For some unknown reason my decision to spend Easter away from work and my desk means that I think I must complete and perfect every single task still piled up on that desk. And find time to degunk my keyboard which is blobbed up with dog hairs and coffee drips.
Outside in the garden, lemony, copper and umber leaves are spiralling down from trees and I woke up to the distant plaintive sound of plovers calling in the mist. Autumn’s beauty and melancholy. I stood out under the trees drinking my coffee and thinking about how brief our lives are and how so much of daily life goes unrecorded, unappreciated and unnoticed. Then I went back indoors for a hot bath, found myself sharing the steamy suds with a half-eaten, disintegrating spider and briefly lost all sense of the melancholy loveliness of life.
So good to be reading Lou again at Subdural Flow II. I used to know the significance of that medical title but no longer remember it. Never mind, Lou always makes sense to me.
In readiness for Easter, I have hot cross buns in the kitchen to be eaten with ceremony on Good Friday. I don’t eat hot cross buns at any other time of the year. These buns are an English tradition dating back to medieval times when the Lenten fast was slightly broken on Good Friday to eat sweet yeasty fruity buns marked with the sign of the cross. The symbolism for Holy Week and Easter is liturgically and spiritually rich and I sometimes wish I could enter into it with more depth of feeling and belief.
And outside the autumn leaves keep falling from the oaks, catalpas and liquidambars while the sun burns through the mist and sets the wet fields shining. A sight worth looking at.
Thank you for the link. Subdural is the space between the surface of the brain and the dura, a thin layer of tissue that separates the brain from the skull. In head trauma, blood vessels there swell causing a subdural hematoma, a seemingly common condition for actors on medical shows.
I just watched “White Material” and I think of you and wonder if you ever feel in any danger.
Autumn is my favorite time of year, but it does bring on some melancholy for me. I’ve often wondered why: is it the beauty or that there is something ending? I am sure that your spot there is beautiful. Enjoy those hot cross buns. I remember the nursery rhyme:
Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns!
One a penny two a penny – Hot cross buns
If you have no daughters, give them to your sons
One a penny two a penny – Hot cross buns
My birthday always rings in autumn for me. I have always loved the colours, but seeing the trees loose their leaves have always saddened me. This year I trying a new perspective – at least they get to prepare for their winters, but eventually we all get our leaves back.