Staying with friends in Scotland I came across this lion in the woods. You could not have hoped to be in a more fairy glade if you'd donned your wings and gone out and searched for one.
The stitch and the clawed robe are all down to Pocket. A while ago I purchased an amazing party gown by Jasper Conran from a village fete for £20. It was so beautiful with lots of feathers hand sewn all over it and I don't think it had ever been worn. Pocket couldn't believe his luck in finding so many small birds in one place without having to travel more than a few feet from the bed. I need say no more.
Here is puppy again at four weeks. It is traditional apparently to name lurchers after herbs so we have settled on Rocket. He has an Uncle Rocket I gather. Certainly he'll move like one. We deliberated for ages over names. I know we now have a Pocket and a Rocket but someone suggested Button and I thought we were beginning to sound like a haberdashery shop with a pocket and all.
And talking of birds we now seem to have 13 ducks. I couldn't fit them all in the frame so here are 6 of them. And the good news for Croaky the rook is that he has flown away! He made a quick bid for freedom and I watched him sail over the hedge. A lovely sight. Colin from Gosport however has chosen not to follow him but seems content with the ducks for companionship. Like Croaky did he walks out and hops around and once did fly over the fence. I watched him strutting around the field and jumping short distances. I left him to it and later found him sitting on his branch back in the shade tunnel. I suppose the outside world was a bit scary for him. The door is always open for him when he feels the time is right.
As Lord Pocket would say "there are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow, so today is the right day to live, believe, do and mostly - live" - and sleep and catch things. I said I thought the Dalai Lama had said that and he said I can't possibly answer that I'm sleeping. I wanted to say sounds like Alice in Wonderland - jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but never jam today. But he was already asleep. So I couldn't tell him the interesting fact that that is a pun on a mnemonic for the usage of jam. Iam in Latin means now but only in the future and past tense, not in the present (nunc). What a clever man Lewis Carroll was. I was going to tell Pixie so she could use it as her interesting fact but she said she already had one.
Pixie says her interesting fact this month is that a stitch in time saves nine. I told her that wasn't a fact that was a proverb and she said that Pocket had told her and that it was something to do with some birds on a dress. So her interesting fact instead is that Novichok (very topical given the poisoning in Salisbury) means new comer. Also did she hear correctly that there might be some jam somewhere?
When Death Comes
Mary Oliver
When death comes
like a hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
likes an iceberg between shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth,
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
