This has been a very rushed week and it is only Tuesday. Flabbergasted by the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, imagining all the drop-jawed cardinals wandering around Vatican City in a daze. The first Pope to resign or abdicate in 600 years. This is going to be a very strange Lent.
Busy writing a monograph of the Portuguese writer Fernando de Pessoa who spent his youth in South Africa in the early 1900s. Fascinating work, impossible deadlines.
Village funerals and more busyness.
A difficult argument with the gardening services manager, too many mutual misunderstandings to be resolved without long negotiations through sulks on his part, meaningful silences on mine. .
I’m starting to revise my out-of-date blog roll. If you stopped blogging and don’t want to be ejected, start up again and I’ll put you back on. If I don’t know your blog and you want to see it shining brightly on my blog roll, send me your url.
The playful sweetness of dogs as a constant distraction from work.
Return of summer heat and I crave homemade ices, raspberry and mango, melting on the tongue.
Should I make pancakes for Shrove Tuesday? I am the clumsiest pancake tosser ever. Why does Lent catch me unawares each year? Metanoia, transformation, staying receptive to the unexpected. Will the next Pope be African?
Fernando de Pessoa, a truly plural person who wrote under many heteronyms. Another Whitman embracing multitudes.
Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.Fernando Pessoa as Ricardo Reis, from Odes
