Gift of the Day

From one bird to another by Jo Bradford

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It was passed from one bird to another,

the whole gift of the day.

The day went from flute to flute,

went dressed in vegetation,

in flights which opened a tunnel

through the wind would pass

to where birds were breaking open

the dense blue air -

and there, night came in.

Excerpt from Bird ~ Pablo Neruda

Gift of the day by Jo Bradford

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You will already know from this blog, that I enjoy Neruda immensely, and simply can't resist an opportunity to use his poems for inspiration - the poem bird supplied the inspiration and the titles for these two new pictures. Thanks Pablo xx

Rest is not Idleness

Rest is not Idleness a short series by Jo Bradford

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“Rest is not idleness,

and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees

on a summer's day,

listening to the murmur of water,

or watching the clouds float across the sky,

is by no means a waste of time”

~John Lubbock~

Flight Path

Flight Path by Jo Bradford

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“When once you have tasted flight

you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,

for there you have been,

and there you will always long to return.

***

~ Leonardo da Vinci ~Italian engineer, painter, & sculptor (1452 - 1519)

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This picture is one of my newest listings in the Green Island Studios Print Shop

Monkeys Wedding

Sun Showers by Jo Bradford

Growing up in Africa, there is a funny describing those weirdly wonderful weather moments when the sun is shining and it rains lightly as a "monkeys wedding". As kids, we would shout this with glee, whenever we experienced a sunshower. I always pictured in my minds eye a host of well dressed monkeys celebrating their unions in the trees, wearing white lace and top hats and tails.

The expression is what linguists call a loan translation of the Zulu "umshado wezinkawu", meaning a wedding for monkeys. Similar sayings or proverbs exist in a surprising number of languages it turns out. A great many of them have animal associations, often to do with marriage (or that activity for which the word marriage may be considered a suitable euphemism!).

Michael Quinion, in "World Wide Words", goes on to say that in Arabic, they say “the rats are getting married”, while Bulgarians prefer to speak of bears doing so; in Hindi it becomes “the jackal’s wedding”; in Calabria, it is said that “when it rains with sun, the foxes are getting married”, for which there’s a similar phrase in Japanese; Koreans refer to tigers likewise; there’s even an English dialect term, “the foxes’ wedding”, known to come from right here in the South West of Britain it seems.

No-one seems to know how, where or why the expression arose. There’s clearly a common association understood and in use by widely divergent language communities, so it seems to be something at a level below that of superficial culture. But what is it?

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