For Old Times' Sake

I have this strange passion for winter. I love its stillness as it seems everything is asleep. Every day is like Sunday afternoons when you can’t hear a sound, no one to be seen, and only the smoked chimneys transfiguring in the mellow sunshine indicate that there are living beings behind the closed doors. There is hypnotic effect in this philosophic calm. We need silence to steady our lives.   

I’ve been travelling a lot lately.  My recent adventurous journeys made me realised how much I’ve been spoilt by living in the remote and quiet countryside. I encountered the fiery core of all lives floating and circling around me in a forceful, speedy, matter-of-fact manner in my journey. How long such state of nerves can continue is a question of personal temperament. I often wonder if the pace of life in our modern world would either keep our soul fit to endure the common hardness of life or wear it down to thinness like one of those Chinese lanterns you see made of paper that could only be used once.

My simple pleasures include walking on the beach...

I do not mean to declare that I dislike travelling. Travelling allows me to observe the unfamiliar world around me. In the atmosphere of general anonymity, we observe the world around us in a sense of irony, pathos and understanding. But the feeling of longing to come home is immense.

 

Drinking a cup of tea to unwind.....

 

I adore folk art - that little ceramic figurine that I got it as a souvenir from a friend many years ago is a bell

 

I miss simple delights in the comfort of my home such as drinking a cup of tea while listening to the sound of falling rain from the black roofs of slate, the cries of curlews that wake me from my dreams, listening to my favourite music and reading a lot of books. On the other hand, writing, I decided that, is an importunate craving as it does not seem to shrivel away in the heat of the more generous and tolerable hobby. Homesickness magnifies little things; the pleasure of things known and tasted; the books that one loves and leaves behind, the exaggeration of nostalgia and memory that trickles endlessly from moment to moment into the thin, limpid stream of our consciousness.       

 

Above all, reading is my favourite hobby...the books on my bookshelves are my flying carpets to the world of imagination