new moon of February 2025

I saw a few fascinating birds. Words cannot do them justice. Neither can photos nor videos, for that matter; the form is not the same as the substance. But, oh, what wonder!

And, on a more than one occasion, a butterfly has floated past me, like a visitor from a far-away planet. I recall a humorous quip: “Life is like being stuck in a traffic jam, and moments of beauty are like the butterfly that floats past your windscreen as you stew inside your car: rare but much-needed.”

new-to-me stuff

  1. the Bhairav scale, in an Indian raga. What is a raga? If a musical composition were to be a painting, a raga seems to be a kind of colour palette.
  2. EPK is an acronym for Eka Pada Koundinyasana. In the field of “yoga”. I use inverted commas because yoga used to mean something else, a long time ago; but, these days, people view yoga as a kind of stretching exercise for the physical body.
  3. If I write a sentence in Indonesian language – say, I want to write, “I gaze below, looking” – I could use either aku or beta to refer to myself. i.e. Beta menatap ke bawah. Or: aku menatap ke bawah. However aku seems to be the de facto choice among modern-day Indonesian people. Could beta be an anachronistic word today, though it may have been the fashion, a mere fifty years ago?

bookshelf

  1. Malcolm Gladwell. The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference.
  2. Simon Grigg. How bizarre: Pauly Fuemana and the song that stormed the world.
  3. Roman Koshelev. (2023). Peo. Semela. Sefata: A philosophical tale.

#lunaticus