I though it should go to a caring home, not so sure I’ll be wearing it in public though! In the mean time it can pretend to be a cat. Happy about that.
By the end of the day; ready to rest, relax, sit for a bit and then turn in. These summer nights the light doesn’t fade from the sky until nearly 10.00 pm. With skylights I can watch the grey/blue turn to navy blue, some nights the stars shine in. There is something about an attic room that can’t be matched, and at the moment my room is at the top of the house. Ah, attics! When the light has faded and all is still I’ve been inclined, these past days, to stay with the stars. If not the stars then deep sleep into the morning has become my habit.
I’ve been thinking about documenting what happens when a Buddhist dies. Specifically what happens to the body; the practicalities around disposal and the ceremonies we do in my particular Buddhist tradition to do that with due dignity. And I’ll hopefully get down to that now I’m rested and settled.
There is no doubt about it a sudden death is a shock to the system, what ever the circumstances of the death happen to have been. The shock, rather like an echo, reverberates for quite some time. Even after the last strains have faded, which to a large extent they have for me, there still remains a certain something. A long shadow perhaps, cast by a presence no longer there.
Edera continues to write for Little House, at the moment documenting the days leading up to her husband’s death. Some days she takes a break and writes about this day. I know already that these past weeks, as we sift and sort our way through our days together, will leave a deep impression on both of us. One grows close in adversity.
Later. Much later. Edera and I go over her today’s post on Little House. I tend to go by how written words sound when spoken. The music of speech, on the page. And the rhythm. That’s the rhythm of a sentence which is beaten out by commas sprinkled here and there. And I want to know about the proper use of colons and semi colons. she said. Oh they are about being able to list lots of thoughts one after the other, divided by commas, so you don’t need to make lots of sentences. I could almost hear Iain, wordsmith as he was, groaning or growling. But actually that’s not a bad explanation for a semi colon.
Much, much later we talk about the vital importance of commas, when to put them in and when not to. See here a joke about poor punctuation:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
‘Well, I’m a panda,’ he says, at the door. ‘Look it up.’
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. ‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’
Less is best as far as commas are concerned. But I do like the way they add a da, DAH emphasis at the end of sentences. Let’s have more lunchtime conversations, please.
Little House in the Paddy is the place where Iain shared his ideas and kept records of his life in Japan. Writing for it was usually his first job of the day, with a cup of coffee beside him. Even when he was taken into hospital, he told me to let readers know what had happened. He would be glad, I think, for me to keep posting. The ideas will be very different, because it’s from me.
Now is the time to tell my side of the story about life in leafy Chiba-ken.
A New Beginning – Edera at Little House In The Paddy.
This step to continuing Little House is no small thing. Every success Edera with your new beginning.
In recent years, a lot of surprisingly rich archival photo series has been published on Moscow and on Russia in general. This is only partly explained by the easier access to the archives and collections of the former Soviet Union. A rather more important reason is that the interest in the city and its history has been livened up in a previously unimaginable way both at home and abroad, which created a wide public for this kind of photos.
From Poemas del río Wang blog. Moscow 1900-1960
This post is for Iain late of Little House In The Paddy blog – and so much more… Do take a look at the photos at the end of the blog sited above.
Viewing these black and white photographs this evening brings up a mix of emotion and sentiment. Excitement and mystery and rigor, honor and pathos. And an odd sense of the tragic too. All these thoughts could be attached to the way I have been thinking about goodly Iain as his sudden passing becomes less raw.
There are people who touch our lives
and there are people touched by ours.Just sometimes these two people meet
and most often they don’t realize….Until later.
Goodness! And there are these The Lithuanian School, photographs. They rival the big names in black and white documentary photography….