Enjoy the little things in Life...

(Pic from WiseGirl)

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70 days into 2013...

... and I have this in my garden...

 

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Wireless technology

Here in the rural area where I live in Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa, telephone poles are becoming a thing of the past. The copper wire has been stolen so many times that Telkom has abandoned the land-line system and resorted to a satellite telephone system. I’ll miss the poles and lines in the landscape, they provided great perches for birds of prey and congregating swallows before they leave on their great winter migration up North. 

I AM a copper wire slung in the air, 

Slim against the sun 

I make not even a clear line of shadow 

Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming: 

It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and 

the tears, the work and want, 

Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, 

carrier of your speech, 

In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the 

shine drying, 

A copper wire. 

- Carl Sandburg 

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Crow wears a band of silver

W&N watercolour on Amedeo 200gsm 

With thanks to John from "Midmarsh Jottings" for the use of his beautiful photograph. 

Crow wears a band of silver on his ankle, holds it out to watch it glint in the sun like cool creek water. It is noon. He is the only one out. All others have sought shelter under the canopy of live oak, the leaves beneath the chaparral, Crow the only one among them unafraid to cast a shadow. He is a black body to absorb the sun’s heat, and yet unheated.

He's silver studded with stones, turquoise to match the cloudless sky. He stretches out his leg again, watches sky and water glisten on his ankle.

 He flexes claws and brings his foot beneath him again, stretches out his other, naked foot for balance. His feet are beautiful, furrowed skin like charcoal scales, sharp and onyx claws. As flexible as hands, good for grasping new-hatched thrushes or pulling gate hooks from eye bolts, and sleek. The humans see crow’s feet in the faces of their most seasoned elders, the scars of a learned life spent laughing. Crows’ feet, the mark of craft and cunning, crow’s feet a sense of humor made skin and sinew.

 He swings down on the branch, holds himself upside down and swinging, the silver falling down around his upper leg as he barks in delight. Sky below his feet and swaying, silver pools above his head. The world so beautifully inverted, he cannot keep from laughing. This is beauty: the world turned upside down. You can keep your lithe ingénues, your florid sunsets and cloying sentiment: beauty is all that cleft in two, a cunning spark suspended by crow’s feet, a fall from a deadly height and then the swoop of wing, the thickening of the air beneath splayed feathers. Seeing air rising within air and climbing on it, sun glinting blue-black as night sky off your feathers? Night colours blazing brilliant from your feathers? Beauty is day turned to night and night to day.

Heart beats furious beneath that dark breast, mind burns in onyx eyes. Beauty a glint of laughter in a bottomless dark eye. He barks again.

Sun above live oak, a thousand suns refracted on the earth below. Grasshoppers leap into the air clicking. Wild oats, tawn in the summer heat, lean eastward with the breeze, and a wall of fog on the ocean twenty miles west.

All this beauty: all this.

Story from "Coyote Crossing"

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March inspiration - Pets

"The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too." 

~ Samuel Butler

  My companion and life-long friend, Jacko (read Jacko's story HERE.)

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For many of us, our pets mean the whole world to us. For me, a house or an apartment becomes a home when you add one set of four legs, a happy tail, and that indescribable measure of love that we call a dog. I've always subscribed to the creed that the purity of a person's heart can be quickly measured by how they regard animals. Mahatma Gandhi said, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." I whole-heartedly agree with that.

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