More figures at the museum

I keep swapping these over -

photoshop sections of the two together

and it wouldn't be a bad photo. Bah.

So why not make the effort to learn something about light

and shutter speeds instead of pointing and hoping?

No better place than a museum for people-watching. The visitors loiter and linger - one of the rare contexts, these days, in which this is a morally approved activity. The light inside is often lovely. (Last week the light outside was pretty good too). And then there are the guards, whose job it is to sit or stand in watchful stillness.

Even Kooler Kwan Yin

Mmmm. Very subtle level of discourse on Buddhist iconography. S/he is reelly kool, though, no? I can appreciate, but not articulate - when I stop working, I'm sadly aware of this empty, crackling space between my ears! For intelligent and moving commentary, see Antony Gormley's article, which Marja-Leena spotted on the V&A site. No surprise to know that ancient Buddhist figures are very meaningful to him. The deep pleasure and satisfaction I find in much of his work, and especially the Iron Men, is certainly akin to what these provoke.

Cool Buddhas on a cool day

Oh my, I could see my breath before me this morning - so much chiller than a week ago. And, as the season turns, a lovely day out this week to see the timeless figures in the V&A's new Buddhist Sculpture Gallery.

In a quiet place

This past weekend I was in a lovely place. Elegant and spacious within, natural beauty all around and quiet, quiet... more horses than cars passing picturesquely on the horizon. Even though I was there to work and barely looked or went outside for the first twenty-four hours, the heart expands, the pores open wide to take in a tangible breath of calm. The skin of humans is so much more porous that we like to believe. Supposing my life had not been in the city, how very different it and I might have been - not so feeble, maybe, on a lifelong larger oxygen supply, not so roughened and carapaced.

Mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror

Rather like the inside of my head, in this first week or two of the new academic year.

Perfectly simple

If I ever have a front garden of my own, this is the one I want, with its densely planted, fragrant lavender bordering the distinctive but calming symmetry of the Victorian-style tiles (too intact, I think, to be original).

Hell and heaven

These are the hell weeks of too much work, too little time, so a stolen Saturday of much needed relaxation seemed a good opportunity to get inspired by Lorianne. I bought a small sketch book and went to the park on a perfect early autumn day of soft, warm light with a tiny bite of chill and damp at its very edge. Held between the leaves already crackling underfoot and a densely woven canopy of quiet birdsong, I sat beside the lake in Dulwich Park which hummed with even more birds and bugs than usual - humming their pre-death or pre-migration swansong, but no swans. Looking, drawing, looking, drawn close to every purple daisy, curling oak leaf and rosy crabapple, far from all the worries of the working world. It was heavenly. Now I'm back in the office.

Dream yoga

Woke at 5 today, then fell briefly asleep again and woke remembering my dream. It was a lovely one, of reuniting in happiness and complicity with an old friend from long ago (we were divided by love of the same man, though we tried hard, like the right-on little feminists we were, not to let it divide us). In the way of dreams, it was both the past and the present - her kids, now in their thirties, were small, but we spoke poignantly of the days when they were young all those years ago. This is a truth of dreams, isn't it? Both past and present are in us here and now. I don't have, or least don't remember, happy dreams. For years and years, not a single one. No exaggeration. Always the same tedious variations on being reviled and excluded, interspersed with the ones of feeling scared and guilty because I'm very late for something. How weird, then, to wake on this Friday morning of a horribly tiring and stressful week with a heart warmed by feelings of reconciliation and completion.

Settling into standing

A retreat was held in London last weekend with Ajahn Sucitto, a British Theravadin Buddhist monk and abbot of Chithurst monastery in Hampshire. I haven't visited any of the Buddhist monasteries in this country. They evoke, I suppose, less than positive feelings from my childhood experience of religion, so I tend to seek out Buddhist teachings in an environment without institutional or structuredly devotional trappings. But, anyway, having heard good things, I went along and was bowled over, really, by this gently forceful and uncompromising teacher.

He has a slowly growing series of Reflections posted on a blog site. Powerful stuff, some of it, especially a thought-provoking - not to say wince-inducing - account of what it's like to go out for alms in a small town in southern England (from which I couldn't cull an adequate extract - to get the full impact you need to read all of it).

Would Barthes have been a digital photographer?

Grafton Street, Dublin

"I am not a photographer, not even an amateur photographer:

too impatient for that: I must see right away what I have produced."

Roland Barthes, in La chambre claire / Camera Lucida, 1980