Of Eggs and Blogs . . .

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It wasn't much of a nest, as nests go
Some birds' nests can be elaborate, intricate feats of artistic engineering
Using a varety of materials interwoven, intertwined in surpising ingenuity
But this one was just a pile of twigs barely holding together at all
With hardly any form, a stiff breeze would have blown it all to bits
Yet despite the fairly feeble final result, the large mother pigeon had worked
For several days collecting her chosen twigs and piling them up
In the top of a bush right by the side of our house
Why she chose that spot is anyone's guess
Who could fathom the depths of a bird's pea sized brain ?
She probably didn't imagine that she was going to be disturbed and perturbed
Every time we came in and out of our house or took the trash out
Each time I went by, even if trying to give her and her fragile nest a wide berth
Tip-toe-ing quietly, she would erupt out of the bush with a great flapping of wings
And go soaring off into the distance, returning only after we were long gone
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She laid two eggs on that pile of sticks and she sat on them
For days on end this went on, her frequent obviously terrified flights
From our unintentional interruptions of her peace and quiet
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But last week we realized she had left and wasn't coming back
She abandoned her two bright white eggs to their lonely fate
Whatever life might have been in its embryonic beginnings
Had no doubt quickly grown cold and faded out slowly
In the still chilly Spring nights
An unfulfilled promise of flight that was not to be
And with what feelings did that mother pigeon fly off ?
Did she leave with a broken heart, grieving ?
Or is giving up on a poorly chosen nesting site
Just something that happens in the bird world
And perhaps not a major tragedy ?
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What is it about the form of an egg
That is so appealing to the eye ?
And that famous question...
Which came first, bird or egg, egg or bird ?
Considerable food for thought there
I carefully took the nest out of the bush
To have a closer look
Even so, one egg rolled from its precarious perch
And broke on the ground, leaving only one intact to ponder
The infinite oval form fascinating
The hidden worlds within of mystery
A source of life waiting to be born
Cracking through the surface
Waiting to take flight
And travel the world
Soaring high above cities and forests and fields
Seeking sustenance
Craving company and warmth
Bearing the spark of life
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And is a blog not a bit like an egg ?
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Liquid Reflections . . .

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Just couldn't resist slipping in a couple of reflections in the direction of James' Weekend Reflections, that fine collection of luminous moments where light, being light, bounds around off of any possible reflecting surface, liquids, solids, air, transforming the viewer and the viewed, contributing to small miracles to keep us mystified and amazed... at all that we can take in with our two eyes as we wander this planet of ours. And here's wishing whoever may stop here a moment a fine Sunday evening and an excellent week ahead.
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Clearing Out Cobwebs . . .

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The Spring Cleaning continues. As you can see here, things sometimes need to be cleaned out, including cobwebs in the mind, and the mind's eye . . .
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In fact, these scenes were in an abandoned house out on the island off the coast of Brittany where the rock concert photos of a couple posts back are from. A sublime corner of our paradise on Earth.
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While turning our own home inside out and shaking out dust and debris over these past few weekends, I came across another stash of negatives from photos taken back in the 1990's on mostly black and white film. With these as well as all that still remained to be converted to digital files from the main hoard, there are close to 4000 negatives to edit and scan. I've decided to invest in a digital scanner, which will be far cheaper than paying a lab to do the work. But it will take some time to go through them all, decide what to scan, and then do it. A labor of love in any case. Many of portraits of our daughters in there when they were still very little. A voyage back in time.
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Another rock turned over the other day took me back into my (large) collection of cassette tapes from the late 80's, all full of music that was near and dear to my soul, but which has largely lain un-listened-to in the last 20 years since I moved to France. Last week I found a fabulous little free piece of software on the web called Audacity which allows plugging a cassette deck directly into the PC, and then recording the music as MP3 files. So there are 16 tons of music lined up to get converted to MP3 and then to be copied to the iPod, to have a second life before the cassette tapes disintegrate. I'm amazed that after 20 years the tapes are still crystal clear. Will wonders never cease !
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Life is good . . .
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The War of Kindness . . .

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Well, I said I might write a poem one of these days. So for whatever it is worth... a simple thought from a simple mind.
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...The War of Kindness

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Just once…
Just once in my life before I die
I would like to get up one morning
And not have to read
About another awful war somewhere
About another country burning
As humans pillage and plunder and rape
As they have been doing for millennia now
As humans blow each other into little bits
With pistols and rifles and bullets and bombs
As humans demonstrate yet again just how great
Is their infinite capacity for hate
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Just once…
Yes, just once in my lifetime
I would love to see
A headline in the morning newspaper
Hear the newspaper vendor exclaiming
"Extra, extra, read all about it,
A war of kindness has been declared" !
And then to find when reading the story
To find that a powerful country
Had decided one day
Upon careful deliberation
After seeing another country in misery
To overwhelm the suffering land
With an outpouring of love and kindness and harmony
To learn that they had mobilized
Their every available resource
To mount a vast and caring logistical operation

Thus by surprise one fine morning
An army of cleaning ladies
Crossed over the border
Bearing brooms and brushes and feather dusters
Followed by an armada of trucks
Carrying cleaning supplies, soaps, detergents
They cleaned every kitchen every bathroom every toilet
They did all the laundry and hung it out to dry
The ironing was all done and neatly folded
They washed every window pane
A second wave of brigades all pushing vacuum cleaners
Followed by more with furniture polish galore and rags
And they set about cleaning every house in the land
At noon battalions of handymen
Were sent in as the dust was already flying
Each had toolkits and loads of supplies
They fixed every leaking faucet
Every squeaking door hinge was oiled
Every machine every axel was greased
They had brushes and paint
This army of saints
They cleaned out gutters
They swept the streets
They pruned the trees

In the afternoon
Hospital ships appeared along the coasts
Mobile field hospitals in vast tents
Were set up across the land
Whole armies of doctors and nurses
Were sent in, but not to clean up
The usual disasters of traumatic amputations
And mangled bleeding bodies of our usual wars
But to heal cataracts and dispense cancer treatments
To comfort and cure and care for the downtrodden
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By the end of day one
The war had been won
But it was not over by far
It was just getting started
The generals and admirals
Had all been lovingly plotting
The machine of kindness
Had been set in motion
There was no telling
Where it might be stopping
Baskets of fruit were sent to every home
Boxes of chocolates to every address
The billions of dollars usually spent
During wars for things that go "bang" and "boom"
Were quietly transferred in careful equality
To every bank account in the target country
No strings attached to this giant infusion
Fresh flowers were sent by the truckload

Farmers came with tractors and ploughed the fields
Whole trainloads of fine foods and wines
Were sent until every table in the land overflowed
Cooks and singers and dancers and poets
Were all sent on missions to do their best
To spread happiness and good cheer
Far and wide
As they waged this war of kindness
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Just once…
Just once in my life
Is that too much to hope for ?
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Copyright 2012

A Rock Concert . . .

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Out on the north Brittany coast this past summer. Empty white sand beaches as far as the eye can see, and happily nary a human in sight. A place where one can quietly appreciate the subtle forces of wind, water, and weather on rocks that have been there long before man arrived, and which will be there long after we are gone. What a beautiful place we have here, this planet of ours. If we could only keep it that way.
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What I was listening to while composing this minor key rock concert : Click...
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Spring Cleaning . . .

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Hello... My name is Owen, and I'm a recovering blogaholic. :-)
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I've been taking a break from blogging as Spring Cleaning is in progress, and it has been occupying whole days of going through all the various rats nests that have been accumulating in and around the house, to clear out the dead brush to help let the living things breathe and grow. Today it took me all afternoon to clean out the eight large, deep drawers in my big old wood desk. Large piles of stuff went to the recycling bins. I've lightened my load, and am smiling for it.
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All this cleaning has been giving me considerable food for thought. Putting me in touch with certain things again which had been laying forgotten, or fallow if you will. I'm realizing I need to make some adjustments in my life. The blogging for one thing. This blog now has over 1100 postings in it. It has become my War & Peace. My life story can be found in it. My heart has been poured out in it. Massive amounts of time have been spent composing it, and then following through answering comments, and getting out to visit as often and as many as possible of other wonderful blogs encountered along the blogging highways and byways.
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It's time for me to slow down a little bit in regard to all that. The Magic Lantern Show will continue, but perhaps at a slower pace than previously. The house cleaning of late has shown me that there are numerous books around me that I haven't read yet. And I love to read. Have been doing a lot more reading recently than I have since blogging monopolized large amounts of my life over three years ago. My guitar has been languishing in the living room corner, neglected. It is time to change that. I need to spend more time out with the camera, and less time in front of the PC. My writing, other than composing paragraphs for the blog, has gone to the dogs. There are a poem or three rattling their bones in the back of my head, I need to start sitting down again and scribbling on paper, tinkering with bits of the loose verses I've written so much of in years past, and from which I, if no one else, derive some considerable pleasure. Time to take care of myself perhaps a little better. Time to spend more time with la Grenouille. Less burning the midnight oil leaving just one more comment in a comment box, and more time sleeping. I've had some health issues over the winter which I won't bore you with, but they have served as a wake up call. I need to adjust certain perspectives and priorities, spend more time more in touch with the real, the immediate, and less time in the virtual realms of cyberspace.
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So, I shan't disappear from the blogosphere, which is a vibrant community I've come to love and respect and admire, but I shall be a bit less present than previously. The Spring Cleaning has a ways to go still. The vegetable garden will be wanting to be planted soon. La Grenouille wants new flower beds prepared along parts of the yard. There's a bird house that needs mending.
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Now, it's time for what I set out to blog about today, which was not the above series of reflections which simply happened spontaneously, but about a wonderful exposition at the Grand Palais in Paris which ended in February, of large works of map-making sculptures from the 17th and 18th centuries. Applied architectural modelling of entire cities and the landscapes around them done by artisans of the highest artistic levels, producing dumbfounding results with the raw materials they had available at the time, which we might consider rather crude and basic today.

Some of these works can be seen all year round in the rather unknown Museum of Plans and Reliefs which is housed in Paris in les Invalides, on an upper floor, which is one of the greatest hidden treasures in Paris, imho. They were made for military purposes, to help strategists better understand the defensive requirements of key areas. I stumbled on the Museum in les Invalides by chance many years ago, and still have the guide book from my first visit there, which was  published in 1981, the cover of which is scanned for the first image here. After seeing some of the "plans" in the museum, I was inspired to go see some of the places in situ, like the beautiful city of Briancon in the French Alps. Some of the displays that were on exhibit at the Grand Palais cannot be seen in the permanent museum, because they are simply too big for the rooms there. The model of the city of Brest takes up over 60 square meters of floor space, or roughly 645 square feet.
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I'd like to thank Peter, of the excellent blog Peter's Paris , who clued me in to the exposition at the Grand Palais with the piece linked to here at the end of January. I had just enough time to slip down there and see it before it was over.
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The second image here is also scanned from the guidebook, and gives a more precise idea of the extraordinary level of detail used in making these models. Each window, each chimney, each roof, each door is exquisitely visible with startling realism. I hope no one will mind me borrowing the cover image and this one picture, in the intention of encouraging you to go visit the museum in les Invalides the next time you are in Paris, and where you pick up your own copy of a book.
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The following images I took on my visit to the expo in February, just a few weeks back now. Enjoy. And do go see the Museum of Plans and Reliefs the next time you have an hour or two to kill in Paris, it is well worth a visit.
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These were samples of some of the materials used to make the models.
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Now I'm off to clean out the attic. :-) See you soon.
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