22nd January - rambling

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt, crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, 

tomorrow is a new day;

begin it well and serenely,

with too high a spirit to be cumbered 

with your old nonsense.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I came across this today and thought it spelled out a way to approach life;) Well it is cold, the snow fell from 1.30 pm yesterday afternoon, but was not heavy as to lie thickly on the ground, though Paul took Karen and Lillie back an hour earlier to catch their train, along with Teddy the whippet.

Poor Teddy got bullied by Lucy and he spent most of the time creeping round her and staying upstairs.  I had bought fillet steak for the meat eaters, then had to tell them that I had just signed the Avaaz pledge to not eat meat, or at least to eat less.   Usual idiotic banter from those with a guilty thought that maybe it is not just right to send all these animals to the slaughter.  I have lived with this conundrum a good deal of my life, feeding people meat whilst not eating much myself.  Will the new vegans triumph? doubt it, and I myself eat eggs and cheese and put milk in my coffee.  Sometimes I think we are made to go round with a great burden of guilt for every action we take, but do those vegan eaters have a feeling of superiority, does that carry them along in their actions?

Enough, a friend brought along a catalogue of Paul Nash's paintings they had seen at an exhibition 'up North' and I wandered with rapt attention amongst his megaliths and landscapes of the moon.  There are essays in front of the paintings but somehow I am not interested in where he painted only on what he painted.

I have a problem with art, Ravilious and Nash are favourites, but to my eye the paintings are naively done yet that is not so, the subject matter catches the imagination and is this not the whole point?

Perhaps in seeing different work we delve into the mind of the artist we see the images that cloud our own minds.  Here I see the stone avenue at Avebury in the background is that flat topped Silbury and Glastonbury on the left with the maze path.

Landscape of the megaliths

Landscape of the Vernal Equinox

When ever I see those funny mushroom shaped clumps of trees, these are the Wittenham clumps in Oxfordshire, I am reminded that their neat undersides are nibbled by countless generations of sheep than cattle to produce that evenness,  a delicious idea of trees dancing on the hills, did Tolkien ever admire Nash I wonder!

November moon

'November moon' was seen on an evening but I always see the moon on those crisp cold mornings against the blue of the sky, though now at the moment it is but a thin sliver of cheese.