frailty

'Everything breathes again

The tablecloth is white'

 (Rene Cazelles, de terre et d'envolee, 1953 quoted in Bachelard, below) 

'It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality' 

(Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p. 61)

round to home

"Journey does imply a movement through time and space, as though that's what a life is. And sometimes it strikes me that we live on a round planet. You can't get outside the circle of everything. Luckily....We have something that is eternally spherical....you see that you come from somewhere, that you can't possibly name.....when you look at it as a journey, it's a very disappointing journey; it ends up in a terrible place (laughter)." 

Susan Murphy, Zen Roshi, writer, filmmaker, broadcaster, speaking on ABC radio national 19/12/2009  'This is not the way home: on satellite navigation, the perfect woman, and not having a sense of direction'

'he had been told that life was beautiful'

'No! Life is round'

 

(Joe Bousquet)

is life round?

'Life is probably round'

 Van Gogh

the space of a tree

'Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things:

if you want to achieve the existence of a tree,

invest it with inner space, this space

that has its being in you. Surround it with compulsions,

it knows no bounds, and only really becomes a tree

if it takes its place in the heart of your renunciation'

 

(Rilke (1924) Poeme)

the door

'At the door of the house who will come knocking?

An open door, we enter

A closed door, a den

The world pulse beats beyond my door'

 

(Pierre Albert Birot, Les Amusements Naturels)

what makes a local?

Today a child told me that locals slow their cars down for people and especially for ducks who may be crossing the road. You can tell, he said, that people who don't are not locals.

retreat

Peter Zumthor's secular retreat

out of place

"The Greenham women were metaphorically described as dirt because they were women on their own outside a heavily masculinized air force base...The use of dirt metaphors to describe Greenham women is evidence for a way of understanding these women as out of place"

Cresswell, T. (1997) Weeds, Plagues & Bodily Secretions. A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of Displacement. 

making an air base your home (for 19 years)

96 cruise nuclear missiles as your neighbour?

the basis of all life

"On the 5th September 1981, the Welsh group “Women for Life on Earth” arrived on Greenham Common, Berkshire, England. They marched from Cardiff with the intention of challenging, by debate, the decision to site 96 Cruise nuclear missiles there. On arrival they delivered a letter to the Base Commander which among other things stated ‘We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world which is the basis of all life’"

image & quote  from a brief history of Greenham Common women's peace camp 1981-2000