something wonderful

What is somethingwonderful?

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:46:00 +0000

Hello again, its been some time, but I'm back now.

What is something wonderful? That, of course, is for you to decide. It could be the iridescent blush of dew refracted by the moribund autumn sun. It could be the smell of freshly mown grass, or the warm summer sun on your back. Something wonderful is the child like joy of being the first to leave footprints in a virgin snowfall; something wonderful is understanding that there is so much to be understood and its the journey along the way. Something wonderful is what’s left when bad things happen and through courage and self determination you rebuild your life, your relationships and your character.

Something wonderful can happen any time, any where to anyone. On a walk along a beach; during a quiet moment of reflection turning in on one’s self; or whilst holding your lover’s hand in a state of drowsy consciousness, entwined in bed.

Something wonderful is what happens in a moment, and if you’re lucky, the memory last forever. What is a life without such moments and lucky is the human that leads a life of such joined-up moments.

I started this website in 2005. Wonderful things happened to me back then and since and my intention was to document them to augment by physical memories of each day. I lost the domain and with it the project was derailed. The domain became available and the project resurrected and with it a sense of urgency to record all the wonderful things.

Most wonderful things are shared, but the shortcomings of human communication mean that we each take a different perspective of wonderful things. Sometimes, some wonderful things need to be viewed through the lens of a camera or carefully chosen words. That way the moment is captured, explored from different perspectives and transmitted. What is transmitted may not be what is received and this could be seen as one of the tragedies of the human condition – that we each live our lives as islands of consciousness, desperate to be understood. In roughly equal measure, it also gives us hope that, through our endeavours, even though we may not be understood by others, we can at least begin to understand ourselves.

In the end, we all live in the hope that something is going to happen, something wonderful.

How?

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 12:30:00 +0000

how can the one
be one and the same
as the one that i love
and the one driving me insane?

how can smiles
be smiles swept away
with cascading tears
i fear will stay?

how can the first
be the first and last
someone to trust
absolve me of my lying past?

how can i be so strong
and yet so weak
my head so rationale
my soul so meek?

In pursuit of happiness

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 09:54:00 +0000

Ten to the power of eighty is the math types say,
Give or take a factor, likely to portray,
The approximate number of particles that comprise the universe.
I know a little of the theories espoused in an attempt to explain,
Elliptic and random motions, in the cosmic and quantum planes;
But I shake and I struggle to comprehend,
The meaning of this moment, of life and how it will all end.
Raging against uncertainty drives me close to insanity,
And almost keeps me bound to the spot I know so well,
As miserable as a sinner, in a true living hell.

What is man?

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:49:00 +0000

What is man without endeavour,
But an ape destined to live forever,
Not knowing of the deliverance,
From the sum of all fears and ignorance,
That enslaves the simian mind;
And that the gods have long since left behind.

The dying of the light

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:24:00 +0000

What are we to make of twilight, those final searing moments when the sun sinks and dies and brings our own mortality sharply into focus? We can party like shamen, or view the setting sun as an ecological metaphor; the smouldering embers of a tired and angry giver of life. We should count our blessings, our lives pass in the blink of an eye in the scale of all creation. We take for granted the rise, phoenix like, of a rejuvenated sun come the morning. But inevitably there will come a day when all our sunsets are done. I can't help but think we should rage and rave on towards that day, never loosing sight of our responsibility to carve out a little happiness in a daunting world.

I wrote this poem about being true to oneself three years ago. I have lived with the pain of lies ever since. Truly for something wonderful to happen we should absolve ourselves of the shackles of self-deceit, and welcome the new sun and new loves with an honesty that allows one to anticipate the dying of the sun with a clean conscience and content soul. Occasionally in life someone comes along that reminds you of this fact.

Liar

Shall I compare thee, liar, to a corpse?
Compared to that brittle and lifeless husk, thou art sick.
And ye knows it.
Black is the colour of thine alignment:
The dark brooding clouds that hath enslaved thy mind's summer seasons,
Holds thy soul captive more securely than any prison bar.
Lies are to blame;
Denying the truth has driven thee insane.
Does thy know, even, what the truth is?
Thy lives thy life at a perennial sunset.
I have oft thought this to be the most difficult time in any man's life:
To accept that thy's day is finally concluded.
But fool, for you, another can still yet begin;
Whilst thou let it?
Whilst thou accept the wonder of creation,
In all its blaze, and all its glory?
As the new sun labours to free itself of its saline warder,
A countless myriad of stars shimmer on the crescents of the ocean's fabric;
Far more plentiful and far brighter than any night sky.
Echoes of the heavens on Gaia's seas.
Reflections indeed.
This is life, and it can be yours,
But never again for that rancid corpse.
So liar, does thy see the truth?
Will thee look eastwards and dance naked on the sands?
The future is the only one true purity, so take it by the hand;
But have a care not to violate it,
For time will come when thy's tomorrow's are exhausted.
Or ye can go now, and head westwards again,
And covert the corpse's vile and dark den.

And from another Welshmen far more eloquent than I:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

~ Dylan Thomas

Snowfall

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 11:39:00 +0000

Snowfall,
Covers all;
Except the guilt,
That my broken heart has built.
No winter fun can be had there;
Nor summer sun for us to play without a care.
Nothing grows or comes to those hinterlands,
Those barren patches polluted by clumsy hands.

Postcard from Cyprus.

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 14:49:00 +0000

Coooooie! I saw this and thought of you...

In my monster book of Su Doku, puzzle number 99 only has a I in the centre square. As you will doubtlessly imagine, my simian mind trembled with fear at this impossible outrage, although Harry says that's life.

I saw a dead fish today. Already nature had begun to recycle its quickly rotting flesh, as a swarm of anonymous bugs swamped over its body in a feeding frenzy. I'm more convinced than ever before that immortality on a sub-atomic level awaits us.

The Geordies, Scousers and Essex bints that are as common here as dead fish are all lovely and share my quantum aspirations, unlike the tedious Welsh.

The food here is mainly dead fish.

The sky is blue, its beautiful and so are you. How many fish might still be alive just for the want of a little prudence do you think?

Hopefully I'll see you soon when maybe we can play with the dead fish together.

Thomas xxx

Untitled lamentations concerning oceans

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:57:00 +0000

I recently returned from an antipodean adventure to New Zealand, and talking with Mike last night shamed me into action. I have myriad pictures to process with PohotoShop as well as writing-up my blog for the main website.

As a start here's a picture of Ninety Mile Beach at sunset. Blinky and the brothers Deak are silhouetted in the background. This shot coupled with our regular visits to the beach along New Zealand's coastline got me thinking about the oceans again, what follows are snippets of my meandering reveries.

One:
A billion billion photons scorch a wound in a drab and salty sky,
Casting burnt umber reflections in the flat plane of other universes,
That, for me, will never endure or evolve beyond this moment.

Two:
Gravity makes you mesmerising so that jilted lovers must come,
A million each generation here each to cry a thousand tears,
To keep you deep and salty.

Three:
Blue meets blue with seemingly linear perfection,
That betrays the spherical nature of things
In ancient minds.

Blood moon

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:09:00 +0000

I went to Cyprus recently and took this picture of the moon with the most amazing colour. The shot was taken at around 10PM when the moon was languishing low and large towards the southern sky. Unfortunately I did not have a tripod with me so I had to rest my trusted D70 on a stack of old paperback books, hence the degradation in sharpness.

The shot was taken at f5.6 with a 1/4 shutter speed. Apart from cropping, slight desaturation the shot has not been changed in any way; the moon's hue is as recorded by my Nikon.

The Serpent That Bade Me Well

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:20:00 +0000

There is a kind of happiness that ignorance delivers (1) especially the ignorance encouraged by the pious or by the social engineers. I sometimes envied the religious; those who follow blindly deeply entrenched and dogmatic beliefs. It somehow seems to me that one can defer deep spiritual meditation concerning the nature and meaning of things simply by believing in the moral fortitude offered by hard work, or by the promise of an eternal paradise of the afterlife. Of all the charges levelled at atheists it is the assertion that they are devoid of a spiritual nature that is the most offensive to me.

As a committed atheist the questions that have always taunted man seem more pertinent and pressing without the safety net of a benevolent deity. When I was young, and bad things happened to me, which was thankfully a rare occurrence, my parents would console me by assuring me that "everything would be ok". For someone of tender years, belief in their words was both easy and comforting. As we grow-up, without exception, we all learn that everything is not ok; we absolve ourselves of ignorance and what a painful experience it is.

Is religion really so different? Is not the distraction of the working life designed to mollify the true spiritual problems of living? In this respect, the contention of a divine afterlife is a comparable fallacy to working for the world-go-round. There is no god and no plasma HDTV. There are only moments.

The comfort I found counting anonymous wealth was self-perpetuating; and how I worried it would all be taken away. But the comfort it engendered came at a price: I paid with my soul, and sacrificed the chance to attain true contentment.

Eventually, after and interminable age, I found it in me to change, to purge my ignorance. That was some years ago, and moments latter, I'm still here. I'm not afraid anymore.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) Footnote
I am reminded of a little verse I once may have read or perhaps will some day come to read, viz:

"See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron,
My god, perhaps I am."

~ Extract from "The Serpent That Bade Me Well", (c) SomethingWonderful Press 2037.

Happy the man

noreply@blogger.com (stephen) — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 11:48:00 +0000

So just how should I use my maiden blog? A rambling discourse on quantum possibilities; a general moan at the state of the world and the myopia of its leaders; or perhaps I should write of my blinding headache following last night's excesses: why do birthday celebrations always leave one feeling so old?

Let's park such thoughts for now, for surely they will be a reoccurring theme come a different time. The rather pompous and ambitious objective of something wonderful dot org is to explore what it is to be human. Being one of life's malcontents, I often languish in a pit of my own despair. In such times I try to alleviate my malaise through various techniques: music, the familiar smile of a trusted friend, or the wise and insightful words of others who seem to inject a simple truth into the business of living.

I want to thank Sara for introducing me to this poem by John Dryden. Writing in the mid to late 17th century, its interesting to note that Dryden's words regarding personal happiness and contentment are every bit as relevant today as three hundred years ago. Every generation spawns countless minds with a common pre-occupation, and happy the man indeed who knows how to live today.

I strive to make some small measure of progress towards this lofty but edifying aim.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
Who today can call his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power
For what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.