The Good Salad: Dressing: (mix well and chill) 1/4 cup canola oil; 1/4 cup lemon juice; 2 cloves of minced garlic; 1/2 teaspoon of salt; 1/2 teaspoon pepper; honey to taste Ingredients: 2 bunches of torn Romaine lettuce; 2 cups chopped tomatoes; 1 cup shredded red and while cheddar cheese; 2/3 cup slivered toasted almonds;…
Complex & Simple, Persons, Posts
The Weight of Glory* – weighing heavenly rewards against earthly pleasures
“This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is in fact the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the onset, taken each other seriously.” “If you ask twenty good men today what they thought the highest…
Complex & Simple, Nature, Posts
Lines end ……. or they soar into eternity
Lines divide …………………………………… or they unite Lines block ……………………………………. or they move Lines are rigid ……………………… or they are wiggly Lines are straight …………………… or they are wavy Lines encircle ………………………. or they can radiate Lines are focused ….. or they are allowed to meander Lines are heavy ………………………….. or they are dotty Lines clarify…
Complex & Simple, Posts
May You Eat and Have Some Left Over (2)
Perhaps more worldly and less wise in this prolonged period of self-indulgent isolation, is the simplicity of luxury, of a Sunday breakfast of local ground coffee, toasted local baguette, accompanied by a spade of slated butter and some fig preserve. Perfect.
Complex & Simple, Nature, Posts
Startle & Plumage
These series of pictures of sunbirds show the demands on their attention as they go about their simple lives. A loud cry had startled this female sunbird to scan the heavens just as she is ready to work on the nectar of the red button ginger plant. The male sunbird, an even more flighty creature,…
Nature, Posts
Bulbul’s Progress
Nature’ gentle symmetry is often unexpectedly revealed in the passive draw and perch of gravity, growth, and rest. A perch for the Bulbul parent and it’s off-spring, or the graceful ascent of an errant creeper to meet its fate amidst the majestic crown of the Rangoon creeper. What else can we do but just to…
Books, Complex & Simple, Nature, Posts
Living with Viruses
I wrote this in March 2020, and stopped. ” Writing in February (2020), I did not believe the world would turn in such a way as if nothing else matters, to be able to think of nothing else, but as a contagion which has afflicted the earth and its people in a hundred varied ways.…
Complex & Simple, Nature, Posts
“It is not those who are well who need the doctor, but the sick.”
The two consecutive Gospel Readings that confronted me on Saturday after Ash Wednesday and on the following day, the First Sunday of Lent challenged the present-day cozy certainty that a Christian life paved with good intentions, faith, hope and love will inevitably succeed – and bears witness to the angst-filled battles in the lives of…
Nature, Places, Posts
Remembering the Trek to Mount Bromo, Java, Indonesia
With news that Mount Semeru in the Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park has erupted, and is pouring ash and smoke an estimated 5.6km into the sky above East Java, i am brought back to the recollection of our trek up Mt Bromo at its northern base from Pura Luhur Poten Gunung Bromo. See ” The…
Nature, Places, Posts
The Waters of Abundance
The Pictures of the New Year were always going to be a little bleak, emerging as it were, from the Year of the Pandemic. In a time when it had become ‘acceptable’ to be distanced and disdained, this cold and wet New Year weekend cast a cold but familiar shudder onto a world seeking warmth…