific emotional and moral sequence: guilt, sorrow, duty, and devotion.

The Basilica, Oamaru

When you look at those statues, your mind isn’t meant to stop and rest in absolute, non-judgmental stillness. It is meant to run a pre-programmed religious and historical script. It forces your intellect to remember a story, weigh your actions, and feel a kinetic push toward a specific moral conclusion. It keeps the mind moving along a track.

The Statues: Represent the world of structure, form, instruction, and the early grooving of the young observer’s mind.

Playing to Learn: The Practical Application of the Discontinuity

So far, we have looked at the mechanism where a great work of art—be it music, a canvas, a perfectly cast fly line over a trout pool, or a cleanly carved ski line down a mountain face—induces this state of stillness from the outside in.

But I have discovered that Aesthetic Arrest can be actively deployed as a tool. The underlying requirement for this is developing a sharp instinct for pattern recognition.

The Cafe Experiment: Grounding the Circuit

Imagine you are sitting in a busy cafe. A barista you know slightly catches a brief lull in service, and you observe her begin a task that requires a highly focused, repetitive pattern of concentration—perhaps a stock take in a notebook. As she walks past your table, navigating a tight space close enough for a quiet, succinct remark, you drop a completely unexpected variable into her field: you ask if she would like your autograph in her notebook.

My bet is that this instantly springs a moment of total grounding. The automated, high-RPM task loop she was running is suddenly broken. The present moment lands completely, and the immediate energy in that vicinity changes from transactional noise to shared stillness. It is a playful, zero-drag way to use the concept.

The Institutional Ward: The Architecture of Survival

But this same tool can have a far deeper, more critical application in high-stakes environments. Consider an introspective child lost within a dysfunctional family structure, or one who has suddenly been siphoned off into an unfamiliar, sterile institution. The child is powerless and must figure out how to get basic needs met without drawing hostility.

While engaging in loud, disruptive choices might be an obvious instinct, the child quickly learns that high-friction behavior usually yields punitive results. But if that child steps back into the “Observer’s Hangar” and quietly maps the patterns of the adults in the room, a sophisticated alternative emerges. By introducing a gentle, absurd discontinuity—the psychological equivalent of an eight-year-old looking up from a hospital bed and asking a busy nurse, “Would you like my autograph on my medical chart?”—the rigid institutional script is instantly broken. It is playful on the surface, but for a vulnerable system, it is a serious business of establishing safety through human connection.

The Wild Card: De-escalation by Design

I am reminded of a story involving a late friend of mine. Many years ago, he found himself at a New Year’s Eve celebration at a local hotel—a venue notorious for the kind of volatile conduct that bubbles up when holiday celebrations get out of hand. The local manager approached my friend’s group, his posture likely tense, carrying the heavy momentum of a man trying to brace for a chaotic situation.

My friend was always a bit of a wild card, completely sober, and highly attuned to the room. Before the manager could run his standard confrontational script, my friend reached out, grasped the manager’s tie, and with a pair of scissors that happened to be within arm’s reach, cleanly snipped the tie in half.

It was a move executed at immense risk; in a tense room, a pair of blades can easily be misinterpreted as a weapon. Yet, it pulled off a total miracle of de-escalation. The sheer, bizarre absurdity of the act broke the collective tension of the room, and everyone laughed. Because my friend and the manager knew each other, there may have even been a silent, unspoken collusion between them to defuse the larger room. By cutting the physical fabric of the manager’s uniform, he cut straight through the volatile momentum of the crowd. It was an aggressive, beautiful act of live-engineered Aesthetic Arrest.

The Two Modes of the Screen: To Consume or to Behold

In his final reflections, Joseph Campbell distilled this entire mechanism down to a beautifully simple, rustic contrast: The difference between looking at a magnificent turkey dinner as an art object, or simply eating it.

When we eat the object, we are fully locked inside the high-RPM machinery of daily survival. We are driven by desire, hunger, or perhaps the fear of lack. This is life in compulsive action—what the Eastern traditions call the projecting power of Māyā. The world remains an opaque, heavy obstacle course where we are constantly running a script of gaining or losing, succeeding or failing. Campbell calls this compulsive state the “Fall in the Garden”—the moment our consciousness shifts from stillness (stasis) into frantic, forced movement (kinesis).

But when we experience Aesthetic Arrest, the world does not physically change. Our consciousness changes.

Instead of viewing the world as something to be consumed, mastered, or feared, we suddenly look through it. The projecting screen of Māyā becomes a revealing lens. Like a technician probing for oil who suddenly strikes a deep artesian well, you realize that the silence—the radiance—is actually running beneath everything. It is under the workshop floor, beneath the busy cafe counter, and inside the quiet rooms of the institutional ward.

The two frames below map the exact boundaries of our internal architecture.

This Dunedin intersection represents the high-RPM machinery of Māyā in its projecting mode. It is a visual landscape constructed entirely out of boundaries, rules, and kinetic requirements—the crane building the grid, the street markings directing our path, the traffic lights commanding us to stop or go. Every element is designed to keep the mind moving, calculating, and striving within a script of transactional survival.

But when the focus of our consciousness shifts, we drop into the revealing mode…

Captured flawlessly by the telephoto frame of the mountain. Here, the chaotic clutter of the lower world is completely submerged beneath a clean, silent base of cloud. The near triangular peak stands as a monument to stasis—an absolute, unmeasured form that demands nothing from us, offers no transaction, and triggers an immediate internal stillness. The world hasn’t vanished; rather, the heavy static of the lower grid has been muffled by the haze, leaving only the radiant, un-scripted architecture of the absolute.

The Practice of the Sacred Space

To live with this awareness in a Western world designed for perpetual distraction requires what Campbell calls a “sacred space.” This doesn’t require a grand cathedral or an ancient temple. For the modern operator, a sacred space is simply a deliberate perimeter—a regular pause where you intentionally step off the high-velocity hamster wheel to enrich the internal structural integrity of your system.

The Mt Aspiring Observer: Wu Wei in the Sacred Space

This solitude, captured beside a clear mountain stream in Mt Aspiring National Park, embodies the required setting for Campbell’s “Sacred Space.” It is not an escape from reality, but a deliberate perimeter established for the “watering of the seeds of self-awareness.”

Here, in the presence of unscripted nature, the internal static is muffled, and the capability for high-fidelity pattern recognition can be fully engaged. By listening to the inherent rhythm of the water and the silence of the valley, we begin to perceive what Aat Vervoorn describes as the innate tendency of situations.

Daoist concept of non action:
Do nothing and there is nothing that is not done by Laozi.
He means that if we come with fixed ideas and preconceptions, and try to impose our will on events, we are likely to fail.
Action succeeds when it is, in a sense, non-action, when our acts are entirely in accord with the disposition of things, so that it’s as if our desired outcomes just happen by themselves.
Successful action depends on correctly perceiving the innate tendency of situations (what does ‘the innate tendency of situations’ mean?) and understanding the importance of timing. This requires full alertness to what is going on around us and within

Mountain Solitudes by Aat Vervoorn

Navigating the Innate Tendency: Timing and Alignment

To answer the question often asked: What does ‘the innate tendency of situations’ mean? From an operator’s perspective, it means recognizing that every moment, every tense room, and every complex human interaction has an underlying momentum, an inevitable direction of flow, long before we choose to act. It is the specific current of Māyā in that second.

  • High-Friction Action: Is when we arrive with fixed ideas and preconceptions, trying to force our willpower against that current. We fight the Dunedin or Wānaka traffic, try to out-muscle a volatile room, or impose a generic solution on a delicate situation. This kinetic striving is heavy, inefficient, and usually fails.
  • Sovereign Action (Wu Wei): Is when we first use Aesthetic Arrest to stop our own compulsive script. We wait in full alertness, using the Sacred Space of our own calm mind to identify the unique pattern—the innate tendency—of the challenge. And then, we simply drop a precise variable into that existing flow at the perfect moment.

It is the commitment to being an observer rather than a compulsive participant.

Once this inner depth is secured, a remarkable shift occurs. You are no longer compulsively linked to the drama around you. You are disengaged from the frantic script, yet you can choose to voluntarily step back onto the floor with a sense of playful, joyous participation.

You can walk into a tense room and cleanly cut a manager’s tie in half, or ask a busy barista if she’d like your autograph, because you are no longer fighting the chaotic spectacle of life. You have recognized the harmony of your own nature, dropped your ego defenses, and found the still point in the midst of the turning world.

The Hidden Gold of the Screen

Most of us encounter Māyā exclusively in its “veiling” mode. It is the ubiquitous engine behind modern marketing, but it is far more insidious than simple consumerism. Consider social media for example and how it’s used to curate falsity in all aspects of life and politics. It dominates our day-to-day existence under the respectable guise of “being organized”—the endless optimisation of to-do lists, metrics, and calendars. This is pure, high-RPM noise masquerading as purpose, a constant measurement that keeps the veil firmly drawn over reality.

Yet, the true, hidden gold lies in Māyā’s secondary capability: its power to reveal.

To pierce that organised static and strike the underlying current is precisely where art and creativity excel. If we want to move beyond the veil, understanding the specific mechanics of the Arrest is the necessary place to start.

That, as Campbell so beautifully concluded, is the whole story.

With thankful reference to his “Companion” publication – an eBook circa 2011.

PS, the Featured Image is an ice lattice over tussock grasses.

Posted on

The Solar Governor

Setting sun descending in inversion cloud in Wanaka

What we can learn about internal expenditure when harvesting energy.

Ultimately, we are meant to be Sovereign Travelers through life. We wake up each morning, hopefully from a restful, dreamy sleep, and begin our day as independent operators.

But along the way, we lose our efficiency. We get tangled in legacy code, and our internal electrical grid begins to red-line.

Recently, I decided to tackle the installation of a new smart controller in my mobile solar power system. Technology has advanced significantly since my initial install of panels, wiring, and batteries back in 2014.

In those early days, the system was fragile, high-resistance, and easily compromised. If a slim shadow—even a single overhanging branch—were to fall across a fraction of a panel’s surface area, the delivery of power to the controller would instantly drop to zero. The entire circuit would stall.

Clever modern engineering has changed the game. It is why an upgrade is so vital. The new Victron controllers sense the micro-changes in the atmosphere—even a passing, high-altitude cloud—and via a kind of digital alchemy, they instantly rearrange the internal circuitry so power continues to be harvested. It is not the blinding current of a perfect, blue bird-sky day, but it is a hell of a lot more than zero. It is adaptive. It possesses structural integrity.

You can monitor the rhythm of the day on a phone. The sequence tells a story:

State: Off — The system is resting. It is night time. Dark, still, and unburdened by input.
State: Absorption — The voltage has reached its threshold. The controller decides enough is enough for now, tapering the current while the battery deeply absorbs and stabilizes the harvest.
State: Bulk — The sun breaks the horizon. The system wakes up, and the controller knows it’s time to allow the incoming power to arrive fast and heavy. It rushes to charge the core.
State: Float — The work is done. The battery is full. The system drops into a low-RPM equilibrium, coasting along nice and steady, maintaining its charge while enjoying the view.

The Architecture of the Internal Controller

The life lesson in this blue-and-white interface is a perfect analogy for human energy.

The inner Buddhist in all of us would recognize this calibration. It is the wisdom of knowing when to drop into “Float” instead of forever striving in high-RPM loops that disallow Stillness.

Our internal controllers get stuck. We make enough money for the day, yet we refuse to sit back. We tone our muscles just fine, yet we refuse to rest. We chase a conversation or an achievement long after the battery is already at 100%, creating parasitic drag and thermal overload.

What a beautiful world it could be if each of us honored our inner Controller—one that perhaps we never realized we had, or one that has rusted up from decades of neglect.

It is time for a firmware upgrade.

The Parenting Paradox: Forgetting How to Float

Let’s explore where our controllers first begin to fail us. Consider the shift into parenthood.

When you bring up a child, you are thrust into a decade-long “Bulk Charge” phase. A newborn requires maximum current, 24 hours a day. You are constantly monitoring, correcting, and expending energy to keep another human system alive. You learn habits of hyper-vigilance. You become a highly efficient, high-resistance machine out of absolute necessity.

The trouble is, habits persist.

Years pass. The child grows up, becomes an independent sovereign traveler, and walks out into their own horizon. But the parent’s internal controller remains jammed in “Bulk” mode. We forget how to scale back the voltage. We look at an empty nest or a quiet afternoon, and instead of dropping into a beautiful, steady Float, our nervous system continues to frantically scan for a load to carry. We have become addicted to the strain. We have forgotten how to sit in the stillness of a full battery.

The “Love-Based Responsibility” Trap

The reason it’s so hard to “let go” is that the rushing feels like Proof of Love. In the “Legacy Code” of parenting:

  • Velocity = Care.

  • Stress = Commitment.

  • Stillness = Negligence.

The Heart with No Companion

This systemic failure becomes most acute when we are forced into the ultimate decompression event: the Heart with No Companion.

When a long-term partner passes away or leaves the grid, the emotional damage isn’t just grief—it is a massive structural shock to the circuit. For decades, that companion was your “Ground.” They absorbed your static, shared your electrical load, and provided a reference voltage.

When that ground is suddenly ripped away, your heart is left un-terminated. The signals of love, routine, and care that you used to broadcast into the room have nowhere to land. They bounce back, creating chaotic internal interference.

If your inner controller is rusted out, your posture reflects the system failure. The shoulders round forward, collapsing inward to protect a vulnerable, short-circuiting heart. You are pushing against a phantom resistance, straining into a gale-force wind that has already fallen dead calm.

The work of the Sovereign Traveler in that dark space is not to frantically search for a new connection to plug into. The mahi is to allow the system to drop into Float.

To sit quietly with the missing link, to let the internal circuitry rearrange itself—just like the Victron under a passing cloud—and to realize that you can still harvest light in the quietest, coldest weather. You don’t need a hostile takeover of the world around you. You just need to look up at the hills, take a breath of still air, and let the controller do its job.

Footnote from the Field Guide:

“For those navigating the phantom resistance of an un-terminated grid, let the poem be the regulator. Being a soul without a king isn’t about isolation; it’s about becoming the sole operator of your own circuit.”

Now god bless the soul without a king

Who is called upon to stand

Who got no validation

In the high places of the land…

Heart with no companion

Kindred to the hurt

Ask the tiny sparrow

How much the feathers hurt…

— Leonard Cohen

Postscript: The atmosphere has its own timing. The images of the sun dropping through the inversion layer were captured fresh between paragraphs. A glance out the door revealed the horizon doing exactly what the pen was trying to describe: filtering the static, slowing the RPMs, and dropping completely into Float.

Posted on

Building for Stillness

sunrise from awakino ski area accommodation hut

Beyond Kurow: Overwriting the Legacy Code of Scarcity

We live in a world that prizes a few specific things that make it remarkably hard to slow down time as we age. In Western culture, at least, we invest massive amounts of energy into not losing anything.

Yet, some things are destined to leave us, or to be lost: belongings, people, and eventually, our current versions of ourselves. We treat these departures like system failures rather than scheduled maintenance. An immense uptick in efficiency would come to pass if we channeled some of this “protection” energy into gaining stillness.

Scarcity in a nutshell

Fear of loss is, at its core, a scarcity mindset. I know the “Ground Truth” of this from my own lineage. My grandmother used to say, “Here is some money, Donald. Go to the corner dairy and buy some cream for your porridge tomorrow morning.”

The next day, she’d add sugar and that cream to my breakfast. It was an act of love, but also a safeguard; she didn’t want me to grow up hungry like the generation of the 1930s. Back then, in the hills behind Kurow, depression was rife. She kept my father and uncle fed by encouraging them to hunt rabbits and forage for mushrooms—subsistence as a survival strategy.

Looking to the St Marys Range behind Kurow.

I must find a photo of her! Meanwhile I can at least honour her passing. It was at Easter and I was holidaying with my parents at Danseys Pass. She was the only grandparent I knew so it was a shock, but at least the news came while I was in one of my happy places.

Today, that scarcity is ubiquitous. It’s the “Puff” that powers our society. Marketing hinges on it: “Quick, buy this—only three left at this price!” It creates a high-RPM environment that induces “time poverty.” We are so busy clutching at what might disappear that we never question the game itself. We play the game instead of investing in our own structural integrity.

The “Bulk” Phase of Misplaced Effort

We persist in legacy behaviors because we haven’t audited the code. We see it everywhere:

  • Working for assets that are destined to dissolve.
  • Marrying because of a “Dead Click”—that fear of missing out sparked by a shoddy emotional web page.
  • Persisting in a marriage that has become the very cage we thought we were escaping.
  • Resisting Ageing—fighting a natural voltage drop instead of recalibrating the system.
  • Worrying about losing a business client or a job.
  • Clutching at opinions—defending a “V 1.0” worldview to avoid the friction of being proven wrong.
  • Hoarding information—collecting “Puff” in the form of data we never use, instead of trusting the “Stillness” of intuition.
  • Colonising the future—over-planning the next decade to suppress the anxiety of a single grey morning.
  • Hoarding physical goods inc. food—the irony is that my collection of nuts and bolts etc. is so well established I so often can’t find what I want. It’s less of a burden to use the local hardware shop as a storeroom.
  • In love—It manifests as the urge to compete for a partner, driven by the ‘Legacy Code’ that there isn’t enough love to go around—a high-RPM game that eventually leaves the system depleted. Competing for affection—as if the heart were a finite grid with only so many amps to spare, rather than a renewable frequency.

When we refuse to get off the merry-go-round, we fail the test of curiosity. We doom-scroll instead of writing the books we have inside us. Lacking reflection, the days blur. We batch-process the same old perceptions until we find ourselves at the local cafe, telling our mates how quickly the last year has gone by.

The Solar Parallel: Light, Storage, and Passing Clouds

Think of your life like a solar power system.

Sunset from Oteake Conservation Park. The Maniototo Plain

The Light is our attention—the only true currency we have. The Clouds are the inevitable interruptions: the scarcity marketing, the family dramas, the Tasman weather fronts of “busy-ness.”

If your system is V 1.1, you only harvest when the sun is glaring. When a cloud passes, your “State” drops, and you feel the “Friction” of the grey. But a V 2.0 life—one built for stillness—uses a high-efficiency MPPT solar panel controller (I’ve just installed one, digging deep into my inner geek to ensure I didn’t “miss out”). It doesn’t “clutch” at the sun; it simply harvests what is available, even in the gloom or when the shadow of a tree branch falls on the panel.

Stillness is the Battery Bank. When you have deep storage, a cloud (a loss, a setback, a rainy day) doesn’t cause a “Dead Click.” You have enough internal “Puff” to maintain your frequency until the sky clears.

The “Control”

In any experiment—and the clinical trial I’m currently part of at Dunedin Hospital reminds me of this daily—the “Control” is the constant. It’s the baseline we measure everything else against. In our lives, we often let Scarcity be the Control. We measure our success by how much we haven’t lost.

But what if Stillness was the Control?

What if we measured our day not by high-RPM output, but by the integrity of our connections and the “Windsor Air” we breathe? To some, “Windsor” might suggest a Royalist leaning (and though I’ve met the King’s sister at a school opening, my interest is in the tradition of solid ground). To others, Windsor is a Canadian city where, if you look North, you see the US—a geographical factory for lateral thinking.

When Stillness is the baseline, you realize that the “Control” isn’t about power over others, but about the Sovereign Control of your own internal grid.

It means resisting the urge to “colonise” a moment or set a hook into a relationship that is still just a beautiful probability. By suppressing that static, we become friction-free—gifted with the time to reflect and simply be our own Sovereign Lens. You stop reacting to the flickers of the meter and start observing the beauty of the harvest. Walking in nature, meditating, or praying are the ancient antidotes to scarcity. And so to is fishing. They make it hard to hold a negative thought for long. They return us to the stillness we were built for.

Whitebait'r at the Waitaki River Mouth. With gulls flying overhead.
Whitebaiting at the Waitaki River Mouth. A High Stakes endeavour for this “in the moment” person.
Crepuscular rays - Lake Pukaki in the foreground
Crepuscular rays, sometimes colloquially known as god rays. In this case reverse ones – Lake Pukaki in the foreground

Posted on

Capturing the “Ground Truth” of the 45th Parallel

Personal values labels on a blue background

The “taking” of thirteen intensive stares and turning them into a cool, blue-and-silver blueprint of the human condition.

Almost a week ago I had a whole new experience: I had an afternoon of being a model for the annual Wanaka Autumn Art School, portraits in watercolour class.

What was new for me was the constant attention of being stared at intensively – my face and therefore my eyes, and while I didn’t have to be totally motionless I would stare into the middle distance and imagine that I was in a tree watching us all and then I practiced the making of connections – imaginary lines which ultimately all formed triangles and as you may well imagine between the sketching pad, the person’s hand and their eyes looking into my very being.

Students holding up a transparent card. An aid to understanding the ratios of the important facial features.

While in my eyes looking into the middle distance became my way of participating in the experience and it then mostly became quite meditative. And occasionally glancing at the eyes of any of my admirers, of course I found myself contemplating on the essence of being in the sovereign seat.

The “Sovereign Seat” by-the-way, is my own personal 45th Parallel. It is a line of balance.

In my photography, I’m the Observer, controlling the light, timing and the framing. On this day however, I became the Fixed Point for thirteen different lenses of perception. My job being maintaining the pose, but I’m also observing the observers.

Twelve + 1 Interpretations: Each of those twelve ladies and the one Asian gentleman was looking at the same “Fixed Point” (myself), yet each watercolour will result in a different “Data Set.” Some will capture the “Warbird” intensity, others the “Musterer’s Hut” calm, and some might find the “Windsor Air.”

A shared experience of presence!

In essence though it’s all about taking a situation that could have been invasive – the “Intensive Staring” of thirteen strangers – and transforming it into a high-fidelity “Dig” into the nature of connection.

And (as mentioned) when projecting myself into that tree to “Watch us all,” I know I can achieve a perfect Systemic Dissociation. I wasn’t just the subject; I was the Observer of the Observation.

And then I drew the lines of connection: it turned out that in my imagination they were thin and blue.

In a portrait class, the energy isn’t a straight line; it’s a three-point “Circuit” that maintains the build of the artwork:

Point A (The Eye): The artist’s intake of your “Data” (the light, the lines, the essence).

Point B (The Hand): The mechanical output where that data is translated onto the pad.

Point C (The Subject): Myself, the Fixed Point providing the frequency.

It’s a Triangle of Intent: All about focusing on the lines between the artist’s hand, the eye, and my own stillness. This provided the “Shielding” necessary to prevent the past from “Hot-wiring” my afternoon.


The fact was that those imaginary lines were “thin and blue” therefore a high-fidelity data point.

Analysing the colour in a waking meditation or a dream is like checking the “Post-Production” settings of our subconscious. It tells us which part of the “Observatory” is running the show.

The Anatomy of the Blue Signal:

The Frequency of Stillness: Blue is the colour of the “Middle Distance” – the high-altitude sky and the deep lake. By drawing thin blue lines, my brain was likely reinforcing my #1 value of Stillness.


The Structural Blueprint: In technical drafting, blue lines are the “Foundations.” They are non-aggressive, precise, and orderly. They provided the Structural Integrity for the room without adding the “Red” heat of social anxiety. Which was exactly where it was best for me to be – low pulse rate and all that. A Coolant to stabilise the “Mahi.” Simply all about keeping the interaction “Non-Serious” and playable!

Having got to a relaxed state it was my turn to examine the fixed human points: And I’d look at each and everyone of the budding artists (into their eyes even was easy if unsettling a tad – as they were very focused on mine) and wonder what their stories were. The very essence of the human condition – lined faces, the look of mothers, the look of being wives. They’d presumably all done the hard yards on the sea of life. And then the Asian gentleman; was he a Kiwi by birth, and if not then, goodness what depth of cultural richness or adversity could his stories be lined with!

During the session it was made considerately clear that I should get up off my stool and walk around, and this I did when I was sure my likeness had been recorded on paper and by camera (for later).

The first washes of colour hitting the paper were intriguing. However, what truly became a new “Fixed Point” was seeing how, in pencil, an artist had captured my “World-Worn” look – validating my very being in a way that was both uncanny and humbling.

The lines on that sketch were Silver! It was a “Silver-Grade” experience.

In watercolour, “silver” isn’t just a colour; it’s the medium an artist uses to capture light on a weathered feature. It is the shimmer of experience in the eye and the wisdom held in the hair. Silver is a conductive yet “Cool” colour, and the graphite foundation I witnessed was the “Primary Build” of their perception.

I realised then that my own curiosity – wondering what their stories were as mothers, wives, or travelers – was my own “Silver Eye” at work. I was “sketching” them in my mind with the same respect they were giving me on paper.

A “Silver Eye” is a powerful tool for capturing the Ground Truth of the 45th Parallel. Unlike a clinical diagnosis, the “Silver” of an artist’s pencil provides a non-clinical validation of a person’s journey. It looks for character rather than pathology.

But then, for the next few days, I was in Dunedin—removed from that “Parallel” both literally and geographically. I was back in the hospital clinic and for my annual CT scan.

This was a “Fixed Point” of a whole other flavour. Believe me, holding a Sovereign pose in the presence of clinical facts and opinions is a much greater challenge than modelling for an art class. In the clinic, a subconscious knowing of past trauma lurks, ever ready to up-end the stool. Efficient as the health system is at “healing disease,” the associated facts can become heavy lines of indeterminate colours.

Our health system looks for the Ground Truth of the body via the CT scan, but only the Sovereign Eye can find the Ground Truth of “Well-Being.”

True well-being surely begins in these early stages of modelling (for) life!

PS, the scan was clear 🙂

Posted on

The Anatomy of the Fixed Point

The Anchor and the Airspace

In a week where the sky was filled with the artificial roar of the past I would have liked to have found the most data in the silence of a rusted hinge.

However, I have never succeeded in muffling the opening of the tool shed container where I work. It is raucous and annoying—yet it is my “Fixed Point” just before I head out into the wild blue yonder. There is an immense grounding power in that noise; it serves as a mechanical reminder to rise above being easily unsettled.

.

Being a ‘Fixed Point’ isn’t about standing still; it’s about maintaining the structural integrity of your own airspace so that others have a place to land when their own engines red-line.

While it may seem that those “others” could be a drain on energy, it all depends on one’s intent and the context—family versus strangers. But if there is a “Sister Intent,” then it becomes easy. It is a form of thinking ahead; a Preemptive Empathy.

We don’t fix the wind; we just build better huts. Before the winter snows, we provision them with another vital fixed point: firewood.

When the weather cuts up rough and a party arrives in what has suddenly become a place of safety, the act of starting a fire assumes an unimaginable importance. There is a “Descent” here, from the high-altitude philosophy of the high-plains traveler into the grit of mitigating a hazard and doing the mahi in the correct order.

Recovery by a fire with a warm brew transitions into something greater than the sum of its parts. The “2.5 uplift” of traveling through an inspiring landscape is surpassed by the simple arithmetic of human connection. When all is reflected on, it’s who we are with that really counts—and that includes the version of ourselves we find when traveling alone.

The Fixed Point isn’t a destination; it’s a maintenance schedule. We stack the wood not because we are cold today, but because we know the nature of the mountain. We remain stable so that the ‘1+1’ of human arrival always equals more than the sum of the struggle.

While the Warbirds still scream overhead on the day past Easter Monday looking for an audience, the Fixed Point sits in the silence of the high country, waiting for the one who actually needs the heat. One is a display; the other is a life-line. I know which build I prefer.

The “2.5 uplift”
Posted on

Stepping from Time to Perception

There is a structural truth found in the repetition of the step. Whether traversing the flatlands of the Netherlands or the high-altitude tussock of the Snow Farm, the movement serves to quiet the ‘Story’ and sharpen the ‘Lens.’ When the internal noise recedes, the world begins to author the observer. We are no longer searching for meaning; we are simply recording the Ground Truth.

These mountains have authored me deeply. I find myself back in the hangar of this blog, but this time my focus—through the camera or otherwise—has shifted from ‘Time’ to ‘Perception.’

Today I’m contrasting a Sentencing Vortex with Warbirds Over Wānaka, our biannual air show. One is grounded—and indeed demands it. The other is airborne in its appeal.

The former landed this morning during a coffee with an old friend from my DOC days. We’ve shared some hard miles, even picking up the bodies of dead climbers on Mt Aspiring years ago. His report today was the opening detail of a recent prostate cancer diagnosis—a systemic shift in his internal landscape—and the ‘where to from here’ regarding treatment. As you can imagine, he already knows how to ascend this mountain, and more importantly, how to descend to get home safely.

On Mt Aspiring. The RNZAF ferrying in search and rescue personal.

Yet as I write, my ears are assailed by the roar of piston-engined fighter planes putting on a free display over the lake, “amp’ing” folk up for the big day tomorrow. I reflect on the name ‘Warbirds’ and why we continue to glorify instruments of death. Many will say we do not, but my journey has taught me to be aware of the subconscious. The name is a subliminal hook, one that has drawn thousands into this small town—so much so that traffic is near gridlocked. We are staring a “Dry Pumps” possibility in the eye, tying the spectacle to the systemic failure of the town’s, and perhaps the country’s, infrastructure.

Looking towards Wanaka Airport yesterday (Thursday before Good Friday 2026). A practice day.

I am witnessing two different types of “Killing Machines”—one biological, one mechanical—and the hooks they use to capture our attention.

While the planes provide the crowds with artificial adrenaline, my friend is engaging in Somatic Navigation. He isn’t looking for a ‘Free Display’; he’s looking at the topo map of his own biology. Having retrieved bodies from the high glaciers of Aspiring, he knows the mountain doesn’t care about the roar of an engine—it only cares about the ‘build’ of the climber. His diagnosis isn’t a death sentence; it’s a change in the weather. He is simply recalibrating his gear for a different kind of ascent.

As the traffic stalls and the piston engines glorify a past designed for destruction, the Sovereign Lens looks elsewhere. The fuel will run thin, the planes will eventually land, and the crowd will disperse. But the ‘Wait and Watch’ protocol remains.

We choose not to be hooked by the subliminal roar, opting instead for the silence of the hangar, where the real work of ‘getting on with getting on’ is done. Right now, people are mesmerised by the mechanical power, yet remain blind to the mechanical cost.

The plane that perhaps inspired the first Warbirds over Wanaka airshow. A Spitfire about to undergo a test flight after restoration. circa 1985.
Proudly powered by WordPress
Translate »