Category: Musings
-
Theatres . . . great joys from past to present
Snapshots from the past are often very evocative, and our January visit to Taormina, thirteen years ago now, hoves back into the present as my mobile phone reminds me. Those days seem like a lifetime ago, but then life has a way of crescendoing into its climactic periods before or after it’s been more of…
-
Compartmentalisation: co-existence of deep sorrow and cheerful joy
I’m holding a few emotions, thought processes, musings and bewilderments, in separate compartments of my mind, just at the moment. On the one hand, deep sorrow, but in another compartment joy bubbles up. Sometimes the compartments feel like they’re mirroring each other, only upside down and backwards. Frank laziness in one cupboard while persistent creativity…
-
Almost unfeasible delights
The incredible floribundance of the mallow in the front garden, pruned last autumn with what felt like devastating ruthlessness, has given way in our amazement to the solitary, somehow unfeasible blossom of a giant decorative onion in the back. How can it possibly sustain itself? I feel that way about life, sometimes. How has this…
-
Exuberance
Oh! The peonies are out in full floral abundance, this morning. Acquired as tightly wrapped buds from the grocery store, as one does, they sat in water along with the luscious-smelling stocks, and gradually began to unveil themselves. When I came down this morning, all I could think of was: exuberance! Behold, world, this is…
-
A musing on a silhouetted vignette
We sat together, my beloved and me, in our warm upstairs room, looking up over the hills behind the house, as the cat, bemused, looked back at us from its perch on the windowsill. The setting sun fired the sky through the dark clouds, and we thought, this is our life here, here in our…
-
The harbingers of hope
Snowdrops, when they appear, are such a delight, but nowhere more so than when they’re in one’s own garden, as the dreich of January flushes itself out. And with these harbingers of hope, we’re finding that work we’d been planning is finally beginning, as if the world around us has suddenly woken up and has…
-
The encompassing comfort of family and friends . . .
In normal times, I guess, family and friends are just ‘there,’ part of our lives but busy with their own circumstances too. It’s when crises arise that our support network coalesces and keeps us going. I have been the focus of a crisis or two, as it happens, when my beloved might have collapsed under…
-
Sunny side up, or over easy?
We’ve been waiting weeks for the giant poppies in our new-to-us front garden to bloom. These plants are just about taller than we are! Three have opened all at once, in the past couple of days, and it’s been worth the wait. There’s lots more on the way, too. Over the past fortnight, life has…
-
The gentle rain from heaven
You wouldn’t know it from the concrete blocks of the patio, but the glass-topped table has a telltale reveal: rain fell last night. It does feel, as Portia opined in her famous ‘Quality of Mercy’ speech, as if the mercy that gives us a respite from this prolonged dry spell has come upon us unstrained,…
-
Subtle grace . . .
The Korean dogwood tree, at the bottom (or top, if you consider the gentle rise from the house back up towards the field) of our new-to-us garden, is in full bloom. But you’d never know it, until you get very close indeed. The flowers, a paler shade of green than the bountiful leaves, are an…
Roads to Joy 