the simple matter of living and dying in love.

Mountaineering Culture Studies at Michigan.

dave holland.

the shark's fin in 2008.

Prayer for travelling people

If it is evening when they set out,

collect them into the last light

and make it dawn for them.

If someone kissed them

goodbye, let them both remember.

Give them fewer waits at airports

or train stations or bus stops

or rickshaw-stands. Mostly,

give them breath to walk

far and wide and with

clouds catching their eyes.

Keep them warm.

Give them silence if they

are happy. Give them

conversation if they are

in themselves alone

and thinking not just of

passing from place to

place but of passing the

very world by.

Bring to them the

kindness of strangers.

Fill their eyes.

Let there be someone,

when they arrive, to

bring them home.

yosemite.

win.

claim.

fly a photo by olidhar on Flickr.

hyderabad.

i read this in the norton rendition today. kempe is marvellous. laughter builds and builds alongside wonder and admiration and intrigue and much else. but you read, really, for these moments, when it is simply impossible to not fold the book in your hands and give over -- several times -- to laughing out loud :).

winter. storm. winter storm.

sunday. the second movement of mahler's second symphony. imagine a dead man. and then -- for what could be more retentive than a dead man's memory? -- him imagining his life in music. what a world of thinking back and longing. you remember it well into the sublime last movement and even after.

monday i came and went back and around and around and back all day listening to a man who had just died.

one reason for a very quiet birthday. but five voices to break my silence all day, and i am glad of them all.

go watch how the camera has to work to keep up with the man.




(detail from Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, Saint Rémy, June 1889 [photographed at MOMA])

month of white and red.

and sometimes i think all i did this year was leave.

merry christmas, all.

There was a pass on the mule track from Kalimpong where someone at sometime had put up a sign asking "Is it nothing to ye who pass by?" How strange, how deeply moving those few puzzling words. For these muleteers and horse riding traders, who sat on beautifully worled saddles and rugs or rich brocades, what did the end of a long journey mean? Not that Christ died for them, as I learned was the answer to the conundrum, but that they had crossed river and barren plateau, climbed high passes and were about to arrive at their destination with its many attractions for those who normally enjoyed none. For me those words were an aching challenge. If only I could go the other way, over the dizzy Jelep La and Tsang Po to Lhasa. Gape at the Forbidden City, perhaps see the legendary Dalai Lama. Oh yes it meant much to me who came upon that gentle Christian enquiry. Praise the gods, praise the Lord, praise the heavens I was at so wondrous a spot, sitting by a forested trail with mist racing past and the tintinabulation of bells coming from somewhere down the trail muted by distance and trees. How glorious to be alive in so wonderful a world.

Desmond Doig, 'A Bus to Gangtok', Look Back in Wonder (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1995), p.21.

epic.

also read.

dhauladhars.

curioser and curioser.

sunday.

reads.

and on.