Jua Kali is Swahili for ‘the hot sun’ referring to artisans and vendors who work outside.
On our dining room wall we’ve hung a batik picture of Kikuyu tribesmen, bought from an ethnic shop in Edinburgh, like the other things displayed in these photos
It’s spring here, and that creates a fruitful restlessness in me, a primitive, profound and timely desire to die to my old self and be resurrected. Something too inward, physical, dynamic and inchoate to be directly described—leaves me speechless.
Doesn’t make sense to call it writer’s block, for that would imply the pretension to be a “writer”. I’m a writer only in the sense of not being illiterate: achievement enough. It would also imply that I have something I want to say which I’m unable to express. I have nothing to say, only an urge towards 
creative expression, which, given free rein, has its own ideas. Free rein? Let me be true to my chosen icon of the centaur, where there is no hierarchy of rider and mount, therefore no need for reins. They are one, welded together.
As I commenced by saying in my last, I’ve missed the design and construction work which had turned this tiny house into a carpentry workshop in which you could hardly move for tools, sawdust and shards of offcut plywood. Not long after cleaning up, I started to suffer withdrawal symptoms, missing the creative high. I couldn’t write as I had nothing to say.
A suggestion from Karleen got me on another design-and-build project, modest in its pretensions but satisfying for the work’s sake as much as for the end product.
a wayfarer’s notes 
A fine looking end product! As for having nothing to say, I'm reminded (as I often am) of John Cage's words: “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it”.
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Just read your post, and my immediate feeling is that I am somehow comforted (!) by your admission that you “have nothing to say”. (Which I don't actually believe btw). It has the effect of removing the pressure that always seems to hover over me to frantically engage in writing, writing, writing…what about silence? Nothing wrong with it! Nice piece…
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Spring?? Why do you “Northern Hemisphere” nincompoops keep assuming that the entire planet revolves around the Mediterranean Sea ….
(or the Atlantic?). While yep, sometimes might be able to come up with 'philosophic thought words' – until, or unless – you can argue from the Southern Hemisphere of this planet — yer all blowin' up yer own podexes.
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Sackerson, thanks for your remarks and for drawing attention to your blog, which is full of treasures and has to be examined from start to finish; and for drawing attention to John Cage.
Brian, I know, there is comfort in the words “I have nothing to say”—in the right context, of course. For that “nothing” is immensely pregnant, rich with uncertainty (or in John Cage’s words, swiftly harvested from Wikipedia, “indeterminacy”). There is almost a brutality about having something to say. It pollutes the silence. It drowns out the still small voice. It scrawls its disordered, ill-considered prejudices, its unasked-for graffiti, over the pure indeterminacy of the yet-to-be, and the simple act of observing the interactions already going on; or of listening to the sounds and silences of the present moment.
Permission to clarify, Mr Davoh? When I say “it’s spring” I am not speaking for the northern hemisphere, the mediterranean, nor the atlantic. Nor do I represent any nincompoops other than myself. I speak only for this little valley in the Chiltern Hills, where we see unmistakable evidence in the form of daffodils, primroses, forsythia and cowslips, to name a few yellow flowers now in season.
How is the mood Down-Under? Is it autumnal and melancholy? Thanks for the expletive. I did Latin at school but they never taught us that.
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Sometimes you are too subtle for this reader. I wish I could keep up with you.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/
“In The Human Condition and subsequent works, the task Arendt set herself is to save action and appearance, and with it the common life of the political and the values of opinion, from the depredations of the philosophers. By systematically elaborating what this vita activa might be said to entail, she hopes to reinstate the life of public and political action to apex of human goods and goals.”
Thanks, as always.
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Thank you, Ellie.
I glanced through the article at your link and felt it does not do justice to Arendt at all. I never got the sense that she had an agenda to pursue, only to take pleasure in thought, and give the same pleasure to her reader; just as a master-gardener need not set himself any other particular task (such showing what can be grown in that climate, or preserving rare species).
The Human Condition does have a rational framework, it's true. And as for depredations, they are caused by everything in history; and it is her pleasure to trace them.
Or if we are convinced that she must have set herself a serious and not a frivolous task, it is to open our eyes, and see how intricate are the processes wherein ideas develop and change.
So you can come to her with your own reader's agenda, and not be disappointed. Unless she started and ended her book with reference to theoria (θεωρία), the Greek word meaning contemplation, I would not have bothered with it. Perhaps what she and the Greek philosophers mean by θεωρία is not the same as I understand from contemplation. But the book is written so intelligently that I can take away from it as much as I can absorb, leaving plenty behind, unexamined; and still feel that the journey through the chapters was worth the trouble. I'm sure I have skipped part of the middle chapters. But you can open at any page and get something from it; and I don't foresee dust settling on this book as it sits on my shelves.
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Still excellent, even without major editing and restoring!
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Whoops, I should have said after much needed restoration. Thanks anyway, Kathleen
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