buddhist monks spend weeks preparing complex pictures made from coloured sands for festivals. after the festival the sand pictures are washed away in sacred streams:
the ephemeral accepted and celebrated.
last night a programme on sibelius: his 5th symphony: hewn from granite.
like stonehenge: built to last.
both mirror the 'desire for the eternal' but from completely different ends.
newsnight review: van gogh's letters.
so his paintings were not as instinctive as I thought?

it's been a bad week.
wednesday thursday no psalms.
but thursday: silent prayer.
today I realised that the silent prayer had been the heart of my day.
struggling again with the psalms:
sung tentatively.
much gained
but this knowledge is not storeable: I must remember this

yesterday, salinger died.

strange week. . . . . but:
looking up at my garden under grey sky:
how would I paint it?
thinking of this, I looked again and saw the colours.
painting would proclaim them;
otherwise unseen - even by me.
in my music too I proclaimed colour.
'seeing on behalf of'
sharing what I saw.
I say 'see' and not 'hear' because when I hear colour I see it
and it is in the seeing that joy resides:
living seed of hope.

reading this again I am puzzled.
I don't always see the colour when I hear the music.
when I do not see: the music falls on deaf ears.
when I play: I search to see rather than to hear.
when I cannot see: I cannot write down.
hence the blockage.
I cannot see because I cannot believe
cycling then?

foreboding. . . . .
hostile diffident world.
needing you:
my own reality tenuous; tentative. . . .

all that is not of you crumbles away.
as long as I grieve at this I have not understood.

the allness of you:
hard to comprehend,
but essential you say.