first blirthday

I have been blogging for one year, here are some numbers.

82 posts

22 on thinking
18 on wine
11 on poems
8 on peek and boo
8 on nature
8 on words/literature
3 on domestic

4 unaccounted for

apple flower

white apple flower
blossoms during heatwave night
sign of summer soon

My quick attempt at a haiku inspired by our flowering crab apple tree.

For more information ...
haiku

fool

(credit: neat whiteface, glen "frosty" little by jim howle)

What is it about men that they only realize at the end of their life that it was all for naught and the 'smaller things' not the 'bigger things' were what life was really all about?

Whether it is Ivan Ilyich realizing in his final few moments that his whole life and its conventionality has 'been wrong'. Or Dorian Gray realizing that his vanity was not worth the price of his sins and then dying as a result of his final attempt at reform. Or Charles Foster Kane who in spite of his success and acquisitiveness dies without love and with only the word 'rosebud' on his lips, a final remembrance of his childhood.

Why do we realize what is important near the end? Why are we distracted? Do women suffer the same neglect of life itself?

Is it because man is still a conqueror who wants to go out into the world and leave his mark and does so at the expense of what is close to home? Is it because he needs to focus on been a provider and provides the wealth of the world but not time or the love? Or is it because he simply does not stop and think about what is important?

Why do we wait until the end, to begin? Why are we such fools?


For more information ...
the death of ivan ilyich
the picture of dorian gray
citizen kane

on our watch

(source: bbc news)

In the margin of a report on Rwanda, the US president scribbled, 'not on my watch'. An admirable sentiment but one that seems increasingly futile as the Darfur crisis spirals downward. We cannot be too harsh however on the inept president because the collective world has largely ignored Sudan. Indeed we tend to ignore the whole of the African continent.

Africa makes it onto our news and nature programs but there is a shocking lack of TV fiction about Africans. Through the news, we get the facts, through the nature programs we build pictures of the continent but we do not have a sense of Africans.

Good fiction connects us with people as people. The only TV show to address Africa and some of its concerns is ER and for that it is to be commended. It does not present a through analysis of the Darfur situation but it does show us African's as 'real people'.

Only when we connect with people from far off lands as 'real people' will we begin to work on making sure there are no additions to the genocide list that currently ends; Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur.


For more information ...
darfur crisis
oxfam darfur press release