Savour It

From her place in the shadows, the woman wills you to explore deeper and lose yourself in the green wood. Let your life merge with this fecund world that alludes to all seasons.

Dark branches festooned with garlands of verdant leaves all traced with the autumn shades of gold and burnt umber. Tangled roots and stinging nettles, heavily scented by decaying leaves, guard the sleeping, infant seeds of spring. It is our life and we have to live it in the NOW.

Enjoying the pleasures of watching cherry blossoms bloom & fall at the height of their beauty. Glorious to see autumn leaves fall.

What is NOW will pass into memory tomorrow but we would have been more blessed to have seen the poignant beauty that the things in nature make us aware of, while also making us aware of being alive and be counted amongst the living..

To seek solace in parting with your beloved, to calmly bear the loss of beauty.



After all sometimes....just sometimes....there is great beauty & purity in death too.





When In the garden, enjoy every moment
Every moment of every day.
Spring passes into summer,
and summer into autumn,
And all the flowers of Henna
Shall wither away...


- Alamgir Aurangzeb





.

Here & Now.....

Travel has played an important part in my life. Travel has been my vehicle to look outward. It has kept me going. There is always one more place to see, one more road to traverse. There is always an in built goal. Aside from all the solace it has provided, it has helped continually redefine myself. I can only guess the Transformative power of grander passions.

Take chances; to not do so kills the spirit. Live on the edge a bit, peer over the proverbial cliff's edge and feel the adrenalin pumping ever so often. Ask for that promotion. Propose to that girl you've always had a soft corner for. Don't let go of your passions even at your low points; these are what sustain you. And forr your own sakes put your past mistakes behind you. You win some. You lose some: That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

CONCENTRATE ON THE HERE AND NOW.


















The Epic of Gilgamesh, speaks across to us across the centuries on the meaning of it all.

When Gilgamesh goes in search of eternal life, he is advised by SIDURI, the wine maker, to accept mortality and live in the here and now: to dance and be merry, to rejoice and make his wife happy in his embrace, to take delight in a child holding his hand as all life is transitory.

Wise words to live by....I intend to do just that....

mooning

Awed by her splendour
Stars near the lovely
moon cover their own
bright faces

when she
is roundest and lights
earth with her silver

A Talk

We could be so great
if only we could sit or
stand in the same room together.

We could drop the 'silent' bit
and try a chat or hug for reassurance.

One chaos after another it seems;
life takes its toll I try to stay ahead
but I seem to always be one step behind you.

Angry Skies

Did you see the sky?
Cremated...
The Dark Brooding Clouds
They Surround

The sun
extinguished by leaping flames
dips down & disappears


All this Crimson
drips into my Soul
Absorbed by my pores
Lays bare my Soul
My skin it bristles
The Heat makes it, prickle


Tis' the other side of Dawn
& I wait there alone and forlorn.

Bitten

With its venom
Irresistable
and bittersweet


that loosener
of limbs LOVE
reptile - like
strikes me down

I stare,
transfixed, in
starry eyed surprise...

A Walk Down Memory lane

The hoopoe that used to tap its long digger beak on the windowpane has flown away; it isn’t there to cock its brown crest sharply, to warn me where the next attack of fate may come from. Half the day wasted on an idle game of chess and now I walk briskly past mansions whose owners have disappeared, empty houses that have wilted and collapsed to the dusty, yellowed grass at the edge of the watercourse where a river once flowed. Only the signs remain.
**

Something of the defeatism of these dead houses enters my soul. Blood straining at bone, half phantom and half stubborn desire to keep going. I stagger up the long shadows that the streets throw at me. Keep to the right and look out for rogue drivers, even a sleep walker cannot break the law, even as he staggers up those tilted shadows all the way into the sun at the end of the square.
**

This now is high noon. All this and a bell tower that launches itself from a red – tiled roof. The wind flings a rain of silver coins through a crab apple tree that has squeezed what water it could from this earth and now makes its last stand.

When you lie alone with yourself, as I have over many a summer, it isn’t surprising that only first things and last things should come to matter. Over all that intervenes, a discrete veil is drawn.

A whirr of helicopters, the harsh sound ripping through the prudent clauses of history. And a burst of bugles that strums the tangled telegraph wires.

Curious signals from the future but not a crow in sight

**

With age you lose your gift of prophecy and cannot predict the future from the patterns that form in the red sands of time. It’s a sacrifice, which I accept, with stoic grace. Now you can no longer predict which way the two headed god of time will point.


A principle of growth: as you age, your needs grow fewer and fewer. Or they should, but I won’t moralize, it’s never been my custom nor do I have the authority to coin precepts for others.


**