Sorry we're late, teacher, but the dog ...

This morning, I suppose, was a fairly ordinary morning in the life of a parent, filled as it was with the usual ups and downs, and a little magic. Sebastian had been left at home once, so far. The squabbling over whose turn it was for the front seat, which had already delayed teeth brushing and final departures, was not yet resolved by the time I was trying to get Mila and Karl strapped into the car. That elusive even-keeledness with which we, as parents, aspire to ride the choppy seas of our children's emotions, was by now being buffeted amongst fierce white horses, far from shore. "Right", I shouted at Sebastian, "If you are not happy with where you need to sit, then you can get out and stay here."

The taxi man

Phoebe interrupts her game to swing through the front door and announce that the taxi is here. It irritates Sandra slightly that he arrives so early. It makes her feel hurried. So I go out to tell the taxi man that she will only be ready in half an hour. “I'm early”, he says through the wound down window, as I approach. He is finishing a mouthful of lunch. And still has some red stains from it in the corners of his mouth - maybe tomato sauce. “I came early”, he says, “so that I could sit and look at the mountains for a bit.”

Rowing into light

"I think you should go through the dunes and grainfields to Salamander Bay one day in the spring, when the wildflowers are blazing in the sailors' cemetery. There are ghosts of ships and seamen in that old harbour, but the ghosts of Salamander harm no one ...”

lines from Lawrence Green and immortalised for me by a yellowing piece of paper on which they hung above the large table of our childhood family holiday home, nearby.

Phoebe's grin is centred in the frame, and stays there. If she shifts, I remind her to shift back, to keep us balanced. The slightest imbalance is discomfort in the oars. Her long hair flows outward from the centre of her scalp. And behind that stretches the transient mark of our passing – little eddies that live fleetingly and then return to stillness. There is something about the stillness in this place that speaks of deep connection. The stillness and the light. This is a place that has held me for as long as I can remember, and holds me still.

Walking over water

It was not the picture that I had held in my imagination. Perhaps overly influenced by photos of Dean Potter solo high-lining above Yosemite, the picture I held had me looking cool, thrillingly poised, yet in control and making delicately deliberate progress across the line to the other side. Orange cliffs behind me, black water below.

I'd been slacklining only about three months. From the moment I was first introduced to it, in a Banff festival film, I knew I wanted to step onto the line to feel the taught and delicate balancing sway of the tape under my bare feet, and to experience that beautiful coming together in movement, of body and mind.

Easter 2010

Easter is a time when life and death are in close proximity, where Good Friday and Easter Sunday are separated by only a single day. Phoebe asked us why Good Friday is called good. “Surely”, she said, “the day that Jesus died was a bad one”.

I had heard of Bobby Woods’s death on Table Mountain, but it wasn’t close to me, just a newspaper article about a climber I had met once, long ago. Until I spoke to Adam.

Giving Voice to Walking

On the 19^th of March 2010 my friend Galeo and I did a presentation at the wonderful but too brief institution that was the annual Freewheeling Festival, held at Stanford Valley. Our idea was to share, through words and images, the inspiration and importance of the simple act of walking. Among other things we read alternate pieces of our own writings, that had been inspired by walking. Between us on a screen ran a continual set of images from our various walks, mostly of mountains. Black and white, fading into each other. We called the presentation, Giving Voice to Walking.

These were the pieces I read:

It was just a walk. A short walk. And yet something perhaps about the low angle of the sun’s light from behind the clouds, and the response it invoked in the landscape, and in the scrubby vegetation at my feet,

Why won’t Mr Retail let us swim in his pool?

We take two books with us this year, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. A Sand County nearly doesn’t make it. When you’re hiking with kids there’s a lot to carry and only essentials make the final cut. But as I deliberate the last items to pack, I open the book arbitrarily and read this passage