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Picture taken in the Halebidu temple complex, Karnataka.
Looking Back..
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Category Archives: shadow
Time At The Temple: Part 3
Coming or going..
Picture taken in the temple at Belur, Karnataka.
Temple Time
Revisiting the temples of Halebidu.
I last visited Halebidu almost two years ago.
It is just as fascinating the second time.
Shadows And Stripes
My bedroom balcony overlooks the coffee plantation.
Picture taken in Wayanad, Kerala, during a tour of South India I am presently making with old friends
Lux Redux
A detail from yesterday’s image re-examined
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“Sorrow is hushed into peace in my heart like the evening among the silent trees.”
From Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds: verse 10.
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The quotation was suggested by S Etole at Just… a moment
This is the original image
Winter’s Light And Shade
Cochin chiaroscuro.
A December evening’s sunlight and shadow.
In The Shadow Of Prayer
Chapel lights and shadows
Picture taken in Fort Cochin
Sunday Evening Calls
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Picture of a corner-shop, taken in Pattalam, Fort Cochin
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.”
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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?”
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All photographs taken at the Padmanabhapuram Palace, during my family’s recent visit.
Caught On A Wire
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Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a baby, stillborn,
like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
( From “Bird On The Wire” by Leonard Cohen)
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Photographs of a discarded snake-skin & plastic bag caught upon the razor and barbed-wire, that surround our local Naval base.
Ghost In The Machine
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“…creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep” John Milton
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“I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.”
William Shakespeare
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