Zoo

Filled with school-children
All wearing fluorescent yellow
Hazard-warning waistcoats

Here for feeding time
One group from which school I wonder
Are paired off in couples and walk around holding hands

Also grandparents and parents
And pre-school children
In brightly coloured perambulators

Stopping
To look at the dramatically coloured exotic birds
Whose gaiety they are soon set to mimic

Now it is the time to gather up the bairns
For this year's group photograph
Before the twenty-eight juniors

Of the class of 2016 exit for the day
While the grey clouds approach
To cover over their once clear blue sky

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Box

The boxed edge does not look quite so precise as it might have done under a more disciplined head gardener

The pathways are not so tidy or well kept as they would have been when first laid down the paint is flaking on the pillars and the ceiling of my sitting area and the bricks are engraved with lovers initials

Kate used the term 'municipal planting' for the flower beds I think she was concise and exactly to the point they are way too formal

And so on to the Clock Tower Café for a prawn and lettuce sandwich on oatmeal bread then a coconut slice with a black Americano coffee while Kate waits in the queue to make her selection

Our friends that is all three generations are taking the Road Train into town and back again before we meet up for tonight's concert in The Spa

Where the Last Shadow Puppets are filled with energy and boundless obvious joy as they give and receive the love and the adulation of their Bridlington Brid audience

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More Light

The sunlight streamed through the Georgian window casting a rectangular patch of nine lights onto the dining room wall the centre part of which had the crystallised light form of the flower vase which sat on the window-sill

I sat to the side of the window for my morning meditation I listened to a recording of Tibetan Bells and Ocean Waves as I meditated in the warm light knowing that a few hundred yards away stood the cliffs against which the real sea swelled

I know this because yesterday evening we walked out to the cricket field at Sewerby I edged from the boundary line towards the drop though not too close for I am not too fond of heights and know that vertigo or fainting or light-headedness can occur at any moment

Walking around the field we saw a down-at-heel middle-aged man asleep on a seat outside the cricket pavilion we saw him again later in the evening outside our holiday cottage ambling towards the street-light of the road beyond

I did not interrupt his stupor should I have done should I have enquired as to how he had arrived at this situation would it in any way have helped him to shed any more light onto his particular life story

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Sound-Scapes

I find meditating in a group inspirationally energising in point of fact just a week back I was with a small gathering doing a taster meditation in our Old Stables we were listening to music Tibetan Singing Bowls with Ocean Waves (feat. Vidura Barrios) from Vajra Yoga Meditation for Beginners Volume 2

The meditation was to let thoughts come and go as they wished not forcing them in neither forcing them away yet not to focus on them either instead to use your breath and your mantra as a place to gently return to

I found myself in very many places with water being the thread which connected me to the various locations from the Idle Rocks Hotel at St Mawes to Porthminster Beach in St Ives from St Brelades Bay in Jersey to that same islands Corbiere Lighthouse from the wide open sands on the Outer Hebrides to the streams on Dartmoor which flow into the river at Buckfastleigh Abbey

These are the ones I now remember yet I know for sure that there were many many more so it is therefore a meditation which I do wish to return to for I will always have ample desire to be refuelled by nostalgia

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Wasp

It is a good word isn't it wasp
In every which way it seems to take hold of you

Just to look at those four letters arranged as they are
Yes already there is a level of fear attached don't you think
And then as you roll the word over your lips
Your tongue pushing to flush out any residual venom

Yet how could such a small word
Hold claim to such threatening behaviour
Short as the wasp itself is short
When compared to my size ten boot

And how such an uncomplicated word
Can take you to that intricate assembly
How it can raise the black and yellow stripes
How it can raise such imperious buzzing

All of which together raise wide-scale disturbance
As it approaches our outdoor dining-table

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