Posts

Posted on

Weekend

I went to stay with Tall Girl at the weekend. She is indeed very tall.

tall girl

It was lovely. We made the most both of an unusual state of not-rain and the delights of Hebden Bridge. Women appear to learn their role in life particularly early in Yorkshire.

siblings

The absence of rain continued in the afternoon allowing a longer and less sploshy walk than had been possible in the sluicing downpour of Friday.

eye on the sky

We came across this family shearing operation – father with hand clippers, daughter in charge of the shorn fleeces, son bringing refreshments, dog peering fixedly through the bars of the make-shift fold, mother directing operations. “Don’t get his bum in” she said when I asked if I could take a picture. Ooops. Too late.

The circuit closed again back by the water, one of the many streams which cut through steep-sided valleys down to join Hebden Water which in turn joins the River Calder and on to the River Aire, the River Humber and on to the sea. Brown and frothy it rushed over the stones but caught in the circle of an abandoned mill pond its stillness reflected the gold of the late sun and the extraordinary, almost oppressive, green of tree and moss and fern.

duck

That evening we went to see Gambian kora player Seikou Susso with his band at the Trades Club in town.

kora, drum and bass

Check out the drummer in the middle there who seemed to spend the whole time peering anxiously at the kora and bass players in turn. The first half was good, but after the break they appeared to play the same songs all over again and Susso’s strange smile and habit of using the phrase “tickety boo” made the experience disturbingly surreal. However I’d become fascinated with the face of the fourth member of the band who played the djembe drum and spent most of my time trying to get a decent shot of him.

djembe drummer

It’s lovely seeing an old friend. Like a home-from-home. And Maizy had a great time too.

Posted on

The canal

canal lily

A feral lily. Going away for the weekend tomorrow today (goodness it’s late), may be off line.

Posted on

links for 2007-07-11

Posted on

The Dhamma Brothers

For anyone who found the film Doing Time, Doing Vipassana interesting (about meditation in prisons in India) here, fresh off the camera, is a film about the same practice in a high-security prison in the US.

The Dhamma Brothers has its own website complete with trailer and details of a book of letters from the prisoners to accompany the film which is being published by Pariyatti Press.

That last link indicates financial support was being sought for the book. The film, clearly a labour of love, benefited from support from Rivers Cuomo of Weezer.

There’s an interview with the film’s director, Jenny Philips, which gives some interesting background to the project:

In the fall of 1999, Phillips, a licensed psychotherapist and cultural anthropologist, was researching meditation within Massachusetts prisons when she heard about a group of men at Donaldson who gathered on a regular basis to meditate. “I’m not sure why I went down there,” she said. “But I did.”

After an examination of the prisoners, through observation of their meditation as well as one-on-one interviews, Phillips found their lives to be filled with apprehension and danger and, even though many of these men were serving life sentences, they were still searching for some sort of meaning in their lives. “There was such a sense of misery and hopelessness there, but also such a sense of survival of the human spirit,” she said…

Phillips, a meditator herself, knew that meditation could offer the prisoners relief from suffering. “If you can find peaceful ways to live in prison, you’re going to be much happier there,” she said.

Getting a camera inside the prison proved difficult. “Prisons like to do what they do quietly and be left alone,” Phillips said.

But, after pulling some strings with Dr. Ron Cavanaugh, director of treatment at Donaldson, Phillips was able to capture the transformation of the prisoners on film. “I think it was the only medium,” she said. “The written word can’t quite capture them — and I think film is the most powerful medium anyway.”

I’m not sure how I might get to see this film but for anyone living in Massachusetts you can watch it at the Woods Hole Film Festival later this month.

Posted on

After the storm

after the storm

The crap gets washed into the dips depressions.

(The camera on my phone is a higher quality and has far more options than my first digital camera.)

Posted on

Stormy weather

Two hours the dry rasp of thunder had coughed its threat as blue gave way to cloud. Now the whole sky was layered with sheets of gunmetal grey. The leaves, stirred from their silence, hissed and seethed in dry warning of rain to come. I moved slowly across the darkening park, uncaring.

From the top of Primrose Hill the approaching storm was drawn like a dark curtain around our vantage. All others there had run aghast at the bruising of the sky. We sat enfolded in each other’s shelter watching the light shine through jagged rents closed over by skeins of rain.

The first flash of lightening was followed, seven seconds later, by a ripping crack rattling the ill-fitting sheet-iron of the sky. I always count the seconds between lightning and thunder, a habit from childhood. How far away? nearer or further?

We counted the gaps as the storm moved back and forth across the bowl of London spread before us. Five miles away, then six but seeming closer because dead ahead of the bench where we sat. There is something about the straight and forward which gives an illusion of proximity the oblique, the ascance, lacks.

Fat, lazy drops first. Plopping, big-polka-dotting the path.

When it was obvious it was headed right towards us we ran to meet it. Holding hands tumbling pell-mell down the steep slope. As we collided with the curtain of rain we stopped and kissed. Mouths mingling in the streaming water. My hands, spread, pulling his face to me as rain-rivulets washed over us, sealing in a seamless caul of water.

When the real rain came it was staccato, angry. Beating on bowed head, battering tears.