Shadowlands

Coping with descent:

Now you see it;
now you don’t.
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Pictures taken in Diskit Monastery, Ladakh.
Music courtesy of The Shadows

Monastic Light And Shade

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Our route took us on to Likir Monastery, a one thousand-year old Tibetan Buddhist community.
Both its centuries of prayer and our privilege of being their only visitors contributed to the perception that Likir was a place of palpable peace

Climbing the steep hill on which the monastery stands, we walked through shadowed passages, past rows of prayer wheels and into an ascending series of temples.
The monks smiled kindly, but said nothing.
Whatever we might be seeking, it would have to be found in silence.

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Please forgive the advert which precedes this clip.
It came as quite a shock to me but the contrast with what follows is dramatic and perhaps, inadvertently telling..

Pictures taken in Likir Monastery, Ladakh.

Aspiring To Altitude: Almost There

Aspiring To Altitude: Base-Camp Logistics

Chandni Chowk market, Delhi.

Caught By The Light

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Picture taken in my room while staying in Kopua Monastery, New Zealand

The Lament Of Loss

The two chairs still sit together on their verandah:
his and hers;
the grandparents I never met.

Following a decade of health problems, all had assumed that he would be the first to go.
But it was my grandmother who quietly surrendered:
the unexpected loss of a son, too much to bear.

Life’s meaning was lost.
My grandfather turned his face to the wall.
In a matter of days he followed her.
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Dido’s Lament

“Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me,
On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but Death invades me;
Death is now a welcome guest.

When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.”

From Dido and Aeneas
Music: Henry Purcell
Libretto: Nahum Tate
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Picture of the verandah in our family’s home, which my grandfather built, and where my father lived as a child and young man.

Unchained Melodies

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Picture taken in Fort Cochin

The Nature Of Stone

From our kind hosts’ garden

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To still glorious ruins

The transience of beauty.

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Pictures taken in the Yorkshire Dales and the ruins of Fountains Abbey.

Colunnade

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“Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.”

Louis Kahn

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Photographs taken at the Padmanabhapuram Palace

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Latticed

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“In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living—in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?”

Doris Lessing

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All photographs taken at the Padmanabhapuram Palace, during my family’s recent visit.