T is for ...

Sometimes the road travelled comes to an abrupt end, and if you still have a pulse, then it’s not a dead end, just a T-junction. Now you’re faced with two choices, in opposite directions. Unlike a fork in the road, neither choice in this case is a continuation of what you’ve done before; both are new directions.. mutually exclusive ones. Will one lead to heaven and the other to hell? That’s what I’m asking myself.

I wish there were sign posts. Even something like “Road Less Travelled” would give me some clue as to the merits of either direction.

I consult my Better Drivers Guide. T junction: stop and give way to traffic. Proceed with care.. I’d be grateful for some traffic. A fellow traveller drawing alongside right now would be greeted with cordial relief.

I look around for any shady trees under which may sit a wise old guru ready to point out the way, but I am a lone grasshopper and must make up my own mind it seems. Why isn’t real life more like the movies? If I was the winsome starlet, the screenwriter would lend me some clever words, and the director would produce a smiling monk doodling in the sand stage right..

Who am I kidding? I’d be likely to view any advice at this point with suspicion, and probably stubbornly go in the opposite direction to the one suggested. It’s tough being contrary. I’m glad actually, that there are no pesky, well-meaning on-lookers poised with unsolicited advice. Yes, it’s tough being contrary. Sometimes I feel like I am the human version of that horse which is led to water but wont drink.

But back to the junction. How appropriate that it is called T. T for think, T for trust your instincts, T for time to decide. Okay. So let’s say I hang a right turn. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume I don’t look back. We’ll assume I head out on my new direction without regrets. Because.. how will I keep my eyes on the new road if I keep trying to remember the scenery from all the previous streets and alleyways? Isn’t it better to be decisive and make the turn, rather than sit idling at the T?

I took a wrong turn once. Even with the GPS directing me, I took a left when I should have taken right. Then, every thirty seconds, that machine kept telling me to perform a U-turn when safe to do so! And if I think about it.. in life, when I go the wrong route, some little voice sounds off and keeps telling me to make a you turn and get back on track..

  

I prefer forks. At least with a fork in the road you can opt to just merrily continue doing a similar thing. Forks are so pleasantly gradual. None of this coming to an abrupt halt out of the blue. T-junctions that pop up right after a corner are the worst. You just come out of a satisfyingly executed turn on a tricky curve at speeds way over the recommended mph and suddenly BAM! A stop sign. A T-junction. Make up your mind. Do you know the way or not?

I’ll confess right here and now. No, I don’t know the way. That’s bad news considering I’m not willing to ask for directions. Time to trust the inner compass. It points true North, and if I follow that instinct I must eventually end up on top of the world. I’ll likely get cold feet the closer I get, and quite likely encounter a number of T-junctions, but this grasshopper is on the move, and that’s a step in the right direction.

Syria Sorrow

Syria. Halfway across the globe but not out of sight. 

In my lounge room, on my breakfast table: Syria, Sarin, send in the bombs. 

Whose children are those carpeting the ground? A mosaic of sadness. 

The sounds of Syria today: screams, silence, prayers .. in Arabic.. but other tongues yesterday. 

A litany of laments the national anthem for ages, since Adam walked Eden, perhaps under the same sun.

Syria, the very navel of mother Earth, fought over like the prize of the harem. 

Land between rivers, stained red with more blood than both arteries can carry. 

What babble have the rocks there heard.. in Assyrian, Kurdish, French, Latin, Aramaic? 

A land older than its name, newsboy catch-cry, spread over the war-table and stuck with pins. 

Sorry. 

The world wants another spectacle.

My prayer,

as Russian fingers march the map to meet American fists, 

as guerrillas mark off territory sweating the name of Allah or of Mammon; 

is for a second bolt of light to strike those eyes considering the roads to Damascus. 

Are You For Real?

I’m starting to wonder what that is. Real, I mean. A good friend gave me a book recently, about philosophy and humour, and somewhere between those two I may have lost my point of focus. Once you start messing around with perspective and relativity, reality gets a little slippery and starts swaying like Moses’ staff in the wilderness. Good ole Reality, something that I’ve been brought up to believe is as solid as a nice cedar stick, becomes all floppy and even makes funny hissing noises..

Dreams. Are they real? Are they, as serious dream analysts say; prophetic, inner truths, issues crying out for attention? Or are they just the runaway sleepy fantasies of our over-stimulated minds?

The swami walking on the bed of coals will tell you that the mind can overcome reality. We’ll have to believe that his, at least, certainly can, since the reality of those embers putting out plenty of heat seems to have been safely ignored by his soles. (Don’t try that at home.)

Will reality go away if we ignore it? Having actually tried this myself, I can testify to the negative. My library fine stayed right where it was despite a very valiant effort on my part to deny its existence. Blaming that reality on someone else having misplaced my book did help soften the harshness of my undeniably real financial depletion..

Life is real, of that I am sure. My perspectives do seem to turn on a paradigm, but each one settles into its own groove, the good bad and ugly combining to decorate the reality of existence. Much as I might like to believe the twilight fancies dancing in my REM rest, eventually I need to wake up and embrace the real me.

I blog therefore I am... :)

Sleeping Beauty ~ Thomas Spence

Q for Quest..or maybe Question?

I’ve been running around. Like a hairy goat. Like a headless chook. From one place to another, inside airports and train stations, and one thing is certain. Wherever I go, there I am. It’s been an exciting half a dozen weeks tripping on a holiday through Europe. Perhaps I thought the change in scenery would cause some kind of commensurate shifts in my viewpoint of life, or my personality, but I seem to have reached home in the same shoes I left with.

Looking over my shoulder, the whole experience is already rapidly receding into memories. Luckily I took a few snapshots or I may not believe it had happened at all. I’ve been on trips before, and have to confess that apart from the slideshow performed for a few very lucky friends, those photos haven’t seen the light of day since. Life seems to happen in the now, with little time to think back or forwards.

That gets me thinking...that if I haven’t changed, and the memories move so quickly into distant past, why do I go to all the trouble of packing hefty cases and lugging them around the world? (If my husband is reading this, now is the part where he’ll be rubbing his hands hopefully, thinking that my wandering days are done)..but no. Quintessentially quite the opposite! That’s like saying I’ll give up eating jellybeans.

The singular, wonderful, awe-inspiring experiences I have, moment by moment, in places I’ve never seen before, with people I’ve never met before.. are worth the miles. Perhaps some do change me a little, but on the whole it’s the joy they bring in that moment that adds to my enjoyment of life.

The shiver at the giddy views from a mountain, the zing of an exotic recipe, the giggle at a silly busker, the understanding as another piece of history’s puzzle makes sense, the surprise in the discovery of a foreign custom, the pleasure of an unexpected kindness..even the fear of losing my way, and the frustration of a rip-off. Everything adds up. I probably don’t even remember them all, but they are special moments.

I have special times at home too of course, but there’s still a lot out there for me to discover. My suitcase is stowed in the closet for now, but I think it knows it won’t have to languish in the dark for long...

Questions?...always.

Life is a quest.

Quality produce ~ Stresa Italy

Promise me ... that ... smile

Today's blog is brought to you by the letter.. P. It seems the perfect day for a poem :)

Promise me that smile

The runaway which has

No introduction just an

Unpretentious entry like

Uncle Charlie bursting into the room

Promise me no

Hesitation but just the rush

Of the current over stones

Warm and liquid and

Wordless

Promise me a crushing

Soothing velveteen couch

Kind of burying embrace

Full of overstuffed cushions

Which we toss out of

The way and timeless like

The moment before the sun

Goes down past the lip

Of the horizon seeming

To wait there burning a

Last cigarette before

Ducking under

Make me a promise

That you cannot fail to keep

A promise picked free of the

Cobwebs and dust of past

Hearts and simple

Like a naked grape

Ready for the roundness of

One mouth

©Julia Zed 2013

pascalcampion.blogspot.com

Oh I love the way you say it doctor!

Oscars only ostrich oiled an orange owl today..

If I make a list of the people who most influenced me as a child, it would have to include Dr Seuss. A quick look at wikipedia tells me he was Theodor Geisel, produced 44 children’s books and won a pulitzer prize. What, only 44? I had expected to find hundreds. I must have read the whole lot then. I went to places like Pompelmoose Pass, the island of Gwark and the country of Motta-fa-Potta-fa-Pell, chasiing Poozers, visiting Sneeches, marvelling at the Tufted Mazurka, and Fiffer Feffer Feff. C’mon, what an imagination!

My life is still a little like a Dr Seuss book. A combination of sense and nonsense, a river of words many of which are not found in any dictionary, and a love of funky individualism. If you can learn to recite ‘I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew’ you will not only have done a great deal of excellent exercise with your tongue and lips, but will have learned some fabulously bodacious new words and a sensible life lesson to boot.

Childhood is a long way off now. Can you think of what influenced you way back then? Mum, Dad..sisters, brothers, those are a given. What else? Teachers? A coach? A film star? Friends? Taking a look at the small stitches that knit us up can be a surprising revelation of how just a few hours or few words made a lasting deposit. Who knows what makes certain people or events stick in our minds? Sometimes just a short unexpected connection with someone leaves us impacted right into adulthood. Good or bad. And it never stops. We take new things on board every day.

And that means...yes me, yes you. We’re not Oprah, Orwell or Obama, but we still influence other people, probably without even knowing it. Authors like Dr Seuss are well aware that they make an impact, no doubt they write with that well in mind, but I don’t think most of us are aware that unless you’re a hermit, just about everything we do affects others. Perhaps it seems like a big responsibility to bear. It’s certainly something to think about considering that modern motto: “Do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.” ... I’d be happy to change that motto to “Do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t affect anybody else.”

Live obstinately or obediently..  or ostentatiously, outrageously, originally, orderly, openly, or outstandingly, or omnivorously... do it your way... but...

Know that it does matter. Ok? ;)

Taken from Dr Seuss's ABC

Would you accept candy from a stranger?

N is for naïveté...

At a community picnic last week the crowds were thick and the mood upbeat as we were entertained by various street performers, among them an enthusiastic African drummer. A number of us jiggled and hopped along with the rhythm, flashing smiles and enjoying the common groove. It wasn’t too long before the sun and the exertion had me panting. The woman next to me grinned, fished about in her dilly bag for a bit, and then pulled out a small pillbox. I watched fascinated as she flipped the lid and selected a tablet with long acrylic tipped fingers. “Here,” she said, offering me a tiny pellet, “pop this under your tongue, it’ll give you more energy.” I declined with my kindest grown-up expression. (you know, the one that says “don’t be silly dear”), and thanked her with a smile. Well, would you accept a mystery substance from a stranger who could be a few squares short of the full chocolate bar? ..and what’s that got to do with anything anyhow?

Here we are in the middle of a still accelerating boom of technological advancement. New devices regularly make their entrance onto the market amidst fanfare and excitement -so often that we are dizzy and wide-eyed, hardly knowing which to choose next. The general mood is upbeat as we all tap and click our way to modern community. Are you up with the latest buzz? Is the new iphone better than the competition? How many more months should you wait before upgrading to a better laptop? Do you really know how to get the most out of that gadget?

Even my grandma has a shiny new mobile toy to juggle, reluctantly accepting a device that is as mysterious to her as Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most of her blue-rinse buddies also have a mobile phone stashed in the handbag, and/or a computer blinking and winking on a table next to the wireless at home. I sat next to her when she first got hers, and tried to explain which little boxes on the overcrowded screen were waiting for her input. In the end I sent her on a crash computer course.. don’t let the irony of that one escape you. But even after computing 101, she remains generally confused about the inner workings of the grey box in her home, never deviating from the exact key sequences that will take her to her email.

We are armed to the hilt with the latest microchipped wonders, but an alarming majority of us don’t know how to use the technology properly. Those who do, find themselves in a fools’ paradise of sitting ducks. And it’s duck season. In a move akin to passing out loaded guns to children, we are equipping ourselves with smart technology minus a safety catch. Parents hand their offspring tablets and phones that have cameras, microphones and access to social networks. Sure, the kids are miles ahead of Granny trying to deal with email and dodge spam, but they are still babes in the wood compared to the undercurrent of IT wizards, themselves kids in a candy store of opportunities.

Privacy is the undecorated casualty of this information explosion. Actually, it’s an information war. Ignorance is the ally of our enemy, and we are prisoners of our own materialism. Sorry to say that Grandma found herself cleaned out recently. She fell victim to a telephone scam, giving remote access of her computer to a supposed maintenance firm. And me? I’m not that much more savvy than Grandma really. I have accepted a tablet, one full of cyber-mysteries and security systems that are continually superseded. It lets me run a whole lot of sweet applications... but I have to confess a woefully inadequate knowledge of all its sweet implications.

Whose job is it to make sure we are all fully aware of the capabilities and risks of the products we are buying? Who is responsible for Granny’s misfortune?  Nobody’s putting up their hand.

Somehow Naïveté isn’t so cute anymore.