Some photos of the French Alps from the Saulire on the mountain ridge between Méribel and Courcheval. The Saulire is at 2738m and has spectacular views of the surrounding mountains, including Mont Blanc in the distance 63 km away. And then a thousand metre descent which made for great skiiing.
Looking west over the Méribel valley towards Val Torens
A comprehensive list of publications relating to my professional work is available at www.colinmathers.com
Colin Mathers. A Baker Family History. Thomas and Mary Baker, their Australian descendants and European ancestors . Lulu.com, Australia, 2024 (143 pages). (In press).
Colin Mathers. James Cook and the discovery of Queensland: The Australian descendants and English ancestors of James Cook and Anne Cobb. Lulu.com, Australia, 2023 (98 pages).
Colin Mathers. A Baker Family History. The family and ancestors of Audrey May Baker: from England and Ireland to Australia. Lulu.com, Australia, 2023 (253 pages).
Colin Mathers and Irene Waters. Audrey’s Family: a Daughter, Mother and Grandmother. Pixxibook, November 2021 (148 pages).
Colin Mathers. Shall I try Australia? A history of the Mathers family in Ireland, Scotland and Australia from the 17th to the 21st century. Lulu.com, Australia, 2010 (148 pages).
My great-grandfather, James Mathers, was born in Armagh, Ireland, in 1852 and moved to Scotland in the 1860s where he married Margaret Melrose. They migrated to Australia with their six surviving children in 1897. This book documents the history of the family in Australia, and traces the Mathers and Melrose ancestors in Ireland and Scotland back to the 1700s and earlier. The previous generation, born around the 1820s, were almost all illiterate labourers and coalminers. The subsequent history of the Mathers family encapsulates the dramatic changes in the educational, cultural and economic opportunities brought by the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
This edition of the book was available only to Mathers family members, and a second edition is planned. The second edition will include substantial additions and new information, not least because it has recently been discovered that James Mathers had an older sister, who migrated to Australia earlier, and whose existence was unknown to his descendents. Continue reading
I started practicing Zen with the Canberra Zen Group in 1992 following my separation from my first wife. I had become interested in Zen practice as part of my jujutsu training at black belt level. My jujutsu teacher had been exploring some of the inner (mind, spirit) aspects of budo with his yudansha students, and from around 1989 I had started to sit zazen fairly regularly at home.
The Canberra Zen Group met for zazen several times a week at a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in the north of Canberra, and were also affiliated with the Sydney Zen Group who have a zendo in Annandale, where I used to live, and also have a retreat centre at Gorricks Run, a remote valley in the Northern Blue Mountains.
In 1993 I attended my first sesshin (7 day silent retreat) at Gorricks Run where the teacher was John Tarrant Roshi, the first Australian to be authorized to teach Zen. Tarrant Roshi had been a long-time student of Robert Aitken Roshi, one of the most influential figures in the transmission of Zen to the West.
I was using the Twenty Ten theme and decided I wanted my category pages to show the full post, not just the first few lines (and without any images). So I changed to Twenty Eleven today. Not sure I like it as much, the pages seem narrower, though I did a comparison and the amount of text on a line was the same. A small bonus is that the header image is a bit deeper, so the cropping is not as extreme as in Twenty Ten. Gives more flexibility in using photos for headers.
I’m new to this blogging stuff, and I’ve decided to rearrange the furniture before I’ve settled in too comfortably and collected lots of junk. So I have moved my blog as follows
new domain: mountainsrivers.com from old domain colinmathers.wordpress.com
I’ve asked wordpress.com to move my loyal followers from the old domain to the new domain. If that doesn’t happen soon, you can just press the button to follow this blog. I also had another domain name colinmathers.com associated with the old blog. I am now using that for a different blog on professional stuff. So if you bookmarked that, it will go somewhere else now.
Sorry for all the confusion. now that I have rearranged the furniture, I’ll start hanging up some nice artwork.
I started this blog with theme Twenty Twelve but did not like the fact that the menus were above the header image. So I have changed it to Twenty Ten which has the menus under the header image. Twenty Ten also allows random display of a selection of header images, and I’ve set it up to display among six images, all photos I have taken (except the one of me underwater). My only irritation so far with Twenty Ten is that it does not allow larger header images like Twenty Twelve, but I can live with that. Remains to see whether I find other limitations.
"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" -- William Blake
Reflecting on what it all means
Neurofeedback
In Search of Inner Freedom
Motivate | Inspire | Uplift
Traveling Poet Philosopher & Occasional Wiseacre
The Philosopher's Stone
the look, feel, and stuff of the Dharma
A blog and Dharma forum from Jiryu Mark and Hondo Dave Rutschman-Byler
Philosophy | Psychology | Ecology | Sociology | Economics | Finance | Strategy | Scenarios | Futures | Foresight | Operational Research | Complexity | Networks | Systems | Dynamics
Explorations by Colin Mathers
Global health trends, summary measures, projections
A Book of Unconnected Dots
it always knows
Fun With Genealogy
Everyday, Everywhere We Are Guided Towards Happiness
Photography, memoirs, random thoughts.
Memoirs, writing, publishing and more
The Art and Craft of Blogging
Mountains and rivers 