This website is a collection of ideas and observations that I feel are worth recording. Why? Because we often have to create a legitimate platform and place for sharing good ideas, many of which can be lost in the lapse between their inspiration and doing. If you have ideas and thoughts you would like to contribute to this page, please e-mail me at: david@davidrisstrom.org. I will endeavour to post your ideas as soon as humanly, or otherwise, possible. This site was last updated on 19 February 2007.
MITT LIV NEJ SOM HUND
For those less existential amongst us, it is often more apparent than not that many of us are not dogs. That's a pity in many ways. For those having seen the Swedish film 'My Life As A Dog' (Mitt liv som hund), these observations are self evident.
Others less so. Sitting listening to Andrea Hull, Head of the Victorian College of the Arts, talk during a 'Going Further' session, I was drawn to write down some observations.
Having written similar things that contribute to the recycled paper content of our household bin, I thought I would put some of these on this page whenever I can. And so I hope this begins: My life other than as a dog …
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I was asked to write something about myself as part of the first Green Politics School in Tasmania on 24 April 2004, and so I tried …
If asked to write something about myself, my immediate thought is fine, good, easy. I’ll knock that off in no time, and then I go and make a cup of coffee and do something else.
That was last week. Coming back to begin writing, now, the coffee has moved beyond cold, leaving, as for a Tasmanian autumn Saturday, all vestiges of warmth, as has my imagination and prose.
How best I write about myself, that I write it about not doing so?
Have you ever been asked to write in the first person? To find there is not enough room in there for both of you. Let alone a third.
Procrastination is a word of menacing familiarity. A suffocating word, implying inadequacy, ineptitude, inefficiency, an assertion of pin-pricking accuracy that allows you to believe that if someone is capable of using fifteen letter words they probably know what they mean, that they are mean, and they are about you.
Fortunately, I think therefore I am.
And I drink, therefore, I write.
But to drink of myself, is for a mirror to converse with itself, and which of the image or the self is me, perhaps Plato only knows.
Despite the bravado, and the good fortune of preselection as the Greens candidate for Victoria, the dishonest truth may be that it is caves that I enjoy and reflections for which the world knows me.
And so it is I hope, that all great tracts begin, somewhere down a train of thought, in the caboose, where reality is stored and sorted, where delay has been defrosted and dreams begin to form as crystal.
And so it is, with the rattle of empty carriages of thought, I arrive to declare, I too, have a dream.
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Rosa has been a gift to this planet every day her four beautiful paws have been on it: Dave
Never assume. It makes an ass out of you and me.
The following proverbs were listed above a public toilet urinals in Seoul, Korea. I don't know who authored them, but I thank them.
The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.
The civilisation of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
The countenance is the portrait of the mind, the eyes are its informers.
On earth there is nothing great but man, in man there is nothing great but mind.
This is a moral universe. Right and wrong do matter. Our choice in favour of truth and goodness, our individual acts of courage, honesty, standing up for the truth do not evaporate into the ether: Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Take whatever this mountain is and turn it into a molehill: Don Elgin, Paralympian.
Life is too short to hold on to hatred. David Risstrom
Woof: Rosa
Thanking people is worthwhile, even if at times it only be ourselves.
15 August 2004: The following is taken from a Friends of Same - East Timor, flyer at a function hosted by the City of Boroondara. It is a quaint variation on an old theme, taken from 'a noticeboard in a community organisation':
If you give me a fish you have fed me for a day.
If you teach me to fish you have fed me until the river is contaminated or the shoreline is seized for development
But if you teach me to organise! then whatever the challenges I can join together with my peers and we will fashion our solution.
25 November 2004: History often writes out the catalysts of change as a way of avoiding embarrassment for those of us who favour wilful blindness.
