Tag: gardening

Someone Else – 20th November 2022

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Confident and handsome
A mirror, to make smiles
Smart enough to understand
Dumb enough to be ignorant
Wanting for nothing
Always in control
The best of health
Someone else

How much pain have cost the evils which have never happened!

Thomas Jefferson

Today I’m feeling:
Tired but happy
Today I’m grateful for:
Little Amy being her usual happy self. Her own energy rubs off on me and pushes me even though I’m tired. I need it. I need to move my body despite everything inside me telling me not to.
The best thing about today was:
Cleaning, moving, cutting, planting things in the garden with Amy and enjoying the fruits of our labour.
Does your family make any special dishes for the holidays?
My family? Who is that these days? Amy will make special dishes but doesn’t need a holiday to do that. This app like many things one might come across on the Internet is US-centric and is referring to Thanksgiving but this annoys me really. Most of the world does not live in the US or celebrate Thanksgiving or the genocide of indigenous populations. I felt the same in Australia when people always talked about the seasons not thinking that half the world doesn’t follow the same seasons! So, in general, in short, I guess my answer is no. With a cherry on top.

I took this picture because my student Anchan took my phone and replaced my Gloomy wallpaper with her selfies so I had to find some new Gloomy wallpaper images. I love Gloomy, and Anchan too!

God’s Deal – 17th November 2022

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

It’s catching up, chasing at our heels
Kicking guts and stabbing in the feels
Lumps are growing, now we’re knowing
This is the worst of God’s shitty deals

We stand before the world, in all its majesty and torment, and say ‘we mean something’ – we, who contribute in some way toward the betterment of the world; we, who have skin in the game; we, who improve matters; we, who care. We find, to our utter astonishment, that we have faith in ourselves.

Nick Cave

Today I’m feeling:
Happy
Today I’m grateful for:
The rain again. It’s not long since the rainy season ended but in that short time, the garden was getting parched and forcing me to water far more often than my laziness would like. But today, I can lie down and relax and watch the downpour doing the work for me.
The best thing about today was:
Taking about an hour to leave school as at every turn there were new groups of students wanting to chat. I had good conversations with many of them, my current students, my old students and even some I don’t teach.
Are you in control of your life?
As much as it is possible to be. So many factors can not be controlled and honestly, it is better that way.

I took this picture because this cutie was above the door into the bathroom at school and though the picture doesn’t show it is bigger than my hand. What a beauty.

The Decline of Western Civilisation Pt II – 26th June 2022

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 1 Comment

It’s difficult to care about the west
Always declaring itself as best
Fighting its war against the beast
Maintaining control across the east
Patience one day will gain reward
No longer counting whose goals were scored
A better way will come to be
A time that most of us wish to see

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

from Welcome to Night Vale

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful to get some gardening advice for Bruno when he came to visit today.

The Week That Was – 16th September 1979

Smug – 15th May 2022

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Shake yourself out of smug satisfaction
Are you perfectly formed? Happy and disgraced
Apply the training beyond your aspiration
The destination always remains misplaced

True action, food and radiant action…grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer.

Hermann Hesse

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful for the tree-cutting tool Amy’s dad brought yesterday. making it easier to hack away some branches that needed doing.

The Hexagrams – 27th March 2022

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 1 Comment

*Truth, as terrible as death
Yet harder to find*
Is there any proof we exist
Beyond what’s in our mind?
Dark yin and brilliant yang
Blind faith in blind fate
As good as any other man
With enough patience to wait

*from (and inspired by) ‘The Man in The High Castle’ by Philip K Dick

Today, we’re being suffocated by abundance.

Louis Pereira

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful to cut the grass in the cooler morning air this morning.

The Past Was Someone Else – 18th March 2022

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 1 Comment

I know I did wrong that time
And my excuses were poor
I didn’t need to defend myself
Or lie about it anymore
Those actions were not mine
They were a me in the past
I hope you can forgive me
So I can forgive myself at last

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew.

Abraham Lincoln

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful to have the tools and equipment to do a little bit of gardening myself and cutting and sweeping yesterday made for a good achievement.

The Week That Was – 29th April 1979

Feed The World – 17th October 2021

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

It’s time to cut the lawn again
Pull out all the weeds
Time for regeneration
And sowing hardy seeds

Time to reevaluate everything
To see which way succeeds
Time to return to our nature
On which this family feeds

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful to be able to push through these last couple of days of sickness with diarrhoea and still be able to do my abs workout in the morning. I feel like I can see a little difference in my belly fat and shape.

Zen and the Art of Rhyming Maintenance – 14th May 2021

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 2 Comments

As an extra challenge to writing, I thought it might be interesting to write a poem for each of these quotes that I highlighted in my copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I don’t like to make things easy for myself.

If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.

Problem Solved?

So, what’s the problem?
I’m an ungrateful prick?
Thanks for your comment
It really made me tick

Was it somehow helpful?
Did it get things straight?
I don’t think anything changed
I guess you’ll just have to wait

…that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface.

Under The Hood

I can feel it in my bones
Unshakeable but invisible
I try to look inside it
But this time, it’s not divisible

Clouding up the thoughts
Stumbling around my guesses
Impossible to clarify
Mixed within my messes

Can’t be touched upon
Or identified in the grey
It’s on the tip of my tongue
But what it is, I cannot say

He travelled alone. Always. Even in the presence of others, he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not important to him.

He Travelled Alone

You said that we all need a friend
And perhaps that’s really true
But I think that I’ve decided
That friend isn’t going to be you

I’m alone but I’m not lonely
It doesn’t matter what you know
You don’t have to be like me
I’m happy if you just leave me alone

I accept the way I am
And don’t care what you say
Why do you want me to be like you?
It’s just your ego getting in my way

I’m sorry if this makes you sad
But that’s really down to you
I’ll see you again tomorrow
And know my feeling’s true

It’s frustrating to see how completely unaware he is at the time of the significance of what he is saying.

Significant Words

I look back at my old words
I see I understood things well
Yet somehow I couldn’t act on them
I couldn’t really tell

That big truths underlie all this
Almost as plain as day
It’s so easy to say them
But much harder to put in play

Sometimes so unaware
I stumble way off course
I have to remind myself
And get back on my horse

No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.

Shout at the Sun

Some things don’t need to be said
But maybe they should be
Reminders to our busy selves
About how simple things would be

If we took time in appreciation
To really know that the sky is blue
Of course, we already know this
But we could really understand it too

Take a minute and look on up
Above your thoughts and feelings
Astound yourself with simple things
In all your daily dealings

The effort of fathoming what is in another’s mind creates a distortion of what is seen.

Are You For Real?

You don’t see what I can see
Do you?
You can’t see what’s in my mind
Can you?
You’ll never work it out now
Will you?
You aren’t really real now
Are you?

I see blue but you see red
You didn’t listen to what I said
I’ll react exactly the same
Until we can agree on a name

Let’s be clear, just talk it straight
You said mind games are what you hate
But you always do that so well
So deceptive, I couldn’t tell

Now I’m empty, now I’m blank
And for that I’ve you to thank

We have to keep going until we find out what’s wrong or find out why we don’t know what’s wrong.

Knowing

What’s wrong? Do you know?
If not, why is it so?
Don’t stop, just keep going
On this path to one day knowing

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful to receive a friendly warm welcome when I dropped by Bruno’s house yesterday. He is feeling very happy now that he is no longer working for TLC and is enthusiastically talking about plans for the future and particularly his garden, which I can tell has got him really upbeat.

I’m feeling rather pleased with myself today. I spent it all either reading, sketching, studying Thai, drinking coffee, driving and writing poetry – not bad for a day at work! Enjoy it while I can.

Start Again – 13th May 2021

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ 18 Comments

Looking back over poems I wrote in the past, I realise what a catharsis they provided and thought it a good idea to try and get back into the swing of it. I needed to make a small statement (and a trial).

Start Again

How long, how many years?
Pen on paper held no fears
Laziness, time, other things
The good and bad that it brings

So back to it, start again
New book and brand new pen
Conscious to make the time
To find that special word to rhyme

Throw emotions out in words
From realistic to absurd
My own form of meditation
To re-read all my own creation

9th Jan 2026 – Shared with Poets and Storytellers United #209

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful to discover the Oasis vegetarian restaurant in the city. Dylan took me there yesterday. They have a wide range of delicious fake meat and vegetable dishes. I’ll keep going back if Amy doesn’t cook me lunch.

This morning, I got up a little earlier so that I could do my 5 minutes of exercise and start getting back into some good habits again, and I think it really helped set me up for a positive and happy day.

I’ve started sketching again when I go for my coffee and also want to start writing more poems too. The one I wrote today may be the first one I’ve written in, I don’t know, two decades or more! I used to look out for interesting phrases I would come across and use them as a basis. I came across a cool phrase today in some article I was reading and jotted it down. I hope to keep inspiring myself in different ways whenever I can.

Things are good today. George even looked me in the eye when he was talking to me today. Even that small change made me feel good.

I went to visit Bruno and Nut after lunch, and we talked mostly about his garden exploits – he’s really into it, which is cool – it’s great to see his enthusiasm for it. It inspires me in that direction, too, but I am still a little lazy when I get home from work. Or, more accurately, I prioritise other things instead.