So, as stated earlier, and as evidenced by my driveway, I am a Volvo Tragic. What started out as a search for a weekend wagon, capable of mildly off-road and carting bikes, dogs and punters around, has turned into a mini-obsession. Volvos are not the first thing one might think of when we are talking obsessions, but there ye go, each to their own.

The current focus of this Volvo obsesion is a recently acquired 1979 Volvo 242 GT. The GTs were a factory option that were produced to compete alongside BMW, Audi and Mercedes as a viable sports option. Yes, sports option. Yes, Volvo. The above picture is one of their advertisements from the 70s.

The GT came standard with a 2.1 or 2.3 litre EFI (electronic fuel injection) motor, some were normally aspirated (no turbo or superchargers) and some had forced induction (a turbo charger was fitted). All had front and rear disc brakes with the (for the times) awesome Volvo (Girling/ATE) four-spot calipers. The suspension wasn’t fantastic, but it could be modified to handle even better than factory, a mod still being carried out on most Volvos today, and most, of not all, the work could be done from home by a competent home mechanic.

The GT I have has been fitted with a 2.3 litre Motronic controlled turbocharged engine, close to, but not the original factory motor. They are a classic car, really, and probably only something a mother could love, but they are a great car for the price.

As with any car that is 33 years old (although the motor is 28 years old), there are bound to be a few issues. One of the most common ones is the wiring harness that runs from the ECU to the fuel injectors. Over time, the earlier looms suffer under the heat and oil and become crumbly and brittle – like this:

This wiring controls the firing of the fuel injectors and the cold/hot start sensors for the motor – not something you want shorting out on you, not at all. So. I’ll begin rebuilding it as the time and money allows.

So, as I pondered the sense in working on a vehicle that needs a bit of work before it can begin polluting again, all while whales are being slaughtered, oceans are rising and resources are depleting, I wondered at my sanity.

Why would you do this?

How would you justify this?

Well, how do we ever justify anything! We live in denial, and we cohort…

Whale protestors burned so much fuel in getting to ‘save the whales’ and pootle around the oceans; good luck to them, I say, as they have done an amazing job of bringing this back in to the public eye, but don’t then preach about using fossil fuels for our own uses. I don’t intend to drive this car everyday, nor do I plan on spending great gobs of money travelling all over the world in it, or consuming more than I need, which in my case is pretty low maintenance.

This is a hobby, one I enjoy, and one that helps keep me sane. As the Doomsday Clock moves another minute closer to our destruction, sanity is what I need most…

Is there not an irony in watching a doomsday clock tick and spending time on a car that contributes to the problem? Absolutely! Yet, unless we all stop, and I mean all 7 billions of us, right now, one man tinkering away and not driving his car isn’t really gone amount to much. Cows belch more methane in an hour than I expend in energies or creating pollution…

See, justification is easy, you’ve just got to believe you’re doing the right thing, or the wrong thing for the right reasons.

If you want me, I’ll be out in the garage…

Kosho Uchiyama

Been a while since I thought of Zen, which is possibly a good thing, cos thinking of Zen is like chasing wind sprites…

Anyhoo, a dear friend is staying a the moment while his boyo recovers from a bizzare illness, and it got me thinking about my own life and children, especially the impermanence of life. One of my favourite books on life and letting go/hanging on is Kosho Uchiyama’s “Opening the Hand of Thought”. I thought of it while teaching the other day.

I play an instrument called a Bodhrán (bau-rawn), which is an Irish frame drum, and I also have a couple of students who are learning from me about my philosophy toward the instrument. It was to one of these students that I said, “Holding the tipper is a constant action of holding on and letting go”, which is also a Keith Urban Album note and is also Kosho Uchiyama’s abiding mantra.

We fear loss. We fear it more at different times, and one of those times is when your child becomes severely ill. The axiom that “No parent should ever have to bury there child” comes to mind, but it does happen, and all too regularly.

So we develop the habit of hanging on tightly, gripping the things and people we love with all our energies. In doing so, though, many of us come to realisation that our hands/hearts are are only so big or strong, and we can’t hang on to everything forever. So much angst, so much inner turmoil, too much… We need to let go. Yet, how do we let go without losing those things we hold dear?

Here is what I do, and bear in mind, this is a metaphor, and a poor shade of what Kosho Uchiyama is getting at.

Take an object, any object; a spoon will do… Imbue that spoon with the weight of intense love/desire/person’s character. Hold it tightly for as long as you can, until your hand begins to burn and ache with fatigue, unable to leave even if they wanted to, then, when you can hold it no longer, let it go…

What happened when you let go? Did the spoon fall to the floor or onto the table? That is what my spoons always did when I let them go, and I saw their loss as inevitable and a part of life that must be endured. The floor soon became littered with spoons, and walking around the room became hazardous…

Then I read Kosho Uchiyama, and I saw the image on the front of his book, an upturned hand*. Suddenly I saw that I do not need to let these things I held so tightly fall; I could hold them in my relaxed and open palm, and look at them, see them in their fullness, come to know them, and then, having ‘let go’ I could put them aside, or let them leave or have them stay. They are my thoughts. Thoughts of loss, delusions that want me to not change, to keep the status quo, to live my life pretending that life will go on forever…

Water from the well, and a fresh cup everyday is worth the walk, if only to remind me that all things change, and all things die.

*The book re-release has a different image now; and open window from a room to a garden, from the constrained to the wild, still apt, but not as powerful to me, but that is another thing I need to let go of…

Some think this morbid, or a banal existentialist pith take, but it is a fair summary of life. We seek acceptance because most of us are unaccepting of who we are, and have no real love or confidence in what we are made of.

Some call it compromise or mutual acceptance; I just call it lazy. The sort of discussion that involves getting to know the good, the bad and the ugly of ones-self is one very few of us rarely have, mostly because we end up beating the crap out of ourselves. Pity…

Machu Picchu © Tom Walwyn

What can you say about these two other than they are simply inspirational. They’ve been living off their panniers and on their bikes for 18 months now, possibly more… They started in Alaska, and they’re currently in Peru… Go check em out…

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’ve nothing against the woman herself. She is a very attractive and curvy lass. What I find objectionable is the pure cheesiness of the whole presentation; it’s pure corn, and it really is an overindulgent, fanciful and banal series of sexual motifs that use food and the requisite cooking time to join these moments of innuendo together.

What on earth am I talking about? Well, thanks to commenter Sheeple Liberator over at No Place For Sheep, this brilliant little video sums it up!

740T Wagon via Brickblog

So, sometimes, you see a mechanical, polluting, ozone-depleting, environmental changing, personal and totally self-centred transport device that you desire…

Weird, huh! I told you, I’m a Volvo tragic…

Caoineadh is like mojo; it involves the merging of musician with music…more commonly used to mean ‘keening’, which is weeping, wailing, lamenting, the word is associated with a trance-like state…No amount of applause can fill the void if this does not occur.
– Talitha Mackenzie, American-Scottish Singer, Songwriter, Composer and carrier of the puirt à beul tradition.

Rain and Raspberries © Shilpa

It is turning from spring to Summer where I live, a slow, easy progression. Yesterday was wonderfully warm, with the sun carrying enough poke to let us know what summer will be like, while today has been one long wet. It’s beautiful, this time of year, and I love it. Contrasting weather from one day to the next, and the raspberries are loving it too; they’ve just begun their show of arrival.

It amazes me, that for those who will take the time to look, listen and learn, that where we live is an amazing place. Yet, even as early as this morning, I heard people whingeing about “Days of Drenching Rain”, as if the world was coming to an end and that the land was going to disappear. I think they forget just how brutal the past two summers have been, and how close to 200 Australian’s lost there lives in horrendous bushfires, while some suicided after that one, last, heart-breaking season of drought. Yes, we’ve had some of the worst flooding in decades, and the damage that it and Kiss My Yazi brought us is not forgotten either.

Yet, we need the rain, we need the water, we need it to bring its abundance to us so that we can sally forth into the dry months to come. We need to store it, to honour it, to consider it precious and to not squander it, living our lives one dunny flush at a time and considering the plight of the world whilst taking our 15 or 20 minute showers. We need to do better, we can do better; we just need to want to do better.

We are ‘the lucky country’ because of the rain, and we know that we need to do a lot more about the proper use of this global resource that falls on where we live, instead of squabbling over ‘my river’, ‘our dam’, ‘their water catchment’. It is a folly that we have deluded ourselves with for too long, and one we can well-and-truly no longer afford to entertain.

- Dr Tim Jackson, Economist and Lecturer, on the follies of current economic models