Orua-poua-nui/Baring Head
(A Selection of photos with personal reflections)
A potent mix of European, Polynesian and Asian creation legends occurs in me , the child of an island in the great Pacific Ocean.
In the first, a voice booms from the heavens above “Let there be light” and all manner of life comes into being.
In the second, the dark sky father and the fecund earth mother are separated, allowing rays of light to generate all manner of life.
In the third, the compassion in me enables this wonderful, fleeting experience of existence to be manifest in the universal potential.
All in their ways inspire joyous sensations of sanctity and stewardship.
Preface
The same land. The same ocean. The same sky. The same sun. Every colour we can see and more. A vast array of fleeting formations beyond imagination. And what is the constant agent of all this transformation? It is water, invisible water vapour, the same water molecules that inform the universe as far as we can see.
While we cannot see this vast, pervasive, water vapour matrix, it is manifest in the form of steam, clouds, rivers, oceans, ice, snow and other solid and liquid formations.
Water vapour is one of a select group of gases that are perhaps best described as the Warmer Trace Gases* because they have a relatively high capacity to retain heat and they constitute only a few parts per thousand of Earth’s atmosphere.
Indeed a vital, dynamic flow, interplay and balance of these invisible gases enable life as we know it on Earth – without their existence the average temperature of our planet’s surface would be about 33C (59F) colder.
In other words, these trace gases act as vital warmers and their thermodynamic interplay is so entangled it is impossible to discern their individual thermal impacts. However we can know 99% of the mass of Earth’s water vapour exists in the troposphere.
This is our zone and water vapour’s bounteous play here with colour, raindrops and cloud shapes forms a wonderful theatre that can inform us all in sustaining ways, in true hope of physics. This grand show enables us to better experience and embrace the invisible when viewed with compassion.
The scenes pictured here are recorded using the cameras of cheap-end digital devices. The tilted ocean horizons are a product of my diplopia causing the appearances of two horizons, one at 30 degrees to the other.
Cameras cannot express the magic of the most climactic moments . However the images form valuable reminders of our place under the sun and who we really are.
- Note A common, unhelpful name for this select group is the “Greenhouse Gases”.
The same mountain’s cloud still sustains me though it is the Orongorongo River on this side that feeds me with water these days whereas for my first 17 years it was the Waiorongomai River on the far side that informed me in water and wisdom.
Little did I know as a child that the mountain cloud was also feeding a child on the other side of the mountain range who was to become the mother of our child.
The Roaring Forty Gale winds used to thunder down through the ancient, indigenous forests of these mountains and crash on our farm cottage by the Waiorongomai River. For 38 years my father, the farm’s clerk, would voluntarily battle his way through all weathers up an exposed ladder to record wind speeds, rain fall and moisture and post the information to our national Meteorology Service.
We marveled at his determination, he only marveled at the tenacity of a spider who dared to live in its web atop the wind meter.
Even after he retired he kept daily rain records till the year he died aged 90.
At age 84 a stroke destroyed his capacity to speak and write. So he re-taught himself to write again by painstakingly copying out articles in the Met Service magazine about climate phenomena.
Perhaps one had to hear the matter-of-fact way she said “silly” and witness her in her last days still wrangling with her twisted, arthritic fingers to bring the clothes rack off the verandah before the wind came up. She communicated practical care for our planet in ways that no fancy advertising agency ever could.
It was to be over a half a century before I learned why.
This phenomenon proved to be even more a puzzle from this side of the Remutaka range because, as the photo shows, the cloud forms both mimic and hug the land forms even in gale force winds.
Now I understand the thermodynamic process by which the land forms inform the cloud formation by causing the passing water vapour to condense and then evaporate in accord with the altitude.
My comprehension of this thermal reality has only made the process of transformation even more magical because it enables me to better sense how all forms simultaneously inform each other according to the principles of physics.
The area now forms an enclave for the planet’s high-rolling jetsetters who helicopter in for a taste of the wild. The lake was tapu for Maori.
While the ever chuckling and chattering waters of Waiorongomai River were my greatest teacher, the still waters of Lake Pounui formed my greatest spiritual sage.
My parents had one rule – do not go beyond the farm limits and be back by meal time! The farm was 7 miles (11 kilometers) long while the Western boundary was somewhere in the forested ranges and the Eastern one was somewhere in the middle of Lake Wairarapa to the East.
Most children would find these parental rules very tolerant. I knew the farm had previously extended the extra several miles to Lake Pounui in living memory and the pull of the legend of Lake Pounui was irresistible for me on occasion. I secretly biked there a number of times and crawled on my belly across the open paddocks to visit it.
The surrounding forests formed deep, dark reflections in the lake out of which emerged the light reflections and murky shadows of the clouds passing overhead. These would inform me in profound sensations of awe, wonder, fear, respect, humility and the sacred such as no human media ever has. The waters of the lake seemed to communicate and inform me in the essence of the whole vast, mighty universe. I departed each time so venerating the ground my feet trod on that I found myself apologizing to any plant or insect inadvertently hurt by my passage.
Twenty years later, when our child was six months in her mother’s womb, we traveled from Christchurch to visit our parents.
Conceiving a child was for me such a vastly humbling and overwhelming responsibility that something in me begged to take this unborn being to visit Lake Pounui, for only it could communicate to her the essence of her father’s spirit.
One perfectly still, starlit night I heard a distant booming and felt intermittent puffs of air buffeting my cheek. Intrigued, I followed these forces to their source way down in the bay. I stood on the concrete pathway high on the ancient cliff for a long time, awestruck by the mighty force of the great rollers arriving out of the dark ocean and feeling the resonance throughout my body of the immense whoomph as they exploded against the cliff.
The next day I returned to discover the cliff face had vanished into the ocean, taking with it the pavement on which I had stood.
The Ōrua-poua-nui /Baring Head formation reaches out into the ocean at the entrance to Wellington Harbour. The mystical play of light on its steep rock faces and elegant terraces can make the formation seem so soft and welcoming.
Other weathers, the barren, rugged cliffs can seem wild and exhilarating.
Yet others weathers, the darkened rock formation becomes foreboding and seems to approach the ship breathing hostility.
In gales, bow sprays sheet over the ship, the cliff emerge as shifting shadows out of the mists and the roar of the maelstrom at the rock face seems an arm-length away.
All these experiences combine in most potent way to humble, inspire and remind us we are
finite human beings and we mess with Earth’s climate balances at our peril.
Learn more of the legend of Dave Lowe
Then our eye is drawn back to catch a glimpse of radiant blue reminding us of our place in a far greater universal potential.
Compassion, being the inclusive, connective force in our psyche, is paradoxically no colour and all colours. It is the transcendent radiance of the blue that reminds us in compassion so we are better able to all live in a far more sustaining world beyond this miserable, ego-driven place of wars, waste and pollution.
On occasion they form mighty cumulonimbus with the power of several thermonuclear bombs and thunderbolt displays of such ferocity even the seas seem to tremble.
It forms a dramatic illustration of the Butterfly Effect whereby a small change to a trace element of a system can generate disproportionate change elsewhere.
Each is of the other, both informed and sustained by the same thermodynamics.
A tiny change in temperature with a small wind change can cause the mightiest cumulonimbus tower to implode – a humbling reminder that our most imposing, glitzy “skyscraper” constructions are but sand-castles in the wind.
I never proved whether or not there is such pot of gold or if a boy could sprint faster than a rainbow can move over a short distance.
Perhaps I became too engrossed in this “scientific” experiment to observe the wonders of rainbows?
Half a century was to pass before I first appreciated how a rainbow frames and highlights a familiar formation by bathing it with a halo of sacred light.
Even more of my life passed before I got to attend an exhibition of Constable’s paintings where he taught me to see that the colours are actually inverted in the secondary rainbow.
Stunned I assumed the camera was faulty but within a minute it was registering a familiar world again. Soon after I learned our modern cameras can detect colours we may fail to see. This was a rare, fleeting opportunity to experience a widespread Southern Aurora at dawn.
It remains a privileged glimpse into another dimension of the universal potential, reminding me all is being informed in ways unimaginable.
The frayed edges of the low cloud form the tassels of a theatre curtain framing a stage. It lifts to enable us to catch a glimpse of a glowing, rich light charged with unimaginable potential.
Anything being possible, it behoves us to act in accord with the principles of physics.
I marveled how often her seeming blurry sketches portrayed something of the essence or truth of the model better than most of us could.
This pastel play of the various waters of the Ōrua-poua-nui /Baring Head formation remind me in gratitude of her because she taught me great truth can be manifest in simplicity – even it occurs because of our loss of eyesight.
The thunder, roar and scream of jets arriving and departing the airport becomes muffled and then ceases.
The sea fog calms car drivers, forcing them to slow down and ease their way up and down the hills.
The sea fog gently envelops the acres of motley tin-roofs, freeing the land to float free and dance with the skies.
My whole being relaxes as I am reminded there is indeed a wonderful world possible beyond cars and jets – even planet Earth seems to give a vast sigh of relief in the sweet silence.
He made the radical suggestion that shell and bone shaped stones are the fossilized remains of ancient living creatures. The book answered a question dogging me since childhood:
What was before paleontology?
Some people believed stone fossils just grew in the ground like living plants.
Others believed the theology that God, The Creator, so loves playing with shapes that He forms them out of all sorts of material just for the fun and joy of it.
I never did find two identical cloud shapes.
Pleated skies like this one livened me at an early age to the exciting possibility that certain patterns reoccur universally in all manner of formations.
Could it be that existence is far more simple and wonderful than we can imagine?
Observe how they even highlight the seas along the rocky coastline with subtlety, skill and surety that no harbour pilot can ever match.
I sniff the air for smoke. My memory is still fresh with the smokey stench of the vivid sunsets when Eastern Australia was on fire about 2500 miles (4000kms) across the Te Moana-a-Rehua (the Tasman Sea) to our West. Indeed the NZ summer midday sun was reduced to a faint, spooky orange orb in the haze in 2022.
No sign of smoke tonight. My being floods with gratitude and the grandeur of it all.
Nicolas Steno is credited with inventing Stratigraphy – the study of geological layering or stratification. Perhaps the sight of the transient, beautifully layered cloud formations inspired him to challenge the European orthodoxy of the immutability of rocks and time being rigidly limited?
Even in the 1950s my teacher reprimanded me for daring to ask is it possible that the continents had once fitted together like a jigsaw.
Keep reflecting and suddenly they appears stacked atop each other i.e. forming a vertical dimension.
Keep gazing and they may begin alternating between the horizontal and vertical.
Could it be the sky is fooling with our perception?
This dualistic behaviour is typical of the ego, which is an exclusive, divisive, linear force, trapping us in paradox.
It is our compassion, an inclusive, connective, holistic force, that enables us transcend the paradox of change and experience the cloud formation for what it is – an exquisite, fleeting thermodynamic, electrochemical balance amidst the universal transformation reminding us in the wonder of our own being.
However my hearing only registers the constant snarl and roar of the cars accelerating up the hills and the jets accelerating into the sky nearby. These vehicles are supercharged by rare combusted minerals and their encapsulated cargos of unseeing, mute occupants are oblivious to the dance and music.
Such times it is easy to believe this exquisite dance of the silken veils is a unique performance for me.
The next moment the veils of rain transform into pure white light, dancing with their radiant reflections in the waters of the bay.
It’s an inspiring reminder that all things pass and we can never truly know if some thing is good or bad and that’s OK.
The purity of the luminescence of the passing shower reminds me in compassion, stilling my soul like the ocean waters so my being can also resonate with the dance of life.
In such moments, we are better able to transcend the limitations of our human condition and enjoy greater harmony with all.