Shaggy not-dog story
He appeared, or rather his hair did, in my peripheral vision as I waited to board the train. A great spiky halo of vibrance, coiled clumps zinging in all directions around a golden-skinned face with huge velvety brown eyes. Gentle eyes. A tall man, six foot or more. A tan overcoat and a canvas shoulder bag.
“God you’re gorgeous” I thought as I very deliberately plopped myself down in the seat opposite. Just so I had something beautiful to glance at between rows of the sock, you understand. But without being observed, naturally.
I smiled as I (kfb, k8, dd, k8, kfb)x4. What, I wondered, would this beautiful creature think if he realised that the ill-kempt middle-aged woman crouched over a tangle of small pointy sticks was licking his lips with her eyes.
Amusement made me incautious. I looked up, smiling, and… he smiled at me!
Not a condescending nor superior smile, neither a fleeting nor flirtatious smile but an open, engaged, luminescent eye-crinkler of a smile.
I was suffused with an inner glow. Suffused, I tell you. I sat thinking how it had made my week, possibly even my month. And if that latter was the case then also my year.
I also thought about how I needed to get out more. And that, if I did get out, I needed to do more knitting and less eyes-closed meditation on public transport.
Daemonic
I understand the film is hellish and I shan’t go to see it but this amused me (via Simple Country Vicar on Facebook). Apparently there are 12 days of mutability during which the time-rich/curious can go and change my self-image and turn my daemon into something else. Maybe a slug, or something.
links for 2008-01-06
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“In which the Mystery Socks of the Universe are revealed for all to see!” Superb idea – get people to knit up those really annoying sock patterns provided *without* a picture. Check out the aran braid!
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Collecting Austen knitting 🙂
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And with twisted rib!
This is not a blog post
Saudi Arabia added yet another accolade to its freedom of speech record by arresting its first blogger. Fouad Al Farhan, considered by many as being the dean of Saudi bloggers for being among the first to blog in his country using his real name, has been arrested in Jeddah.
Inside out, upside down
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.
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.
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
links for 2008-01-03
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Which country has the largest network of surveillance cameras in the world? Yes, you’ve guessed it, the UK
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Oh frabjous day. Oh frabjous day.
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Fun!
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“People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of other
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…
I hope everyone had a joyful and celebratory time.)
links for 2007-12-27
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“We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
frizzyLogic 