Cait O'Connor

Bridge Over Troubled Water

2012-01-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul

Plato 428-328 BC

I'm in a musical mood tonight.

I watched a lovely programme last night on BBC4 about Simon and Garfunkel. It was called Imagine and was the story of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's beginnings and went on to the making of their iconic album that is Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Quite by chance one of my granddaughters visited me today and as she was making tea for all the family who were also visiting (I forgot to say she is also an angel) she said

Do you know that song which has the line

Me and Julio down by the school yard? I love that

and that one called Cecilia?

That got us both singing (as I was last night while watching the programme). She hadn't seen the programme so it was just another one of those coincidences (or windows into the Divine as I prefer to call them).

Bridge Over Troubled Water is one of my top favourite albums, It was called an LP when I owned it and the songs take me back to my younger life and all its happy memories. The music is classic, it will never stop being loved if my teenage granddaughter is anything to go by. Her mother, my daughter, grew up with our music and so she has been well acquainted with masses of good stuff. I don't feel we are so well served with such great songs nowadays, not in such a great number as in the sixties and seventies. What do you think?

I have been thinking about the programme today and I thought I would do a series of blogs about my top albums, ones that I would take to a Desert Island, not singles but whole albums. I would love your suggestions as well and I could post songs from them.

I find it hard to choose a favourite from Bridge. I also adore their Sounds of Silence album and Paul Simon's Graceland is terrific.

My favourites are the title song Bridge..... of course, The Only Living Boy in New York, The Boxer and Song for the Asking

Side 1

"Bridge Over Troubled Water" – 4:52
"El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" (Daniel Alomía Robles, English lyrics by Paul Simon, arranged by Jorge Milchberg) – 3:06
"Cecilia" – 2:55
"Keep the Customer Satisfied" – 2:33
"So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" – 3:41

[edit]Side 2

"The Boxer" – 5:08
"Baby Driver" – 3:14
"The Only Living Boy in New York" – 3:58
"Why Don't You Write Me" – 2:45
"Bye Bye Love" (Felice and Boudleaux Bryant) (live recording from Ames, Iowa) – 2:55
"Song for the Asking" – 1:3

Anyway have a listen, go down memory lane, if you are as old as I am.

I will start with Bridge tonight.

BYE FOR NOW,
CAIT.

Night-time

2012-01-19T03:38:00.000-08:00

Night-time

The tiny bedroom at night has order,

stonewalled serenity like a nun’s cell.

No-sound, such quietness a rarity.

One green candle burns, its scent fills the room

with patchouli, geranium, basil.

I sip hot chocolate, such sweetness comforts,

soothes and sedates me, entices me to sleep.

I feel pain-free and unusually warm,

my blood seems free-flowing, unchilled for once.

I rediscover a stillness which comes with

just listening, not-doing, just-being,

hearing its peace which only speaks in silence.

Cait O’Connor

Stop What You Are Doing And Read This

2012-01-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

This is a must-read book recommendation.

In the ten essays in this book some of our finest authors and passionate advocates from the worlds of science, publishing, technology and social enterprise tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken forgranted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention - make books one of them.

Authors:

Carmen Callil

Tim Parks

Nicholas Carr

Michael Rosen

Jane Davis

Zadie Smith

Mark Haddon

Jeanette Winterson

Blake Morrison

Dr Maryanne Wolf

Dr Mirit Barzillai

Did anyone else catch this book? It was Book of the Week recently on Radio 4 and was brilliant, especially Jeanette Winterson's essay, that was my favourite... but then I love all her writings. I have been musing and trying to write my own essay in my mind but I felt I was just repeating what everyone else had already said. And I have blogged so much in the past about the joy of books and reading, it is my passion after all. Anyway I took a wee walk this morning and from this came a wee poem.

The cottage sits softly on a January noon

The cottage sits softly on a January noon,

soaking up the Winter sun, secure and cosy

in her wrap-around garden ,she still appears

warm amongst the hardness of white frost.

All lies in wait for spring, though daffodils in

January are really not usual,

nothing confuses, nothing will waver,

Nature will cope, only humans falter.

Logs lie about, they too are waiting,

only the dogs are desperate to run.

As usual I am musing, today on

a lifelong passion for the written word,

squiggles on paper, symbols of language,

a love affair that has lasted, can you

think of another the same?

Ah, the smell of books, the look, the feel,

soul linking soul to soul, writers

reaching to me from the heart with prose to

wallow in, dream of, escape to, become lost in

(with no need for rescue)

and the crown that is poetry, which can

be pure magic, living on forever

in one’s memory.

Cait O’Connor

A Round Tuit

2012-01-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

Ever wished you had one of these?

I found one in a local Oxfam shop.

(can you spot the missing word though?)

Ghastly Gallstones Diet

2012-01-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

He that takes medicine and neglects diet wastes the skills of the physician

Chinese Proverb

Dear Diary,

Although I didn't need to I've lost a lot of weight eating a less than 5%/ low fat diet while I wait for my gallbladder operation and a lot of people have asked me what I am eating (or not eating) so I have put my diet notes on this blog on a stand alone page - see the link in the right sidebar. It's a bit higgledy-piggeldy but I hope it makes sense. If you are trying to lose weight - and a lot of folk are at this time of year - then it may be of use to you. But don't exclude fats altogether if you don't have to as they are essential to good health - but take in moderation, like all things. If you have the ghastly gallstones then I hope it may be of some help to you. I had no instruction or advice from the medical profession; I have researched it all myself and found the best information, solace, companionship and comfort at this site, (Jamie's ideas asylum)The first part of my diet sheet I have copied from the site, thanks Jamie, you are a star.

Happy Eating,
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait

Happy New Year

2012-01-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

Winter - Royo

Dear Diary,

A library is a hospital for the mind

Anon.

This will be a short post just to update you and apologise for my absence recently. I have had another attack of biliary colic – I have gallstones and am waiting for an operation – and was taken to hospital in an ambulance, all lights flashing on New Year’s Eve evening – bad timing don’t you agree?

Home now and very pleased to be here. I will be catching up with blog reading soon.

I am on a low fat diet and if anyone wants tips on how to lose weight, just ask! Trouble is I was never overweight to start with.

Anyway I just want to wish you all a very happy and healthy New Year. Have you made any resolutions?

Before I go, here is a (very well known) poem,nothing to do with illness or the New Year but I did watch Bright Star yesterday, the film about John Keats and I loved it so. A visual and a romantic delight; if you haven't seen it try and do so.

Endymion

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

An endless fountain of immortal drink,

Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

John Keats

Bye for now.

Cait.

Because it's Winter, Thoughts on the Sun

2011-12-29T05:08:00.000-08:00

Sleepy Lamb Diane Whitehead

Dear Diary,

The picture is nothing to do with the winter or with the sun, apart from the fact that the lamb is sunning himself or herself - I think it is a boy myself, he just caught my eye and I fell in love with him while I was on the net seeking out sunny pictures for you.

I bought my daughter for Christmas a book of selected poems by one of my most-loved poets, Mary Oliver. Quite by chance I heard this poem of hers on Irish radio this morning, only on Irish radio would you hear poetry on such a regular basis, great music too and conversation which makes you feel you are in someone's home or the pub.

In these far-too-short and dark days of Winter we need to remember the Sun; we do see her occasionally, like yesterday as I drove to Hay for a dental appointment, she shone on me through the car window all the way. She is absent today but at least I have a poem. It is one long question this poem, so true, so wise.

Stay warm.

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly
oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Mary Oliver

Connemara Girl

2011-12-27T12:33:00.027-08:00

Augustus Burke

Connemara Girl

She is of the mountain, her backdrop beauty:

purple mountain, blue ocean, green marbled rocks.

Beauty will not feed or sustain her small frame
hidden beneath her tattered shawl, poor girl

not yet woman. Her feet are bare, but underfoot,
summer’s heather is kind and soft as the tale
her eyes might tell, if they were inclined to speak.

Gazing hard, she keeps her feelings close, moods
like clouds, forever transient; beloved

beasts protect her back, four-footed, or fowls
of the air, she is their familiar.

They too may one day starve and die like the
Connemara girl who seems to be already
gleaning what may lie ahead. Ancient wisdom
lies within her, wrapped in heartfelt language,
washed with tears; ancestors sing a sacred song,

a sometimes dirge, a sometimes prayer, a sometimes
vision of eternity, an oft-times song
of love. You may catch its strains across the land,

for it frames the mountains and rides the waves.

In times of stillness you may hear it,deep
and haunting, like an Irish serenade.

Cait O’Connor

Ray La Montagne - A Falling Through

2011-12-27T04:10:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas to Everyone

2011-12-24T10:42:00.001-08:00

A poem - A song for Christmas. My favourite carol too.

In the bleak midwinter

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Christina Rossetti

One Year Ago

2011-12-18T05:08:00.000-08:00

Thumbelina

Wendy Chen

Dear Diary,

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The sun is (sometimes) out today so I am feeling a little brighter and a trifle warmer too. However the road became frozen overnight after quite a bit of rain which had fallen earlier and in the early hours of this morning we heard vehicles struggling to get along, including a lorry. The council are usually excellent at gritting our road but I think this icy spell must have taken them by surprise.

As I sit and type I can see two dippers by the river, they are always a joy to see, all year round. Time for a poem by one of my much-loved poets.

The Dipper

It was winter, near freezing,
I'd walked through a forest of firs
when I saw issue out of the waterfall
a solitary bird.

It lit on a damp rock,
and, as water swept stupidly on,
wrung from its own throat
supple, undammable song.

It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.

Kathleen Jamie

I am spending a fortune on bird food now, on both peanuts and seed; I had decided to cut back and just buy cheap old plastic bread for them in a bid to save money but I couldn't bear to see them so hungry and obviously not satisfied by such rubbish! But the rate they are getting through it is amazing. Never mind, I balance that with the joy I get from watching them. My own diet is very sparse at the moment while I stay off fats prior to my gallbladder operation and I reckon I am saving money there which will be spent on my dear feathered friends.

I was wondering what to write about this morning and decided to look back one year to the piece I posted on the 18th December 2010 to see what was happening then. - sometimes this is quite fun to do and can be quite revealing. So that is my gift to you today, a glimpse into the past. I cannot give you a voyage into the future but perhaps it's just as well.

One Year Ago

Have a good Sunday,
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait

Celebrations

2011-12-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

Fleece on Earth
Wild faces Gallery

I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month.

Harlan Miller

Celebrations

Her life was a predicament, a life of non-adjustment,

her wildness inexact but she did not falter

in spite of a malaise that’s seen as quirky, not quite normal.

(I tell myself and her that normal is boring).

Orphaned and unmoulded, she had no prototype to run by

and Christmas strangely always brings such pains to mind.

On shrinking days her heartstrings became broken;

there is so much she abhors, avoids or even tries to tolerate

for she’s learned false colours are a sham, a visual fallacy

and a false light always shows itself before a coming dawn.

Never one to fall in and march, she cannot sing in unison

while all her loathings move to stir and wake.

Getting up, going out, they all become too much,

planned events and obligations, grandeur, pomp and circumstance,

anything wide of the truth, deceptive or deceiving.

Pressure to spend precedes a runaway frenzy.

Her list of hates goes on, I beg her stop.

What does she love, I hear you say?
Ah, that could fill a book and would make a far nicer poem,

let’s celebrate,

there is so much, so much.

Cait O’Connor

On Childhood

2011-12-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

I feel sluggish this week, I always dread this time of year and have no inspiration to write so today's post will just be a Walt Whitman poem that I love and and a couple of pictures on the subject of children and 'gifts' - perhaps it's because Christmas is on the horizon, well its almost impossible to avoid and hard to escape it, bah humbug.

There was a child went forth every day

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of
the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the cow's calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there--and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads--all became part of him.

The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him;
Winter-grain sprouts, and those of the light-yellow corn, and the esculent roots of the garden,
And the apple-trees cover'd with blossoms, and the fruit afterward,
and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road;
And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence he had lately risen,
And the school-mistress that pass'd on her way to the school,
And the friendly boys that pass'd--and the quarrelsome boys,
And the tidy and fresh-cheek'd girls--and the barefoot negro boy and girl,
And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went.

His own parents,
He that had father'd him, and she that had conceiv'd him in her womb, and birth'd him,
They gave this child more of themselves than that;
They gave him afterward every day--they became part of him.

The mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table;
The mother with mild words--clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor
falling off her person and clothes as she walks by;
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger'd, unjust;
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture--the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay'd--the sense of what is real--the thought if, after all, it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time--the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets--if they are not flashes and specks, what are they?
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows,
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank'd wharves--the huge crossing at the ferries,
The village on the highland, seen from afar at sunset--the river between,
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown, three miles off,
The schooner near by, sleepily dropping down the tide--the little boat slack-tow'd astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
The strata of color'd clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away
solitary by itself--the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud;
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

Walt Whitman

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Anna Quindlen

Bye for now,

Go mbeannai Dia duit,

Cait aka Ms Scrooge

Just Some Wise Words Really

2011-12-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

Work Interrupted William Bouguerau

If you have ever wondered.. All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

by Robert Fulgham

Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do, and how to be, I learned in Kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandbox at nursery school.
These are the things I learned..

Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life. Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup? The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the plastic cup - they all die. So do we.

And then remember the book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and sane living.

Think of what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world had cookies and milk about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or if we had a basic policy in our nation and other nations to always put things back where we found them and cleaned up our own messes. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

It's A Beautiful World

2011-12-12T15:24:00.000-08:00

Winter Words

2011-12-11T03:38:00.000-08:00

Winter Words

A line of naked oaks looms tall upon the hill;

guardian angels standing firm, astride the line of sky,

a shield from fear perhaps or maybe simply dread.

What lies beyond? A deadened, hardened earth

a solemn chill, so cruelly unforgiving.

What lies beneath? No hope of birth or any form of

life among the depths and woes of winter

which only brings a universal heartfelt need for rest.

But all the while some words I hear are racing through my head,

a kind of waking through an optimistic prayer, a solace to my soul.

Do words of hope have such a life and such a strength of voice

whether dancing through my dreams or simply written through my heart?

While I step through sheeptracks, moss and river stones

muffled, wrapped up well, towards my home below the hill,

I stride more surely through the cold and sodden turf.

The winter words still speak through me of hope;

I trust they will not fade,

as newly heard each day, they make me strong

and keep me singing wildly through the snow.

Cait O’Connor

Only Kindness Matters

2011-12-09T05:37:00.000-08:00

If you Want To Make Yourself Happy Practise Kindness

Dalai Lama

More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent and all will be lost."
~Charlie Chaplin

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Ted and Sylvia

2011-12-07T04:17:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

I found this lovely piece on the Internet telling of how Sylvia met Ted.

Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes

by Steve King

On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes. The morning of writing was "gray, most sober, with cold white puritanical eyes"; the evening before had started at a bar where "I drank steadily the goblets" and endured "some ugly gat-toothed squat grinning guy named Meeson trying to be devastatingly clever." At the party -- "and oh, it was very bohemian, with boys in turtleneck sweaters and girls being blue-eye-lidded or elegant in black" -- there was more of the same, but "the jazz was beginning to get under my skin, and I started dancing with Luke and knew I was very bad, having crossed the river and banged into the trees....":

Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . . And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes . . . and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hairband scarf which had weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.

I have been musing on Ted and Sylvia as Ted has been very much in the news these last few days because a memorial to him has been unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.

A stone bearing his name and lines of his poetry has been placed below the stone for his mentor, TS Eliot.

Seamus Heaney unveiled the memorial in front of more than three hundred guests, who included Hughes' widow Carol and daughter Frieda.

The greatest poets of the age have been honoured with a tomb or a stone in a tradition going back six hundred years.

Chaucer, Tennyson and Thomas Hardy are among those buried in Poets' Corner and others include Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake and Eliot are memorialised there.

A friend and I have always disagreed; she is a Ted Hughes fan and I have always been a Sylvia Plath fan and if I am honest I have struggled with Ted Hughes’ poetry. I like this one though and the subject matter suits the season. And I would love to hear of any of his that you love and might recommend to me, I need the education.

The Warm and the Cold

Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.
But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven.
And the badger in its bedding
Like a loaf in the oven.
And the butterfly in its mummy
Like a viol in its case.
And the owl in its feathers
Like a doll in its lace.

Freezing dusk has tightened
Like a nut screwed tight
On the starry aeroplane
Of the soaring night.
But the trout is in its hole
Like a chuckle in a sleeper.
The hare strays down the highway
Like a root going deeper.
The snail is dry in the outhouse
Like a seed in a sunflower.
The owl is pale on the gatepost
Like a clock on its tower.

Moonlight freezes the shaggy world
Like a mammoth of ice -
The past and the future
Are the jaws of a steel vice.
But the cod is in the tide-rip
Like a key in a purse.
The deer are on the bare-blown hill
Like smiles on a nurse.
The flies are behind the plaster
Like the lost score of a jig.
Sparrows are in the ivy-clump
Like money in a pig.

Such a frost
The flimsy moon
Has lost her wits.

A star falls.

The sweating farmers
Turn in their sleep
Like oxen on spits.

Ted Hughes

And just to be fair to Sylvia’s memory, here is one of hers called Candles which I love. I also love her poem Mirror, which is also a favourite of my daughter’s and she introduced me to it but I have posted it before. Shall I do so again? Why not? You can’t have too much of a good thing can you?

Candles

Candles

They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they'll ignore
A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,
Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows
Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments,
And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna.
As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef.
The burghers sweated and wept.
The children wore white.
And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,
Imagining himself a headwaiter in America,
Floating in a high-church hush
Among ice buckets, frosty napkins.
These little globes of light are sweet as pears.
Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,
They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.
I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening.

Sylvia Plath

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath

I wonder how long it will be before a female (British) poet is honoured?

Bye for now,

Go mbeannai Dia duit,

Cait

A painting, a poem, two quotations.

2011-12-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

Light, Cuil Phail, Iona
Donald McIntyre

If one keeps loving faithfully what is really worth loving, and does not waste one's love on insignificant and unworthy and meaningless things, one will get more light by and by and grow stronger. Sometimes it is well to go into the world and converse with people, and at times one is obliged to do so, but he who would prefer to be quietly alone with his work and who wants but very few friends, will go safest through the world and among people. And even in the most refined circles and with the best surroundings and circumstances, one must keep something of the original character of an anchorite, for otherwise one has no root in oneself; one must never let the fire go out in one's soul, but keep it burning. And whoever chooses poverty for himself and loves it possesses a great treasure, and will always clearly hear the voice of his conscience; he who hears and obeys that voice, which is the best gift of God, finds at least a friend in it, and is never alone.

Vincent Van Gogh

The Bread Of Beggars, The Wine Of Christ

Dublin, Christmas 1953

In Dublin’s streets
Around the way to Christmas
Blackbirds sing.
Eire’s orphan children cluster
Stashed in alleys, lost in sidewalks, cold in vestibules
of movies
There to chant and carol through the snowing winds
In nights of rains.
Their high and weather-tossed refrains
Sound Christ and his sweet breath
His sun-birth, not his death:
His greeting forth of wisdom in the land
Sings forth down every street on every hand
Enchants your hotel room where echoes of it
Time your shaving before supper,
And as you leave the hotel door
More sparrows rise, more orioles
And blackbirds sing
From out the Christmas pies that celebrate a holy King.
The bread of beggars, the wine of Christ,
Delivered with the falling white, it manifests
A wonder, such miracles of snow that
Melting on small tongues
Become his sweetly breathing life.
You move to wife the weather
Husband winds that knife and harrow
Strike your marrow, freeze it pale.
Yet all about in storefront jails
Stunned flocks of starlings
Driven to earth in winter flood
Of fogging heaven, raining thunder, God who lids
them down
And bids them sing for their lost souls.
And so they sing in promises of love not pain
A time that was, is not, but will arrive again
To warm the land and stir our bloods.
These hearths of children know all Dublin’s neighbourhoods
In every corner, alley, shop
Where snow drifts like spun-candles:
There they hide. Would you abide their place?
Then lift your touch to every heartbeat face
The bright coals of their cheeks breathe charcoal pink
As if the bellows of their tiny starling lungs
Blew on them forcing fire and ash
And fire once more.
From every winter door they cry a last refrain
To burn downwind;
With Christ a fever in their eyes
They birth him forth in snow that melts to rain
In Dublin’s streets now once again
Hark! midnight church bells ring;
And echoing that sound of Christmas:
Blackbirds sing.

Ray Bradbury

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions

Albert Einstein

Alphabet Day

2011-12-03T08:53:00.000-08:00

Sleeping Cat

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Are cats lazy? Well more power to them if they are.

Anon

Alphabet Day

Anything you do today may tire you,

best thing is to rest,

create masterpieces in your head. Enjoy a

do nothing day.
(Everyone needs them).

Face up to it,

give in,

have a day off. Spend time

in relaxing surroundings, think only of

joyous pastimes whether it be

knitting,

lazing or

meditating.

Never feel guilty, let

others do the chores,

please yourself just for once.

(Quickly before you change your mind!)

Read on the sofa or

sitting on your favourite chair.

Take time out,

under no circumstances relent or

vary your activities, just

watch the world go by,

X-ist.

You know you deserve it.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Cait O’Connor

PS As Winifred Carriere said ' Cats always know whether people like or dislike them. They do not always care enough to do anything about it'.

Jeremy Clarkson

2011-12-01T06:53:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

So Jeremy Clarkson wants me taken outside and executed in front of my family does he? I have never ever liked the man but I think even with his low standards he has sunk too low with this one and I for one demand that he is sacked from the BBC. I do not wish to contribute in my licence fee to his over-huge salary.

This is what he said:

I would take them [strikers] outside and execute them in front of their families. I would have them all shot.

I mean how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed, while the rest of us have to work for a living.

I am a member of the union Unison and am off sick at present. I am not in the pension scheme, not all public service workers are, my reason being that at one time I could not afford the contributions and I never opted back in. I am one of the low paid, there are millions of us. However, wherever I sit on this issue, I support anyone’s right to strike.

Dave Prentis, Unison leader’s comments:

Jeremy Clarkson clearly needs a reminder of just who he is talking about when he calls for public sector workers to be shot in front of their families," he added. "Whilst he is driving round in fast cars for a living, public sector workers are busy holding our society together - they save others’ lives on a daily basis, they care for the sick, the vulnerable, the elderly.

Clarkson then went on to comment on people committing suicide on railways, stating:

You just think, why have we stopped because we've hit somebody? What's the point of stopping? It won't make them better.

I wonder how many people have been seriously upset by that statement, the relatives and friends of people who have committed suicide? There must be so many.

I didn't watch the programme and have no idea why he was on it -he was probably trying to sell a book or promote something.

Presenter Matt Baker made an on-air apology for the remark, saying “We are seriously sorry”. A BBC spokesman later declined to add to the issue. The corporation confirmed that they have had 4,769 complaints on Clarkson's comments.

And I can tell you that the number is rising.

Take one man, place him in an old aircraft hangar, surround him with hordes of ignorant worshippers, all made to stand and hang on his every word. Make it seem like a church where he can preach his creed. Have SPEED his GOD (along with HIMSELF of course). Wreck cars for fun. Waste energy and public money hand over fist doing silly stunts in the name of ‘entertainment’. Pay him an obscene amount of public money.

The worrying thing is how many fans he has............but then so did Hitler I guess.

Why not give him a Knighthood as well? He is a friend of David Cameron's after all. His comment was that Jeremy had been ‘silly’.

I would remind Cameron that very immature young men have been imprisoned very recently for the ‘incitement to riot’ by posting somewhat mild remarks on Facebook etc or for stealing a Mars Bar or a bottle of drink from a shop. I consider Jeremy Clarkson's remarks on the One Show to be fascist, a possible incitement to violence and most certainly inflammatory as they could definitely incite violence among certain elements of society. I would like to know what is to be done about his remarks which were made on a prime-time programme that goes out before the watershed and is watched by the general population, many of whom may be influenced by such a man.

Is it one law for the rich and one for the poor? Are we not only being ripped off financially?

This is also the man who went on Who Do You Think You Are and his only concern was in finding a lost fortune with seemingly no interest or emotional response to finding his roots. Sums him up really doesn’t it?

Bye for now,
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait.

David Whyte

2011-11-29T03:48:00.000-08:00

Burren Area Looking North Along The Coastline

Dear Diary,

You look and look and look,beyond all looking

David Whyte

The world of blogging is an amazing thing. Foxglove Lane recommended a poet to me by the name of David Whyte. I am ashamed to say I had never heard of him but I immediately looked him up (isn't the Internet a wonderful thing?). What should I discover but that he had been a friend of the late John O'Donohue, someone I very much admire and have written about many times. Not only had he been a friend, he had also written a beautiful poem in his memory which I am happy to be able to share with you. Before the poem there is some wonderful prose.

Enjoy.

In Memoriam
John O’Donohue

A drive into the setting sun of a summer evening, west of Ballyvaughan would take you along the limestone coast of North Clare, with the salt ocean on the right and a rising, almost over bearing, mountain of white stone on your left. The road grips the cliff edge for a good while and then opens into dunes. From there you would see a long curve of beach and a far, inviting prospect of the Aran Islands silhouetted in the low sunlight. As you drive, your gaze is so naturally pulled forward into this horizon of fire and shadow that you would most likely, and thankfully, miss the narrow lane to the left that disappears very quickly into the recesses of the mountain. You would have passed the entrance to the valley without knowing, much to the relief of the people who live beyond its entrance and who have enjoyed its solitude for centuries.

That quiet lane disappears into a sanctuary, one of the most hidden and silent enclosures in the whole north Burren. The geological architecture of the valley speaks of shelter, the human history of fortitude and the view out to sea from the surrounding hills, of all the possible and imminent futures about to blow in from the west.

Out of that private, beautiful enclosed valley there came into the world a very private but very unenclosed man, one who knew the need in every human heart for that sense of sanctuary, and for that silence but equally for the high and necessary walk which brings the horizon and the future alive again and again in the home-bound human imagination. John O’Donohue grew up in that valley and eventually entered our world through that narrow pass down to the sea. He took us with him as he journeyed to those beckoning horizons and generously brought us, as we listened to him or read him, to marvel, to wonder, and to return home transformed. He was a rare form of human possibility, a razor sharp intellect married to a far-travelling, Irish articulation and a bird-of-paradise vocabulary that made the listener realize that until then they had never listened at all. Like the valley from which he emerged, all the geological and imaginative layers of human experience were present in his speech at once; he could bring recesses and contours in the listener alive that quickened their senses, broke their enclosed imprisoning notions of self and lead them on, up high into that clear western air, listening to the lark calls, letting the wind blow them clean of worry, and returning them to their shadowed, home valley with a strange sense of intention, of courage, and a brave, laughing almost flamboyant, sense of celebration.

I was privileged to have a close friendship with John, to witness him work and play, to eat and drink with him and to participate in that moveable, laughing, bull-fighting, swish-of-the-cloak drama that accompanied and enlivened everything and everyone around him. I also knew, behind the mesmerizing cloak, the serious philosopher, the critical take-no-prisoners thinker, the responsible head of a close, extended family, and the courageous, almost sacrificial activist, who with a group of North Burren allies, took on the might of the Irish establishment and won a victory that changed Irish law at a foundational level. This is a man who could hold the broad spectrum of human experience together in a fierce, intimate and compassionate way, leavened with a humour that defies easy description and that enlivened everyone around him.

John leaves behind an enormous circle of bereft readers and listeners, a great crowd of mourning friends, and most especially, a shocked and grieving family in his loving mother Josie, his loyal brothers PJ and Pat, his good sister Mary; his extended family, Dympna, Eilish, Shane, Kate, Triona and Peter and more recently, but equally poignant, the woman to whom he had just committed his future and who had brought him a happiness he had sought all his life: Kristine Fleck.

John was a love-letter to humanity from some address in the firmament we have yet to find and locate, though we may wander many a year looking or listening for it. He has gone home to that original address and cannot be spoken with except in the quiet cradle of the imagination that he dared to visit so often himself. As a way of sending a love letter in return, I wrote this poem for him a good few years ago. I hope it can still reach him now, wherever he is to be found and that he finds it as good a representation as he did when he lived and breathed. I remember the bright, surprised and amused intelligence in his eyes when I first read it to him, sitting by his fire in Connemara. It brings him back to me even as I read it now, as I hope it does for you.

Looking Out From Clare

For John Donohue

There’s a great spring in you
all bud and blossom
and March laughter
I’ve always loved.

Your face framed
against the bay
and the whisper
of some arriving joke
playing at the mouth,
your lightening raid
on the eternal
melting the serious line
to absurdity.

I look around and see
the last days of winter
broken away
for all those
listening or watching,
all come to life now
with the first pale sun on their face
for many a month,
remembering how to laugh.

But most of all I love
the heft and weight
and swing of that sea
behind it all, some other tide
racing toward the shore,
or receding to the calmness
where no light or laughter
lives for long.

The way you surface
from those atmospheres
again and again,
your emergence seems to make
you a lover of horizons
but your visitation
of darkness shows.

Then away from you
I can see you only alone
on the strand
walking to the sea
on the north coast of Clare
toward the end
of an unendurable winter
taking your first swim
of the year.

The March scald
of cold ocean
even in May about to tighten
and bud you into spring.

You look across
to the mountains in Connemara
framing, only for now,
your horizon.

You look and look, and look,
beyond all looking.

David Whyte
January 2008

Bye for now,

Go mbeannai Dia duit,

Cait

Last night my dreams found me

2011-11-27T06:03:00.000-08:00

Last night my dreams found me

Last night my dreams found me

and sent me on horseback, solitary but safe.

Two Connemara ponies carried me across Irish mountains,

one horse was the purest grey, one black,

one for my baggage, one for my glad heart alone.

(No swimming for me in deep rivers, not waving but drowning in seas).

I wonder how in your dreams will you travel, on the wings of which bird will you fly?

(Or will you develop your own?).

Will you perch in the pocket of a fairy or travel tucked behind an angel’s wing?
Will you be cwched warmly in the trap of a pony

or, like Mary, will you sit on the back of a donkey

with one special brave knight leading the way?

Will you play, will you sing, will you dance there with music?

Or will you ride in a vardo with Romance and just a poem to brighten each day?

Will you venture by footfall by day or will you stroll in the dead of a night

under the spell of a bright Harvest Moon?

Or will you meander your way at your leisure

in the shade of a sun, in an autumn

which spreads out your smile with its gold?

I just pray you are not over-burdened;

greed, hatred and envy can carry a toll.

Only love truly lightens your journey,

helps all your dreams find you,

lift you and bring you safe home.

Cait O’Connor

Farewell

2011-11-23T15:17:00.000-08:00

Farewell

Nearing nine decades, you were

weak of heart, frailer than frail,

thinner than thin, paler than pale,

never one to give in, your soul had lost its body’s–fight.

Your mind, still strong, your voice was weak,

only your eyes could tell of its defeat;

(those eyes, intelligent and wise).

Fading fast about us, the only will remaining, was the will to live,

its strength of purpose hung about the bed

courting your spirit, preparing for its flight.

I could almost taste the ward, so white,

the sterile coldness seeping deep inside your ag`ed bones.

The Earth became a stranger to you then;

you’d little left to learn, nought to fear, it was clearly time to leave,

without one tiny tear or ounce of fuss, right to the end,

(no softly-spoken angels in your wake),

just a final straightening-up, one quick soft look, an outstretched hand

so all seemed strangely right and fitting for the day.

For me, a sadness and a pain

that lies down low, so deep within my heart,

a grief that I must bear, soothed only by your strength.

I felt that as you quietly passed; your spirit rose

to stillness and to certain Paradise,

away from all the darkness and the sadness in this world,

the world you bade farewell to on that stark November day.

Cait O’Connor

The Road Not Taken

2011-11-23T05:20:00.000-08:00

Woodland Faery by Robin Pushe’e

(www.fairy-art.net)

This faery pic reminds me of my youngest granddaughter.

This video below is for Tracy Golightly-Garcia (whose blog is a lovely place to visit by the way); it is the poem that she would choose to take to her Desert Island. (see previous posts).

I love the name Golightly by the way...... and it's also a great way to travel...down any road.

I have posted this poem before; it is much-loved by so many.

Enjoy.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Innisfree

2011-11-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

This poem is for Foxglove Lane on her Desert Island (Foxglove Lane has to be my favourite blog title and it's a wonderful place to visit too which lives up to its name).

I have posted this one before as the poem is one of my much-loved, in fact I chose it as my all time favourite many, many moons ago when I worked in a different library and we each had to choose one for National Poetry Day.

The story goes that while walking down Fleet Street in London one day, Yeats was trying to cross a road, wishing for seclusion and this poem was the result.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

W B Yeats

Poem in October

2011-11-20T00:52:00.000-08:00

This poem is for Mark as he chose it for his Desert Island. (see previous post).

My favourite lines?

   And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
     Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
             Through the parables
                Of sunlight
        And the legends of the green chapels

A great choice. I shall post others' favorites soon.

POEM IN OCTOBER


        It was my thirtieth year to heaven
     Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
        And the mussel pooled and the heron
                Priested shore
           The morning beckon
     With water praying and call of seagull and rook
     And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
           Myself to set foot
                That second
        In the still sleeping town and set forth.

        My birthday began with the water-
     Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
        Above the farms and the white horses
                And I rose
            In a rainy autumn
     And walked abroad in shower of all my days
     High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
            Over the border
                And the gates
        Of the town closed as the town awoke.

        A springful of larks in a rolling
     Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
        Blackbirds and the sun of October
                Summery
            On the hill's shoulder,
     Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
     Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
            To the rain wringing
                Wind blow cold
        In the wood faraway under me.

        Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
     And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
        With its horns through mist and the castle
                Brown as owls
             But all the gardens
     Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
     Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
             There could I marvel
                My birthday
        Away but the weather turned around.

        It turned away from the blithe country
     And down the other air and the blue altered sky
        Streamed again a wonder of summer
                With apples
             Pears and red currants
     And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
     Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
             Through the parables
                Of sunlight
        And the legends of the green chapels

        And the twice told fields of infancy
     That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
        These were the woods the river and the sea
                Where a boy
             In the listening
     Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
     To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
             And the mystery
                Sang alive
        Still in the water and singing birds.

        And there could I marvel my birthday
     Away but the weather turned around. And the true
        Joy of the long dead child sang burning
                In the sun.
             It was my thirtieth
        Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
        Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
             O may my heart's truth
                Still be sung
        On this high hill in a year's turning.

Dylan Thomas

Let me know your choice and I will try and post it for you.

When You Are Old

2011-11-18T03:02:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

I listened to one of my favourite BBC Radio 4 repeats this morning, the perennial programme that is Desert Island Discs (may it never end or be taken off the airways). The subject was the Irishwoman, Anna Scher and she chose one or two 'musical' records which brought back memories. But best of all was this poem she chose which I would also pick as a poem to keep if I was ever cast away. The BBC played a recording of it by T P McKenna which brought tears to my eyes;I had never heard it before. I couldn't find a copy of that version to share with you but I found this recording on YouTube which I hope you like.

Is there a poem you would take to your Desert Island?
One of your own or one written by another?
Or both?

Bye for now,
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait

Home

2011-11-16T03:17:00.000-08:00

Where thou art, that is home

Emily Dickinson

Plainsong

Stop. Along this path, in phrases of light

trees sing their leaves. No Midas touch

has turned the wood to gold this year

when you pass by, suddenly sad, straining

to remember something you're sure you knew

Listening. The words you have for things die

in your heart, but grasses are plainsong

patiently chanting the circles you cannot repeat

or understand. This is your homeland,

Lost One, Stranger who speaks with tears.

It is almost impossible to be here and yet

you kneel, no-one's child, absolved by the sun

through the branches of a wood, distantly

the evening bell reminding you, Home, Home

Home, and the stone in your palm telling the time.

Carol Anne Duffy

Meditation

2011-11-14T00:10:00.000-08:00

Whisper of the Muse - Julia Margaret Cameron

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

Diane Arbus

Meditation

Away from human noise, the cough, the sniff, the clearing of the throat.

The ticking of the ever-present clock.

Depart from the mind, a sometimes lifeless place, where all is brash,

bereft and Belsen-like, where no birds sing at all.

Seek out the spell, or speak a heartfelt prayer for long-forgotten love.

Until then, listen less, relax and go towards the far and distant place called home,

to the heartbeat of the womb, to past times, rhythmical and raw,

to a land where birdsong resonated with the silver bells of angels.

Now at last all is quiet.

Peace. Like a cathedral.

Cait O’Connor

Family Silver

2011-11-12T05:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

A quick blog today, it is Saturday and as I am off sick from work I am enjoying being home and having a normal weekend which is quite novel for me. The weather is fine, quite warm and dry but the soil is still too wet to plant bulbs. I bought tulips, daffodils and alliums ages ago but since then the soil has been either frozen or over-wet. Never mind, I am not up to gardening at the moment and M will have to do the work, hopefully tomorrow when the soil may be that bit drier; if the weather forecasters are right we are in for a dry spell.

I have just enjoyed a wee stroll outside in the field with the dogs, the colours all around are still achingly beautiful ; I love autumn so and especially on days like this. It is a complete contrast to yesterday which was grey, extremely so and wet with it.

Today I am posting some pics of photos by the wonderful photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. I caught a bit of the TV programme ‘Flog it’ yesterday and saw that a Berkshire grammar school had sold off one of her photos. The photograph (a gift to the school) sold at auction for £8,000.

The photograph is one of Sir John Herschel, a German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and a composer. Herschel became most famous for the discovery of Uranus in addition to two of its major moons.

In a recent recording of the ever popular BBC series of 'Flog It!' at Henley Town Hall, the stand-out item of the day was a photograph of scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the preeminent photographers of the 19th century. Researchers are to investigate the history of the photograph, which could fetch thousands when it is flogged off at Cameo Auctioneers, near Reading.

Apparently the photo had been on the school office wall for years. This angered me, firstly because it had been a gift to the school and if it was in the office it was depriving the school children of the gift of seeing it, And selling it in the current climate any money they make is soon to be worth less with inflation but worst of all, should one really sell something that was a gift to the school? It smacks of selling off the family silver to me and resounds with the current crime that is closing public libraries.

Paul Martin the rather nice antique expert on Flog It admitted that Julia Margaret Cameron was his favourite photographer, I have always loved her work too. Surely our schools are not that hard up that they have to stoop to these measures to raise funds and if they are there is indeed something very wrong with our society.
I am sure it would never happen in Ireland.
Rant over.
I hope you enjoy the photos.

Bye for now,
Enjoy the weekend!
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait

A Winter Walk Has Warmed my Heart

2011-11-10T01:45:00.000-08:00

Something that has moved me today.

Has anything moved you

or left you cold?

Recession

2011-11-07T04:15:00.000-08:00

Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated ... what is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature.

Erich Fromm

Wisdom for the Soul

Autumn’s recession

Multitudes of leaves today are drifting overhead,

as atmospheric pressure rises in its wicked worldlike way

En masse they hover, swirling, helpless, carried on the wind

and too soon reach the highway, so alive with all its busyness.

The strong survive, the others chance to fate

and play a game of Russian Roulette as they cross

as the slowest in their weaker currency of air

soon trip, with many bound to fall.

These scrape across the tarmac noisily and become too quickly crushed,

while the others, high flyers in the land of leafdom,

still soar with ease and they can only laugh,

as they coolly reach the other side

to land upon a listening bank of green that wears a welcome smile.

Secure, untouchable, as they always were

when fixed so high upon the branches in their tree;

those lucky leaves whose hue is painted precious gold,

will live entirely free of penalty or pain of death

or such an undeserv`ed poverty.

Cait O’Connor

2011-11-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

Kitty

Dear Diary,

I'll start with one of my favourite quotations on the subject of success and which has nothing to do with the acquisition of money.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have been enjoying listening to Irish radio a lot recently and it is great to get a feel of what is going on in my spiritual home even though I can't actually live there. Living in the wild hills of Wales as I do, I find that I can get a better reception for Irish radio than for British and it is very easy just to switch over the wavelengths from Radio 4 so that it will go straight onto RTE. I love Radio 4 of course, couldn't live without it to be honest - but if I fancy a change or there is a programme I don't enjoy I switch over. I do enjoy the laid back Irish way of broadcasting. Nothing and no-one is rushed, conversations seem to go on for ever but are never boring, there is no sense of urgency or clock-watching, all is intelligent and covered in depth and there is of course much attention to all things literary, political, local, personal, sporting etc. As a broadcaster on Radio 4 said recently (she also admitted listening to Irish radio at home! - people always sound as if they have just wandered into a pub or something and it is all so relaxed. I listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 every morning but lately it is driving me mad the way everything is so much more 'rushed' (especially the weather!) and the way the interviewers interrupt so much (not John Humphreys but Sara someoneorother does this a lot.

Continuing the Irish theme here is a poem from the wonderful Irish poetry publisher Salmon, the book is A Journey in Poetry 1981-2007 and the poem is about a border collie (the poet is American).

There is a photo of my border collie above; her name is Kitty not Kilty Sue but I have to admit that when she was young she did have a very slight tendency to behave a bit like Kilty Sue. She is a reformed character now though and perfectly well-behaved though I sometimes think she too has the look of of a slightly retarded devil-dog (or as I say probably an inbred one!).

Kilty Sue

Instincts jammed by lack of sheep

in this region, she attends to babies, ducklings-

anything small and in need of care.

A border collie whose eyes, opposite

shades of brown, offer the look

of a slightly retarded devil-dog. And

if you must know, she bites people:

my brother presumably because he was mean

to me at a younger age; the UPS man

because he carried a package too quickly towards

my pregnant sister; my mother-in-law, I suppose,

to keep in shape. And various relatives

and strangers – Kilty Sue reminds them

of the precise location of the Achilles tendon.

Mind you, she never actually rips it out,

but merely offers a sharp touch. Like a pin-prick,

only deeper, her bites spring out

from a sudden vortex of silence. When Kilty Sue howls –

in a voice high and piercing as a drunken soprano,

and you wish your ears would just drop off and die –

you are safe. She is protecting you.

Marck L Beggs

Bye for now,

Go mbeannai Dia duit,

Cait

Butterflies and Hibernation

2011-11-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Nothing changes until you do.

Anon

Dear Diary,

I love this painting.

Blue Morpho butterfly

Martin Johnson

http://www.paintinghere.com/

I read an interesting blog post about butterflies here and it coincided with me already having decided to write today about two Red Admirals that are hibernating in my bedroom of all places. We lived in an old Welsh farmhouse before we lived here in our little riverside cottage and the odd Red Admiral would often appear flying around inside that home during the winter. The first time one appeared coincided with a family bereavement and I was convinced it was their spirit – they are reputed to be spirits of the dead if they are indoors – perhaps they are, who knows?

As I lay in bed the other morning I looked up to the beams in the corner of my little bedroom and saw an unusual sight, not one but two butterflies cwched up closely on the beam together (Welsh word meaning snuggled). The following morning one had moved a little bit lower down (had they fallen out?) but lo and behold by the evening the other one had moved down to join the other and they were close again. Could they wake up and go back to sleep? I have no idea how hibernation works but it often appeals to me in the depth of Winter, usually in December around Christmas time……..(bah Humbug)….

I researched online what I should do if I find a butterfly hibernating in the house and it seemed to say that I should move it outside to somewhere ‘safe’ where birds can’t find it, not too cold, not too warm, it all sounded rather impossible to me so for now I am leaving them. One site suggested making up some nectar (?) and feeding them before I put them outside to sustain them through the cold weather. And apparently when they do wake they will be hungry and there will be no food for them in the cottage. I think when they wake I will put them outside then; I hope I am doing the best thing.

I grew up in South London and don’t remember seeing many butterflies to be honest but I always had the impression that butterflies only lived for two days, where that came from I don’t know but it stayed with me nearly all my life until I found out it was not true - just another childhood illusion shattered.

I shall leave you with a poem by the late John O’Donoghue. Its title is November and the theme is the coldness and melancholy of the season and I feel a need for ‘hibernation’ within it.

However it may be November but today it is so warm that I have no heating on at all so the poem does not really fit the day or my mood. They tell me colder weather is on its way but I am making the most of these balmy, happy days for even the sun is shining now…..the rain showers have passed away from us. I very much hope all is fine with you too, in every way.

November

November’s hunger strips the fields, its thin light

rifles the web and warmth of every nest

allows the cold day to invade each secret,

absolves the ghosts of leaf that outlast autumn.

Now I can depend less and less on the grace

of spontaneity, talk quickly tires,

words become contrived, as they eyes of others

notice my mind unravel in this sallow light.

Intense with silence my room waits for me,

the paintings and open books grown distant,

its window one huge eye on the tree outside;

in the mirror the glimpse of my face draws tears.

John O’Donoghue

Bye for now,

Cait.

The Touchstone

2011-11-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

The Lady
John William Waterhouse

You are not enclosed within your bodies nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the winds.

Kahlil Gibran

The Touchstone

On Samhain’s night by a waxing moon

the veil was thin, the spirits drew near,

their music was heard in rocks, deep as a drum

beating hard and true against my heart.

I felt them in the Irish mountain rains

whose clouds I follow keenly, like a nun.

I saw them too in the embers of my hearth

and in the candle’s flame.

Today, I scry in my crystal ball

on an Indian summer’s morn,

my tiny cottage windows are open wide.

and sylphs rush in on the breeze.

I pass my dreams to them,

attaching a prayer of hope

that Truth will always prevail,

far and wide, way above treetops.

My dreams can fly with joy

but should they ever fall in pain

I know they will reform

by magic and by alchemy

to form a sacred touchstone for my soul.

Cait O’Connor

Samhain 2011

2011-10-31T06:27:00.000-07:00

The Crystal Ball

John William Waterhouse

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

Anne Dillard

Dear Diary,

Being at home off sick now I have taken to searching my own bookshelves for reading matter and I found Anne Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to read again and am also re-reading all my John O'Donohue books, both newly discovered finds which are such a joy to read. What would you seek out from your own bookshelves?

I am listening to a lot of Radio 4 and this morning I enjoyed the first part of Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal as it is the Book of the Week. The adoption aspect is close to my heart so perhaps I get even more from it but she is such a great writer (and poet).

On Sunday morning I heard Will Self's A Point of View about the arms trade (and more); what a fine piece that was. Details are below if you would like to hear it.

Will Self A Point of View Arms Trade

Duration: 11 minutes

Will Self deplores the arms trade and Britain's role in it, including the sale of weapons to authoritarian regimes which abuse human rights

Listen Again or on Podcast

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01694p0

Anyway enough of the present for you surely know that it is Samhain/ Halloween and the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest so all our ancestors will be at their closest.

I for one will be out tonight and hopefully there will be sweet moonlight to ride by..........................................

Here is a poem that fits the occasion.

Sweet dreams.......

Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;

Come in the speaking silence of a dream;

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

As sunlight on a stream;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,

Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,

Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;

Where thirsting longing eyes

Watch the slow door

That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

My very life again though cold in death:

Come back to me in dreams, that I may give

Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:

Speak low, lean low,

As long ago, my love, how long ago.

Christina Rossetti

Michael D Higgins

2011-10-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Michael D Higgins

So Ireland has a new president. The marvellous Mary Mcaleese who has been such an excellent representative of Ireland will indeed be a very hard act to follow but I was pleased to hear that Michael D Higgins has been elected and by such a huge margin. Perhaps it could only happen in Ireland that a poet could be a President though he is much more than that of course but it did make me happy to learn that he is one. He is also decribed as being without charisma - don't you just love that? And he is seventy years old to boot. He is a proper socialist, an anti-war campaigner and a fighter for human rights and I particularly loved his statement that he wants to 'create an intellectual space' in our dear country. God bless him.

Here is one of his poems.

When Will My Time Come?

When will my time come for scenery

And will it be too late?

After all

Decades ago I was never able

To get excited

About filling the lungs with ozone

On Salthill Prom.

And when the strangers

To whom I gave a lift

Spoke to me of the extraordinary

Light in the Western sky;

I often missed its changes.

And, later, when words were required

To intervene at the opening of Art Exhibitions,

It was not the same.

What is this tyranny of head that stifles

The eyes, the senses,

All play on the strings of the heart.

And, if there is a healing,

It is in the depth of a silence,

Whose plumbed depths require

A journey through realms of pain

That must be faced alone.

The hero, setting out,

Will meet an ally at a crucial moment.

But the journey home

Is mostly alone.

When my time comes

I will have made my journey

And through all my senses will explode

The evidence of light

And air and water, fire and earth.

Michael D Higgins

Samhain approaches

2011-10-28T04:34:00.000-07:00

Friday already, this week is really flying as I will be in a few days when I have prepared my besom.

Today, after a slight frost overnight the sun is shining and the magical low lying mist has lifted. I am taking gentle little walks with the dogs every day to fill my lungs with our pure Welsh air. It is such a beautiful day and very well-deserved as yesterday was not just wet but was a dull, dull, dull dark and dreary grey all day.

Isn't it funny how sunshine lifts everyone's spirits so? It must be a light thing, perhaps we truly are drawn to the light.

I am reminded that Halloween is approaching; my grandchildren are getting excited and have been busy carving huge orange pumpkins. I am still not yet inspired to write myself but I am following dear Exmoor Jane's advice to just be and to watch the raindrops on the windows, we get plenty of those. Anyways I have found a poem for you, a contemporary one written in 2001 by a poet unknown to me. The Internet is wonderful in the way it introduces me to poets and poems I might otherwise miss. This poem is not a very happy one so does not fit the mood of the day and for that I apologise.

Dispatch from the Home Front:

Halloween 2001

like every other year I sit outside with a guitar

while kids roam in small packs

from lit door to lit door

the costumes tonight are not that frightening

angels and fairies and superheroes abound

a few bloodsuckers and ghouls

a sprinkling of skeletons

no terrorists

the adults pretend to be scared

jessie (the giraffe from across the street)

solemnly hands me M & Ms from her stash

when I put the Snickers in her pumpkin

“honey,” I tell her

“it’s not a trade – it‘s a gift”

and she solemnly takes them back

the young girl in the bathrobe and curlers

wearing the sign that says

I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON

says to me

“I want to hear you play your prettyful music”

so

I hand her candy

and I pick up my guitar

to play a song appropriate to the season

(a song by the Grateful Dead)

for this world’s recent ghosts

this world

where unimaginable ashes

sift down on children’s beds

in one part of this world

the very rocks and baseballs

smell of abrasives, jet fuel, burning rubber, corpses

in another part of this world

they are making the mail glow white

long enough to kill what lives on the words

in another part of this world

this guitar would be

illegal

in that country a shrouded woman

has been carefully picking food from a minefield

(food that was air dropped in my name)

she runs and lifts her child from the ground

raising his head high up onto her shoulder

vainly trying to keep the frightening blood from spilling too much

it will take her years to fall asleep again

when she does fall asleep

she will dream of picking up a yellow bomblet

wrapping it in swaddling clothes

suckling it until it blooms hot and bright

but she will not cry

as she holds him in that dream

we all dream that dream these days

we all hold our children closer

while holding back tears

a dream like that

is not a gift

it is a trade

we have all already given

more than enough in return for this one

and you do not let go of your tears

when tears are all you have left

Halloween night

I am pushing aside the veil between the worlds

a mourning person waiting for dawn

pretending to be scared to cover real fear

while I give sweets and prettyful music

to my neighbors’children

we are all a long way from home

if I knew the way

I would take you home

Tony Brown
________________________________________

Tony Brown is a poet, publisher & host of the long-running Poets Asylum reading series at the Java Hut in Worcester, Massachusetts. You can find more of his work online at the Open Mike Poetry site.

Oatmeal and Inspiration

2011-10-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

Thank you for your good wishes in the comments, they mean a lot to me.

After having been really rather ill I am convalescing slowly and feeling a little stronger each day; I am eating well on a strict low-fat diet and though I am weak my body is feeling strangely well on it. I should be feeling even better when my gall-bladder is taken from me – please let it be soon.

All that’s missing is creative inspiration, I have none at all and feel quite bereft because of it so all I can post for you is a poem I heard on Radio 4’s Poetry Please on Sunday afternoon. It’s by Galway Kinnell and is called Oatmeal. Perhaps it struck a chord with me because I too eat oatmeal every morning and also eat it alone. I have never dreamed up an imaginary companion though as I am not a morning person, I love to be solitary and do not like to converse with anyone if I can help it.

I hope you enjoy the poem too – and pray tell me …….who would your imaginary companion be at breakfast time?

And please do tell me how I can get my inspiration back?

Oatmeal

I eat oatmeal for breakfast

I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.

I eat it alone.

I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.

Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health

if somebody eats it with you.

That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have

breakfast with.

Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary

companion.

Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge,

as he called it with John Keats.

Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:

due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,

and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal should

not be eaten alone.

He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat

it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had

enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John

Milton.

Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as

wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something

from it.

Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the

"Ode to a Nightingale."

He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad

a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through

his porridge.

He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his

pocket,

but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,

and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they

made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if

they got it right.

An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket

through a hole in his pocket.

He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,

and the way here and there a line will go into the

configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up

and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark,

causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.

He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about

the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some

stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.

I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal

alone.

When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."

He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words

lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.

He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there

is much of one.

But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started

on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their

clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,"

came to him while eating oatmeal alone.

I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering

furrows, muttering.

Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.

For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch

I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneously

gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh

to join me.

Galway Kinnell

About his work, Liz Rosenberg wrote in the Boston Globe: "Kinnell is a poet of the rarest ability, the kind who comes once or twice in a generation, who can flesh out music, raise the spirits and break the heart."

Bye for now,

Cait

A poem

2011-10-14T05:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry I have been off the radar for a while; I have had a spell in hospital as I was taken ill quite suddenly. Am on the mend now but waiting for a little operation some time soon (I hope). Times like this makes one appreciate friendship and quite coincidentally, among the doom, gloom and despair that seems to dominate the news these days I heard this poem on Radio 4's Today programme in the Thought for the Day slot.

Really bad news yesterday was hearing that Alan Bennett and the protestors have lost the fight to save Brent libraries from closure. Sad news indeed.

Anyway here is the poem.

Friendship

Such love I cannot analyse;

it does not rest in lips or eyes,

neither in kisses nor caress,

partly, I know, it’s gentleness

And understanding in one word

or in brief letters. It’s preserved

by trust and by respect and awe.

These are the words I’m feeling for.

Two people, yes, two lasting friends.

The giving comes, the taking ends.

There is no measure for such things.

For this all Nature slows and sings.

Elizabeth Jennings

A Sad Day

2011-09-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

Try never to count the days,try instead to make the days count.

It is a sad day here in Wales as we have now heard that the fourth missing miner has now been found dead so that is now all four men who have tragically lost their lives as a result of flood water underground.

All over the country everyone's thoughts and hearts are with the bereaved families of the men whose lives were lost.

May God rest their souls.

Just a poem tonight and it seems to fit the mood.

Amber

It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:
trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping—
a plastic gold dropping
through seasons and centuries to the ground—
until now.

On this fine September afternoon from which you are absent
I am holding, as if my hand could store it,
an ornament of amber
you once gave me.

Reason says this:
The dead cannot see the living.
The living will never see the dead again.

The clear air we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet
this resin once
collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell
and fell
which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as
they ever were
as though the past could be present and memory itself

a Baltic honey—
a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much
can be kept safe
inside a flawed translucence.

Eavan Boland

Just a picture and a poem

2011-09-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

Autumn leaves - Millais

West Virginia – A Life

Once a cog state,

good for only coal and oil and gas,

it was always almost heaven to me.

I sit out this lifetime on my porch now;

my dreams are ancient mountains,

cool trout waters, may apples and black walnuts

white pine and willow, sycamore.

Our old log cabin in the wildwoods,

my one-room school, a walking bridge,

grapevines over rivers, skimming stones.

Winter and I are kin now;

where once was warmth, sub-tropical and kind,

there’s only snow, bone-seeping ice, so cruelly cold.

I seek my solace in the Appalachian Fall,

its radiant colours lift me somewhere high,

a place near heaven, bright and God-given.

I still hear music in my heart,

the fiddlers and the balladeers, they move me

with their tunes of joy, laments of pain,

and strains of Ireland in their tears

Cait O’Connor

Hard Times

2011-09-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde 1854-1900

Philip Pullman's Speech

2011-08-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value. Blog False Economy

This is something that should be read by all who love books, all who love libraries.

Read and pass it on if you are moved by Philip Pullman's heartfelt speech.

Hope

2011-08-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Hope - The artist is George Frederick Watts RA

1817-1904

This is Barack Obama's favourite painting and I have to say I love it very much too.

Hope

Hope lives in silence,

his face so often obscured

in low-slung shadows, esconced in sunbeams.

Such peace; like a silent order, save for birdsong

and its new day’s heartfelt repetitions.

Yesterday a white down feather lay upon a loved one’s shoulder,

while a black cat slinked, ghost-like, past French windows in our view;

(today, two magpies graze the garden).

Late, summer-scented, sudden and secret, a swift rain shower descends,

falling vertically, innocently unaware, unabashed by the sunlight

which is understated; warm but not yet bright.

Verging on unnoticed, to me it is a treasure,

unfolding a promise of persistence.

Positivity comes as its gift, unwrapping itself

in an August rainbow, just for you and me,

something you might dream of in some future winter.

Cait O’Connor

Jorg Luis Borges, the Argentine poet.........

2011-08-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen on the Google home page that it is his 112th birthday today; here is one of his quotes and a sweetish poem. I think I have blogged a poem by him in a previous post but my Google (blog) Search button is not working for me. Perhaps some kind soul could check and see if it works for you? My new computer has a mind of it's own, has teamed up with Google Blogger and both seem intent on forbidding.

Anyone else hate Windows 7?

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. "Funes the Memorious," Labyrinths (1964).

Anyone else had that feeling?

Here is the poem.

Instants

If I could live again my life,

In the next - I'll try,

- to make more mistakes,

I won't try to be so perfect,

I'll be more relaxed,

I'll be more full - than I am now,

In fact, I'll take fewer things seriously,

I'll be less hygienic,

I'll take more risks,

I'll take more trips,

I'll watch more sunsets,

I'll climb more mountains,

I'll swim more rivers,

I'll go to more places - I've never been,

I'll eat more ice creams and less (lime) beans,

I'll have more real problems - and less imaginary

ones,

I was one of those people who live

prudent and prolific lives -

each minute of his life,

Of course that I had moments of joy - but,

if I could go back I'll try to have only good moments,
If you don't know - thats what life is made of,

Don't lose the now!
I was one of those who never goes anywhere

without a thermometer,

without a hot-water bottle,

and without an umberella and without a parachute,
If I could live again - I will travel light,

If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet

at the beginning of spring till

the end of autumn,

I'll ride more carts,

I'll watch more sunrises and play with more children,

If I have the life to live - but now I am 85,

- and I know that I am dying ...

Jorge Luis Borges

Anyone else think this poem reminds them of another one?

Where has all the good news gone?

2011-08-18T03:09:00.000-07:00

Where has all the good news gone?

It’s the shy but gifted child at the back of the classroom

who was cradled in compromise,

knows the truth, has all the answers

but simply cannot raise her hand.

It’s what God would bring, or the angels,

but the mouths of the media,

brought up on the bad

are too often gagged or censored.

It blows in on the wind sometimes, unbidden;

and before we have time to prepare, it will circle a room

looking for the best place to land.

It hovers; rearranging, repositioning,

raising energies, brightening auras.

refuting all that’s gone before.

Exploding, it exposes our cynicism,

despairing of our apathy,

knowing it will lead to anarchy.

Wanting to embrace you, it will instead shake you,

will move you and change you.

It’s what we should all try to seek

every damned minute.

It’s in this poem trying to speak.

You may have given up on it.

But you deserve it.

You deserve it.

Cait O’Connor

High Haf

2011-08-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

Picture by Gayle Murphy

High Haf

You deceived me with your promises

of bright, warm days and long, light nights.

How could you.

We were to fly among the hills

and walk through new warm sea;

instead I emerge like a pit pony

into the coal-black afternoon.

You have done this before,

but I am soft and need your touch

yet you tease me with trailers of might be

you advertise so well it is a pity

you have nothing to sell.

You are the summer love:

Transient, naïve and remembered

with distorted fondness.

Christopher Challener

10 metaphors for a Friday

2011-08-12T02:35:00.000-07:00

10 metaphors for a Friday

Rosebuds sigh pure innocence

Extroversion, the ever open door

Patience is a collared dove

Summer, a smile

Autumn, first chill

Winter, a death

Spring, the rebirth

Seasons fit my moods.

Days are lifetimes.

Tears are a well

Cait O’Connor

For a brilliant article on the riots go to Peter Oborne's article in the Telegraph.

Just for Once

2011-08-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

Dingle Cottage by renowned artist Ellen Lefrak

Just for Once

Just for once let me reveal what holds me here in this cottage, once a blacksmith’s home and now my would-be hermit’s abode where I live, dream and write in such sweet seclusion.

It is a cerise and blue sunrise that calls me, drawing me from my bed to meet the day anew while all is fresh and free of Man’s contamination. All is still quiet, there are no jarring sounds, no ringing phone, no bad news on the radio; none of modern life’s stressful interruptions.

Just for once the cottage wakes on a summer morning clean and bright and smiling broadly. Each of its little corners warm from the rays of the sun and all the surfaces shining having been polished to a fault. There are jugs of roses and sweet peas, both scented, new novels in piles, their worlds waiting to be lost in The crystals hanging in the windows reflect the sun and cast rainbows round the room (we call them fairies or angels ); there are the cherished little treasures hanging from brass hooks on ancient oak beams, beams which once framed the finest British sailing ships of old. What stories could they tell?

The white cat is home from a night’s hunting, she lies on a windowsill; birdwatching is her favourite pastime. The two dogs mill about, eager to go outside, their excitement at the thought of tasting the new day is contagious. I don outdoor shoes and throw on a cape over my night-wear. No-one will see me thus attired. I venture out.

As I stand and watch the river I cannot keep from singing. The river plays its melodies and little white horses race across stones. There is much life in our river.

It is not only the fish who jump. My heart does too as it remembers I have long days ahead that are filled with blank pages. I cannot help but twirl but it is a secret dance for with all the world seemingly asleep, only the earliest of birds can see me in my nightgown at the water’s edge, a grey haired old diva dancing for joy.

This new day has begun.

Let me not be too afraid to say that just for once, all is well.

Cait O’Connor

Percy Wakes Me

2011-07-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

The greatest love is a mother's; then a dog's; then a sweetheart's.

Polish Proverb

If I lived in a big enough house this is (one of) the breeds of dog I would like to own, it is of course an Irish Wolfhound. Like Finn, our much loved lurcher, they are very loyal and affectionate. Unfortunately I couldn't fit one into my wee cottage.

And talking of dogs, I promised you another favourite poem from the Mary Oliver book.

Here it is:

Percy Wakes Me

Percy wakes me and I am not ready...

Now he's eager for action: a walk, then breakfast....

He is sitting on the kitchen counter where he is not supposed to be.

How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you needed me, to wake me.

He thought he would hear a lecture and deeply his eyes begin to shine.

He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.

He squirms and squeals; he has done something that he needed and now he hears that it's okay.

I scratch his ears, I turn him over and touch him everywhere. He is

wild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then he has breakfast, and he is happy.

This is a poem about Percy.

This is a poem about more than Percy.

Think about it.

Mary Oliver

Birdwatching

2011-07-09T09:41:00.000-07:00

Birdwatching

Martins, luck-bringing eave-dwellers,

diminished in number

are heralding summer again.

A gang of sparrows,

grown in size and confidence

play back my London childhood.

From its woodland hide

the jay ventures out,

predatory in coloured robes.

No longer so rare,

the red kite looks down;

buzzards driven far abroad.

Elegant in flight,

statuesque in my river,

the heron stands in silence.

Robin, my steadfast friend

companionable all the year

is sociable, yet always stands apart.

Lone pheasant, mate-less

escapee from death

is safe within my garden.

Dippers in their secret home

from generations past

still bring their gift of constancy.

Akin to angels and patient,

harmonious to a fault,

the gentle dove will wait.

Would hell be a birdless garden?

No birdsong

no angels in its wake;

Nature’s avian summer gone awry.

Cait O’Connor

Next poem

2011-07-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

Foxgloves

Rebecca, our first-born,now thirty-nine

flies in to check that I am well again

and spots beside the bed the photograph

I took of you when you were carrying her

six months gone in your purple polo-neck

and blue smock, and laughing, I remember,

because I have decorated with sea pinks

your black abundant hair, and given you

foxgloves to hold as though to welcome her

to the strand at Inch and the Kerry hills.

Can you go on smiling from your dune-throne

with your hair and hands full of summer flowers?

Because the marram grass is damp and sandy

I have spread a yellow oilskin under you.

Michael Longley

A Hundred Doors

Pics and a poem

2011-07-04T12:55:00.000-07:00

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here is the second of the favourite poems I promised you.

How I Go to the Woods

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unbearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

Mary Oliver
Swan

Summertime

2011-07-01T14:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

Those who wish to sing will always find a song

Swedish Proverb

I am sorry I have been absent for so long; I am going to try and be around more. Life has the habit of getting in the way of writing and it takes up too much time and why does time go so much more quickly nowadays?

In spite of life all is well here in my little Welsh heaven; even the fish are jumping but I cannot lie and say the cotton is high. Cotton grows wild in my spiritual home across the water, up on the bogs but not around here in my little Welsh valley.

(I just love that song Summertime, perhaps I will post it for you?)

My thoughts are on all things avian this morning as our writing group ‘homework’ is to write a poem with the bird theme. I have many written in the past but had better not cheat and pull one out - instead I must try to produce something new.

My thoughts are very often on our winged neighbours but especially so at this time of year when we feel outnumbererd by the birds and the beasts who share our abode. There are birds a-plenty, I have never known so many which is very encouraging after the Big Freeze of last winter when we had temperatures of minus sixteen for many days and many of their precious little lives were lost.

So the list of birds species in the garden grows ever-longer and they all seem to take it in turns to visit the feeders, it is as if they have set ‘appointments’. Some breeds will mix happily side by side – the doves living up to their name being the gentlest and most harmonious. Some visit en famille, the woodpeckers and the nuthatches for example and their wee ones wait to be fed by their parents, their feathers quivering in anticipation, which is such a joy to watch. We have a real gang of sparrows now (we had none to speak of before) and that is also good news as they are supposed to be in decline. Sparrows were the only birds I knew really when I was growing up in London.

Feeding the birds (and the gate-crashing squirrels) may be draining our purses but is at the same time filling our hearts with gladness as we watch them from the kitchen, bedroom and parlour windows –and surely gladness is worth more than money anyway? Just one of the few things remaining that cannot (yet) be taxed or measured only in financial terms?

Before I go I must mention a couple of poetry books which I have recently enjoyed. The American poet Mary Oliver first, she is one of my very favourite poets and her book Swan is fantastic, so good I am going to have to buy a copy. I have picked four favourites to share with you but there will be just one today.

Here is a taster and as avian poems go this one is hard to beat.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -

An armful of white blossoms,

A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings; a snow bank, a bank of lilies,

Biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall

Knifing down the black ledges?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -

A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet

Like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

Mary Oliver

Books are like buses. You don’t see one you want and then three appear altogether. The other book I love is the Irish poet Michael Longley’s A Hundred Doors which a friend kindly lent me recently. I have favourites among them to share with you and will do so very soon.

Finally the great poet Graham Clifford has an excellent book out called Welcome Back to the Country. I have favourites there that I would love to let you taste in a future blog.

Shall I leave you with a song?

Bye for now,
Cait

Josephine Hart RIP

2011-06-05T04:32:00.000-07:00

Writer Josephine Hart who died this week.

Josephine Hart's last message: 'Without reading I would have found life less bearable'

Dear Diary,

I am sorry I have not been here for so long. I've certainly not given up this blog but just lately life has taken over a little. I hope to be present again from now on and just had to pay tribute today to a fine writer who moved on from this world this past week.

I have copied a newspaper article from the net and below that I add some quotes.

Novelist Josephine Hart gave a powerful endorsement of the Evening Standard's campaign against illiteracy days before her death.

The writer and "visionary" poetry campaigner lived her life cherishing the power and beauty of words, and said she was delighted by the Standard's "wonderful campaign" highlighting the shocking number of children unable to read.

In a statement dictated from her hospital bed, she said: "Without reading, and for me especially poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable, and infinitely less enjoyable. It has never let me down."

Today tributes poured in for a woman revered for her brilliance as a writer, intellect and determination to encourage children to develop an understanding of the great poets.

For two years she kept secret that she was battling primary peritoneal cancer. Even her agent Ed Victor did not know until the day before her death yesterday. He told the Standard: "She wrote one of the most stunning, dazzling, moving, powerful first novels of the last half-century.

"She wrote because she needed to write and she wrote what she wanted to write. I think her passion for literature and her passion for poetry burned with the purest flame."

She attended a Poetry Week rehearsal at the Donmar on Monday but was unable to see the sell-out shows. Lady Antonia Fraser said: "Josephine Hart was beautiful in everything she did (including how she looked) but above all there was her passionate love of beauty in language, especially poetry."

Born in Ireland, she drummed into her two sons the need to "grab life by the throat" after losing two brothers and a sister by the time she was 17.

Married to Lord Saatchi, her first novel, Damage, sold more than one million copies. It was translated into 27 languages. Jeremy Irons starred in the film version.
Here are some quotes by her:

Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

Josephine Hart (Damage)

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

— Josephine Hart

Memory is never pure. And recollection is always coloured by the life lived since.

Those who do not have imaginary conversations do not love.

I always recognize the forces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. The inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again.

We learn from tragedy. Slowly.

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

Lucky people should hide. Pray the days of wrath do not visit their home.

For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird

Rest in Peace Josephine
You are free to fly now.

Bye for now,
Cait.

Humans and Avians

2011-04-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

Just a quick post tonight. My time is being taken up in the garden just lately. I am a fair weather gardener and the weather has been very fair so….out I have been.

I haven’t seen any otters since the last time (see previous post) but I did see two wild ducks swimming in the river this morning which was exciting. I stood stock still for about ten minutes on the bank and they didn’t notice me there. Usually the ducks fly off if they catch sight of humans. They spent a long time swimming up and down as if they were looking round our little bit of river; I got the (probably stupid) feeling that they were ‘house-hunting’ and I prayed they would like our little piece of heaven for their home. They both ducked under the water in the end and disappeared - I like to think they went behind the old tree stump and a huge mess of branches that sits on the bank and that they are setting up home there or have done so already. I will keep you posted.

Talking of posts I just have to post this poem for you from the new Neil Astley Bloodaxe poetry anthology Being Human. I borrowed it from the library, it’s brand new and I am the first to borrow it but will no doubt end up buying a copy. I already own and love Staying Alive and Being Alive. I've only read a few pages of this one so far but have fallen in love with one poem. I wonder if you will like it too? It is funny (sorry that was unintentional but Funny happens to be the title) how poems still often translate so beautifully into English. It must depend a lot on the skill of the translator I guess. It’s funny too that the subject matter of the poem is also avian. I shall have to read more by this poet.

Here it is.

(There is no punctuation)

Funny

What's it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don't know
it's being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity
being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity
being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful
being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat
breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly
it's being on fire
with a nest made of ashes
eating bread
while filling up on hunger
it's dying without love
it's loving through death

That's funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air

Anna Kamienska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh

Bye for now,
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait

Nature news

2011-04-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

Otter Swimming

paulamayberyartgallery.com

Dear Diary,

I had a wonderful experience yesterday evening, one you get not too many times in a lifetime - I saw an otter close up in our river in the daylight. I had been out picking a few daffodils for the parlour and was pruning a few wee bits and pieces as I made my way back indoors. I decided to throw the very tiny clippings into the river and as I did so, on the opposite bank I spied an otter ducking and diving. I stood still and watched it swim upstream and out of sight. I flew excitedly indoors to tell M and as we looked out of the window a heron landed in the very same spot in the river where the otter had been. The heron is here a lot, he is the most patient and stealthy bird as he makes his way upstream on the lookout for fish. Every year a parent heron will bring a young one to the river, obviously teaching it how to catch fish.

I have seen otters before in the moonlight, I hear them regularly on my nightly walks and there is always otter spraint on our banks. I blogged about otters many times but I have never seen one up close in the daylight before though I have seen mink and polecats. M has glimpsed otters in the early evening diving near our little bridge, he was struck by how huge they are, especially the dogs (males).

Tonight I decided to sit by the river and stage an otter- watch. I have just been out at the same time as I saw the otter yesterday which was 7.30 pm. I sat by the river partially hidden by a laurel bush but with a clear view of the river.

We have a dippers’ nest just upstream under the road bridge and I had a very clear view of that, there is much activity there - I believe there may be young ones in the wooden nest box. Dippers have nested here for generations, I have read about them in a book written by someone who grew up here. We are very lucky to be able to watch them in such close proximity, they are used to us and even tolerate the dogs being near them on the river ‘beach’.

I sat by the river for quite a while, all was quiet apart from the dippers flying downstream to fish and then returning to the nest, the occasional car passing by and various birds singing in the trees. I decided to go out later when dusk is starting to descend.

As soon as I came indoors I looked out of the cottage window and saw an unusually large bird, but not as big as a buzzard on the little bridge so I got my binoculars out to see what it was. I think it was a kestrel and as I called M to show him, it swooped down onto the surface of the river in an attempt to catch something - obviously one of my beloved dippers. Luckily he missed - I hope that the dipper dove down deep into the river. This kestrel must have seen me go into the cottage before deciding to swoop on his prey!

So it is all happening here on the wildlife stage. I often think that I would love to set up an infra-red night camera but they are quite expensive.

I will report back as soon as there is more news on the nature front.

Bye for now,

Cait

Positives and Revisitings

2011-04-06T04:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

I have just heard of three recent deaths in the local area, two of which were young people, it is so sad. Round here everyone knows everyone so any death touches the whole community. Bad news doesn’t seem right on such a beautiful morning. Why do such sad things have to happen and why in threes? I can only believe they have all gone to a better place, a cliché I know but I am sure it is true.

Just for today as we say in Reiki circles I will try and dwell on the positives here on Earth. It is a beautiful spring day and I will not tarry long as the outdoors is calling me. I have already been out to my local garage, they did a small job on the exhaust pipe of my car and have not charged me a penny; this is the third time they have done this sort of thing. Isn’t it wonderful that in today’s Rip-Off Britain there are still some folk left who are not out to fleece you. A good start to the day.

I have just re-read Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn for my book club, it was such a joy. I am not one to re-read books very often but Toibin’s way with storytelling just flows, his writing is superb. If you haven’t read him yet please do. He is one of my favourite writers; I admit that so many of my faves are Irish authors, it is not bias, it is just that the Irish love words so much and weave them so well. I am now re-reading another - Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry. I almost bathe in his prose; I just have to stop and go back to re-read his words, they are so poetic.

Talking of writing I have set up a blog for our writing group members as a place to post our homework and leave each other comments. Just because I like a change I have ventured into Wordpress (ssssshhhhhh don’t tell Blogger) but although it all seems very professional I am a real Wordpress virgin still finding my way on there. We are starting to post all our old bits of ‘homework’ and it struck me how many pieces of work are there which proves that the group is worthwhile and does indeed spur us on to write. The blog will remain firmly private, open only to members.

I am still tired from the clocks springing forward. I can’t go to bed on time, I can’t get up in the morning and I look like death warmed up. I am on the genealogy trail once more, not my family but someone else’s - she has a close relative with a bit of a mysterious past. It’s a case of burning the midnight oil with this one, I think I should have been a detective. My daughter is on the case too; perhaps we should set up in business…….

I received two lovely cards yesterday. One was this picture by Gu We, a new-to-me artist, isn't it lovely when you discover a new one? I have posted one of his pics as my new header above........

and one by John Shannon, a tree-free card not this one but the one I received I can't find online.

What else am I looking forward to today on this day-off work day?

A CD soon arriving in the post by Gurrumul, so haunting, it reaches deep into my soul. I have posted this before but it must be a time for revisiting,

Spending some time in the garden in the sunshine. I have treated myself to a new garden bench - my present very cheap one is starting to crumble and the new one should be delivered soon so when I am tired from gardening I can try it out.

Reading more Annie Dunne of course, also in the sunshine, if it lasts.

Watching the birds nesting from my window; several species are busy at the moment and I shall need to get the binoculars out.

Visiting my daughter and granddaughters later (I have to keep them supplied with reading matter).

I had better go,
Enjoy your moments today.
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait.

Christy Moore - Magdalen Laundries

2011-04-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

Words by Joni Mitchell

Magdalene Laundries

2011-04-03T05:48:00.000-07:00

Turning the Corner

2011-03-29T14:16:00.000-07:00

Turning the Corner

As she settles in for sleep she remembers the words of the clairvoyant as she scried in her crystal ball.
She told her she could see barriers around her heart, shutting out her need for love……….

Even in a dream it takes her by surprise,

such an old but pretty gate, quite small,

wreathed in scrolls of heavy iron,

their Celtic spiral patterns painted black as night.

The gate is tightly shut but able to be opened

if she would only try.

Belief helps her open it,

trust takes her through it,

relief is there to greet her at the other side

where she feels strangely safe.

On a bright pathway

strewn with coloured blossoms

fear takes its flight,

till she feels strangely light.

As she turns the corner

she does not look back

but only forward, led by hope

to a place where peace can take her hand

and bring to her a heart where love lies,

between the arms of stillness and serenity.

Cait O’Connor

Too much light and shade perhaps

2011-03-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

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

March Garden

2011-03-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

It has to be a quick blog

2011-03-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

Listening to: Adele’s 21 Album.

Thinking about: the problems in the world.

Feeling: sad about the problems in the world.

Dreaming of: a perfect garden.

Dear Diary,

I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.

Sir George Porter

At the start of spring—the vernal equinox—day and night are each approximately 12 hours long (with the actual time of equal day and night, in the Northern Hemisphere, occurring a few days before the vernal equinox). The Sun crosses the celestial equator going northward; it rises exactly due east and sets exactly due west.

It is a special time of course, the Spring Equinox was yesterday. It was 15 degrees today and sunny even though the weather forecasters said Wales would be cloudy. Seems like nothing can be relied upon these days. At least the sunshine and the abundance of yellow daffodils is cheering everyone up.

I have not been lucky enough to see the Super Moon, it has been covered in cloud every night.

I worked hard in the garden today starting my yearly battle with the cursed ground elder. To reward myself I visited the garden centre and treated myself to an angel statue, a birthday present to me in advance……. I got the price reduced as the poor wee thing had damaged toes on one of his feet. I also bought a large pink David Austin shrub rose, well it will be five feet tall when it grows….both of these will go in a circular bed in my back garden. I found a witches ball in a local antique centre last week, it is made of a gorgeous deep blue coloured glass, that will go at the feet of my angel. The person who served me in the antique shop asked me what I was going to do with the witches ball (fishing to see if I was a witch perhaps?) and I told her I was going to put it in my garden. She said my garden sounded interesting. I wish…….

I also bought some winter pansies and violas (violae?) for my baskets to replace those bought just before the Big Freeze which disintegrated in the many minus 18 degrees of frost days.

Just a quick blog tonight as someone else wants to get on to the computer (!) and I need to get to bed soon for an early night as I am back to work tomorrow.

I will return on another day with pics of my new acquisitions.

Off to bed now with Colm Toibin,

Nos Da,

Cait

St Patrick's Day

2011-03-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

St Patrick's Day Dreaming

On a St Patrick's Day's morning

I can only dream myself home

back to that Irish mountain's precious stream
amongst carpets of sweet celandine

with purple violets at their edge,
peeping shyly, hiding coyly

and so timid in their beauty.

Daffodils, full-on bright yellow,
not the least bit bashful,
compete with primroses

along the river’s bank.

And all around is greening

and every plant and shrub is budding,

simply bursting into life.

And all the while the river sings her song
and birds join in the chorus as she flows.

And I detect a brightness in the tune,
a tinkling sound of joy rings in its melody,
as if the whole of Nature loves an Irish Spring

and all can feel God’s beauty in its midst.

Cait O'Connor

And just for you on this special day here is a poem by the late John O'Donohue, one I have posted before but make no apologies for doing so again.

Beannacht*

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

John O'Donohue

*Blessing

(From his book Echoes of Memory)

And here is an extra treat, an interview which took place in 2005 with dear John O'Donohue, God rest his soul.

On Beauty.
Click on the link below.

News | John O'Donohue

www.johnodonohue.com

(Pic by Barrie Maguire)

The Ides of March

2011-03-15T04:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Diary,

Paradise starts with the love we show each other here on earth.

Four-month old baby rescued

There seems to be so much unrest in many places in the world of late. People are roused and are rising as one against oppression in more than one country, this can only be a good thing but so dangerous. When bad things happen I always think of the saying You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and I can’t help feeling that we are entering a period of great change. We can only hope and pray that all will be well in the end.

Even the Earth is reflecting this unrest with so many earthquakes of late. Yesterday a blogger I follow, Decadent Housewife, alerted readers to this blog written by a woman living in Japan. I read it before I went to bed last night and it really brought me close in to Sue’s life (and her family and friends) who are luckily alive but living now with shortages of every kind and most dreadful of all on top of the shock of the earthquake and the tsunami are suffering the heightened fear of radioactive fallout. I read back through Sue’s postings before the earthquake and tsunami struck the people of Japan and it was, much like ours, filled with the everyday and you could say but only in hindsight, rather mundane matters.

My heart goes out, a cliché I know but it does, especially to all the bereaved; there will be many orphans and many who have lost children. Am I the only one in that I almost feel a sense of voyeuristic guilt watching the film footage taken by onlookers of the tsunami as it struck and I wonder how people had the calm presence of mind to film it (they must have been up high surely?). I get rather annoyed with journalists who keep commenting on the huge number of cars strewn about - the number of cars shocked me, they typify our dependence on them and how they pollute in more ways than one. James Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today was waxing rather too lyrically about the cars, saying they would not see the light of day again - I found this rather insulting in the light of the numbers of human lives lost.

Watching the news from Japan I am lost for words and have been quiet for a few days, wanting to blog about it but hardly knowing how to express my sadness and my sympathy for the Japanese people. I am glad that our local Mid Wales Search and Rescue Firemen are going out to help.

Sue gives this wise advice, something we all hear and say over again but too soon forget.

Make the most of the present.

Live in each moment.

The present is indeed our gift and we should treat it as such, savouring each one and the next that is soon to be upon us and enjoying every aspect of life which is really so short and meant to be good; dispelling negativity and dwelling on the positive blessings. I often wake in the small hours unable to get back to sleep; I usually start ruminating and worry often dominates my thoughts, they enlarge at this time of day, I know not why. When I woke this morning at 4 am I deliberately set out to think only of blessings and it was incredible the numbers there are, they are endless really.

As I sit here at the computer I can start counting blessings again: my hands, my ability to type and spell and read and write, the computer itself, the internet, the view from my window, my cottage, my animals beside me, two dogs and a cat, music playing. Time off work, I am feeling better, the daffodils are coming out, I have good things to look forward to, books to read, places to go, plants, birds, warmth, clothes, food, peace, photographs, my camera, blogs, email messages,…… I will stop but I could go on all day really and I haven’t mentioned the most important blessings of all, my children, grandchildren, other family and dear friends.

The Dalai Lama got it right when he said Only Kindness Matters. The pictures from Japan should bring home to us the fragility of materialism and that what really matters are people and the love that we can give to each other (and the Earth).

In one of your moments do send out a prayer for Sue and all the Japanese people,

Bye for now,
Go mbeannai Dia duit,
Cait.

pay attention: a river of stones

2011-03-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

From small stones a book has been produced. This is how it began with the words of writer Fiona Robyn.

Fiona Robyn is on a mission to help people connect with the world through writing. She is a novelist, a blogger, a creativity coach and a Buddhist. She writes a weekly inspirational newsletter & runs e-courses. She started writing small stones in '05, launched a handful of stones in '08, & started a river of stones with her fiancé Kaspa in '11. She is very fond of Earl Grey tea and homemade cake, her cats Fatty and Silver, & the lovely Malvern hills (which she can gaze at from her home office window).

This is how it began. Fiona's words:

If you’d like to feel more at home with yourself and with the world, then you’re in the right place. Write small stones. You don’t need any previous experience of writing or any special equipment. You just need to notice one thing properly every day & then write it down.

Pay attention: a river of stones.

This is a book I shall be ordering and I would like to recommend it to you. The excellent idea was spawned by Fiona Robyn and I am pleased that there may be a future collaboration. I think I shall try and write something myself if possible; I have no excuses as I am lucky enough to live beside a river of stones.

Below is a little interview I had with Fiona's partner about the book..

For those who have not heard of this creative writing project can you tell people a little about it?

Years ago Fiona started writing small stones - one per day. A few lines of writing based on an observation in the world. She's been encouraging people to write them for a while and has an e-zine at www.ahandfulofstones.com. Towards the end of last year we saw the potential of using writing small stones to encourage people to really connect with the world - to really pay attention.

Somehow the idea of encouraging people to write one small stone a day for the month of January entered the conversation and a river of stones was born. We had lots and lots of people taking part, all over the world, and received lots of lovely comments and emails. When we started to see how many people we writing, and how many people were writing well - we had the idea to collate lots of our favorites in to a book.

Was it relatively easy to self-publish? Would you recommend this route to others?
We received submissions all through the month of February, more than three thousand pieces of writing, (most only a few lines long). About once a week, we'd print a batch out, sit down together and read through each one. We chose based on what fitted the 'form' of a small stone: how observational was the writing? occasionally we suggested edits to create a stone that was more focused on the world, than on the writers experience of themselves, or ask contributors about repeating words, or capitalization.
This meant that not long after our submission deadline we knew what was going in. We'd also collected and written some prose pieces. We then worked in to the night for a couple of days, creating the order of the chapters and so on, creating the documents in the correct format. It helped that Fiona had used lulu before to publish and had book templates on hand.

I designed the cover and the insides of the book, and we had to proof read everything ourselves. I know some writers who publish with 'small press' publishers and although much of the support, in terms of editing, is much less than it used to be, you still do get your manuscript read by a professional, and a cover designed and typeset. And depending on the size of the publisher they often have different routes to sales than an individual might have.
I think if you are writing something very specialist, and you want to create a hard-copy for yourself and people who might be interested in that area then print-on-demand is not a bad way to go. But it does take time and energy. On the other hand you can end up with something really beautiful at the end of the process.

I do hope the River will keep flowing. Will there be any future editions?
The main focus of the River was never the book for us, although recently it became an all consuming process. What is central is encouraging people to go into the world and really pay attention, to see and hear and smell the things we usually miss, the wildflowers growing in the cracks in the pavement and so on.
We're going to run the river again in July 2011 asking people to observe and write one thing down each day.
About half way through the process of reading submissions, sitting in a local coffee-shop, we talked about how much work the book had been and how we'd love to do something 'low maintenance' in July. I'm going to have another go at collating .rss feeds of people's blogs (the technology failed me in January) so that we have a webspace where anyone can log on and see the river. As I said I tried that this year with the Yahoo! Pipes widget and it only worked intermittently.

We're both away in July as well, in the second week we're running our 'Connecting with Others' workshop in France, a week long workshop using writing, and using psychical theatre to connect with the world.
After July? Who knows.... Next year maybe...

Remind us how we can buy copies of the book.
Currently available to download, in paperback and hardback at Lulu.com - soon to be available at Amazon. Watch this space.

Her New Beau

2011-03-07T02:18:00.000-08:00

A chameleon does not leave one tree until he is sure of another
Arabian Proverb

Her New Beau

Sometimes she wonders if it is kind to keep him in a jar
as he surely has a brain,
a rarity in these no-brain parts.
She has always attracted these reptilian males
but this one popped up spilling culture
from his wide, reptilian mouth.
He is, after all, a Guardian reader,
a slow and gently creeping thing, ophidian
and his eyes are not too bulgy,
a rarity in these bulging-eye infested parts.
An intellectual reptile, both hard to say and to believe,
he will readily cosy up and chat to old ladies
who are shrivelled up and just as unattractive as he
but they do say affinity breeds kind deeds.
His warm, slow breath is always light;
no wild, Welsh dragon, heavy-breather of the fire is he
(and between you and me there are far too many of those
in these heavy-breathing parts).
He cuts quite the fine dash in his suit of green
and his wrap-around vermilion scarf
and she is secretly charmed by his un-croaky
but not quite tipping-into-velvet voice.
They both want the same things from life:
warmth, enough food, drink in moderation
and plenty of loving attention.
She hopes this one will not be another chameleon
but still she wonders,
is it really kind to keep him in a jar?

Cait O’Connor

Tree of Life

2011-03-05T03:54:00.000-08:00

Tree of Life Gustav Klimt

Genealogy Days

Perhaps it was because I had no roots at all, I took to
playing keenly and too well the generation game;
making myself at home in others’ times,
playing the extra’s part in others’ live-in history.
Chasing the dead, feeling joy but also others’ pain,
treading with care when walking in another’s shoes,
spying on the secrets and the sorrows from their past.

Detection is not easy but persistence pays me well
through the many hours of boredom, sweat and toil
but finding folk is like a fever breaking.
Consanguinity, linking life to life,
creating a wider, ever-spreading family tree,
beginning with paternity and maternity,
growing a tree of linkage, lineage and heredity,
attaining a sense of place,
gaining an identity.

Cait O’Connor

March Ramblings

2011-03-02T06:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Diary,

It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society.

J. Krishnamurti

It has been too long since my last posting so I can only offer many apologies. I have been suffering from a berludy virus that is doing the rounds. I am still not fully better so bear with me, I am a wee bit fragile. I had a break of fever in the night and felt so much better, so much so that I got up for an hour and checked emails etc while supping on ginger tea.

What am I doing now? Very little, keeping warm having dosed myself with strong analgesics, cough mixture and herbal teas. I am trying to avoid going t o the GP and going down the antibiotic route.

Blessings?

Radio 4. How could I live without it?

The book programme at 6.30 pm on BBC2 every evening with Anne Robinson (don’t worry, she has softened and is excellent in this, she has also apologised to the Welsh!). She and Chris Evans also made a fantastic case against closing libraries on TV recently so both have gone up in my estimation.

A ‘comforter’ which I bought in a lovely craft shop in a local market town recently. It is Fairtrade, made in Nepal and just the thing for my sore throat. It is knitted in multicolour; turquoise, rusty red, burgundy, greens and dark pinks.   I am a firm believier in colour healing. It is also very soft and soothing to my neck and throat., if I had the energy I would photograph it for you.

The weather is also comforting me, it is bright and blue. cloudless and sunny (!), as it was yesterday for St David’s Day. The sky was a mass of blue then too which made the day special. I spotted several children in national costume which was sweet.   The yellow sun here in Wales made up for the lack of daffodils in my garden which are nowhere near out yet. I have instead bought some wee pots of the lovely dwarf varieties and they are very cheering. Yellow is the perfect colour to lift us from winter blues.

A new magazine to get lost in.

Some new books ordered from the library:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog., Muriel Barbery
Life in a Cottage Garden, Carol Klein
Stranger in the Mirror, Jane Shilling.
Life Alignment, Philippa Lubbock
A Discovery of Witches, Deborah E Harkness
Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx
21 golden rules for cosmic ordering, Barbel Mohr
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

A no-work today day luckily.

A poem is brewing in me, a line came to me during the night.

I made a breakthrough in my husband’s genealogy trail yesterday when I found a relative in France, thanks to the Ancestry website.

The birds in my garden, better than TV sometimes, I could watch them for hours.

My daphne is flowering, its colour is a perfect mauve.

I am soon going to make a big pot of spicy and hopefully curing, vegetable soup.   I had a very tasty bowl of spiced parsnip soup in the aforementioned craft shop last week, very spicy indeed, just how I like it. And along with most delicious home-made bread it was delicious.

March is underway, thank God. A friend and I have come to an agreement, we would like to abolish two months from the calendar and they are December (my number one hate it is so stressful, pressured and I hate it!) and also February as most folk are a tad depressed, exhausted, or are suffering from some virus or possibly all three.

But now the only way is up and

(wait for it a cliché is coming)

Spring is just around the corner……………………..

But just before I go here is a newly discovered poem by Elizabeth Bishop.

The End Of March

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
--it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost...
A kite string?--But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of--are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l'américaine.
I'd blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
--at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
--a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

Why?

2011-02-22T12:38:00.000-08:00

Why?

Why did God make Men; was She only joking?
Why does the caged bird sing?
Why do I beat myself up and always drive myself on?
Why do the good die young?
Why do I always fall asleep on the sofa
and then wake at the end of the film?
Why can’t I sleep when I get to bed
but not want to wake in the morning?
Why do I feel wide awake at night
yet could easily drowse the day long?
Why does time pass more quickly the older you get?
Why does each year go faster than the last?
Why do a few minutes pass so slowly when I am willing them to go by?
Why do hours just whiz by on the computer?
Why does time fly when I’m having fun?
(Where does the time go?).
Why does food always taste better out of doors?
Why, if I am looking for a particular card in my purse, it will be the last to be found?
Why does a good book always end too quickly?
Why do people only call by when the house is a tip?
Why does no-one call when it’s clean and tidy?
Why, if heat rises, is it colder the higher up you go?
Why does the phone ring just as I am dishing up a meal or wallowing in the bath?
Why does a word keep cropping up after it has been discussed?
Why do we always want what we haven’t got
and not appreciate what we already have?
Why is youth wasted on the young?
Why can’t there be an end to war?
Why do we never learn from history?
Why do we laugh?
Why do we cry?
Why do we write?
Why do we blog?
Why are we here?
Why are you reading this cr**?
Why do we worry anyway?

Answers on a postcard please.
(Or in comments below).

Cait O’Connor

On Finding An Ancestor's Will

2011-02-18T14:48:00.000-08:00

On Finding An Ancestor’s Will

In Cumberland, upon a hillside’s crag,
sweet Archibald, I found you.

But were you really not so sweet,
were you rather sour and tight?

You lived and worked by border folk
and married one, Christiana.

Two hundred years have passed,
each archive speaks, yet hides from us its story.

You made and dealt in earthenware,
you dreamed in clay, your land was stone and slate.

A gifted artist, palms worked their alchemy
to make the finest china in the land.

You left great wealth but all was spoken for
by creditors, well more than one in truth.

When you were safely cold, buried deep
and moulded in St Andrew’s clay

the first in line was Samuel Binns, the local man of coal.
Another dealer, patient, open-palmed,
he’d quietly watched you die.

Six hundred pounds lay wait for him.
his conscience clear and firm, un-pricked,

the money owed to him had kept you whole,
had warmed your body and its heart

and hopefully your artist soul,
through all your long, cold, dying days

in Cumberland, upon a hillside’s crag.

Cait O’Connor

Adele at the Brits

2011-02-16T06:49:00.000-08:00

I was babysitting last night and only caught some of the Brit Awards. A lot of what I saw left me unmoved but not Adele's performance. What a talent; she stood out from the rest as far as I am concerned.

See what you think.

I heard that your settled down.
That you found a girl and you're married now.
I heard that your dreams came true.
Guess she gave you things I didn’t give to you. Old friend, why are you so shy?
It ain’t like you to hold back or hide from the lie.
I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited.
But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it.
I hoped you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded
that for me, it isn’t over.
Never mind, I’ll find someone like you.
I wish nothing but the best for you too.
Don’t forget me, I beg, I remember you said
“Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead”
Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead, yeah.
You’d know how the time flies.
Only yesterday was the time of our lives.
We were born and raised in a summery haze.
Bound by the surprise of our glory days.
I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited,
But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it.
I hoped you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded,
That for me, it isn’t over yet.
Never mind, I’ll find someone like you.
I wish nothing but the best for you too.
Don’t forget me, I beg, I remember you said
“Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead”, yay.
Nothing compares, no worries or cares.
Regrets and mistakes they’re memories made.
Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?
Never mind, I’ll find someone like you.
I wish nothing but the best for you too.
Don’t forget me, I beg, I remembered you said:-
“Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead”
Never mind, I’ll find someone like you.
I wish nothing but the best for you too.
Don’t forget me, I beg, I remembered you said
“Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead”
Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead, yeah.

Just a litle romance

2011-02-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
   Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
   And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
   And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
   By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
   Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
   When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare

Here is a song for the day.

First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

The first time ever I saw your face

I thought the sun rose in your eyes

And the moon and stars were the gifts you gave

To the dark and the empty skies, my love,

To the dark and the empty skies.

The first time ever I kissed your mouth

And felt your heart beat close to mine

Like the trembling heart of a captive bird

That was there at my command, my love

That was there at my command.

And the first time ever I lay with you

I felt your heart so close to mine

And I knew our joy would fill the earth

And last till the end of time my love

It would last till the end of time my love

The first time ever I saw your face, your face,

your face, your face

Cait O'Connor

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Side 1

[edit]Side 2

Night-time

Stop What You Are Doing And Read This

A Round Tuit

Ghastly Gallstones Diet

Happy New Year

Because it's Winter, Thoughts on the Sun

Connemara Girl

Ray La Montagne - A Falling Through

Happy Christmas to Everyone

One Year Ago

Celebrations

On Childhood

Just Some Wise Words Really

It's A Beautiful World

Winter Words

Only Kindness Matters

Ted and Sylvia

Candles

A painting, a poem, two quotations.

Vincent Van Gogh

Alphabet Day

Jeremy Clarkson

David Whyte

In MemoriamJohn O’Donohue

Last night my dreams found me

Farewell

The Road Not Taken

Woodland Faery by Robin Pushe’e

Innisfree

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Poem in October

POEM IN OCTOBER

When You Are Old

Home

Meditation

Family Silver

A Winter Walk Has Warmed my Heart

Recession

Butterflies and Hibernation

The Touchstone

Samhain 2011

Michael D Higgins

Samhain approaches

Oatmeal and Inspiration

A poem

A Sad Day

Just a picture and a poem

Hard Times

Philip Pullman's Speech

Hope

Jorg Luis Borges, the Argentine poet.........

Where has all the good news gone?

High Haf

10 metaphors for a Friday

Just for Once

Percy Wakes Me

Birdwatching

Next poem

Pics and a poem

Summertime

Josephine Hart RIP

Humans and Avians

Nature news

Positives and Revisitings

Christy Moore - Magdalen Laundries

Magdalene Laundries

Turning the Corner

Too much light and shade perhaps

March Garden

It has to be a quick blog

St Patrick's Day

The Ides of March

pay attention: a river of stones

Her New Beau

A chameleon does not leave one tree until he is sure of another

Tree of Life

In Memoriam
John O’Donohue