Mountain weather 31 May 2020

It's a small mountain set in the escarpment, but like all singular landforms it seems to have a geological permanence about it. It's good to consider in the fearful Covid era. Mountains are in a way timeless, and yet science measures their formation chronologically in millions of years. It seems that among the Dharrawal people who lived here before Europeans, chronological time (chronos) was not significant in terms of counting years, weeks, days and hours. What was important was the present moment (kaipos) of finding food, and preparing for funeral or initiation rituals in which ancestral time was simultaneously in the present.   Plato thought leadership was the ability to know the “kairos” the right moment or opportunity, and to weave recognition of this right moment in the judgements of citizens. The intense blue of the mountain is a moment of rightness and makes me forget the relentless clock.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Mountain weather',watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 31 May 2020.