mediations

*** * ***[ Saturday, January 31, 2004 ]

 
...Feelin contented over here, having just learned how to change colours. HTML style.

Allow me to present my new page - see my newly tidied links list on left, and click open the electric cupboard if you care to see....(it really feels like presenting a crayonned picture - maybe one which was particularly tricky imagery to wrestle to the page...)

I intend to gather some of the links I wove into earlier entries and to make them more easily accessible in this new cupboard.
I do like the advent-calendar quality of weaving them mysteriously into the text, only, but I want to fish them out from the depths too, for people (there are people coming to e-visit! Thank you!) who may not have the patience / stubbornness / tenacity / time / navigational skills to unravel it all - and who may therefore miss some treasure.

Hitherto buried, now emerging. In a timely timeless manner.
'Here I am / Here It Is / Here She Is'.
More clearly than ever before...x

jaihn [11:48 PM]

*** * ***[ Thursday, January 29, 2004 ]

 
Snow!! In London!!!

I have a kind of bonsai-landscape view going on outside my windows. Lots of potted plants, and a couple of young trees: Rowan and Silver Birch (Shepherd Beauty and Imagination Prayer to their friends). See this fine book for more on Naming - and Worlds besides....

Grasses and decidedly untamed shapes and unstraight forms, living between me and the also-lovely-in-a-different-way concertina-wall line of 'sheds' - storage-garages for the nearby streetmarket, which face my windows, from the other side of a road. A road used more by humans walking or wheeling, and men and boys pulling and pushing carts around, than it is by traffic.
Golden bricks, black-edged white woodslat slanted tops, silver horizontal-lined metal doors. Shapes hard to describe, now I come to try and do so... A shiny painted-black old metal railing fence between the plants and the pavement, then the o-so-quiet road, then the zigzag lines of the 'sheds'.
An altogether amazing collage of lines, planes, edges, surfaces, textures.
No windows looking back onto 'me', since the big towerblock was demolished a few years ago - only sky, big, beautiful-whatever-the-weather sky, above and beyond... It is a wonderfully quiet and spacious-for-inner-city location.

Veg boxes appear and are relocated, all day, between the sheds and the market. Even their labels contain worlds of synchro-niceties - sometimes the names and/or the images on them are giggle-funny in their relevance to my realities.
Towards the end of my 03 autumnal deepsea healings, when I knew the Tide had Turned and Something was definitely Shifting; a stack of five (unseen either previously or since) 'Wild Red' boxes adorned with big Tiger faces gave me a subtle thumbs up and a laugh. Five fine fierce felines looking straight at me when I opened the curtain one day.

Sometimes these moments of confirmation-resonance are so mysterious.

Kali was teaching me stongly then (- more of that in an unstuffed version of my storytelling, later, somewhere...), and a friend had recently, innocently, brought me some astonishingly timely blood-red silk from Delhi.

I never figured out what the contents of those boxes were. What fruit or vegetable would you equate with Wild Tiger?? Cranberries? Apples? Potatoes?
(- and, flowing swiftly along here, in wildmind let-it mode - It delighted me when I was learning the French language that 'potatoes' were 'apples of the Earth'. Pommes-de-Terre. How lovely language can be.)

Now. Rewind a little. My bonsai-view. Today there were mini-icecaps and still-white valleys; they glistened gorgeously, in the last of the afternoon gold sunshine. Ivy leaves shiver-danced again - yesterday they were all buried, momentarily. Windswept tundras, tangled forests and ancient moors all live in my wee potted garden.

I adore snow. Watching it fall is one of the great pleasures of Living, on my preference menu. I could, and may, write much more about the joys of watching, and listening, while snow silently transforms everything around.
My childhood home was in Scotland. I watched a lot of snow fall, in my time... but maybe not quite so much as this man did.

Strangely enough, yesterday I missed the first minutes of the flurry-spectacle, because I was zoned into my screen, and my playroom windowblind - which is not the window just described - was closed.
Even more strangely enough, I was enjoying looking at this picture!!!

So, I will be housebound for a couple of days...probably no longer, this being warm-street-city, so the melt will happen fast. I think this has been our annual city snowfall. Done and dusted, so to speak.
Unlike the months of Scottish whiteness and greyness and all the stages and cycles of prolonged snowing-ness.
Unlike the subject of the Inuit eloquence.
And unlike my e-friend Cathy's world in Minnesotta, where she tells me it is currently minus 20, without the wind chill factor. Eeek!

The snow here may have kept me from joining the Absolute Beginners last night, as I'd planned to, but in Minnesotta it would have me doing a very icy-wheel shiver-dance.... maybe looking a little like this amazing lady....

(I promise 2 write more about the book that picture covers - 'The ReEnchantment of Art' by Suzy Gablik - in Good time...)

Thanks for bein e-here / there with me, in a manner of speaking....

Finally, if you can't see snowflakes, and want to - learn 2 make your own here!


jaihn [8:39 PM]

*** * ***[ Tuesday, January 27, 2004 ]

 
Well, here we are now...I hope this finds you thriving in your late January experience....
Happy New Monkey to you!!!

A combination of nudges is bringing me back to blog .... 2 name a few:

I am writing a book, and writing involves a reading trail, and some of the books I am finding make me want to trumpet out to tell others that such things exist.
Sometimes the books lead to fine sites, and it's good to make my sleuthing triumphs easily available - 'one-click' style...

Book-writing also involves a meandering writing trail ..... and the blog-it process will feed into book-it for me now....unlike William Gibson, whose blog I visited today.
I found he had unblogged since September 03 too.
For him, writing fiction doesn't cohabit comfortably with writing blog.
His words joined in the jigsaw-of-nudge that brings me to the screen now.
I am not writing fiction, and I will be finding ways in to what I want to say, and to how I want to say it, here.
(No way out - or in - but through...and no access to the fine streamlined product I aspire to creating, in time, but through giving form and consideration to the meandering chaos of threads asking to be stitched and woven in2 it... )


I have been loving visiting the Islanders in this marvellous bunch of blogs, to which I was directed in this blog.
I haven't directly contacted any of the writers hitherto - but something in this making-connections-again air suggests to me that today may be the day...

Our singular and collective connectivity, and disconnectivity, are themes to be revisited and unfurled - there are already many snuffling-circlings around them, in my notebooks....more of that to come...

I had made the click of 'yes - time to resurrect the bloggery' while reading Mr Gibson's, and the Islander's, words, just before talking with Arlene this afternoon.
In fact, sooner before talking to her than made good stress-sense. But following impulses is what I do, so I read quickly, and it made better sense an hour later when Arlene suggested 'blog' with no obvious prompting in that direction.
I hadn't mentioned my eleventh-hour online-ness to her, or my newly-landed intention.

I do love that double-click, or click-underlined, or click-made-bold, that comes with a secondary synchronous confirmation of a perceived nudge.

I will be taking an online writing course starting soon; "Women's Spiritual Writing Through the Ages", and I have a sense that bloggery will work very nicely alongside that. Let's see !!!

Those were my nudges-to-blog-again. Lovingly and painstakingly described, lest I forget.

Since there are already several links in this entry (- or anyway, I hope there will be, if I can remember how to conjure those ontoscreen...)
I will save signposts to other gorgeous e-terrain for another entry.
As it is, I will probably be fiddling with this for Quite Some Time between typing these words and proudly presenting a working-links version to publish
- ah yes, that's one of the joys of blogging I had forgotten - the instant-publish satisfaction.
Or, Instant-Ish, in this case, while I recall how-to.
And, as the man who writes Carnan Road Express so beautifully put it - skoosh out those cobwebs.

Good to be blogging again!
Thank you for joining me, so to speak...


jaihn [7:35 PM]