i like this blog really love eh images. where do you get your taxidermy birds?

I really adore your blogs <3

It's always a pleasure, young lady.

"...and there are ideas that dream." The Poetics... is a lovely thoughtful book. My friend Rebecca told me to read it when she discovered it while working on her Phd. She was a dancer researching spaces, both inner (inside us) and outer - in particular alternate performance sites. After she died i picked up the book and so it resonates with me on many many levels. It is such a rich text in ideas and images, opening new thoughts and considerations. I am currently reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which someone mentioned to me after seeing a dance i made titled Gift. Hyde draws from anthropology, psychology, and literature to investigate the idea of gift over time and within commerce. I am finding it engaging, if not as poetic as Bachelard. I found that quote from Sartre there. Thanx for sharing your thoughts and photos.

I have yet to ready Spinoza.

I love the Oxalis triangularis (thank you, copy and paste). Also, that gorgeous orange light - very cosy! I like to think that in the second picture you're looking down having just identified an error in a Samurai Soduku. Either that, or have just spotted a pixie running across the floor. Under no circumstances give them chocolate. A hyper pixie likes nothing better than to burn books in a Wave of Mutilation.

Yes, I went there. No, I'm not ashamed. Well, maybe a little.

We have lots of oxalis in outdoor planters and in the ground for years, and the stuff never seems to die. Even in the drought this year with temps in the 100 for 4 weeks, they've made it. They seem to freeze off in the winter, but come back with vengence in Spring!

while I don't have any dead birds which are picture-worthy (usually being somewhat worse for the wear thanks to my "professional cats"), I'll try to take some pix of my orrerys -- one of which moves at the proper speeds: Mercury takes 90 seconds to make a circuit, Pluto 8 hours. Watching it can be quite hypnotic, as various geometries form, dissolve, and reform. One thing that's really startling about astrolabes is their accuracy: I can take my brass-replica outside and cast a horoscope with it that is within 1% accuracy of any computer-generated or telescope-defined map! Those old fellas knew a thing or two!

words...one thing I love about Sanskrit is that (nearly) every word is a verb in some state or other: take the word for "to illumine: "budh:" the past aorist participle is... Buddha, the past participle is "Bodhi" (has been illumined), and the past perfect participle is "buhmi" (was illumined) and that word we would 'translate' as "Earth" Thus the Buddha (was and is illuminating) sits under the Bodhi-tree (life-illumined) on the "buhmi" (was illumined) earth -- or the human, the plants and the earth itself are all states of Light! there are no static nouns in Sanskrit: there is no "stone" just "stone-ing" as it were--so the whole world is alive, is in motion; examining a word reveals its root verb, and that leads to one of 56 root sound-verbs of a single syllable. Say them all at once, and that would be the ever-popular "OM" A great book on this is "Gayatri" by Sir John Woodroffe, though there's a fair dose of Sanskrit in it.

as for my own reading: it's all about death, as I'm now teaching a class for terminally ill folk who have a vested interest in figuring out this whole dying thing SOON. Still like Jan Assman's "Death in Ancient Egypt" amongst others... so many books about dying are written at a theoretical safe distance from the topic, as is the case for books about Love. Poetry often hits the mark rather better for both..

Lucky you... first touch of winter. Over here it's still like autumn. Some plants are still blooming too or are getting new knots... weird! Weathermen over here predicted it would be a horrorlike winter, with lots of frost, snow, winds,... I'm rather curious about that. Don't feel like driving my bicycle through thick layers of snow

Nice buddha picture there Funny to have encounterd buddhist monks... did they have the marooncoloured robes too, or only the saffron like?

Anyway, I hope your fine dear AnnaLee... it's always a pleasure reading some of your updates, having a look at your gentle pictures. There's many stories in them too

Take care!

So interesting looking at these photos after reading what you said about the Poetics of Space - made me look at the ones from the museum in a different way maybe. I'm going to have to track down that book, I think.

Lovely and interesti g photos as always too

Inspiring and beautiful, as always.