main street

The general pace of the village appears to have caught me up...and slowing down i find an early day becoming a fierce breakfast, a bimble to buddha cave and associated viewpoint becoming a forgotten torch, a change of footwear and then morphing into some scribbles, a book, some slight guitar and then a doze in the hammock...dangerous places hammocks under hill and by watersound...

but quiet place, wander the rough streets mingle with dogs and cats, cows, ducks, hens, a shared world echoing, lacking the distances which prevail in the west...and here poverty, tenacity, once again tenacity...and despite the tourist hut and the bufftets at the crossroads it reatains something...only this year wifi, next year, who knows...it's a journey to get here, maybe that will allow change to occur at gentle pace, but i feel only gratitude for this detour, this finding place.

and so the slowest day of the year passes, a day of such utter sloth that i can feel my inner presbytarian weep and wailing upon the hot rocks of hell.,,.but...i think it was the hammock which caught me...a day of watching the waters change and the light upon hills, a day of clouds and mountain mists upon horizons.

it's the kind of place which casts up false memories, feeling of other places before they learned to speed up, to catch up with we transients who pass through them briefly...i think of a hut above a beach as the river passes and, later downstream and watching the changing lights i think once more upon varanasi, the last time i just sat by a river, listening to it flow past eyes drifting between other places, other waters, same waters, no difference...and, maybe it's a scottish thing but, when faced with a landscape of hills and rivers it feels homely, familiar places which layer themselves upon thought, dream and memory...

and two crossed streams and forty minutes down the river a slope, a solitude of place to do nothing; to drift recent thoughts and the wanders which have brought me here to this place, at this point in the journey...chance, mere chance...but it seems to be the right place at the right time...

and, as kind of hoped for, this has indeed become a place of reflection for a few days, expanded to four and then back downriver to that other world...

and so i sat...sit,,,,

while now, as the last of the light shrinks between and behind the darkening peaks, insect song competes against van morrison,..late boats sound upon the river, single lights reflection upon the unseen waters below...now, well how much less can i actually manage to do today?