Abandoned

A tiny house 

sat under a tree

A-waitin' a leprechaun 
rent definitely not free.

No one came a-callin'
thro' leaves ‘neath the tree

Empty it stood in the quiet.

A potential home spontaneously!

“I think people need housing. And there's empty buildings. 

I think people should live in them. If you want to call 

them squatters, trespassers, hey, I call Wall Street thieves!”

~ Al Lewis (Grandpa Munster)

Tissue Paper Flowers

Spontaneous innocence

flowering gaily as child’s play 

in yards and parks.

“She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.”

~ Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Safe Haven ~1

Pointing skyward
Standing bare and broken
Grasses wave brown and  ripe in the sun
Arbutus, garry oaks and evergreens stand apart
Rejecting the old one’s dead starkness
Fungus sprouts in weathered crevices
Spontaneous drift into sheltered nooks
Accepting safe haven.

“The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.”

~ Tacitus

Book Review: The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

From the first page, the beautiful writing drew me into this story. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng opened our new season at my book group. What a wonderful read. The story opens in Malaysia as Judge Teoh is taking an early retirement from the bench in Kuala Lumpur. Returning to the Cameron Mountains, she plans to go Yugiri, the Garden of Evening Mists. She reunites with Frederick Pretronis on Majuba Tea Estates neighbouring Yugiri. 

Judge Yun Ling Teoh is returning to the Garden to recover her past and honour her sister. They had both been in a Japanese internment camp when she was nineteen and was the only surviving member of this brutal camp. Later she was a research clerk in the War Crimes Tribunal while waiting admission to law school at Cambridge University in 1949. Her early retirement was prompted by early signs of dementia. Yun Ling begins to write her memories that span forty years from World War II through the early 1950’s and into the 1980’s before they are lost to her.

Yun Ling’s story unfolds in layers of present and past, much like the layers in the Japanese gardens that she and her sister loved. The memory of the gardens that kept them alive in the camp. Yugiri was designed and cared for by Arimoto, who was once the gardener to the Japanese emperor.  Yun Ling, despite her hatred of all Japanese, determined to keep her promise to her sister to create a Japanese garden.

Spontaneity in her life was as contrived as the outlines of Yurigi, whose stone placements, foliage and pathways were designed and placed with thought only to the image. Beneath the surface of the present images designed to deceive, lay feelings of hatred, anger, and the guilt that only a survivor knows. The principle of shakkei or borrowed scenery is the use of nearby or distant landscapes, including the sky, is used in Japanese gardening. This principle seems to be a part of Yun Ling’s whole story.  The past, the present and memory all shaped her story without intent.

Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, The Garden of Evening Mists is a book I will read again.

“Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, 

shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then 

the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating 

it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, 

and the world is in shadows again.”

~ Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

Title:  The Garden of Evening Mists
Author:  Tan Twan Eng
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Publication Date: 2012
Format:  Soft Cover
ISBN: 978-1-60286-180-0 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-1-60286-181-7 (e-book)
Type:  Fiction

Walking with Words

Words have come slowly today.
Spontaneity just rising from the sofa to take words walking this evening ~
a few fluttered forward like shy butterflies
early evening backed by a faint twitter of songbirds
covered rudely by crying calling gulls
disturbing the peaceful skies
apple orchard alive with distant voices
city silence settles around me
buildings in sharp relief against evening azure skies.
One man's footsteps marked and hurried disappear down the dirt path;
white, black tipped huskies, collars a-jingle, pull their master energetically,
a young woman shares the acrid whiff of nicotine that jars against this cool shadowed corner ~
three random passersby returning from the workaday world.
Peace settles on the city.

“You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

Winging It! ~ 1

Winging It! ~ 1

“Spontaneity! Please, do not tell me to be more spontaneous. Outside of  my schedules, I don’t have time to be spontaneous when I’m so tired!”

“Nevertheless, Hank, you are pushing yourself with everything that you do and I would just, for once, like to suggest we take off somewhere and you would say ‘Let’s go.” 

This was the argument that Hank and Rhonda had had over and over in the last couple of years. Always, ‘I’m too busy’ or ‘I have a deadline to meet’ or tons of other reasons. Now that Rhonda had finally given up and they hadn’t spoken for weeks, she found the brochure lying on the coffee table. Ecuador vacation, the brochure and plane tickets for next weekend!! It was the trip she’d been wanting for a very long time, but had put her suitcase in the basement and packed away her summer clothes. Tears kept streaking down her cheeks while she re-packed those summer clothes - into suitcases.

“You and I are flying off for that long awaited vacation, sweetie.”

“Patience is bitter, but it’s fruit is sweet.”

~ Aristotle