tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71015186778441801072024-03-05T03:05:20.572-08:00sermon for a birdBlorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-28158688510554361782020-06-12T23:43:00.003-07:002020-06-13T21:00:42.747-07:00Cobwebs<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">Being at home so much now cobwebs catch my eye. At first I want to chase them from ceilings with an upturned broom. Guilt surely. But they have their own elegance. They describe the slightest movement of air - a door opened and closed, a brisk walk by, a cough, a gesture. They respond to delicate, unseen currents with a little ballet of silk and dust. I am reminded of that haiku by Issa, “Don’t worry spiders / I keep house casually.”</span><div><font face="courier new, courier, monospace"><br /></font><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">A few years back Heide Museum showed a beautiful installation, a mobile called Frost, by Japanese artist, Koji Ryui. Drinking straws threaded and assembled into spare, open geometries hung turning gently in the light. Over time a spider started to throw silk between the shapes, connecting one plane with another, creating new abstracts within and between components. I think Koji would have been pleased with the collaboration.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">Late Autumn is a good time to find them outside too. Strung across paths, cast like nets upon the grass, holding from still bare branches. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">They are worth examination. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">They are elaborate or spare according purpose and spider.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">They catch the eye after rain or heavy dew.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">I have read that spider silk was once packed into open wounds to help the blood clot. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div><div><font face="courier new, courier, monospace">This year in a phenomenon created by the coincidence of early frost and late morning sunshine there was a mass ballooning of spiderlings. My friend Purdy witnessed it as she drove along her local country lanes and then out onto the highway. The young of the Money spider, still tiny but ready to catch their own prey, are driven by instinct to find elevation - a fence post, shrub, telephone pole, even tall grasses. Then waiting for an updraft </font><span style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;">they cast out a thread of silk and glide to new hunting grounds - in effect lighter than air - they leave home to build webs of their own. En masse they create, what Purdy later tells me is known as the gossamer effect. An intersection between physics and beauty.</span></div><div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div></div>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-76691310428795235422017-08-22T01:20:00.001-07:002017-08-22T01:20:42.693-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace; font-size: x-large;"><b>Birds and flowers</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Chinese once had a whole school of painting devoted to birds and flowers. The study of it was part of the contemplation of place. And one's place in it. Losing one's place was losing the pattern and order of everything.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">But sometimes making a little chaos in the order can be fun.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Embroidery emboldens.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Sometimes a needle can be a little subversive despite its seeming to carry the thread humbly in it head.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The subtext is in the seams.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Occasionally a hiccough helps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A knot holds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The pricked finger wears a spot of blood like a red beret.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The world is all about birds and flowers.</span></div>
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<br />Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-49954114742204817872017-08-22T00:40:00.001-07:002017-08-24T01:08:43.744-07:00<h2>
<span style="color: #0b5394; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: x-large;">Frida and Louisa</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Frida and I only knew each other for a little while. She hung around the sewing machine for a week or two. She lay in my lap assembling herself, waited patiently while I fixed her hair. She spent sometime naked on the sunny windowsill while her clothes were stitched - looking on with interest when her skirts were embroidered with birds and flowers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">But once she was dressed she wanted company. It was lonely - just the two of us. She was tiring of my solo twittering - even virtuoso whistling bored her. Should we have a tea party I asked her. Yes, she said. She seemed quite decided.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We invited my friend Louisa and baked an orange cake.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">We tidied up just a little bit. Enough that Louisa would find the kitchen agreeable but not so much that she would feel we had gone to too much trouble. We put pink and plum-coloured chrysanthemums in an old blue jug and set out our favourite teacups. We both brushed our hair and fiddled about - fussing over this and that until the doorbell rang.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Louisa took her tea without milk or sugar and only had a dainty piece of cake - she is always elegantly slender.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Frida was impressed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">She and Louisa quickly became good friends.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">They talked about everything. Art. Shoes. Growing cacti. Revolutions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The writing was on the wall really.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">When Louisa got up to go Frida went with her.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">They drove away in Louisa's car.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">I miss her.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">There might even have been some unseemly snuffling into a hanky.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">But I have dusted the sewing machine off again.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">And a small voice in my head says, Viva Mexico!</span><br />
<br />
<br />Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-44851375458254400872014-07-11T06:06:00.002-07:002014-07-11T06:06:53.489-07:00Osso Bucco day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US">An oyster shell-coloured sky today - sheets of water
all about and it seems a far cry from the dry we had only a few years ago. Any
vessel left out on the lawn - the odd jam jar, forgotten coffee cup, empty
plant pot, boot, tipped over watering can, (</span><span lang="EN-US"><i>I've told you not to leave them out - they rust through faster
than.....</i></span><span lang="EN-US">), anything left out overnight is filled with rain. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US">It
might seem drab out but winter colour can blaze. The camellias are pink, white,
speckled cream and deep rose through to red. There are still haw berries on the
hedges and lemons, oranges and cumquats have started marmalade themed cartoons
in my head. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US"> Indoors it's an osso bucco day. I'm simmering one in a black
enamelled casserole under a blanket of lemons, thinly sliced. It will get
another good dose of citrus with the gremolata and after a 90 minute stew we
should be able to eat it with a spoon. Long cooking means a chance to get at
the mending too. There are trousers in for repair, socks and an apron pattern
to cut. The rain rattling the casement windows makes me glad to be busy inside.</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Times-Roman; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-14333234500710966112014-07-09T20:44:00.000-07:002014-07-09T20:44:56.090-07:00How to blow a bird's egg<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Yesterday my feet took me to the museum and my eyes enjoyed it immensely. Was it Darwin who said that god had a fondness for beetles? Me too! Nothing else comes close to their irridescense, their machine-age aesthetic. Engineered for earthworks, their design almost entirely externalised as exoskeleton - by all accounts what's inside is mostly mush. I want to handle them. I know museums are hands in pockets places but I'm itching to touch. My heart drops though to see the birds - their twiggy toes tagged and no note on the noise they make nectaring or courting. I jolly myself by tracking through to fossils and shells.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">On the way home I look in at my favourite opshop and come away with a bunch of books and a Harris Tweed hat. The hat is a good fit, snug and silk lined so no pricks or itches from the wool. Best of all though is the lyrebird brooch pinned smartly to the side. I have done well on the book front too. A 1962 edition of John Gilmour's Wild Flowers - Botanising in Britain, which begins, "The first step to becoming a field botanist...is to be visited with an irresitible passion." It's true. To be struck with a lunacy of love is surely how we begin to know. The other book is a musty smelling 1955 print of The Young Collectors. The pages are foxed and yellow but there are articles by Georges Rees on pressing flowers and blowing bird's eggs and one by Clarence Ellis on pebbles. Who these days could wear the name Clarence without an apologetic smile? But as collectors go he is one of my heroes. Other chapters discuss in earnest tone the merits of collecting cheese labels and porcelain - an unusual hobby I would have thought for a child. Georges Rees spends a deal of his article on how to prick out an egg with a thorn. "I carried a few hawthorn points in my pocket, blew the egg straight from the nest and carried the blown eggs home loose in jacket my pocket; and rarely broke one." I can picture the young George kitted out in something like my tweed cap, socks pulled over his breeches for tree climbing and a future in filling museum cases with specimen birds.</span><br />
Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-42146349328287230062014-07-04T00:35:00.000-07:002014-07-05T20:39:11.480-07:00A List for Winter<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Pipe smoke/wood smoke/sooty chimneys</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Early evenings</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Pie: chicken and leek,spanakopita, apple</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Puzzling out knitting stitches</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Hard frost</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Broth</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Brews</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Berries</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Birds that are hardier than other birds</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Hail</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Moss</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Museums</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Books</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Floor wax</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Earache</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Coughs</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Puddings</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Marmalade: cumquat, Seville orange, lemon </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Lanterns</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Lay-a-beds</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Radio</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Sock darning /shoe polishing</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Seed starting: making newspaper pots/ bird proofing seedlings</span></div>
Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-58046605181340069102014-01-22T20:42:00.004-08:002014-01-22T21:01:06.610-08:00Looking both ways<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The word January - the name we have for the first month of the Gregorian calendar, comes from a Roman god. Janus, a god with two faces, looked both towards the future and the past. Big headed, he must have stored all the spent days in memory - far sighted - he must see clearly what is to come. Sometimes his two heads featured twin-like faces, sometimes one looked old and the other younger, one bearded and the other downy with youth. He was both historian and forward thinker - an appropriate figurehead for the year.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The Romans thought of him as a deity of passage, of beginnings and endings. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The doors to his temple stood open during times of war and closed during peace. He is the god of gates and doors. He has a yin yang quality, a tail chasing quality.He rocks back and forth between what we were and will be.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Some Papuan tribes too believe that we move ahead by walking backwards. Being able to see only the present moment and the days past, we face history and not the future. Like an oarsman in a rowboat we sit with our backs to the future, we look to the past to meet the approaching days. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The last days of the old year seem tidily swept away by the middle of January. It is possible to write 2014 without error and scrubbing out. I'm able to remember the weekdays again after the fug of holidays, Mondays seem like Mondays again. It's a good month to lay plans, to outline projects, to make lists - to look forward like Janus, the uncertainty of things to come hedged by his knowledge of history.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">I like lists, even if not much gets achieved they are a witness to intention. Some of my lists are chores, some of them notes - shorthand reference to the way the days fall in a particular month. Above all January means cherries and swimming to me so here's a sort of list and a recipe for cherry cake.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">January 1 through 31</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">north winds</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">blackberries</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">cicadas</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">house flies, horse flies, blowies</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">lawns that are bone dry</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">first tomatoes</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">bare feet, blisters, stubbed toes</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">electric fans</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">bees</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">jam</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">tennis, badminton, board games, cricket</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">snakes</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">picnics</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">beach towels hung along verandahs</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">cake: Christmas cake, cherry cake, pavlova</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">kitchen ants, bullants, ants in pants, Ant and Bee</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">sleep outs</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">sea swims</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">bindies</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">sunburn, ant bites, all sorts of itches</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">cherries, blackberries, apricots and mulberries</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">icecream, icy poles, ice cubes, eskies</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">bushfire</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">shorts and sandals</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">snakes</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">sweetcorn in standing rows</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
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<h4>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Sour Cherry Cake</span></h4>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><i>The vinegar in this recipe piques the taste of the already sharp cherries and the geranium leaves infuse the plain cake batter with a rose fragrance. If you don't have rose scented geraniums you could leave out the vanilla pod and add a few drops of rose water to the batter.The cornmeal gives the cake crumb substance and is a good foil for the soft fruit.</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #111111; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">250 grams soft butter<br />1/4 cup caster sugar<br />1 teaspoon white balsamic vinegar<br />2 cups pitted morello cherries<br />1 1/4 cups self raising flour<br />1/4 cup medium ground cornmeal<br />pinch of sea salt ground between your finger tips<br />3/4 cup raw sugar<br />2 eggs, separated<br />1/2 cup milk<br />1 vanilla pod sticky seeds scraped into the milk<br />6 rose scented geranium leaves</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #111111; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 20px;">Set the oven to preheat to 170 C </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #111111; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 20px;">Combine 100 grams butter, 1/4 cup sugar, and the vinegar in a bowl and then pour into a pan and heat over a medium flame until thick and bubbling. Add the morellos and stir to coat the fruit in syrup. Remove from the flame and cool.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #111111; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">Butter and line a cake pan and lay the fresh clean geranium leaves face down over the bottom. Pour over the cherries in their syrup.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Mix flour, cornmeal, and salt in one bowl. In another beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. In a third beat the remaining butter until light and creamy and pale in colour. Pour sugar onto the whipped butter and beat for 2 - 3 minutes. Add the yolks one by one. At a low speed beat in flour and milk in which the vanilla seeds have steeped. With a light hand fold in egg whites. Pour the batter over the cherries and bake for 45 - 50 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean - this can depend a little on your oven's fidelity and size. If your oven runs hot turn it down to 165 C half way through baking.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #111111; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"></span>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-86220148962490766192014-01-08T03:42:00.003-08:002014-01-08T03:42:52.814-08:00Old time funnies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-8344678215251211432014-01-05T21:32:00.001-08:002014-01-22T21:02:59.796-08:00Do what you will<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">It's a mite cold down south this Summer but the light is good. The days are long enough for holiday luxuries - waking slowly from sleep to read, eating late or early or not at all or making a meal from fruit cake and coffee and calling it lunch. No-one has to be anywhere except where they are right now and now can be lingered over. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">In the lovely lump of days between Christmas and the new year coming in we've established a routine of nothing much and it goes like this - someone - not me - when they wake to make tea and toast and bring it to bed. I'll be just conscious enough to decide on a jam. We have to three on the go: an apricot from a backyard tree old enough to be my mother, a sour cherry from local morellos and a mulberry and blackberry with that mix of floral and smoke scents that bring to mind a north wind and the whiff of a eucalypt fire. We have 14 jars of apricot on the shelf - some of them will go to good homes the rest are calling for toast and scones to be made and made often. We have three of the cherry and the same of the blackberry jam which elevates each jar to a rare and endangered status. If we are to have one of those on toast the bread better be up to the job. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">After breakfast in bed it's a book and or a chat or the radio, or nothing at all and a good look and the ceiling. When we are upright enough for wandering we might watch a ship slide along outside the window or a cluster of boats tack into the wind straight out from the lighthouse and back. If the cricket is on, the telly's on too with the sound switched down and the commentary coming from the radio instead. You can still hear the knock of the ball on the bat if that's your thing.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Soon it might be time for a walk. Or not. If we strike out along the beach we are bound to find sea glass and shells and sand to bring home and the dogs will paddle or swim and bark at each other and birds. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Next lunch and a game. Maybe some friends will call in and we'll eat salad alongside a savoury tart followed up by stewed fruit or left over Christmas cake. Scrabble, Lotus or a Trivial Pursuit-like game called Parliament can be started in earnest, abandoned for something else and come back to later. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">There has been a jigsaw puzzle on the table for a week and no-one has needed the space for anything more important. Like a video run on a data poor phone its assembling itself in clumps of colour. Mark sits to it for a moment or two or an hour each day depending - I wouldn't dare drop a piece into place even if I found the piece and knew the place, unlikey as that might be. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The afternoon can be as long or as short as you like. When the sun goes down is another matter. It's over almost before it's begun. Twilight is not our thing in the Antipodes. You can watch the sun dip into the sea or walk out into your own holy illumination. You can turn your back on the sky and see your shadow stretch out on the sand. </span></span></h2>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">In the summer slack you can do as you will.</span></h2>
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Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-78501743305545193552013-09-11T06:29:00.000-07:002013-09-11T06:33:01.490-07:00On the Island<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">A fortnight ago we crossed Bass Strait.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">For half an hour the plane looks down at the surface of the sea and that is all. Sometimes a cloud passes.It is landscape enough. Then seemingly suddenly it noses down and follows the river into Hobart. Such a short flight but momentous - leaving the mainland. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Our friend, studio potter, Jane Sawyer, had been shortlisted for a major ceramics prize in Tasmania and a group of us assembled to see her work and marvel. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Her pots embody her seriousness as well as her warmth. They engage the heart and fix in the mind - each a love letter and a lesson and an argument for beauty. Her collection <i>River Reflections</i> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 24px;">refers to the shape of her home farm. Her reference points are specific and finely observed. They are a nod to old geology and geriatric trees. But they are universal.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 24px;">Truth and beauty. Beauty and truth - they can be applied as inarguably as mathematics.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 24px;">Seeing the work in the gallery, we then saw it everywhere outdoors. We saw it in cloud shapes, in dark water, reflected from windows, in beach stones and sea glass and in each other.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 24px;">Hobart is sombre and beautiful too. It put on its best weather for us. We ate good food, talked about politics and art, tasted local honeycomb, walked up and down steep hills and mooched in bookshops. What could be finer?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 24px;">It is the pots that will stay with me though - as a lesson and a preoccupation. </span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-20573613256732723462013-07-15T18:00:00.001-07:002013-07-22T01:38:07.283-07:00Winter is a fine thing too<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">I resist Winter. Weeks into the season I am still not wearing socks. I scoff at scarves and hats. I am stubbornly cutting greens and tossing salad instead of roasting the pants off root vegetables. My internal clock runs slow. There is a reason my totem creature is a snail.Yet the day comes. And one day well into the season I wake up to the idea of soup and socks and late sleeping. Once I have made up my mind to it there is nothing to fear of cold but cold itself and lots to do to stave it off. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Winter has a brace of good things about it. Let me remember them:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Low sun which is sweet to the skin and kind to the eyes</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Knitting - cold weather makes clicking the sticks together less prickly and itchy</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Board games - captive lunch guests are too polite to refuse Scrabble, Mysteries of Old Peking, Scotland Yard or jigsaws. Actually they are not invited to mull over jigsaws but often they will stop in front of a table with the pieces sorted patiently into colours and try their hand. It is a blow when savant-like they drop in a piece. They cannot resist a smile. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Fires - both in the hearth and in the early outside darkness</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">French onion soups with a splash of brandy thrown in as the onions sweeten slowly</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Make that all soups</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Good clear cold nights for looking at stars</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Etegami club and receiving mail from the opposite season</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Sunday roasts with Yorkshire puddings and crabapple jelly</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Cocoa and hot water bottles taken to bed</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Working in bed</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Dogs on the bed</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Winter quilts on the bed</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Dark skies</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Beachcombing - storms throw up good shells</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Late quinces</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Pies - savoury and sweet and all shapes - galettes, potted, flans, freeform. I love them all in all their variety</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Introspection. Of the good sort</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Planning the Spring vege patches</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Wearing woolly jerseys and tights</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Slow cooking</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Seeing dogs out and about sporting hand knit jumpers and coats</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Moss, lichen and mushrooms</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Chimney smoke and the smell of it</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Visiting the Botanical Gardens hot houses or the butterfly avary at the Zoo </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Imagining flying north like a bird</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Actually I love Winter.</span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-84443050143502771932013-05-02T23:03:00.000-07:002013-05-02T23:03:00.709-07:00Autumn at last<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">We were starting to wonder where Autumn was this year. Is it always so slow to come on? I can't remember. The days have stayed hot. Nights too and I have been starving for colour. The long Summer has bleached the grass, trees have kept hold of leaves but droop for lack of water. Maybe I made up the mid Autumn stained glass month that should be April. We went to mountains to look for it and found the cold. We found snow and clear starry nights, spoke to each other in steam and piled on coats and blankets. Back in Melbourne this week the weather is all that I want. Sharp in the morning, sunny afternoons and evening rain. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The pumpkin patch is yielding well - dark green knobby kobocha, summer squash and yellow orb. There are still flowers on the vine and small green bumps that might not ever be fruit. The olive is laden, the last tomatoes eaten by possums and the sorrel still going at a gallop.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">We have had pumpkin soup with sage and butter croutons, kobocha pizza with blue cheese and walnuts - tonight Japanese steamed squash only partly pared and simmered chicken. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Long live Autumn. I'm not quite wanting Winter yet.</span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-38760814485760276672013-05-01T22:57:00.000-07:002013-05-01T22:58:30.476-07:00To the mountains and the sea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">For Mark's birthday this year instead of a party we made camp. He wanted to be on the road and under different skies and I understand that thinking. It's nice to leave the cosiness of home and leave a bit of yourself there also. Age comes on us quickly and time seems more expansive on the road. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Preparing for the trip is both a pleasure and an exercise. I want to take everything. Mark wants almost nothing. I love all the equipment - the yellow gas burner, the red lamp, the picnic baskets, woven mats the hand sewn cutlery roll, the blackened billy can...The book box is a whole other story. I get pleasure from throwing in a patchwork quilt and a ceramic teapot. Mark doubts the necessity. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">On our first camping trip to the Snowy Mountains in 1986 we had a tent, a stove, a billy and sleeping bags (borrowed)- no table or chairs, no icebox. We put our milk and butter in a canvas bag tied with string and threw it into the river. The Swampy Plains river is all snow melt from Kosiosko. It's cold year round and makes a perfect pantry. Now we have a teardrop caravan. It has a soft bed, little wooden cabinets, reading lights - why not take a watercolour box, the dog and a load of field guides? We have the room.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">O</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">ur week and a bit took us first to the mountains to see stars and Autumn colour. Camped by a pebbly river the first night in sub zero Bright, we then took the road up over Hotham and into the snow! No sight is more glorious to a city dweller in the Southern hemisphere. How quickly the landscape is changed by snowfall, especially after bushfire. It's an exercise of imagination now to see where the forest was - now it is leafless and rocky with the extreme changes in light that elevation brings. One moment everything was sharply defined - the next we were driving into a cloud. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Each night we set up by a lake or by the sea. Cooking in the after-Easter-early-dark which comes on fast in April, putting our feet almost into the fire for precious heat, having one too many cups of tea before bed...getting up again at three for a wee under a thousand stars. Less frugal now than on our first trip - the highlights were of the same sort - finding a heart shaped stone, buying fresh walnuts, visiting the opshops, seeing snowfall, watching dolphins at dusk on the inside of a breaking wave, being cuddled together under a cold starry sky. </span><br />
<br />Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-69606323522872263452013-03-14T22:11:00.000-07:002013-03-14T22:11:29.241-07:00Illuminations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">For one night last month the city was incandescent. Plain surfaces - coloured with light - some buildings working like a child's kaleidoscope. Illuminations, shadows, projections - everywhere lamps working to hold back the night. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Before electrics the world would have been dark through the night. Properly dark but for the moon. Still darkness would have stood close to houses separating interiors and domesticity from the nocturnal doings of owls and bats, moths and monsters. The world would have been thick with shadows and the richer for stars. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Melbourne's one <i>White Night</i> was a magic lantern of entertainment - a reminder of the precious commodity that is light - and the large chunk of life called night.Visited by hoards - by children and adults alike - I hope it visits us again.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">After the heat and people, the walking and wonder I was reminded of an excursion M and I took to see a colony of glow worms. We left the city after work and drove 3 hours to the coast - made camp, ate dinner and then drove again into the darkness to a thickly wooded piece of bush. Pulling on jumpers and mittens and bringing a blanket from the back seat of the car we were excited, cold, expectant. Then I realized we had left the flashlight in the tent back at camp. Too late and too tired to turn back - hand in hand with only a matchstick sized key light we walked the pitch black path into the forest. After 10 minutes or so our eyes adjusted and we saw the first spot of light. A half hour later everything was aglow.</span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-571885876380495372012-12-25T15:52:00.001-08:002012-12-25T15:52:58.856-08:00The Old Year is but a Shadow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Buon Natale and God Jul and let there be sun or snow to suit - may big and little find peace, joy and reconciliation. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">All that is left of the year is a crust - a shadow. Let us go forward into the new year armed with good books, strong tea and Christmas cake. I want for myself there to be good swims, friends all around, a year of reading and writing, cooking, drawing and sewing, dog walks and long talks and letters in the post. To the northern you - bring on snow and sledding, carol singing and winter woolies. Go out and make a snow angel for me, drink hot cocoa and gather in the holly. The Antipodes holds dear this idea of the icy Christmas even as we sweat and swim!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Thank-you for reading this blog. And bless you if you left a comment last year. Please come again in 2013.</span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-90824186638459216192012-11-12T03:04:00.002-08:002012-11-13T15:31:19.906-08:00The sun is climbing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The sun is climbing and the evenings are longer and lighter now.The tomatoes are planted, the chard and beetroot has bolted and the quinces are yellowing but so far eluding the birds. We are treading on the coat tails of Summer and already I miss the green fuse that is early Spring. The first short days of the season are fragile. They are early cold and all afternoon sun. But we are grateful for it. Bees are about - they have overwintered on honeycomb but now are about pollen getting again. They are on the pear blossoms and the echium. They nose into half open roses and use the magnolia like a helipad. The first few weeks of Spring are for those, like bees, who live for flowers.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Three years ago we flew to Japan in flower viewing month to chase the cherry blossom north from Tokyo into the mountains. We diligently followed reports in the Japan Times, where a boxed diagram daily charts the tide of flowers rolling across the country. A map spread out on the hotel bed and a squint at the flower forecast on the evening news, helped plot a journey from Spring into the last days of Winter. So linear is the island of Japan it seems to be possible to move backwards through time and seasons.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">On streets, in parks and from train windows we studied the Japanese in full Hanami mode - something deeply arresting in the </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">value put on transient beauty by a nation so steeped in work and hardship. That some of the oldest trees are named and venerated almost as saints seemed wonderful to us - their branches propped and roped to prevent injury - blankets spread underneath them. Picnics and parties celebrate the fleeting few days of blossom. The Sakura is a non eating cherry - it bears small blunt fruit that fall to the ground green, so it is for its flower alone that it is prized. As Basho walked and penned his haiku visiting with mountains and rivers there are some in Japan who visit the old trees, calling in on them, spending an afternoon with them, sharing sake - perhaps even a song.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">In Melbourne spring is signalled by sudden warm days, days of wind and then a week of cold nights. Just as the wisteria has its heaviest bloom the wind dashes them to the ground. This year the blossom seemed to come early starting with the almond and quince and then moving to the cherries and plums. In a spirit of nostalgia we made bento and took it to the cherry trees in the hills. We may not have walked there or known each tree as a friend but it is a good Spring thing to sit with trees.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Now the flowers are gone and the fruit is set. The pictures above might be from another place or age. At the hairdressers I wonder if we will pick apricots before Christmas. The season is at once just begun and nearly over. The Korean barber tells me that the snow is already falling north of Seoul. Early? I ask him. Five days earlier than last year he says. </span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-50626561377068513692012-08-21T01:03:00.000-07:002012-08-21T17:13:54.016-07:00Celadon as palimpsest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><br /></i>
<i>In the chilly Autumn,</i><br />
<i>thousands of porcelain pieces</i><br />
<i>as green as the mountains</i><br />
<i>appear from the kiln.</i><br />
<i> Lu Guimeng</i><br />
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Strictly speaking celadon is not a good green. It has none of the vivid energy of leaf buds, nor the sombre notes of eucalyptus. It is neither verdantly mossy or bravely bottle green. It sits somewhere between jade and lichen - on the colour spectrum it leans towards grey and away from yellow. Rather than lifting the heart it speaks to it - a colour for poets and those of an exquisite eye. Made from earth and ash, celadon has an earthy appeal. The green glaze is composed of iron and cinders. An incremental increase in iron results in deeper greens. One can imagine the Chinese feeling for porcelain as a magic composed of the elements - of fire, water, earth and iron.<br />
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That colour is arbitrary or inexact is a notion we rail against. We do our best to describe it as chemistry in terms of mineral pigments - in physics as wavelength and frequency. But surely my green is not your green. Greenness is in the eye of the beholder. Derwent pencils - the last word in colour in my childhood originally produced 10 greens. In 1939 the full spectrum of Derwent colours was 72 - in the 1990's that increased to 120. When on my twelfth birthday I was given a set of 24 I felt life could not possibly be richer. Today there are 14 shades of Derwent green including teal, fern, felt, apple, iron and Ionian. There is no celadon. Perhaps the fact that celadon can be anything from a smoky jade to a oyster shell makes it a poor descriptor.<br />
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In the Romance and Icelandic languages the word for green derives from the root word for growth. In many cultures green is synonymous with hope, freshness, Spring, youth, perennial return and in times of ecological fragility with environmental safety and protection. But green can also stand in for callow inexperience, for jealousy, sourness and decay. If the green of the celadon ware had resonance for Chinese poets and princes it spoke to Buddhist teachings too. Pottery is the perfect palimpsest. It has meaning laid over meaning. It is used and wiped clean like a slate. It is at once fragile and concrete. It is a vessel and so are we.<br />
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Long before the Japanese fascination for wabi sabi, the Chinese celebrated flaws. Fabled celadons were often crazed - the glaze and porcelain operating differently under fire. Even after being taken from the kiln the finish can move and the cracks travel. This process is said to explain the life of the pot - a resident energy - an exquisite tension expressed in the clay's journey from plastic to some sort of stone. The imperfect finish somehow suggested, hinted at the sublime. How much more perfect can an object be than one where the beauty is somewhat diminished? One must instead hold the idea of perfection in the mind.<br />
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The oldest celadons are also the least perfect - their crackle like cobwebs, their porcelain heavier than other pots. Originally this might have been because of limited production compared to other wares. Practice makes perfect. Or it might be direct reflection of its material makeup. But perhaps celadons were also less than perfect in order to pique the jaded eye of the elite.<br />
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For a long while celadon was secret. Green was valuable. Like the royal purples of popes, the Middle Kingdom's monied classes kept green porcelains for themselves. The Chinese for secret also means withheld - unspoken, reserved as in shy or reserved for, as in reserved for royalty. The ambiguity is aptly appropriate. Celadon's scarcity enhanced its appeal.<br />
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<br />Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-69087557915714815512012-08-14T01:54:00.001-07:002012-08-14T02:06:00.955-07:00Tea with George<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Tea is every day ordinary and also sublime. Even the most humdrum brew sets us up for the day, for work, for study, for attentiveness. The Chinese have it that tea brightens the eye - both the <i>I</i> and the outlook. It's a drug which works equally on the meat and mind. It's a hook - on it hangs, history, empire, enterprise and every day.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">What you drink says something about you but how you drink it is important too. There are rules for tea drinking and while some ignore them - most of them make sense and add drama and ritual to tea time. Not everyone agrees on what the rules are though.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Orwell thought enough of tea to write down his rituals - actually they read as commandments and remind us of how taste is custom and culture but also fashion. He warns against China tea preferring black Indias, he rails against tea strainers and muslim or silk bags - he wants the tea to float freely as it infuses. I am with him there. Never add sugar, he says, unless taking tea the Russian way. I wonder if he means puddled into a saucer and sucked up through a sugar cube. This is fun though perhaps not for every day.He has another jab at Tolstoy and Chekhov and their acolytes - never drink tea from an urn. How very English - one of my abiding dreams is to own a samovar.Poor Orwell would have been subject to railway tea - not of the Orient Express ilk either - an urn would have leeched every bit of tannin from cheap tea over hours - to be endured on the rainiest of cold days in the second class waiting room. I'm with Orwell on additions to tea. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">To my mind most tea is best drunk without milk - builders' tea might want the tannin toned down and sure, milky tea is good for dunking. Billy tea needs to be stronger than usual and laced with torn gum leaves. But mostly with exception of chai I want unadulterated tea.I don't even want a wafer of lemon. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">School tea is a curse on all our houses. I remember an elephant of an aluminium tea pot, hammered with dents and equipped with a dozen tea bags - their strings tied to the handle. Forty or so cups were lined up - pushed as closed together as possible and the weak tea poured in a continuous stream. You hoped to get one of the first pourings because the second, third, sometime fourth were the product of water added to the same tired bags. Edward Epse Brown, in a film about the Tassajara Monastery, spoke lovingly of the kitchen's battered teapots. Cheap, oversized, some stoved in and covered in dings they were to Espe Brown a lesson in service and humility. I wonder how tea tasted from them. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">These days still half asleep my first cup is sometimes brought to me in bed. M leaves it on the night stand and creeps out to work.Often only the dogs open one eye to watch him. Some days this first cup is cold by the time I wake enough to swallow it. The second one of the day is the one that counts. And here our methodology parts ways. Being a coffee drinker who rarely strays towards tea, M boils the electric kettle. I prefer the stove. Most often I boil the tea kettle on the hob. It's primitive but seemingly essential to light the flame and see the steam. I warm our old Arabia 3 cup - throw a measure aromatic leaves into the pot and pour on the boiling water. M is emphatic that the taste is identical between the electric kettle and the stove.(You don't argue with someone who brings tea before first light).If you have a glass pot it's nice the watch the tea leaves steep - otherwise I walk the teapot to the table with a sturdy cup, buttered toast if it is breakfast - or a crumpet for afternoon tea. Turn the pot three times and if you are a black tea drinker like me, pour out that first fragrant cup. Steam yourself in a herbal cloud - its both wholesome and dreamy. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">If you are Orwell you will be using good china and drinking Darjeeling. If you are like me you want something homely in the morning - perhaps bancha or barley and something poetic in the afternoons when friends come - a smoky Lapsang souchong, a Japanese cherry leaf tea or something bright like Orange Pekoe. Even the names are enough to brighten bad weather. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">I have a hierarchy of favourite teacups too.(I have tried M's patience by trying to pack good cups and a teapot for taking camping). I have some wide blue and white cups brought back from Japan, some heavy Denby, some handsome Arabia and the folksy Lotte all from fetes or opshops.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">For my birthday I was given some of Jane Sawyer's tea bowls. They are at once precious and formed for function.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">I am immediately reminded
of the axiom of daily use proposed in <i>The Way of Tea</i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"> – that pots “come to life only after they
are put to the test of their purpose.” </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">I am glad to be giving life to these
beautiful objects by using them.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><i>Recipe for Marbled Tea Eggs</i></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px;"><i>Put</i> 6 eggs into a pan of cold water covering by at least two fingers.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px;">Boil for a minute then cover and turn the flame low and simmer for 7 minutes.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">Take the eggs from the pan and cool in a bowl of water set in the sink.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">Tap the eggs all over with the back of a spoon. Take care to have a light touch so as to keep the shell whole. When patterned all over drop back into the pan adding 3/4 cup of soy sauce, 1 tsp sugar, 2 tablespoons black tea, (Earl Grey or Russian Caravan is good) and 2 star anise or a stick of cinnamon.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">Bring back to the boil, then reduce to a simmer, cover and cook for a further 45 minutes. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">Let cool in the pan for an hour or so or even overnight. Carefully peel to uncover the marbling. Often the peeled shell is as pretty as a bird's egg.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"> </span></span>
Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-1177516411742163012012-07-26T20:49:00.003-07:002012-07-30T00:28:13.361-07:00In praise of shadows<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Once the world was more thickly peopled with shadows than it is today.Cities that burn light day and night were darker then. Streets were lit with gas or oil or not at all. Moonless nights were not for unaccompanied walking. One can only imagine the welcome brightness of full moon. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Shadows would have leapt up on walls in firelight, followed behind us either faithfully or inspiring fear. Their beauty enriched childs' play and a whole genre of theatre. 18th and 19th century toys used the projection of shadow and mechanical motion to exquisite effect. Today although the time has passed for family slide shows or magic lanterns we can still make a duck or wolf move across the wall by putting our hands to work in front of a lamp or using an open umbrella as a screen.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Still architects work with both blocks of light and its absence. And when Louis Kahn was quoted as saying, "the sun never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building" - he might have only been half joking. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">For me the most exquisite reflection on light and dark is Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. For him, an entire aesthetic depended on darkness. Gilded lacquer work was meant to be seen in half light, the beauty of spare rooms appreciated only by candles - the lustre of tarnish likened to an image seen on dark water. A room without shadows, he argues is merely a void. "It was different from the darkness of a road at night.It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself as though to keep it out of my eyes."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: x-small;">*shadow puppet image "borrowed" from the Indonesian National Library.</span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-9246053223293805882012-07-25T02:37:00.000-07:002012-07-26T20:51:48.503-07:00Grey sky and birds fly<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">During Winter I often crave the blue sky of Summer or late Autumn. Lack of blue is like a vitamin deficiency. The day seems a little dull without the definition that high colour gives it. But Winter light is beautiful too. Deciduous trees are leafless and sculptural and let the thin sunlight through their branches. Eucalpyts and other evergreens look silver in the chalky light. And the grey, lilac and violet skies reflect off water with a drama that’s hard to remember in the Summer.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Walking through the local quarry although the air is still cold the birds are busy. They have the idea of Spring before them and work towards it. Everything seems to know where it’s going driven along by the low angle of the sun.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The land here was all under orchards until the seventies. Before that a quarry and further back - bush. Now it is park land with vestigial memory of it's earlier incarnations. Old unpruned trees drop fruit - once there were thirty different types of pear picked - prized for their sweetness and long keeping. The mudstone shelves and breaks along linear faults. Modern labour costs prohibit blasting and hauling. The quarry is once more a cliff and clean cut valley. The creek once harnessed for irrigation remembers its old water courses and ducks follow it too.I walk beside it, mesmerised by its dark surfaces. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">This morning the grass was still wet where I walked and the spiders’ webs dewy. Hyacinths have pushed through the earth – their centres tight and bunched not really yet flowers. Under the cliffs swallows are hawking insects and in a month will begin to build a breeding factory from mud. Soon we will be planting potatoes and picking the first broad beans. We will begin to want that squeaky green taste of uncooked peas, new lettuces, the hot crunch of radish. For now it is burnt sugar biscuits and barley tea, early evenings and cool afternoons. As the mist lifts I set out with the dogs and the smell of recent rain lingers. </span></div>
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<br /></div>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-51711044560328299802012-07-17T19:47:00.000-07:002012-07-25T18:30:19.842-07:00Dog Days of the Backyard Buddhas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">We are not Buddhists but we live with three Buddhas - each of them different and each of them on a different duty.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The least fancy is our backyard Buddha. He is a tubby,
bare-bellied laughing Buddha, who has the eyes of the Dalai Lama – knowing,
forgiving – always faintly amused. He is only a foot high, cast concrete and
there are most likely a thousand others in his exact image, who look after
other backyards. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">It is this very ordinariness I find endearing - a
humble and humbling incarnation. He has lost some of the detail of his chin and
his left hand over time. But that seems only to set him apart from others, as
though cast from one mould, each incarnation seeks only to become itself, as it
also works at becoming nothing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Through the dog days of Summer he sits serenely. After
weeks of rain he wears a thick green moss across his head and shoulders and it
seems to me like a lesson in being still. Looking at him through the kitchen
window I am reminded of the story of the saint, who held still throughout Lent,
with a blackbird’s nest in his outstretched hand. St Kevin was fed berries by
the blackbird and perhaps my Buddha has a similar gig. As he sits cross-legged
in contemplation on his lotus, his lap might seem inviting to a bird. That’s
when I think to lift him up and set him in a tree. He is safe there from being
lost in the long time unmown grass. He is lifted off the ground, as though in
some kind of trace-like levitation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Our other two Buddhas are both Thai and live in the
bathroom - one reclining and one walking. Recently a friend asked, why is it
that our ears grow longer as we age. And without really thinking, I said,
because we are better listeners now than when we were young. Now we have less
to say and more to learn and less time in which to do it. But before bed as I
stood cleaning my teeth I looked over at the sleeping Buddha. He has the
longest ears in the world. Perhaps our earlobes hang lower as we age because we
all becoming Buddha.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">I had always assumed that the Buddha’s ears were long
because he listened to the whole world’s worries. But today I read that his
princely beginnings weighed on him and as royalty he would have worn gold
ornaments in his ears. In the eighties we all wore large earrings – perhaps our
earlobes are longer now as a warning to others of fashion’s follies. I stopped
wearing big baubles on my ears when I had a baby. He reached for and grabbed at
them, lying in my lap as fat and happy as any Buddha.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><span lang="EN-US">The bathroom Buddhas are both painted gold – the
larger reclining one covered in mirrors. If you bend towards him you can see
yourself reflected in him a hundred times over. Perhaps the idea is that, if we
see ourselves in him, we will see <i>him </i></span><span lang="EN-US">in ourselves also. The
sleepy Buddha is cracked through from breast to thigh. He was originally a shop
fitting - perhaps from a restaurant. Whether he was dropped or split in the sun
I’m not sure – but he was no longer wanted. He was greasy and his gold paint
was peeling when we took him home. Now he is dusted clean and spoken to but we
have not mended him. A friend of my son’s got a fright seeing the Buddhas in
the bathroom. She felt watched, though both have their eyes either closed or cast
down. She asked him later why they sit on the side of the bath and he was not
sure. Neither am I really. It seems fitting though to see the Buddha at our
most naked and innocent. There is no hiding from the Buddha and no hiding from
our true selves in the bathroom.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">We had a fourth Buddha but I broke him. I bought him
some months after Tiananmen Square, with illegal currency in a shop in
Shanghai. We were allowed only to have the mostly useless FECs in the 1980’s,
to be spent at designated government stores. But I was trading Australian
dollars with the hotel doorman. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">There were so few Buddhas to see in Shanghai at that
time. We saw only the Jade Buddha in his pavilion. But he was billed as an
artefact - something to see which was extraordinary because of his size. A week
later walking through the French quarter I saw a ceramic Buddha. Sitting atop a
pile of printed papers, he was green and white - a smiling rather than laughing incarnation – rosy cheeked
and red lipped, with ears that touched his shoulders. He was dirty - as though
he had been pulled out of the earth – a fitting image for someone who sits
astride a lotus. Perhaps he had been squirreled away while the Revolution raged
around him. Later I was told that that was unlikely. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">His grubbiness was most probably a clumsy antiquing
process, applied just prior to sale. I carried him carefully home in my hand
luggage wrapped in brown paper. The newspapers were still pasted up on pillars
in those days in Shanghai – not commonplace enough for wrapping. He sat on the
kitchen dresser for a year or two but I dropped him trying to clean some
cement-like grime from his fingers. Some of the Thai and Indian Buddhas have
evenly lengthed toes and fingers. Some even have slightly webbed hands. Perhaps
washing the Buddha’s hands was a little presumptuous. I might have loosened the
webbing and left him less capable of catching reincarnating souls.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Today when I pass the Buddha in the tree he looks a
little uncomfortable. I have no lotus for him to sit upon but I cut him a
cushion of moss. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Perhaps I am too much taken by graven images but this
is not a lesson. I like to think that the backyard and bathroom Buddhas live
with us as friends.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times-Roman;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-80216574133519406512012-07-15T22:02:00.000-07:002012-07-23T00:36:28.525-07:00Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;">This romance like so many others in this day and age began on the internet.Love, it seems can use technology.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;">Six years ago we got Blue as a paddock buddy for our ailing Border Collie, Patch. The Save-a-Dog scheme, (they have a website, with pictures and a biography), billed him as a placid heeler cross. When my sister and I went to the pound to see him we looked up and down all the enclosures without finding him, not realising he was actually corgi. Thinking on it now, we were probably looking at the wrong level. Blue is really a corgi with a heelerish coat and a busy cattle dog brain. He carries himself about on stubby corgi legs well suited to the things he likes in life, like surfing. Interestingly on reading about corgis I found that they are true dwarves. A miscommunication of the genes has produced an averaged sized dog with limbs that are foreshortened. Obviously the Scottish liked this accident enough to breed true from it.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;">Patsy came along later. Hearing about another heeler corgi (Blorgie), dog made me curious. I went to the pound to look and came back with her. All Pat's hobbies are different from Blue's. He loves the sea - she won't get her feet wet. Blue is not interested in other animals and Pat's lives to hunt. Her Spring through Summer job is catching butterflies and skinks. I take them from her mouth when I can. Sometimes I'm too late and we have a little funeral. Pat's is not invited.Although she has the sweetest temper she is a hunter. She and I have our differences there.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;">Both Blue and Pats grew on me. It was not love at first sight. It has been a smouldering affair with bright moments, some tiffs, long walks, great company and a shared interest in food.With Fred it was different. I was looking for him for a long while without knowing. There was going to be no fast car or boyfriend in my mid life crisis. But I needed someone new to talk to and do things with and someone to cuddle on the couch, (apart from M). I grew up on dog stories, Lassie, Grey Friar's Bobby, Rin Tin Tin, Call of the Wild...oh I could go on. But Flush always caught my fancy. He was a lady's companion - a poet's companion. He had a book written for him by Virgina Woolf and another by Flora Merrill. There was a stage play later and then a movie. Flush was remembered for himself as much as for his owner - much like Mozart's starling. Good credentials no? A signifier if you will. Flush was a spaniel with long soft ears and a mournful gaze. He was loyal, almost prescient, an ideal escort for a walker and a reader. He was small enough to sit in Elizabeth's lap but strong enough to walk the dales. Flush was credited with curing Browning of an unnamed illness which had her confined to bed in her childhood home. I think I have been saved once or twice by dogs.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;">Enter Fred. He was surrendered at the Lost Dogs' Home. Not in Melbourne but in country New South Wales. I looked at his picture on their website and read his little biography: Dachshund Border Collie cross fourteen months old, needs supervision, loves people, not good with chickens or cats, desexed, answers to Fred. After two weeks of looking and longing we set off in a storm to get him. When we got Blue he was called Clive. We changed that almost immediately and he seemed not to mind. Patsy was called Patsy and it seemed to suit her. Fred I mused could be changed to Flush. The jury is still out on that.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-weight: normal;">So far this is what we know about Fred. He seems to like to sit on furniture, often I look about for him and he is sitting at the kitchen table like a person, he loves the Blorgies seemingly equally. He does not like the vacuum cleaner but will happily sit in the bathroom hand basin to have his hair blow dried. He likes to fetch a stick or a ball but will not yet relinquish them, better than this is to chase Blue and take the ball from him. He loves the car and likes to be on the front passenger's knee and watch out the window. He swallows or tries to any kind of foreign object - favourites so far are erasers, shoelaces and fleece pulled from the sheepskin in his basket. He doesn't mind being brushed but likes to help get out any tangles himself. He happily sits on my knee while I type and is there now but prefers to be walking. Whether he can balance on a boogie board or not will have to wait for Summer.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">He persists in being called Fred. Perhaps after all he is not Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog.</span></h3>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>Tracked the hares and followed
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>This dog only, crept and crept<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>Next a languid cheek that slept,<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>Sharing in the shadow.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>Other dogs of loyal cheer<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>Bounded at the whistle clear,<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>Of a faintly uttered speech<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: 'Lucida Bright'; font-size: 10pt;"><i>Or a louder sighing.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: #343434; font-family: Times-Roman; font-size: 10pt;">from For Flush Elizabeth Barett Browning</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-59287905238557761282012-07-15T01:01:00.001-07:002012-07-15T22:07:00.450-07:00Cloud study 101<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Clouds give crispness and definition to the sky according to Gavin Pinney. And as founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society he should know. He has looked at plenty of clouds. They predict weather – they can mass or burn back. They inspire both wonder and worry – they can spoil a wedding or a picnic. Sometimes they scroll across an otherwise empty atmosphere like teletype. Cloud fanciers have favourites.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><i>Did you know that Nimbus is the Latin for rain cloud?</i> Nimbus by their very definition bring rain, they are dark, close and classed as praecipitato – clouds which can no longer contain their precipitation. Throughout the ten or so years of recent drought we watched the sky somewhat wistfully for nimbus. Then, it seemed to me that the sky was often empty. The ground hardened under it and even tall trees suffered.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">On Friday last we drove through an atlas of cloud types. The sky was already threatening at two in the afternoon. At first it was diverting, watching the clouds climb and assemble into impossible architectures. Later it gave an unwanted urgency to our adventure. I know only the ABC’s of cloud kinds. But Cumulonimbus is unmistakable. It is almost always trouble or troublesome - Nimbus but with attitude. It means a storm, a sudden swing on the barometer, thunder and lightning displays and possible hail. To us it meant a plummet in temperature and a sudden drop in visibility. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">Leaving town we skirted the Hume which was closed close to Melbourne by an overturned truck. And despite our cross country route progress through Yarra Glen slowed to a crawl - while a tow truck retrieved a youngster’s car that had taken a corner awry and skated on the wet road into a ditch. The kids, thankfully unharmed, watched from under one umbrella while the mud covered car was winched aboard its ride. There would be a deal of explaining to do at home and mothers on their knees somewhere thanking the heavens that it was only an injured car. Meanwhile the storm hit its stride. The next three hours or so we seemed to be driving through all of the elements at once. Trees came down, a semi trailer jack-knived across our path, lightning lit up the road in minute spaced exposures. I was gripping the wheel hard and craning to see. Mostly all I want in a storm is to be home – the gates fixed so as not to bang, the gutters clear. I like the heat to be on, a bowl of soup ready, the family on the sofa or at least busy in their rooms – the dogs at my feet and a book in my hand.I am not known to be brave or adventurous. I am not even that often out at night. But we were on a mission to fetch a rescue dog and that alone made it worth risking wet roads.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">That night we crawled into town like sailors looking for safe harbour. Well, Albury is a good way from the ocean – but the river is close and as we crossed it looked a torrent. Perhaps we could have been sweet water sailors…</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">After dinner - surprisingly good, television - reception terrible and bed - bliss, we woke to a different kind of cloud. Stratus is the kind of cloud that likes to be on the ground. It is a dog at heel. Damp almost to the point of rain but falling somewhere short - it is our chance to experience the sky at sea level. Nosing north to Canberra we sped into a chalky quiet.Either everyone else was sleeping or sensible enough to stay home.</span></div>
</div>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-55002552908577299052012-05-18T22:02:00.000-07:002012-05-19T21:02:06.408-07:00Could melancholia be good for you?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The melancholy of Autumn can be its glory too. Rain, wood smoke, bobble hats, jacket potatoes and gum boots. Then there is the excuse to stay in. It's Saturday, so why not stay in your pyjamas? There are books to read, things to eat in the pantry and the leaves are too wet to rake anyway. Washing won't dry, the dogs are rain shy - there are sofas, blankets, pillows, slippers and novels. Now I can't remember why Autumn is sad.</span>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101518677844180107.post-62625379303337914462012-05-09T19:56:00.000-07:002012-05-20T20:32:38.297-07:00Grasshopper and the ant<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Today when I am dusting I find a dead grasshopper on the
windowsill. He is still perfectly green and even in death his face looks full of intellect and interest. He does not have that frowning fierceness
that the praying mantis has – all hard angles and the eyes of a maniac. No this
sweet fellow has the face of a country vicar - all humility and gentleness and through carelessness I have
killed him. I wonder if the Buddha of household
things sees this misadventure and I leave dusting him till later - still suddenly my
karma seems too heavy to carry on with. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">I think on all the accidental deaths, on all the lives cut short through some failure of attention or care. Better the grasshopper had died in the beak of a bird, I think, more violent but a death with purpose. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">The thing is I had seen this small
fellow come in a few days ago. The screen door was open, the afternoon sun was
coming in at a slant and this perfectly jointed green creature came in too. He
settled on the architrave beside the door and I got up from my desk to admire
him. His sweet face looked somehow familiar and put me in mind of the
grasshopper in Aesop’s fables. I’m not sure what edition I had as a child – it
was a book that had belonged to my mother – a hardback, the pages roughly cut
and the coloured plates interleaved with tissue. I remember that the
grasshopper had spent the summer singing while the ants worked. I think in the
illustration he carried a small violin while the ants shouldered a giant stalk
of wheat…the text was spare, hardly a story really. Labour and frugality was
rewarded and idleness condemned. How much more eloquent the picture was and how
surprised I was that singing could be punished. I liked to sing.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">A day later when I noticed the grasshopper again he was clinging to the cornice. I
wondered at his ability to walk upside down and went back to work. I had spent
the morning bottling quinces, now I was at the sewing machine stitching
straight rows and unable stop – I admired his acrobat instincts in an abstract sort of way, not
thinking he might be in peril – I was being an ant – I hadn't stopped to wonder that he was still in the house, did not even think to open a window
for him. Perhaps he was drowning not waving. Perhaps he was not singing but
calling for help. I looked without seeing the obvious, heard without listening something I am too often guilty of
- and that is how I came to find him a week later, laid on his side as though
in sleep, unmoving on the windowsill. </span></div>Blorgiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14330463627934832509noreply@blogger.com3