Month: March 2023
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Wisps of sphagnum moss . . .
As age creeps up on us, it can get harder to deal with rejections, failures, lack of success, whatever you might feel despondent over, but on the other hand perhaps one’s skin gets tougher too. Strategies for coping might have been developed, and these in turn can contribute to continued productivity. When we took our…
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Of three graces, joy . . .
We saw the delightful sculpture by Canova, the second one he’d created of the Three Graces, by commission, at the Victoria and Albert Museum some decades ago. In researching for this blog (yes, a reasonable amount of study goes into these entries!) I came upon one of the earliest known examples of the graces, as…
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When snow is light, fluffy, pretty . . .
The snowfall was off and on last night, and the flakes began to fall again late this morning. It’ll put folks off the resumed LING Lunch, perhaps, but for those of us who know a bit more about the trials and tribulations of snow, this soft and gentle fall could only be pretty and pleasing.…
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Five Days to Completion
We put in a bit of practice, this morning, shifting things out of the New Galloway Town Hall and into Kitty’s Tea Room across the road, preparing for lunch service commencing again on Tuesday. We’d felt so sad to hear, when we returned to this village after our big move away from Sparty Lea, that…
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The epiphany
sunlight and shadow two deer bounce through the marsh spiked gorse in yellow dress seed pods brown and empty moss-laden branches, beardy wisps rusty tin can hazel strands droop by the dyke willow herb curlicues broken crockery bits vibrant green rose leaves empty whisky bottle white village on a sunlit hill water mirror dazzle clouds…
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The circuit . . .
The red kites have their circuit, and we have ours. It’s a bit of a longer walk, all along the dyke until the passage through the field leads to home, and especially in the cold and biting breeze, but well worth it. Sometimes, a photograph can more surely evoke the passage, but contemporaneous notes also…
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Handwork love . . .
We spent a lovely hour yesterday ambling through the knitwear exhibition at the Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, from Chanel to Westwood. It was a delight to see that the curators appreciated both hand and machine knitting approaches, but for me the single salient exhibition was this pattern cover that was described as very popular in both…
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Sharing the notes . . .
It’s intriguing, it is, how a shared set of thoughts becomes something else altogether when someone else thinks along with you. My notes on our walk a couple days ago raised a comment, and in the ensuing email conversation the concept of ‘poetic process’ came to light. I had to confess that I couldn’t see,…
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Sleeping on it . . .
It’s a commonplace, isn’t it, to sleep on a problem, hoping to awaken with a solution. As we went to bed last night, I was wrestling, somewhere in my subconscious, with a poetic problem that I thought I’d resolved. My dreaming mind thought otherwise. A better resolution than I’d even considered woke up with me…
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Notes on a marshland walk
For my joy this morning, I can’t do better than to relay some contemporaneous notes of our afternoon walk yesterday. Who knows, one day these notes may find their way into another poetic effort, perhaps less formal than the sonnet of my previous joy. But for now I’ll go with the joy I have in…
Roads to Joy 