X marks the spot: poem for my pirate son

Have you heard of a treasure in a distant land?

Buried beneath a pile of sand.

Better than silver, better than gold,

Waiting to be found by a courageous soul.

 

So Pirate Karsten who loves a mission,

Set about fulfilling his grand vision.

He put on his eye patch, fixed his cap,

Studied with glee his old treasure map.

 

Ahoy! The ship sailed with a mighty jol­­­­t,

Full power ahead! To X marks the spot.

The sea was smooth, the wind was high,

The seafarer’s heart was light as a fly.

 

With his hair a-flapping, his hands a-clapping,

To sea shanty tunes his feet a-tapping,

“We’re on a mission, we’re on a quest,

where X marks the spot, is my treasure chest!”

 

Suddenly the sea parted with a roar,

Up rose a dragon, fifty feet tall!

Its eyes were amber, its scales were green,

It looked so horrible, it looked so mean!

 

But brave Pirate Karsten didn’t even flinch,

He jumped on its nose and gave it a pinch,

With a painful shriek, the dragon fell with a splash

And disappeared beneath the sea in a flash.

 

Spurred on by his victory, his spirits buoyed,

Karsten sang loudly with a great big voice,

“We’re on a mission, we’re on a quest!

Where X marks the spot, is my treasure chest!”

 

The next day he found some seagulls in a bunch,

Oh dear! They’d mistaken his map for lunch!

They tore it to bits, Karsten said, “NO!

Without my treasure map, where shall I go?”

 

So he picked up the pieces, one by one,

Stuck them together in the midday sun,

It was crumpled and stained, but it did not matter,

As long as there’s “X” – that glorious letter.

 

The wind was picking up, the storm clouds gathering,

Soon there was rain, and flashes of lightning,

The ship was tossed on mile-high waves,

“Save me!” he cried, “or I’ll sink without trace!”

 

And above the din, he heard a voice say,

“Be still!” it said, and the waves obeyed.

As the storm subsided, the ship ran aground,

Exhausted, Karsten fell asleep on the ground.

 

Then from behind the sandbar, emerged a man.

In a familiar voice, he said, “Hello, my friend.”

“Were you the one who saved me just then?”

asked Karsten, “with outstretched arm and mighty hand?”

 

“Ay, ay!” he said, with a kindly smile,

“Why don’t you talk with me awhile?”

“I’m lost” Karsten said, “tell me where I am!”

“Of course!” he replied, unfurled the map on the sand.

 

And that’s when he turned the voyage on its head,

“You see, the map’s oriented this way instead.

You thought you’re going this way, but you’re really going that,

When you thought you’re heading northeast, you’re really heading west!

 

“So the ‘X’ you see, is no X at all,”

“Rotate your map,” he urged, and then Karsten saw

the “X” becomes a “+” -  yes a cross!

The Cross marks the treasure that’s worth the cost.

 

“Because, the cross is where I died,

To save your life, I paid the price.

So at the Cross, you will find treasure,

In boundless and eternal measure.

  

"It’ll never spoil, it’ll never fade,

It’ll never be spent, it’s always the same.

So now you’ve found treasure, you can truly sing,

With gutso and with your everything,

 

“We’re on a mission, we’re on a quest!

Where the Cross marks the spot, is my treasure chest!”

Crafting around: Balloon puppets

We have been steadily building our collection of balloon flour puppets over the last few months. These puppets have been great fun to make and double up as stress therapy for the adults.

Material needed:
Balloon
Flour
A funnel
Yarn or pipe cleaners (for the puppet's hair)

Open up the neck of the balloon to cover the bottom spout of the funnel. Fill the funnel with flour, tap it gently to help the flour drop into the balloon, and knead the flour from the neck to the bottom of the balloon. When you reach the desired size, tie up the balloon. It should be nice and firm and able to be squeezed into different shapes. Decorate as you please with wiggly eyes, foam pieces for the mouth and yarn for the hair.

Two inconsequences of getting older

How long do you persist with a book before giving up? A while ago, I came across a handy rule of thumb that tells you how many pages you should read before deciding whether to stick with it or leave it:

(100 – your age) divided by 2

So for instance, if you’re 30, you would read 35 pages ((100-30) ÷2) before you guilt-freely give it the boot. And if you live to be 98, well, you can justifiably judge a book by its cover.

What is the basis of this rule? I’d like to think that the older we are, the better able we are to judge a book’s worthiness - to ourselves at least. But I suspect the simple reason is that we have less and less time. The stakes get higher with each passing year. There are only so many books, articles, blogposts you can fit in a lifetime. A sobering thought for those contemplating on doing the “100 books you must read before you die” challenge!

Da Vinci, a man of art and a man of science

Or perhaps we just have less stamina. I remember my adolescence when I would faithfully wait till the very last page of any Agatha Christie novel to find out whodunit. Plus I had good book hygiene. I would patiently go through one novel before starting another – why dilute the experience? But it all started to go awry came the HSC, when I never finished reading my English text, Emma. (Got up to the bit when Emma realised she loved Mr Knightley; Clueless and Cliff’s Notes filled in the rest. It’s very hard to keep the dramatic tension going once the sexual tension is resolved, isn’t it?)

Reading fatigue is not helped by the array of words plying for our attention. A friend used to say that we only have a certain amount of reading energy each day and if that is taken up by reading bullet points and legalese all day, there is precious little left for the important or pleasurable.

And so sadly I am putting this rule of thumb to good practice without intending to. Still, I can’t help feeling a pang of disappointment at not being able to finish what I started.

* * *

On a radio interview some time ago, a scientist made an interesting observation. He said that scientists usually do their groundbreaking work young, while musicians and artists continue producing into their old age.

Case in point: John Nash famously came up with his most important contribution to game theory in his 20s; whilst Picasso painted great works into his 80s.

Why is that? The same scientist postulates this is because in science, you need to be constantly interacting with new information in order to come up with a novel idea. An aging scientist is ill-suited to do this, not least because he or she is taken up by administrative tasks like running departments and applying for grants. Whereas in the arts, the information you need to create and keep creating is acquired in youth, and growth occurs internally.

Interesting. We don't choose our vocation based on its longevity – how a businessman might last longer than a barrister, who might last longer than a surgeon, who might last longer than a footballer. And at this rate of increasing life expectancy, we might all need second or third careers to round out our working lives. So it is natural that many people turn to writing and teaching in their retirement.

There’s a saying in Chinese tradition, “if you read ten thousand books, you might as well walk ten thousand miles” – meaning – it is better to step out, travel and experience the world firsthand than to read about it in books.

But when reading ability is in decline, and the wanderlust is gone, it’s good to know that the final and most thrilling journey happens inside.

Back to the future with Jesus

When a person becomes a Christian, we repent of our rebellion against God and accept Christ as our righteousness. From then on, we entrust our lives to Him – our present and our future.

But what about our past? Past events. People. Things that happened to us. Does Jesus lay claim to our past too? Do we have to surrender our past in order to follow him?

What I mean is this. It is not as if God is in the business of doing weird time warps and undoing history that has already occurred – thankfully He will never retract the historical fact of Jesus’ death and resurrection! So the question is less of a practical, and more of a philosophical one – what if our past, everything that has made us what we are today, were to unravel? Sure, we have all done things in the past we would rather forget; but there are also many things we cherish and celebrate. Do we have to give those up too? Would we still praise God?

To illustrate, consider the parable of the rich ruler. When asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’, Jesus answered “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” The rich ruler walked away sad because he had great wealth.

Now imagine if Jesus had gone further, and said, “Not only do I ask you to give up your wealth, but I will erase from your former life everything that has contributed to what you are today.” What of it then?

Recently, I met someone who had lived through homelessness who challenged me deeply about what made me how I am. I thought to myself, what would I do if I were to be turned out onto the street tomorrow, homeless? I think I might manage to get to a Centrelink office and fill in a form. But my ability to do so is not because of some intrinsic virtue on my part. Something in my past, my upbringing, my education, has empowered me to do that. And so I am still hanging onto my own mental resources. I am still worshipping at the altar of the great “I” instead of the great “I Am”! We forget how much of what we are today, is owed to our past. Everyone is indebted for better or worse, to their past.

So I return again to the question: can you give up your past? What if you are not only required to give up a future life of comfort and ease but to give up the privileges of your past? What if you can no longer talk the way you do, think the way you do – and I’m not talking about being afflicted by some terrible disease or trauma in the future – what if you never had the opportunity in the first place? What if you are no longer you – Tommy from middle class Australia but born in the slums to illiterate parents who did not know the importance of reading to children or feeding them nutritious food? What if you were to lose your entire ancestry and heritage? Where is your identity then?

I finally conclude there is only one thing that reaches into our past far enough, past our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors, that is a sure foundation for who you are. Hear the words of St Paul,

“For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons thorough Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will. “ (Ephesians 1:4-5)

My answer: God's election. You could be born into any place, any era, any circumstance, but before you were conceived, before any iota of you came to be, you were predestined for adoption as God’s children.

It’s like this. In the movie “Back to the Future 2” (surely a retro film now) Michael J Fox had to travel back in time to make sure his mum got together with his dad so that he could exist. It’s a shaky thing to depend on, isn’t it, our parents getting together. Who our parents are. But our ultimate existence is not shaky if undergirding it is the sovereign creation and election by the Living God of the universe.

Have you ever known expectant couples and thought, ah yes, their child is going to grow up with much love and guidance, because of the values and the character of the parents – whether it’s a boy or girl, able-bodied or disabled, through the vagaries of life, their general trajectory and foundation is sure. Now imagine if your parent is God the Father. No wonder Paul is convinced that “neither death nor life, neither angels’ nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This same friend I referred to before said, “My job is not my identity, my home is not my identity. Christ is my identity.”

Today I understood a little more of what that means. God’s grace grows a little bigger in my heart. Jesus’ claim over my past extends to more than just forgiveness of my sins. Everything I am I owe to Him alone and for that I must practise thankfulness. He is indeed my present, future and past, and all of it is to be redeemed for His glory.

Crafting around: Nature picture

Here is another craft idea I picked up from the same worksheet mentioned in my previous post. I loved doing it because it encouraged my child to get outdoors and explore the flora.

 

Material needed:

Collect gum nuts, flowers, leaves, pebbles and any other goodies from the backyard or a park.
A sheet of paper

We spent twenty minutes in the beautiful spring sun picking up interesting bits of leaves and nuts. Then we simply came in and arranged our bits and pieces on a sheet of paper into a crocodile, a fish and a turtle and stuck on some googly eyes.

Can you spot them?

 



Crafting around: Shaving cream painting

I came cross this idea of finger painting with a twist from a worksheet that my son brought home from the children's program at BSF. It seemed so simple and so fun that we got to work straightaway!

 

Material needed:

Shaving cream
Food colouring
Sheet of paper

On a large plate, spray a generous dollop of shaving cream. A tiny drop of food colouring will be enough to colour the whole dollop. Then, get your fingers in there and start painting!

We found the foam surprisingly easy to move around the paper (much smoother and fulsome than finger paint). The texture of the foam was wonderful to little fingers and as a bonus, my house smelt nice and fragrant afterwards!

To create a painting twice over, whilst you are spraying the shaving cream out of the can, do it slowly and try to 'draw' simple shapes like a flower or a circle with the foam. The resulting white drawing will be a nice contrast to your child's colourful smears.

The Scheherazade Experiment

You might remember a TV commercial a few years back promoting Telstra broadband.

The commercial opens with an eager looking, primary school-aged boy in the back of the car, asking his father,

“Dad, why did they build the Great Wall of China?”

The tough-guy dad looked blankly ahead, and then said, with deadly seriousness, “That was during the time of Emperor Nasi Goreng... they wanted to... keep the rabbits out,” and then repeated, as if to consolidate his answer, “yes, too many rabbits in China.”

The scene then cuts to the boy standing in front of his class getting ready to give his presentation on China. We all know what happens next!

We’ve all been there before. Called upon to answer a difficult question, or to explain yourself for some misdeed, you freeze – and then the imagination kicks into overdrive – and out comes a tall tale that surprises even yourself with its outlandishness!

And if you happen to be parent to a toddler who loves stories, you might frequently find yourself in a similar position of having to make up some wonderfully outlandish stories (though not with such dastardly consequences)!

Over the last few months, I must have easily told ten, twelve stories each day. The criteria: they must not be stories “from a book” but “from your mouth” (as one author calls). Bad stories will not be accepted no matter how many times you say “The End” and must be continued and retold to the audience’s satisfaction. Unless you are a Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton, this is a very challenging brief indeed!

True, most of them last less than a minute; and almost all are conveniently ended by potty runs, baby screams and usually by Karsten himself short circuiting my plot with his favourite one and only happy ending. Well, when you are only two years old with an unyielding obsession with cars and diggers, there really isn’t a lot of creative licence to tell a really good story. To be honest, most of the time, he just wants us to join in his pretend-play narrative (or his “recitative” as one radio presenter calls it).

So whilst my son’s interest in these “stories” dwindle as quickly as it’s kindled, I toy with them long afterwards to amuse and challenge myself as to the genesis of these un-premeditated stories. Where do our stories come from? I think of parents everywhere, doing exactly the same thing – where do they get their inspiration? Do they draw upon the fairytales, fables and folklore of their own childhoods? Are their stories moralistic? Or are they whimsical and surrealist? Do they plagiarise from books they have read, or are they pure and original? What if we could harness this creative energy that is being expended everywhere, every day?

So here is my invitation to you: to add to the collective wealth of spontaneous story-telling by submitting your own un-premeditated tales of an outlandish nature to “The Scheherazade Experiment”. They may be a minute long, they may be an hour long, they may be revised or unabridged, they may have been told to a real child or not at all, so long as they retain the spirit of the “make-it-up-as-you-go-along”. Sort of a written theatre sport.

The title of this experiment pays homage to the heroine in the story of the Arabian Nights, Scheherazade (pronounced "Sha-hair-ra-zard"). The story goes that a king, spurned by an unfaithful wife, vowed to spend each night with a new maiden and execute her in the morning. Soon there were no virgins left in the kingdom. Scheherazade bravely offered herself to the king. Each night, to delay her own execution, she would spin tale after tale after tale, but withhold the ending until the next night to keep the king hanging, until the king eventually relented from his vow. Hence, legend goes, the collection of stories that became “A Thousand and One Nights”.

Our storytelling motives may not be so macabre, but they are, to an extent, born of necessity. And necessity is the mother of all invention. So mothers must invent the best stories, right?

Crafting around

The wet weather has meant lots of indoor time lately. Karsten, our two year old, loves making craft (or perhaps more accurately, watching Mummy make craft and occasionally assisting). Here are a few crafts that we recently enjoyed.

Ocean animals

Last week, Karsten became fascinated with sharks after a visit to the aquarium. So we indulged liberally in this new fascination with this little piece of sea...

Material:
Clear plastic takeaway container (we used the lid of a takeaway sushi box)
Water
Agar jelly
Blue food colouring
White cardboard




To make the deep blue sea, I boiled some water (enough to fill the plastic container) and sprinkled lots of agar jelly powder into it. Once it's cooled, but not set, I poured the warm mixture into the plastic container. Then we dribbled a little bit of blue food colouring into the mixture and gave it a swirl - but not too much! - to give it a marble blue appearance.


Whilst the mixture was setting, we drew and cut out different sea creatures onto cardboard - octopus, fish, and of course, sharks. Then as the mixture solidified, we put the various animals into the ocean (best done whilst the mixture has started to harden but not completely set). An origami boat completes the scene. Now, let the hunting begin...

Flower pots

 

Neither my husband nor I have a green thumb. But I live in hope that our children might be more diligent gardeners than I am. Here's what we did to plant that seed of curiosity...

Material:

A plastic tray, preferably with compartments (we used the bottom of a sushi takeaway box)
Cupcakes patties
Collage paper
Straws
Blu-tack or play dough
Green paper, shredded
Brown rice, loose tea leaves



We made the flowers first by flattening the cupcake patties, and sticking a shiny piece of collage paper in the centre. A straw was stuck to the back of each flower with sticky tape (tip: different lengths of straws will look better). We put the flowers into the tray (one in each compartment if the tray has compartments) and used a lump of play dough at the end of each straw to keep the flower upright.


Now the fun (and messy) part! Into the tray, we sprinkled different kinds of "soil" (the tea leaves, brown rice, or anything else that looks similar) and then lots of grass (green paper).


The flowers bloomed for a whole day before over-enthusiastic handling saw it start to wilt.

Tango lessons

Now and then, in the spare minutes of the day, I would think wistfully to the days when my husband and I used to take ballroom dancing lessons. It was a wonderful ritual. Two or three nights a week, we would meet up in Crows Nest, down a wonton noodle soup, then disappear into one of those one-room office suites that had been transformed with disco lights and loud music into a dance fantasy land.

Of all the dances we learnt, our favourite, without a doubt, was the tango – not the ballroom tango, with the arched backs and jerky heads, but the Argentine variety – heads bowed, hands clasped, faces and sides touching. Think Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. (Regrettably, the only dance we were any good at was the stiff-legged foxtrot, but this did not discourage us from setting our hearts on the tango for our wedding dance!)

So what business does an Asian, un-co tomboy have with this unashamedly sexy Latin dance? To begin with, I love tango music. I was captivated the very first time I heard the dramatic run of notes on the bandoneon. (A bandoneon is like an accordion, used often in tango music, along with strings.) Those who are familiar with the songs of Astor Piazzolla will know that they typically juxtapose a slow, sweet, dreamy melody in major key with a fast, dark, agitated melody in minor key. So in the space of three or so minutes, these songs traverse the entire landscape of a passionate affair – the innocence and the betrayal, the tenderness and the violence, the glory and the tragedy. It is indulgent, irrepressibly sensual, sure to capture the complete attention of any romantic.

But the most appealing thing about the tango, is the dynamic it creates between man and woman. In the Argentine tango, the woman never steps forwards, always backwards. Now, before jumping to the conclusion that it is a chauvinistic dance, note this is also a dance where the woman gets to do all the flourishes – from the seductive “ochos” – where she twirls in front of her partner in a figure of eight; to the aggressive “gancho”, where she steps to her partner’s side and deftly flicks her ankle backwards between the man’s legs in a kind of momentary leg embrace. And most unusually, compared with other dances where patterns and timing are everything, the woman is completely at liberty to do whatever flourishes she likes for however long she likes, until she decides to return to the waiting arms of her partner, or when he wants her back! So the whole thing is less like a structured dance and more like a free and natural conversation. The tango maestros call it simply, “walking”.

How then does the man communicate all the subtleties of movement without a word, with his gaze obligingly averted? How, in the words of our instructor, does the man “create the space for the woman to walk”? By nothing more than the momentum of his body! Any ballroom dancer will tell you that a man leads not by his arms or hands, though he embraces the woman with these, but with his chest – they way he carries himself, the way he moves, the way he – well – creates a space where a woman might feel completely protected and encouraged to take a brave stride backwards (hopefully not onto someone else’s foot). This is a much harder task than the heavy lifting! If you have ever seen a live tango performance, you will feel the extraordinary tension and release between partners. But if you have seen a husband and wife perform (as our instructors were), that is altogether something special. With expressiveness like this, who needs to talk?

This is where I think dance imitates life. Leading your partner in a tango, is much like leading another person in real life, especially in the context of an intimate relationship, like a marriage, in at least 3 ways that I can think of:

1. Leading is about having vision. In the tango, this literally means being able to see where you are going when your partner has no idea and trusts you completely. In the same way, leading in life requires vision – a goal for the future that is big and high and real enough to inspire through the good times and bad times.
2. Leading is about encouraging and bringing the best out in the other person. In most dances, and especially in the tango, the woman is often the one who dazzles the crowd with her costume and her flourishes. But she is still following her man's lead. Leading is not about being in the limelight, or being dominant, but being supportive, encouraging and when necessary, pushing the other to be the best they can be. This is as much about courage and confidence as it is about modesty and humility.
3. Leading is not by strong-arming but by the consistency and integrity of your person. If a man tries to lead his dance partner by pulling and pushing her arms, he actually makes it impossible for her to follow him, even if she wanted to! This is because he is not maintaining a consistent “frame”. A frame, in ballroom dancing lingo, is the poise of your upper body, primarily your head, neck, shoulders and torso. A man keeps his frame still when moving; he therefore leads with his whole body. I see the same principle at work in real life. Leadership is not by compulsion. Leadership is about opening up your mind, your heart, your soul to the other person and winning them over with your honesty and integrity.

* * *

But the tango is not just a dance for intimate lovers. In the milongas we frequented (milongas are social dances; in Sydney they are put on in RSLs and community halls), seventy-year old grannies in sequenced gowns and silver heels “walk” together with dapper, olive-skinned young men in white suits and a rose in their lapels. It is, in Argentine culture, a family affair.

* * *

There is a grey, pony-tailed busker who sometimes sings and plays tango music on his bandoneon outside Chatswood Westfield. In between numbers, he would jovially court conversation of passer-bys. I can’t help but feel he is underappreciated there. But transport him to the town square in Buenos Aires, in the cool of the night, I imagine they must, surely they must, stop in their tracks and break into passionate dance.