by tashmcgill | Jun 24, 2011 | Culture & Ideas
I have a Just-In-Case box. Everytime I move house, I unpack it until eventually I need to repack it to move again. Sometimes, I’ve been known to take items from the box with me on travels to foreign lands, beach walks and up windy hills before dawn. It’s the box of things I keep Just-In-Case I need to remember, to reconnect or to rekindle something in me or between myself and old friends. Adding something to the box is never easy – it’s almost always bittersweet. To keep a memory sometimes means to have lost a present reality. Like when my aunty died, or my grandfather, or my first dog.
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by tashmcgill | May 5, 2011 | Community, Culture & Ideas, Food & Drink, Girl About Town
Once upon a time, there was a girl who started a business. She had an office off the main road, behind a building, down an alleyway, up some stairs and straight on the left. She would work late into the night, sometimes stopping for dinner or meeting a friend for a drink.
She always bought her coffee from the same place just in the block she called home, she believed in local economy. And so, one night whilst thinking about a work project and meeting friends for a catch up drink, she found herself downstairs from the office and just on the corner, sitting in the corner bar of the block she called home.
Although a whisky drinker from way back, her palette was mostly developed around wine – but with a fondness for the refreshing sting of Stone’s Ginger Wine, she ordered the Whisky Mac and a love affair was born.
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by tashmcgill | Mar 13, 2011 | Culture & Ideas, Prose & Poetry
We were just kids walking to school, skipping classes, drinking too much Coke in the weekends and talking about small things as if the world depended on them. We believed the world would depend on us. We were well-intentioned, no matter how we played on the edges of darkness and clung to one another in the chaos of adolescence. We held on to one another with a fervour. Somewhere within we knew that innocence was rushing from us like the tide escaping the shoreline. We longed for our freedom but had no idea what ‘real-life’ would bring.
We were unprepared – no fault of our parents, our school system, our religious institutions or lack of. It wasn’t television, the dawning of the internet age or the influence of sex, drugs’n’rock’n’roll. We were unprepared because that’s how you must be, to enter the fray of life. Stepping up onto the diving board, if you knew what was ahead you would never do it. So we closed our eyes and jumped, hoping everyone was just as scared as we were and trying not to show it.
But that was only yesterday, and what the hell just happened?
We gave birth to babies, kept some and gave some away; lost husbands, boyfriends, broke a limb, broke a back.
Suffered cancer, fought cancer and won, fought cancer and lost.
Stayed in one place for 2 years not leaving the house, didn’t stay anywhere more than 2 weeks, didn’t call anywhere home.
Tried to have babies and lost them, tried to have babies and couldn’t make them, tried to have babies then hated them, tried to have babies but couldn’t find a lover.
Found love in the arms of men, of a woman, of a few men and women.
Called ourselves feminist, traditionalist, reformist, non-conformist, modern, post-modern, wouldn’t be called anything or put in a box.
We tried over and over to find hope, until it was hopeless and then we succumbed to depression, succumbed to life and to death.
We died in our waking and living the same old thing, day in and day out wishing we were dead and some of us just died. Drove a car into a cliff face, never woke up. Drank too much vodka and drove, never woke up. Drank just enough wine to wash down the pills, never woke up. Tried to slice ourselves open but that never took, while some of us starved and others threw up. Some of us heartbroken and fear never recovering, others so strong now we hate ourselves and everyone. Some of us just lived but never woke up.
Some of us divorced, divorcing or cheating in public, in private – all of us still lonely somehow, even as we find ourselves in the places we never expected to be. Good or bad, who knows, who cares – we’re still fifteen and holding on to ourselves. Trying to let go and leap, trying to hold on to someone else just enough to let them be loved and be loved ourselves but not enough to kill it, the love in our hearts, the love in our life.
And we have become well-practiced at living, even when it doesn’t feel real but there is so much that feels so good, that we live like the breath is being stolen from us. Live, live, live screams our blood.
Some of us burying children, marriages, husbands, parents. Some of us nursing each other. Some of us dreaming still, looking forward to next beginnings, some of us waiting for the first beginnings and what the hell just happened? Live, live live screams our blood.
It was yesterday and we were jumping with our eyes closed into Life, that we had been hurtled towards by Time and everyone, hurtled ourselves into it and now we are dying. Some of us have died.
So all the time, we are hurtling towards death and it flies at us in the minutes and hours. Our lovers, our children, our parents, our siblings. By car, by disease, by water, by choice and I do not know if we are ever at peace.
![The Art Of Moving Furniture.]()
by tashmcgill | Mar 10, 2011 | Culture & Ideas, Prose & Poetry, Spirituality
Whenever I begin to feel cluttered in my head, I can see the telltale signs in my environment. It starts in my car – a piece of paper left in one place for too long. A plastic water bottle that never gets put in the recycling bin. Then it travels to my office, where a pile of things I need to deal with accumulates in the corner, on the desk, on quickly jotted Post-Its stuck to the iMac and files on my desktop unsorted. Sometimes figuring out the rabbit warren and getting back to calm is like unraveling a piece of thread.. long, laborious and seemingly unending.. until you undo the one little knot that was holding you up and away you fly.
But when I find myself stuck on a knot that I just can’t figure out.. I have one solution, with three simple steps that always helps me to ‘unstick‘ it. (more…)
by tashmcgill | Mar 2, 2011 | Culture & Ideas, New Zealand
The trouble with most first-time experiences, is the necessity of hindsight and reflection to see all the ways you could have done things differently, what you have learned and how you can be a better person as a result. Like I said in Christchurch: We Are Blessed; this is New Zealand’s first experience of dealing with, responding to and reporting a national disaster of this scale. So for media outlets, we are pushing into new territories and having to learn on the run. As such, the dynamics of our news screens have changed almost each day – as committed journos get tired and as hope fades.
But this is a critical opportunity to make vital learnings in our role as broadcasters and news agents, whether we work in corporate comms or behind newspaper desks, news cameras or on blogs and in social.
I’m anxious that we choose sensible, fact-driven journalism with appropriate spaces for commentary over the sensationalist, tabloid, bleed it leads style of disaster broadcasting that doesn’t fit within our culture and disregards the fact we are all so closely connected to one another.
Here are my few thoughts so far: (more…)
by tashmcgill | Feb 28, 2011 | Culture & Ideas, New Zealand
Some will possibly find this thought offensive.. and that is not my intention. Instead, I want to dialogue the context of international aid and disaster response. I have sat quietly on some of these thoughts since the quake.. they have whispered in the back of my mind. And not because this is a subject for debate, in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth.. there is no wrong or right in this context. In the context of disaster, that is. (more…)
