this too

HERE AND THERE

ON HOLIDAY

Best fun all week. Design your own Simpsons avatar at the Simpsons Movie website.

Thanks to Andy for the link. His avatar is better than mine - it looks just like him! (no, I don't mean he's really yellow and gormless-looking, but...)

I'll be away for a couple of weeks. Then I'll probably have photos (probably of rain), so I'll probably be back.

PENDING

I nearly made that last one the last post on this blog. It felt like the end of something - full circle, the first time I mentioned the blog's title and first time I really understood it. Now would be a time to stop. Extremely busy. Holidays approaching: walking a little, seeing friends and seeing this teacher again. And then, change or decay. Start again only when things are different, only when I can blog under my full name.

I don't seem to quite want to do it, though: the plunge into limbo. I may still want somewhere to park my photos, or a thought or two. But thin on the ground for a while, I think.

I'll be reading and commenting elsewhere, trying to get all my photos worth keeping onto Flickr, working on building a website. And this, the pending file.

INSIDE THE FOUNTAIN

Today I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and frightened and despairing. Cannot live like this, do this much work. Need to get off. NOW, please.

Today I’ve been cradling my fear and despair and overwhelm. Holding them, stroking them, until they pass. And pass they do. Bad feelings are just feelings, and they pass.

A decade of meditation, two and half years of on-line talking to myself, and I think I just got it. I can be with bad feelings, fully with them, not suppressing, not denying, but not identifying with them either. I am not my feelings. And they pass. This too shall pass. And therefore can be borne.

Oh.

My tears flow down me like a fountain, and inside them I’m still here - a small, new-born silky thing.

SO OLD, SO SICK, SO LOVELY STILL

MAKING ME SMILE IN THE GAME OF LIFE

Reading what Andy and Tamar have written about our recent meeting. I feel so very lucky to have come upon them through their blogs.

Hearing Alan Johnston's voice when I woke up in the middle of Tuesday night and, finding I could not get back to sleep, switched on the radio.

Such good things, right here and far away, in the midst of so much bad news and such a very frightening world.

Hard to know how I feel sometimes: tremulously suspended between joy and despair.

WHY I NEVER PHOTOGRAPH THE CAT