A problem of Grammar :)

"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with...

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's 'Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations'. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it.

The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father."

Page 216, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', Douglas Adams

A little bundle of love

To all whom I have fed at this dining table, and to those I have yet to feed.

I am always deeply touched by the offering of food. It moves me more than any other gift.

A post about ripe mango curry, and Sudama's little cloth bundle of powa...

The Offering of Food: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2012/04/offering-of-food.html

A Gift

"The artist appeals to that part of our being . . . which is a gift and not an acquisition – and, therefore, more permanently enduring."

Joseph Conrad,
From 'The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World', by Lewis Hyde

If I were sure

"..but a great weariness is upon me —
I would be willing to die now if I were sure that death is sleep."

From 'Day's End', Alden Nowlan

Singing

On a branch
floating downriver,
a cricket, singing.

Kobayashi Issa, Translated by Jane Hirshfield

But the river has ways...

...But the river has ways
of sound and light, ripples

and waves that tell us:
don't be so serious, rumble in

where nothing is finished or broken
and nothing asks to be fixed.

Jeanne Lohmann

Forget your personal tragedy

Ernest Hemingway, to F.Scott Fitzgerald:

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you."

Forget your Personal Tragedy: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tragedy.html#.T5lK81Ygmxw.twitter

Beauty

Important lessons:
Look carefully, record what you see.
Find a way to make beauty necessary;
Find a way to make necessity beautiful.

Anne Michaels, 'Fugitive Pieces'

It may be

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

Coping

It has rained for five days
running the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water
where small islands
are only beginning
to cope
a young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun
forget
and drown easily.

Audre Lorde

Saving

In and Out
Jane Kenyon

The dog searches until he finds me
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing
saves my life -- in and out, in
and out; a pause, a long sigh.

I know this feeling. Many cats and kittens have saved me by falling asleep on my lap, or my tummy, and breathing in and out :)

Pusad, or Journeying into Colour

A life-changing trip. So many wonderful women. So many of my people. There is a reason why I love this country in spite of its many problems. There is a reason I stay. It is good to go out and be reminded about it. We forget, so easily.

 Post: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/2012/04/rang-de.html

As if

Vermilion

Pierre Bonnard would enter
the museum with a tube of paint
in his pocket and a sable brush.
Then violating the sanctity
of one of his own frames
he'd add a stroke of vermilion
to the skin of a flower.
Just so I stopped you
at the door this morning
and licking my index finger, removed
an invisible crumb
from your vermilion mouth. As if
at the ritual moment of departure
I had to show you still belonged to me.
As if revision were
the purest form of love.

Linda Pastan

To the one at the back of the empty bus

Flood: Years of Solitude

To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway.

To the one at the back of the empty bus.

To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall.

To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past.

To the one who loses with the deck he marked.

To those who are destined to inherit the meek.

To us.

Dionisio D. Martinez

What can I hold you with?

What can I hold you with?
Jorge Luis Borges

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,

bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
--just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.

I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.