I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air.  I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being.  The endless grass, the endless leaves, the immense strength of the oak expanding, the unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird; from them all I receive a little.  Each gives me something of the pure joy they gather for themselves…

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal.  The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live… These are the only hours that are not wasted — these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. 

This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance. To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.

Richard Jefferies, Life of the Fields

I have sat underneath this tree, near Kirkby Stephen in the Eden Valley, in all weathers and at all times of the year for the last thirty years. It’s always like meeting up with an old friend.

The deep sky

A marvellously sweet occupation it is to lie on one’s back in a wood and gaze upwards! . . . One does not move – one looks, and no word can tell what peace, what joy, what sweetness reigns in the heart. One looks: the deep, pure blue stirs on one’s lips a smile, innocent as itself; like the clouds over the sky, and, as it were, with them, happy memories pass in slow procession over the soul, and still one fancies one’s gaze goes deeper and deeper, and draws one up with it into that peaceful, shining immensity, and that one cannot be brought back from that height, that depth.

Ivan Turgenev

Have you ever done this? Listening to the wind through the branches & watching the clouds scudding across the sky, feeling the earth supporting you. And then to take it deeper – to imagine the earth hurtling through space. Try it!

“The moving finger writes….

..and having writ, moves on.”
And so much has happened, yet so little has changed.

I just feel it’s time to start to post here again…strange energies, 2012 and all that.
This is a test to check if I’ve got the links with Facebook & Twitter sorted, and to check-in again.
I’m still in Vietnam, very happy in Vung Tau.
More later.

River of Time

Indo-China is like a beautiful woman – she overwhelms you and you never quite understand why….sometimes a man can lose his heart to a place, one that lures him back again and again.

I was in Indo-China for only five years. But I know that in my heart I will be there all my life…After years of travel I have encountered no-where like Indo-China, and I am not alone in this. They are places that take over a man’s soul.

I felt the river carrying my body on a current of happiness. There is something about the Mekong which, even years later, makes me want to sit down beside it and watch my whole life go by.

Jon Swain River of Time

In September 2012 I’ll have been in Vietnam for five years and I agree completely with Jon Swain – the place is fascinating and beguiling.

Photo – Mekong river moonrise at Don Det, Laos

Vietnam

I’m so pleased to be able to stay here for one more year.  I was dreading having to go back to the UK. Anthony Bourdain knows how I feel and he’s exactly right – anywhere else just seems ordinary:

“I’m smiling – we’re all smiling so hard our faces hurt.
I love Vietnam.
I love it now.
I loved it from the minute I arrived for the first time, a few years ago.

Moments

moments

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Thoreau

Want

I know what I don’t want. Now I have to decide what I do want.

“You’re never going to get the thing you want
Not ’till you work out what it is you want.
You don’t actually want the thing you want.
You only want what you can’t have. You want
it blindly. What it is you think you want

is nothing like you actually want.
You’ve still got to work it out, what you want
and what it is, the real meaning of want.”

Ali Smith The Accidental

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

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

The Real Work

Wendell Berry