Category: little fluffy clouds

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Inside out, upside down

sock the second

The socks I was planning to make for my father for Christmas have now become the sock I have completed and the sock I am still making – for his birthday. Which was yesterday. Luckily we’re meeting mid-month so I’ve got plenty of time to finish.

Quite why I started this project I don’t know. I didn’t like working on double pointed needles and I’d never used five before, only four. I didn’t like working with such fine yarn. I’d never made a sock before. Babies booties – check. Gloves – check. But only on two needles. Socks? never. But I’m really enjoying it.

sock the second too

Just one thing. I have the invariable habit of starting with the end of the yarn which is at the centre of the ball. This has the huge advantage of preventing the ball bouncing around, disappearing under the furniture, collecting dust and fluff and appearing to the cat as an exciting toy every time you pull the yarn, which is what happens if it’s peeling off the outside of the ball. Pulling from the inside the ball just sits there quietly and gives up of itself from its guts without any fuss at all.

With the first sock I dug around in the middle of the ball trying to find the end and eventually, like a clumsy surgeon delving in an abdominal cavity, fished out a large dollop of tangled mess. This had to be painstakingly unravelled and rewound into a quite sizeable sub-ball. Then when nearing the end of the ball (and the first sock) the yarn collapsed in on itself, squirmed around and became another dollop of tangled mess which again had to be unravelled and rewound. It seems that Regia isn’t balled for centre-pulling.

When starting the second sock I cast on with the outside end of the new ball. What I hadn’t realised is that, since the yarn is dyed to produce repeating stripes of varying widths, this outside-in approach means the second sock is going to be upside down in comparison to the first sock.

first ever sock - side

This of course doesn’t matter very much because my father probably won’t notice, if he does he won’t mind and if he actually wears them they’ll be invisible beneath his shoes and trousers anyway. It might in fact be viewed as a positive thing since variety is the spice of life and, as I have just been told, “to be on the one way is to be without anxiety about non-perfection”.

Emptiness here, Emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before our eyes. Infinitely large and infinitely small; no difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen. So too with Being and non-Being. Don’t waste time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this. One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.
Words!
The Way is beyond language, for in it there is
no yesterday
no tomorrow
no today.

Hsin Hsin Ming – verses on the faith mind of Sengstan (Sosan) 3rd Zen Patriarch

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Timing

“This reminds me…” we chorused, and then of course both lost words in simultaneous laughter.

“Every time I’m in woods at dusk I think about that time” said R as she drove through the trees as the light disappeared leaving only eery black forms.

“What time?” piped up the elephant’s firstspawn of ‘satiable curtiosity from the back of the car.

It was when R and I had walked and hitched the hairpin-bended road up Zomba plateau to the Ku Chawe Inn, discovered we couldn’t even afford a coke, ambled around and admired the view for a bit and then waited for a lift down. And waited. And waited. And realised, very belatedly, that there weren’t any vehicles and it was going to be dark very very soon. So we set off on foot and, since the light was failing fast, took the short cut known as the Potato Path which runs precipitously steeply directly down the side of the plateau.

So you get the general picture. No idea where we were going, no torch, dark, cold, treacherous near-vertical near-invisible path disappearing into the unknown. We hurtled down in short bursts of headlong uncontrolled descent between tree trunks, having deliberately to crash from one to the next to have any chance of staying on our feet. The next day we were battered and I, certainly, could hardly walk.

“I bet you didn’t know,” I said to firstspawn, “that R and I gallivanted around in Africa together.”

“No” he said, in an ominous tone. “There are many, many things I don’t know about you. I want to know all of them. Now. Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

I declined on the grounds that I might incriminate myself. And it was probably something best shared after he’s passed the age of criminal irresponsibility and parent-grey-hair-inducing behaviour. However it would be good, I think, for R and I to sit together and go through our photographs and memories of that time. It’s been twenty years now and we’ve never done it. R, for instance, had forgotten about new year.

We were camping outside Malindi at the time. R remembered very well the time a giant millipede wandered through the tent and over our sleeping forms in the night. But not lying in the dark listening to the extremely British voice of the BBC World Service news reader wishing a happy new year to all listeners in a catalogue of different countries each hour as the turning world meant their time zone moved through the significant moment.

We nearly missed it entirely this year, we were having such a good time. Someone sensible, me I think, suggested we turn on the radio. Tuned to some random station, we were treated to a rather surreal minute or so of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture up to the top of the hour before hearing the first of the bongs and drowning out the rest with our party poppers and carousing.

(Back from balmy-weathered, friend-filled, beach-based, internet-free new year in Wales…

footy

I hope everyone had a joyful and celebratory time.)

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Solstice tree moment(lessness)

winter tree

Frost and the long low light of the winter solstice. The tree tells of the old stretching out into the new, entwined together as they must be, neither one nor other but both.

read my lips

The lips of the bark speak of beauty and pain. Neither one nor other but both, as they must be.

lichen

And the lichen on the bark says whoa, look at us! bright gold crinkled and crunkled like a landscape, like mud, like the moon! We too are not one, not other but both. Beautiful, omnipresent. There for the delighting in if you but see. And those craters that you’re staring at? they’re our genitals so stop being such a voyeur if you please.

Er, thanks, lichen! All very intercomingly.

At this crux, hinge or whatever one cares to call it, this moment when one traditionally looks back to the source, forward to the mouth, I found myself writing to a friend about the midstream, about that place called “the present” in which I have increasingly found refuge:

“A place where things matter as much as they matter and don’t spiral out of control, don’t tangle up the past and wrap their tentacles around the future. “Resignation” and “acceptance” give the wrong impression. It’s a far more active and joyful thing, I find. I appear to have become rather Pollyannaish. Although having just looked up the definition on Wikipedia expecting it to be slightly other than it was I find that it’s not a bad thing to be at all… it’s not optimism (which implies looking forward) such as gratitude in the here and now which is important.

“Which is not to say that it hasn’t been a challenging year if I look back, which one invariably does at this time. However so much has changed and there is so much to be thankful for. Chief of which is the love of friends.”

To all friends, both near and far, who read here and who don’t, serenity-love-gratitude-joy.

(The next Festival of the Trees will be hosted at yearendbeginning by Lorianne at Hoarded Ordinaries – still time to submit!)

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A short hiatus – the explanation

Several things have kept me from the keyboard, most notably an accident with a cup of coffee which rendered the space-bar inoperative – despite the geeky plastic cover lies beneath in order to prevent just such eventualities.

Both the coffee and the spillage were a result of its being the school holidays. For had it not been secondspawn would not have been in the house to prepare the beverage, nor on hand to cast it sideways over the desk. And since this action occurred during the bestowing of an exuberant hug I didn’t even sigh as I mopped up and placed the keyboard upside down to drain. Three days it lay prone before recovering full functionality.

There has been the sorting out of the affairs of the late van. It (she, Duchess) has now passed on to the gateway of her new life. All our camping equipment is in piles occupying the entire sitting room awaiting removal to the attic probably in the new year.

I have finally had the chasm in my tooth filled, a process which was both quick and utterly painless. What on earth my phobia about dentists is about I know not. Perhaps issues of control and helplessness. However the pain, which had spread to occupy the whole of the left side of my head, did not diminish and was preventing sleep. A friend said “sounds like my mother’s neuralgia”. I went to the web. I phoned the doctor. This intermittent affliction which I’ve had for years now and calling sinusitis, and which is getting increasingly painful, might  be trigeminal neuralgia (TN). I have an interim prescription of powerful painkillers available should the need to take them arise and will actually see the said doctor in the new year.

Meanwhile one wise in the ways of the subcutaneous suggests it might not be TN at all but rather the result of trigger points in the sternocleidomastoid muscle. The latter is much more common and easier to deal with. I’m doing the recommended stretch and haven’t had a recurrence so far. Isn’t the internet wonderful?

And lastly, but firstmost in importance, I’ve been becoming a professional photographer. In that a dear and wonderful friend needed portraits for their professional activities. This involved a rapid attempt to read up on portrait photography, a couple of photoshoots, much nervousness on my part and a *huge* amount of learning. Which has been fantastic.

The process reminded me very much of my first recorded interview. The nerves, the sense of feeling ones way inside a black velvet sack, the overabundance of material, the inordinate lengths of time required, the self-doubt, the knowledge that it could all be sooo much better. However I also have that recording learning experience to look back on from which I know that practice and persistence make a huge amount of difference and that engagement and enjoyment are key. There are a couple of the resulting photographs that I’m really really pleased with.

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Double negative

beautiful bin

I think I’ve never looked properly at frost before.

Coldfinger

I love the way it turns the world inside out.

white line

Writing in lines of white where shadows were.

frosty bin

Light and cold. Dark and heat.

negative

A double negative is a positive.

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It grew cold

And the cold grew on all surfaces.

cold nose

The light was tremendous. “This is what heaven is like” said secondspawn confidently gesturing to the other side of the park, “all white and misty and glittering“.

frost

It grew cold, and even when the crystals thawed the ground was too icy to stand on with both feet.

heron

It grew cold, and the cold grew on all surfaces.

hip and hoar

And the light was tremendous.

low sun

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Warm fluffy pooter

My computer, I have discovered, is a bit like my bed. Far too extensive for the job required of it but the corner that’s utilised is precisely tailored to my needs.

The MacBook Pro went to the Genius Bar on Friday afternoon and, having been diagnosed as suffering from an ailment of the fan rather than a terminal condition of the hard drive, was admitted for minor surgery.

I returned home and lugged out the old iBook which after a long life of daily service had been handed over to the less than gentle hands of secondspawn. After scrubbing off accretions of semi-masticated sweets, blu tack, marmite, and what might have been glue from the exterior I set about performing a similar task on its interior, aka disc, particularly the area occupied by user: secondspawn which was full of videos of the carpet where shortly before a dog or cat might have been, jpgs of toy guns downloaded from the internet and a bewildering array of random mp3s and podcasts presumably put there by his elder brother.

With the drive and its contents de-cached, -cookied, -trashed and generally cleaned, updated and optimised I turned my attention to user: me and installed five pieces of essential software which were not there – Firefox, Quicksilver, OnyX, Growl and Twitterific.

Hmmm. Now we were getting somewhere. Things were beginning to look a bit more homelike. Firefox needed add-ons and the familiar theme, but that was easy enough. Then I came upon my major difficulty. Bookmarks. There were none. And those left behind and imported from Safari were hugely out of date. I had no access to my own blog’s control panel, for instance, and didn’t have a clue what the url might be. (Notes to self: synchronise browser bookmarks either via .mac or del.icio.us. Or both. Synchronise feeds in NetNewsWire with Google Reader.)

So here I am on a little laptop with a tiddly hard drive and a very slow processor and, for day-to-day purposes, there’s really not much difference in my internet-based computer-using experience which is predicated more on connection speed than chip MHz. Would it really, I ask myself, be such a disaster if my MacBook Pro blew up or melted down? Probably not. Although the non-functioning on the iBook of the shift keys, fn key, ctrl key, alt key and apple keys would become onerous, I reckon, should I need to use it in circumstances where I couldn’t plug in a keyboard. The much-used smilicon 🙂 for instance would be completely impossible. No doubt the introduction of some viscous substance into the keyboard is responsible for these shortcomings.

Similarly my bed. Not to the iBook and the introduction of a viscous substance. No. To the MacBook Pro and the non-utilisation of available capacity. It is a double bed. I am a single person. I curl up every night in exactly the same spot, at the edge, and do not use more than 30% of its available area, if that. If it were not for the malfunctioning keys of the iBook and the photo processing capabilities of the MacBook Pro I should be very tempted to sell the latter. There are no such impediments with the bed. As long as I have my pillow and duvet a single futon would do just as well.
A wise friend once told me to look long and hard at every possession I have, ask myself whether it has utility, whether it gives me joy, and if the answer to both is “no” then to chuck it. I haven’t reached that point yet, but I’m approaching it.

I shall not mention, of course, that the aforementioned wise friend may well have applied these criteria to an item of clothing, chucked it and is now having to acquire a replacement. To do so would merely be a feeble attempt to justify my own syllogomania.

And yes, obviously, I eventually worked out the url for the blog workings (and, even more impressively, remembered the password) otherwise this post wouldn’t exist. Hurrah!

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Some pairs

The armwarmers adorn one arm each of two friends.

hands

Two attempts to diagnose the macbook pro rattle. Is it a rattley cough (the fan) or a rattle of approaching death (the hard drive)?

can't you hear it?

seriously, it's making a weird noise

Two baubles from the rather attractive Christmas decorations in John Lewis on Oxford Street

huge green bauble

huge pink bauble

And two pictures of one rainbow.

rainbow 1

rainbow 2

Which do you prefer?