Tag: Storm

I’d Be Lost Without You

by Ebb Then Flood

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All my life I have had fascination with maps and cartography (the mapmaker’s art). I have a geography degree that hasn’t earned me a cent, but I don’t care.

As a child, I would pore over atlases and maps with their linear representations of different parts of the world – seas, mountains, rivers ,deserts, towns and cities.

I would get lost in those pages and charts, but a good lost, y’know ?

I took this photo of an old map on my recent travels in Scotland. It depicts Fife and its coastline. Heights in feet, depths in fathoms, as it was, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Look closer.

It’s really a guide to the lost and endangered, or maybe a series of warnings to prevent yourself getting in those predicaments in the first place.

Beacons, lights, storm signals and lifeboats(!) and their locations.

Because (and I say this from harsh experience),when you are truly lost (the bad lost), you need external direction and you must heed the signals that you receive from around you.

You might have a moral compass, but you ,alone, cannot be your own map…

 

 

Deeply Rooted

by Ebb Then Flood

20190621_182638Pictured is the impressive visible roots system of a Moreton Bay Fig. Massive, sculptural things – and that’s only what you can see.

By way of contrast, a recent storm pulled up a shallow – rooted olive tree in my   backyard and deposited it over the clothes line.

It takes a storm to finds out what your foundation is like.

Like a tree, if we are not deeply rooted we are deeply rooted (that is not a circular nonsense, as I mean the second “rooted” in the Australian / NZ vernacular meaning, “screwed”or “f**ked”).

That means knowing what your mainly silent, often invisible core really is all about and where you have come from.

I hope that you are totally rooted in the more positive sense of the word…