Life is the most complicated, intricate, cruel and beautiful creature I have ever met. It’s quite beguiling. It can hold you tenderly in its hand and nurture you. It can also squeeze you till your very last breath is all but spent and the fire has faded from your eyes.
There is no beast as cold and unforgiving. Yet there is nothing so fragile and vulnerable. There is nothing more robust, and full of hope and potential, yet nothing more fleeting.
Above all however, there is no taming this beast. No cage or whip exists that could bring this Flaming Tiger into submission. It’s utterly fascinating,
One story which has stayed with me since I first heard it is a perfect example of the Tiger Effect. It makes you realize that we are more than the sum of our parts, that what we do today – however ordinary we may think it may be - could change the face of the Earth tomorrow. It shows that we are all interconnected and that we are all a part of the Tiger.
SEPTEMBER 10 2001
A young woman shops in a downtown Manhattan department store. It is her husband’s birthday and she wants to buy him a new golfing shirt.
He always looks so good in them, she thinks to herself, running her hand down the rack. She narrows her choice to two final colors – green, and orange.
She pauses for a few seconds and holds the two shirts at arms length. She decides to go for green – it will complement his eyes.
He can always change it if he doesn’t like it, after all…
SEPTEMBER 11 2001A young man walks through the main entrance of a department store in downtown Manhattan. He walks straight to the inquiry desk. His pace is brisk – he is late for work already – but this should only take a few minutes.
Placing the plastic bag he is carrying with him on the counter, he explains to the assistant that he would like to exchange his green golfing shirt for an orange one.
Moments later, an explosion is heard as the first of two commercial jet liners slam into the World Trade Center, where he worked on one of the topmost floors.
* * *
Who could have guessed that in those few casual seconds, as she waived her hand from golf shirt to golf shirt, the woman was deciding whether her husband would live or die.
Orange, Green, Orange, Green. This is the TigerEffect.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Friday Nirvana
Friday Nirvana
“Lying straight facing upward
Limbs sore, stiff and cold
Soul flying towards heaven”
“Lying straight facing upward
Limbs sore, stiff and cold
Soul flying towards heaven”
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Wednesday Vista
Wednesday Vista
“Golden orb at twelve above
The climber’s summit
The view before the descent”
“Golden orb at twelve above
The climber’s summit
The view before the descent”
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Friday, November 17, 2006
Pass Me My Kimono
I just love haikus. They have a certain charm about them. They are so just so damn cute. They are like little bubbles of flavored words that are simply bursting with meaning and emotion. You can almost put one of these raspberry flavored tidbits into your mouth and feel it pop against your tongue.
Haiku tasty, berry tasty.
Traditionally, the Haiku originates from Japan, being written for thousands of years by long bearded Japanese sages as they sat under the magnificent flamingo canopies of peach blossoms, the dappled sun upon their silken Kimonos.
It’s no wonder that most portray images of the nature, perfection, emotion and beauty so evident in the incredible vistas and cultures of ancient Japan.
The Japanese with their bonsais have an incredible fascination with petite perfection – small reflections of a greater beauty. So it is with the Haiku.
Only three lines of 7, 5 and 7 syllables, Haikus are capsules of inspiration.
Words are chosen with utmost care and it’s not unusual for those three lines to leave an indelible impression on your mind, long after the last words are read.
These are some of the reasons why I love haiku and why I have decided to start a mini blogthology based on a ‘days of the week’ theme.
Readers are welcome to submit their own little bursts of joy.
Here is the first of the series:
Friday
“Smile inside a cubicle
Sparkle in the eye
The face of liberation”
Haiku tasty, berry tasty.
Traditionally, the Haiku originates from Japan, being written for thousands of years by long bearded Japanese sages as they sat under the magnificent flamingo canopies of peach blossoms, the dappled sun upon their silken Kimonos.
It’s no wonder that most portray images of the nature, perfection, emotion and beauty so evident in the incredible vistas and cultures of ancient Japan.
The Japanese with their bonsais have an incredible fascination with petite perfection – small reflections of a greater beauty. So it is with the Haiku.
Only three lines of 7, 5 and 7 syllables, Haikus are capsules of inspiration.
Words are chosen with utmost care and it’s not unusual for those three lines to leave an indelible impression on your mind, long after the last words are read.
These are some of the reasons why I love haiku and why I have decided to start a mini blogthology based on a ‘days of the week’ theme.
Readers are welcome to submit their own little bursts of joy.
Here is the first of the series:
Friday
“Smile inside a cubicle
Sparkle in the eye
The face of liberation”
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
All Things Bright and Beautiful
“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all…”
Snigger. It’s this thing I have started doing lately…I just can’t help myself.
Every time someone starts talking to me, my mind automatically begins assessing which animal they most closely resemble. And let me tell you, sometimes the likenesses are uncanny.
I wish I could stop but I just cant, and its severely impeding my focusing skills.
How am I supposed to concentrate on a conversation when it’s coming from the horse’s mouth, so to speak?
So far today, I’ve had close encounters with a hippopotamus, a lemur, a skunk, and a dingo. And its only 11am. Where are the FENCES?
I can just imagine some of these people, ferreting about, eating berries and nuts. Gathering nuts. Licking their nuts.
And, just like their animal counterparts, some people are furry, some are poisonous, some are highly strung and some people are completely slimy and loathsome.
Like Big Toad sitting over there near the photocopier machine. Ribbit.
Yes ladies and gentlemen we certainly live in a menagerie of creatures great and small.
And what matters is not so much that we should tolerate and embrace the fact that everyone is different and unique. It’s not that we need to learn to respect the incredible variety of our species, which reflects the amazing diversity of our cultures, our heritage, and our history.
What matters today is where you sit on the food chain. What drives the world is money, greed and power.
What a sad indictment for a creature that has more possibility in a fingertip than all the animals in the world.
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all…”
Snigger. It’s this thing I have started doing lately…I just can’t help myself.
Every time someone starts talking to me, my mind automatically begins assessing which animal they most closely resemble. And let me tell you, sometimes the likenesses are uncanny.
I wish I could stop but I just cant, and its severely impeding my focusing skills.
How am I supposed to concentrate on a conversation when it’s coming from the horse’s mouth, so to speak?
So far today, I’ve had close encounters with a hippopotamus, a lemur, a skunk, and a dingo. And its only 11am. Where are the FENCES?
I can just imagine some of these people, ferreting about, eating berries and nuts. Gathering nuts. Licking their nuts.
And, just like their animal counterparts, some people are furry, some are poisonous, some are highly strung and some people are completely slimy and loathsome.
Like Big Toad sitting over there near the photocopier machine. Ribbit.
Yes ladies and gentlemen we certainly live in a menagerie of creatures great and small.
And what matters is not so much that we should tolerate and embrace the fact that everyone is different and unique. It’s not that we need to learn to respect the incredible variety of our species, which reflects the amazing diversity of our cultures, our heritage, and our history.
What matters today is where you sit on the food chain. What drives the world is money, greed and power.
What a sad indictment for a creature that has more possibility in a fingertip than all the animals in the world.
Friday, November 10, 2006
Calling all Kooks
My mother. She’s as kooky as ever she could be. I sometimes just stand there, mouth agog at some of the hair brained schemes she comes up with – all with complete conviction. Every plan she hatches is to her a stroke of pure genius, such that would bring a tear to her eye should it ever make the shift from the conceptual to 3D reality.
Truth be told however, the vast majority of these schemes leave most people a little pale or at the least, feeling slightly uneasy. Stomach cramps and the like.
The latest plan she gleefully shared with us the other day was another sparkling gem of insanity. And it weighed about 82 carats.
“Lets make a huge aviary out of that great chasm !!!”
She points ecstatically over the lawn to a huge fissure on our farm carved out of the ground from millions of years of erosion.
An uneasy silence hangs in the room as we all look at each other nervously. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks. Time passes.
The site of this proposed aviary is probably big enough to engulf a whaling boat, a double decker school bus and the British Armed Forces with a few spaces to spare. Its bottom is filled with water, which in turn is inhabited by crawly things and legavaans [sic] (which are huge komodo type dragon reptiles with forked tongues and an appetite for little fluffy creatures. And birds. And bird eggs.)
The fact that you would need about 5 kilometers of netting, 300 tons of pre-stressed steel, 3000 pine trees in decking, a rifle (for the dragons) and a Masters degree in engineering to get the job done doesn’t seem to enter her mind at this point.
My father looks vaguely stressed. I would imagine he’s feeling pretty much the same as an Egyptian slave whose just been shown a copy of the blueprints for the pyramids of Giza.
At the end of the day however, these golden nuggets are what make her the person she is – they are her idiosyncratic fingerprints which no one else (God willing) could ever come close to replicating. To think of her as completely sane and practical would be stripping away the gloss from her personality. And trust me; we need glossy people in this world of ours.
If it weren’t for these people we would probably not have half the amazing inventions we take for granted today, that in the beginning were greeted with animosity and cries of “preposterous!”
Things like the telephone, flight, and wonderbras™
So to all you kooky people out there: I thank you.
Truth be told however, the vast majority of these schemes leave most people a little pale or at the least, feeling slightly uneasy. Stomach cramps and the like.
The latest plan she gleefully shared with us the other day was another sparkling gem of insanity. And it weighed about 82 carats.
“Lets make a huge aviary out of that great chasm !!!”
She points ecstatically over the lawn to a huge fissure on our farm carved out of the ground from millions of years of erosion.
An uneasy silence hangs in the room as we all look at each other nervously. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks. Time passes.
The site of this proposed aviary is probably big enough to engulf a whaling boat, a double decker school bus and the British Armed Forces with a few spaces to spare. Its bottom is filled with water, which in turn is inhabited by crawly things and legavaans [sic] (which are huge komodo type dragon reptiles with forked tongues and an appetite for little fluffy creatures. And birds. And bird eggs.)
The fact that you would need about 5 kilometers of netting, 300 tons of pre-stressed steel, 3000 pine trees in decking, a rifle (for the dragons) and a Masters degree in engineering to get the job done doesn’t seem to enter her mind at this point.
My father looks vaguely stressed. I would imagine he’s feeling pretty much the same as an Egyptian slave whose just been shown a copy of the blueprints for the pyramids of Giza.
At the end of the day however, these golden nuggets are what make her the person she is – they are her idiosyncratic fingerprints which no one else (God willing) could ever come close to replicating. To think of her as completely sane and practical would be stripping away the gloss from her personality. And trust me; we need glossy people in this world of ours.
If it weren’t for these people we would probably not have half the amazing inventions we take for granted today, that in the beginning were greeted with animosity and cries of “preposterous!”
Things like the telephone, flight, and wonderbras™
So to all you kooky people out there: I thank you.
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