You’ve probably heard the story about the three stonecutters, chipping away at bits of rock. When asked what they were doing, the first replied, “I am making a living”. The second said: “I am doing the best job of stone cutting in the entire country.” And the third said: “I am building a cathedral.” The moral, your Human Resource manager will tell you, smiling, is that the way to motivate staff is to help them see the bigger picture. So let’s talk about the bigger picture, cathedral-wise. Maybe with Sir Christopher Wren, because in some versions of the story those stonecutters were working on his St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Or maybe with Antoni Gaudi, whose Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is still being built, nearly 100 years after his death. Wren will tell you that over the life of his project he had to negotiate the demands of four separate monarchs. He’ll tell you about being caught in the struggles between the Parliament and the Church and how the brief kept changing and there was never enough money for construction. He’ll tell you he never forgave Charles II for diverting him from science to ‘spend all his [...] Read More »
How to move a pile of topsoil
Seated on the right was a professor in politics at Victoria University. This was interesting because a few days before two large truckloads—twelve cubic metres—of topsoil had been delivered. It seems trucks can never dump things precisely where they are required and so the soil had to be moved—shovelful by shovelful, barrow load by barrow load—to its final position. They served the panna cotta and the professor—just back from Kuala Lumpur—observed that the American empire has lasted only a hundred years or so, whereas earlier empires went on for centuries. Now, she said, we are experiencing the rise of an Asian empire—China and India—from which New Zealand is well placed to benefit. Somewhere between the West and the East, on an island in the Pacific Ocean, moving topsoil from where it has been dumped to where it is required (shovelful by shovelful, barrow load by barrow load), you can contemplate such matters. Curt Carlson was a Minneapolis entrepreneur who lived the American dream and built a multinational corporation on goals and targets: “Increase sales by 15% per annum and you double the size of the company every four years”. “Go to work on Saturdays and be ahead [...] Read More »
Hoe while it is Spring, and enjoy the best anticipations
Even the korimako—the bellbird—can’t wait. Like an early riser outside Cafe L’affare on a Sunday morning, impatient for the doors to open, he hops along the branches of the kowhai, inspecting the flower buds. “C’mon team, let’s GO.” (of course it sounds better than that, as anything in Bellbird, or Maori, or French, tends to do.) Spring is Nature’s reset button—Control-Alt-Delete—a rush of optimism and promise that this time round everything really will be perfect. All too quickly however the nor’westers come, a random frost, the summer scorch. Reality bites, life happens and it’s literature all over again. All of us are shaped by the events of our lives and most often the damage is self-inflicted. In a song titled Stoplight Roses (“you’ve broken something this time that Stoplight Roses can’t mend”), Nick Lowe suggests there’s no point believing your ‘same old used to bes will see you through’. Tony award winning choreographer, Twyla Harp, puts it another way. She says we have to be prepared to challenge ‘the status quos of our own making’. We are each given a lifetime of Springs. Each of them is Nature’s reminder to challenge the status quos of our own making and embrace the new possibilites that are always out there. (Thanks to Tim Harford’s new book Adapt) Read More »
Don’t exit through the gift shop
That’s exactly what he was… a ‘cockalorum’. It means ‘a self-important or boastful person’. He was well-bellied, American, and sitting in the lounge of a classy South Island resort, complaining to his buddy, his obedient wife and their New Zealand guide that he’s not allowed to shoot polar bears. “Hell, they’re all gonna die anyhow, so why not get the economic benefit of letting me go shoot them?” Their conversation went on to how you skin a wolverine, and how, when it comes to women, nobody can tell a story that he couldn’t match. I felt sorry for the guide. I imagined he’d read in a book that if you can only find your passion you’ll be happy and maybe even wealthy. So he’d made his hobby—hunting and fishing—his business and this is what it had brought him: a cockalorum. What about that bit, Oprah? Cue Edward Deci, a psychologist who discovered that doing something for an external reward makes it a different kind of activity than if you are doing because it interests you. When you are doing something you enjoy, the motivation is ‘intrinsic’ but when you do it for money—when the motivation is ‘extrinsic’—that extrinsic motivation can crowd out the intrinsic one. Discussing these findings, Clay Shirky (in his new book ‘Cognitive Surplus’) points out that we’ve learned to regard amateur interests—hobbies—as [...] Read More »
When Jupiter aligns with Mars
If you ever go to Martinborough to drink wine (or eat at The French Bistro) you should also go to Stonehenge Aotearoa, which is nearby. It’s a working model of stone circles like Stonehenge in the UK and it demonstrates how such structures were used to track the movement of the sun and stars across the skies. The stones are all precisely placed to align, for example, with the equinoxes, in the Spring and the Autumn. So, in a way, a henge is a colossal calendar in a paddock. At our place, we have a simpler way of tracking the seasons. Right now, for example, we know it’s Autumn, because the nights are cooler and the leaves - and the feijoas – have started to fall. Later on, the grapefruit will be ready, and then the asparagus, and then the raspberries… What we could do, I suppose, is find some big rocks, put them in a circle, and go out and look at them every day. But we find it easier, when the first feijoa falls, to authoritatively declare that summer has ended. Call it Feijoa Henge, if you like, or simply delight in the special treats that every season brings along. Read More »
In the clearing stands a boxer…
Once upon a time, Jude and I used to visit gardens that are open to the public. We still do. We enjoyed the outings – being in the gardens - and at the same time we were building a vision for what our garden might be one day. I remember one garden we went to. I remember admiring the ride on mowers and other implements lined up in the shed. I remember too, the two boxer dogs bounding around greeting the visitors. So now we have a large garden, and a shed with a ride-on mower and other implements. And now, two dogs, Grace and Stanley. Not boxers exactly, but no less enthusiastic greeters of all who visit. We don’t quite know how they came to be here. Suddenly we acquired them, having just agreed that it was not sensible and they would completely disrupt our life, which they have. But their presence demonstrates the power of a vision. Once you’ve imagined how your life might be, some sort of gravitational field seems to be created, attracting and assembling all of the component parts. Be careful what you wish for. Read More »
Pieces of April
In the 1970s, Three Dog Night had a hit with a Dave Loggins song about fond memories. The hook line was “I’ve got pieces of April, it’s a morning in May’. It seems to me that nature would write that song differently. Today is the 2nd of August. Technically, we are still in winter, but at 10am it’s already 16 degrees. The sun is streaming through the garden, lighting up the green foliage. The daffodils are out and in the paddocks between here and town there are lambs playing chasie like new entrants at playtime. In Hastings, the street trees are in blossom. In short, it’s a morning in August, but we’ve got pieces of springtime. Read More »
Fruit Trees
The other day Uzi told me he had just planted thirty fruit trees on their weekend property at Te Horo. It’s the season for planting fruit trees and I was waiting impatiently for our order to arrive to finish planting our orchard, so I was a bit jealous of him. However, a few days later the last of the trees arrived and now they are safely in the ground: bare sticks in a muddy landscape. It’s a bit hard to imagine the eventual effect: a cluster of trees on a grassy hillside, with sunshine and shade and more fuit than we know what to do with, but we are on our way. I was thinking about Uzi and I both planting our trees and our anticipation of picking fruit, fresh from the tree. When I was young, Mum and Dad had farming friends and we children were welcome to clamber in their plum tree and help ourselves. But as you grew up, fruit always came from the supermarket, or a roadside stall, or occasionally, as ‘pick-your-owns’ from a commercial orchard. Everyone’s gardens became too small for fruit trees and in any case, productive gardening went out of fashion. Easy-care conifers were the go. Now, we baby boomers are rediscovering what previous generations took for granted. What was [...] Read More »
Winter wet
On Queen’s Birthday weekend, Craig was here with his bulldozer, reshaping the area that will become the orchard, and cutting a line for the new fence. Fortunately (we thought at the time) he was here working on the holiday Monday, because there was rain forecast for Tuesday. What we didn’t anticipate was that six weeks later it would still be raining: we’ve had over 200mm since and there’s mud everywhere. The supplies for the new fence are piled in the yard… no point the fencers working when it’s like this. It’s winter of course, which is when it usually rains in Hawke’s Bay , but when you’re sloshing around in your gumboots it’s hard to imagine the long hot dry summers when everything’s parched, desperate for rain Read More »
Re-moralising
‘Soul-destroying’ may be a bit dramatic, but ‘demoralising’ seems rather stoic. In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the local population of rabbits and hares and they now hop around and through the garden with such a sense of entitlement you’d think they were celebrities at a Beatrix Potter tea party. Which may sound cute, but when you discover they’ve been in the vegetable garden and munched the middle out of a cauliflower and levelled a line of celery plants it is, well, demoralising. We’ve tried little fences around the beds, but they hop over those, or burrow under them, so now we’re implementing the ultimate solution… a rabbit-proof fence around the entire vegetable garden and citrus orchard. 100 metres long, 90 centimetres high, with 30 centimetres buried below ground, it will have four gates, and guards with searchlights and machine guns on every corner. (That bit’s a joke). When it’s done, we imagine it will be impenetrable. And that, we believe, will be ‘remoralising’. Read More »
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