‘A Map Of The Luminescent World’
A lit up map of the times and places, tracks and journeys, that are past ,when the now is asphalt and concrete, hard and bleak. I will hope to revisit my special places once again and to explore new sparkling corners.
This is the latest iteration in an ongoing (and originally unintended) series .
It’s a recurring image that appears to me, like a dream, and then demands another projection on this blog’s screen.
I see it when I am feeling out of sorts with life.
That “in between” place; neither/nor; the netherworld.
This time around it feels like the whole coronavirus – worried world is of an uncertain mind.
We are mostly, then, somewhere under the wharf and above the waves…for now.
Stay safe people,hang on to the pilings!
‘Dis-ease: Fight Or Flight’
(the final picture post of three dealing (non-medically of course) with the Coronavirus pandemic. See also Gone Viral Blues and Panic In The World ).
‘Panic In The World’
” If the house of the world is dark, love will find a way to make windows.”
– Rumi
Make of this what you will, but in our efforts to tame the environment, the natural world, it’s getting rockier by the meshed minute…
Today’s mystery pic is a view upwards in a chamber in the Scottish National Gallery.
Eight segments in the skylight; eight Grecian-inspired plinths .
Symmetry of numbers.
It always gets me, to show that there is some sense of order in our crazy, supposedly random world.
(The title to this blog is an unashamed pilfering of the name of a 1966 song by psychedelic rock mavens Love, “Seven & Seven Is”. I love Love!)
I took a few shots of a street mural down the way from my home in Auckland a couple of days ago, and now present a portion of it detailing a world globe.
Very cool… I love maps and globes of all sorts and will give the artist some leeway in the geographical accuracy stakes!
Anyway, I post this as I am off to the other side of the world, Europe, on Sunday, for the first time in thirty years. Just a tad excited, and like all tourists, I have been busy plotting and planning the places I most want to visit in the pretty limited amount of time I have.
Which brings this visitor-in-waiting to the below words from a favourite poet,which certainly give food for thought:
” 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.”
– Mary Oliver, excerpt from “When Death Comes”
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
-Frederick Buechner
…and sometimes those things are one and the same…but never be fearful, like the man says.
PS: Bonus points for spotting the evil and laughing double-faced gargoyle plant flower.
For you – when words fail and the world prevails , stuck in your own weird tales – only you know the intracacies, the silken finesse of your web and, having built it,only you can find your way through it all.
For more arachno-themed posts, check out:
The next line of the W.B. Yeats poem featured in the previous post The Widening Gyre goes like this:
“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.
This tropical themed garden features tigerish striped bromeliads, some with sharp points and serrations and is altogether an explosion of chaotic shapes and colours in every direction; botanic flares and shrapnel, an anarchic sprawl.
No neat flowerbeds planted in rows – here there is the sense of the wild and uncontrolled world that Yeats was on about .
Artwork in an arched alcove…try saying that ten times at speed…
Or, ponder this: If asked to describe ourselves ,we focus on our nature and attributes.
But what of our influence – that arc, or sphere, or ripple outwards?
Our essence projected on the world.
What does our arc look like? Where can we effect change ?
Ebb Then Flood 