Quip of the month

Smile, breathe and go slowly.

  Thich Nhat Hanh

Once more in transit

The first step in any journey is often taken long before it formally begins.   For me it usually starts with memories of past journeys---the time in England when I got lost on the morning of my son's wedding, the panic I experienced in Paris, when I nearly missed meeting up with a school-friend, because of misunderstood French instructions, the day all planes in London were grounded by a terrorist threat and I was stranded in Crete with my English grand-children, those happy days in Pakistan, before it descended into its current fragile state and all those moments in far-off parts of the northern hemisphere that have given me a sense of home-away-from-home.   

Tomorrow I am off again on a journey to see my grandchildren in England.  Which means, of course, a long flight.

Suspended here in coma land

so far above all friends and home

that life itself seems left behind

time has me trapped, inert, confused

in dimmed half light in shadow land
                                 

and all around the strangers flit                                 

they come and go, unknown, unreal

they make me eat, they do their rounds

a kind of hour glass they become 

they mark the time like silent sand.

For here time’s dressed in strange new garb

which does not fit its normal frame
it is not day, it is not night
not what’s below, not what’s behind, 
not yet the time of when we land.

So far above each travelled land
time cannot be the way it was
before my zones of numbed existence
were crossed to meet my children’s children.

           The price I pay to hold their hand.

The end of Osama

When we're fighting a war in Afghanistan to destroy terrorist training camps that are actually inside the land of Pakistan (our ally), it is only to be expected that the iconic terrorist Osama bin Laden will be captured near Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan and within cooee of an elite military academy and an important military base.   It is doubly ironic that he was captured and eliminated on the order of that well-known softie, Barack Obama, who (we're supposed to believe) wasn't really born in the USA and is, in fact, a secret Muslim!