hortinterior

fruits and circles, binding ties

the shock of encounter

ways of approach

value, merit and gift

response and repletion

destiny captured; sustenance

a new view

An Other Self

In our life, alot of it's unknown to others.

Here for only a brief interlude, I dragged my friend from Den Haag to Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, where we did a circuit of Guilfoyle's Volcano. Everything you see can be different every time you see it.

I have to admit I like a grandness, but I also go for rustic, roughness and suddenness.

This is one of a handful of pavilions in the Gardens. It is odd, is it not, this dream that has been made real?

Glory be to both the constructed and to the evolving, the man-made and the organic. It's OK to say that, isn't it, in this world of ours that's become so hurt?

If we're dumb enough to obliterate nature, then we might as well obliterate all meaningful connection. How can anybody be wanting to shoot anything when the origin and reality of shooting is an expression and affirmation of life? Plants shoot up into the sky...but we're so stupid we shoot each other. Myself, I don't get that. Love and life are not about collapse. They are about renewal.

The swans are quite possibly wiser than many of the tourists who snap pictures of them. They just get on with their life, however peculiar humans have become...

Sometimes you take a different path to the one you might be expected to take. It can be startling, getting to  be an other self.

But it is known that comfort is available. In the Mauritshuis, Gerrit Dou's doggy is replete. I caught him napping. It's not like life is some kind of alienating experiment. It's a gift.

Scene through a Window

Most of these photos come from the inside of a train window as I traversed Melbourne today.

It's not infrequently said that train travel quietens the mind and lets a deeper and more receptive state to be felt.

It's the rhythm, some say, the rocking and the rolling -

even now, when trains shoot and glide and jolt without apparent rhythm -

or else there's a feeling of being safely encapsulated, of being transported.

From a train we see others' backyards and may take comfort that not everything around us is front.

We're going somewhere, and in going to that somewhere, we can go as we are.

A train view affords a wider, more encompassing, less judgmental perspective.

Train travel isn't simply hypnotic and lulling; sometimes it's bold and dramatic. There's alot more out there than our non-traveling lives allow us.

It's not only the inconvenient and neglected we get to see from the train, but very often the grand or the subtle and the stretch of history that lets us feel we belong.

This isn't much of a shot, I guess, but it's here because it's near where I grew up, right next to the station I went to school from. So the past is reassuringly present.

This final shot is somewhere I walk now and then, as I did today, and does not come from a train. But it could easily be a train-view, unexpectedly and humbly elegant as it is.