A lovely bit of zen, and other things

I had a lovely moment of zen photography today - or rather yesterday, as of the (late) time of writing this. I love it when that happens: when you find a subject that inspires you and there's that concentration. It can be quite meditative.

The zen moment was followed by a visit to my brother's. As usual, a very lovely evening - which ended in a game of Monopoly with my younger nephew. A 6-year-old's rules to any game are somewhat confusing and seem quite random - and usually  are manipulated in the course of the game to always benefit the said 6-year-old. This time, for instance, I ended up in a lot owned by my nephew and was about to pay the rent required by the game rules as is right and proper, when a "guard" in the guise of a wizard appeared and I was told to pay 5 million euros immediately. Oh well, the modern Monopoly - at least this version - uses credit cards rather than cash so it hardly felt like paying.

On the same visit, I borrowed my elder nephew's massage chair - one of those things you can put on e.g. the computer chair. It gives a really good and strong shiatsu massage, so it's going to be a bliss.

I have progressed in my job search plans, in addition to sending two applications for jobs I had looked up earlier, in the way of posting an open application in the city of Helsinki recruitment pages and looking up all the secondary schools which offer Latin courses. My plan is to contact the principals to enquire whether they might accept an open application for substitute teacher tasks and such. Many of them may well get all the necessary persons for any teaching tasks from the department of classical philology of the university and they may even prefer formal teacher qualifications but it's at least worth looking into. Some of the comprehensive schools offer Latin as well, but... run away, run away! The idea of teaching comprehensive school kids going through puberty... *shiver*. In any case, I'm looking into all the options (with the aforementioned exception). I'm what I like to call a realistic optimist: I believe something will turn up eventually - but not necessarily immediately and not if I'm not active in looking for it myself.

I'll end this with a quote, for no other reason than that I love it - although the time of the night that I'm writing is the same as described in the lines.

And under the oppression of the silent fog

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Groundswell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;

And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,

Clangs

The bell.