Photos IV My neighbourhood at dawn and dusk
‘It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean’ – Jon J. Muth
Dr Dan Siegel uses the word, ‘MWE’, to represent that we are an individual self (me) interconnected with everyone (and everything else) (we) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo8Yo4UE6g0)
Today, I got up at dawn and took a few more photos of my neighbourhood / village, and then surfed the net for a while reflecting on belonging and neighbourhood. The bits below are the product of my search….
‘If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors’ prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities – and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared’ – Wendell Berry
‘Do not harm your neighbours, who live trustfully near you’ – Lailah Gifty Akita
‘I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school’ (From A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke)
Neighbours – a short story by Australian writer Tim Winton at: http://zeus.nyf.hu/~granville.pillar/ANB1052%20and%20ANB1052L%20Australia……….Literature/Neighbours%20-%20Tim%20Winton%20-%20Australia.pdf
My neighbourhood is a poem / blog by Ashley Kalagian Blunt at: https://ashleykalagianblunt.com/2018/04/11/my-neighbourhood-is-a-poem/
When we first moved to the village the boundaries of the piece of land that we had bought were defined by remnants of a crumbling stone wall and huge cactuses, and I had liked this sense of countryside openness, continuity and freedom and had decided against the construction of a fence or wall, and instead, I chose to spend money on lots of windows; so that the sky, the distant sea and the fields could enter the inner space. It also made sense that we finish the house, which was still under construction first, before we considered any exterior work. In any case, a fence seemed neither necessary nor desirable, but then a few years later when our dog was poisoned a neighbour told me that it was because I had no fence or wall, and so eventually, we had a wall built, made of local stone, to respect the traditional architecture of the original village, not that it made much difference ……….
‘…… He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder / If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it / Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence…..’ (Mending Wall by Robert Frost)