Tag: death

They cut down my tree 😢

Over summer weekends, I go and spend a few hours every day on a bench on a less used path below the castle. I read, rest, and just be.

Branches full of red leaves, with lightly clouded blue sky peeking through the canopy.
A part of a large red leaven tree on one side, and a fraction of the castle keep on the other, with grey sky in between.
A large red leaven tree's canopy

Opposite the bench was a beautiful tree with red leaves. I loved laying under the tree’s beautiful red canopy. It was great for my head and heart. It was my favourite place to be when I wasn’t working or with Chewie.

I went to castle grounds today for the first time in a couple of months. It was a beautiful, if chilly, day and I wanted to spend some time in the quiet with my tree.

The tree is missing. All that is left is a stump. They cut down my big, beautiful friendly, red tree 😭

A view from above of my bench. The cut top of my tree's stump is partly visible just on the other side of the wooden fence.

Gardening

I also think gardening is great because I am a perfectionist and gardening is really helpful for learning to moderate that tendency a bit – every year something is doing amazingly and something else is just completely destroyed by something unpredictable.

My boss, R (not that one), in the gardening channel today.

I just love that description, her insight, and her self-awareness.

Continue reading Gardening

On murder

On Sunday morning, R casually asked me what would be a good way to kill me. (I suggested a few practical and efficient ones, but she wanted outlandish Villanelle kind ideas)

Last two days she’s been watching a new serial, ‘How to get away with murder.’

If I die or disappear, you know where to look..

Notes from Viking: funerals and Abrahamic religions

In Vikings, a pre-Christian Scandinavian society is shown as burning the dead in a funeral. This is similar to how the Hindus and quite a few other cultures did it.

They even hint at how burying the dead was a sign of insulting them.

Most modern Abrahamic cultures—Christian, Muslim and Jewish—bury their dead. I’m guessing the modern, Christian Scandinavians bury their dead too. Made me wonder.

The Abrahamic religions started in the middle east in arid, often desert, land. Wood from trees must have been at a premium, so funeral by burning would’ve been expensive. Maybe that’s why they chose burial over burning.

Later, these religions spread to other areas with no paucity of wood, but the religious norm—burying not burning—went along. Even areas where there was plenty of wood, but relatively little accessible land ended up burying the dead instead of burning them.

Coming back to the Vikings, burning made sense for them. Wood was, and is, relatively plentiful in Scandinavia. Moreover, the ground would be frozen hard through long winters, making digging for a burial hard. But once Christianity came in, the new socioreligious norms quickly overturned old wisdom.

It may be the same in parts of southeast Asia where the pre-existing religions—Hinduism, Buddhism and native religions—would’ve burned their dead. Yet, after the adoption of Islam, most societies turned to burial. Despite plenty of thick tropical forests for wood, and expense of clearing land (or lack of it on islands) for burial.

Continue reading Notes from Viking: funerals and Abrahamic religions

Letting go..

There’s no trying new things without letting some things go.

There’s no new life, if there’s no death.

There’s no bandwidth to explore new books, genres, TV shows, people, if we’re not ready to abandon the ones that turn stale, or we grow out of, or finished.

Bandwidth is finite. Cognitivo capacity is finite. Time is finite.

A core constraint on growing, changing, exploring, is our reluctance to let go of some of what we have and are.

Create space by letting some mediocre stuff go. Then fill it with something new, untested, unusual. If it fits, great. If it doesn’t, chuck it and try again. Something new, untested, unusual.