Too much light and shade perhaps

 Dear Diary,

I am a little out of sync. today as I hate it when the clocks change, it affects me for weeks.  I shall be 'one hour out'  for too long a while and then when I am fully adjusted they will change the damned things back again.  Why can't they leave them alone?

I love daydreaming and my (new) beautiful header pic was topping an article in Saturday's Guardian so I thought I would post it here.  It got me dreaming about dreaming..... I do a lot of it: staring into space etc. I have always done this and I also love studying clouds by day and the skies at night and the river as it flows.  Birdwatching takes up much time here too.  I suppose it's meditation.

Has anyone else been watching the fantastic Danish crime serial The Killing?  It has been unmissable; the best thing on TV as far as I am concerned and though it has been dark, in more ways than one, it has really brightened Saturday nights TV-wise.  Everyone is saying that it puts British drama in the shade. (Too many mixed-up light and shade references here, sorry).  It was the last episode in the current series last night but still left me with much to think about.  I had to read something 'light' (sorry I am at it again) in bed before going to sleep because I think I would have been kept awake still wondering or perhaps I would have had bad dreams.   I had better not give anything away in case you haven't seen it and you watch it in the future but it did fiercely bring home to me how one killing can affect the lives of so many.  Can ruin the lives of so many.  That of course applies not only to murder but also to war.  Are the two (too) closely related I wonder?

To lighten the tone here is the best Dreamy song I know, written by Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks who by chance also featured in the Guardian yesterday.  I was planning to feature a piece of music by The Shadows as Jet Harris died recently, God rest him, I shall do that another day.





I'm off to take some air now; unfortunately the sun hasn't got his hat on yet, unlike yesterday when he paraded all day and all was bright!

But I must eave you with a poem by the great Wallace Stevens.

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly

Among the more irritating minor ideas Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home To Concord, at the edge of things, was this: To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds, Not to transform them into other things, Is only what the sun does every day, Until we say to ourselves that there may be A pensive nature, a mechanical And slightly detestable operandum, free From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like, Without his literature and without his gods . . . No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air, In an element that does not do for us, so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big, A thing not planned for imagery or belief, Not one of the masculine myths we used to make, A transparency through which the swallow weaves, Without any form or any sense of form, What we know in what we see, what we feel in what We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation, In the tumult of integrations out of the sky, And what we think, a breathing like the wind, A moving part of a motion, a discovery Part of a discovery, a change part of a change, A sharing of colour and being part of it. The afternoon is visibly a source, Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm, Too much like thinking to be less than thought, Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch, A daily majesty of meditation, That comes and goes in silences of its own. We think, then as the sun shines or does not. We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field Or we put mantles on our words because The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound Like the last muting of winter as it ends. A new scholar replacing an older one reflects A moment on this fantasia. He seeks For a human that can be accounted for. The spirit comes from the body of the world, Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind, The mannerism of nature caught in a glass And there become a spirit's mannerism, A glass as warm with things going as far as they can. Wallace Stevens

Happy Sunday to you all,
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait