a diddakoi and her travelling caravan

So I saw Harry Potter 7, pt 2, in 3D and so on. Yes, it was the best of ALL the Harry Potter movies. I used to find the first few movies pretty lame. BUT it left out that really (MOST?) important part. Voldemort was not given a choice for redemption at the end, which was, well I feel, one of the most important aspects of the saga. Why did they leave it out? Why didn't JK insist on it being there? Perhaps redemption is not as important in the media/current culture any more. Perhaps leaving Voldemort's redemption out of the movie was society's judgement that certain individuals are just not deserving, beyond a certain point, beyond a certain number of actions, of being allowed to repent. Given Breivik's actions, I understand. I feel bloody ungenerous of allowing him a chance to redeem himself of what he did. I would not have wanted Bin Ladin to have had the choice of going guilt free before he died either. Yet in the Harry Potter series, somehow the magic of Harry Potter...

...because my father loved to swim in the ocean.. my beloved loves to walk along the beach.. my fear that goodness and beauty and love is fleeting.. Can I not? Enjoy the moment? Sing the happy song? Listen to waves? And not think of loss? Love fills me with sadness Joy gives me grief Hope makes me hopeless Belonging makes me lost. Come back, come back All ye lost souls Help me unlearn all this pain Teach me to be innocent of hurt again. Love me again, but differently Don't teach me about how you go away Show me butterflies and rainbows and sunshine Don't let me have those tears all over again.

Recently I came across this poem: Prayer for a flowering Bamboo Famine by Karen An-Hwei Lee . She wrote this poem because she read an article in the newspaper about how every 50 years parts of India have famine because the bamboo trees flower. The supposed reason for this is that the bamboo roots create an explosion in the population of mice who also then raid the harvest and the stores of the farmers. So Karen writes the poem from the perspective of the bamboo tree, who is essentially praying to the gods. May we blossom every fifty years without afflicting the people. May our seedpods nourish rodents who roam our groves without rebuking lands with famine. May sweet potatoes and rice save us. May ginger and turmeric flourish to the bitter distaste of rats while tresses of bamboo flowers changeling white wasps load the groves with seed in rare perennial synchrony. May our sisters flower en masse hundreds of square miles apart in the ...

...is that the whole damn thing is so soul-less. The subject of self-help is like a giant recipe book telling you that being able to do situps, lose weight, meditate, recover easily from stress, earn a 100,000 dollars a year, is meaningful in itself. Putting self-help into the context of Plato's paths of goodness leading to a greater wholeness, self-help actually only outlines the directions towards something else, some greater good. It's like a road map, telling you how to get to the destination. Yet a lot of writers on self help emphasise too much on the activity alone, the road, the turn-offs, the diversions as the main aim. Being able to meditate or having a strong body is worthless in itself unless it connects to something more, on a different plane altogether. The end of the journey is what makes the journey meaningful, it is not the road itself. What if being strong and healthy means that I am better able to take care of a person less healthy than I? That takes the abili...

I abandoned this blog because blogging was originally introduced to me by my most long-standing friend. I betrayed her by having an affair with her best friend. She's never talked to me since. Hence the reason for my silence. For losing my words, in my head and my heart. I hoped she'd come back, but time has shown that that is not to be. Yet, someone said life is not just about one thing. For instance focusing only on a bad relationship and deriving all meaning from it for the rest of your life is not the way to be. In fact focusing on working on other aspects of life in the midst of a bad situation can work its way back into the bad parts of your life and instill some good in it. I got this idea from Plato's 'the union of goodness'. What he meant is that goodness can harmonise various aspects of life. What is the pragmatic application of this ideal? Improving one's knowledge can help one's parenting skills. Improving one's courage can help a person be a...

The traveling caravan has journeyed around the universe where no human contact was ever possible and returned to civilisation. And what news of the inhabitants? It has picked up various stragglers from around the galaxies: - a lesbian theorist - visiting magpies - a couple of completed Phd chapters - some degree of hope about the light at the end of the tunnel etc. More to come.