It seems eating whale meat in Norway may no longer be as cool as it used to be. It is being reported that Norwegian taste for the mammal has declined. “It shows that it is no longer cool to eat whale,” says Truls Guwolsen from the Norwegian branch of Greenpeace. “The market is disappearing.”

Since the whaling season started on April 1, fishermen have caught about half the number of animals allowed by the Norwegian government – around 500 minke whales out of 1,052, the highest quota ever allowed. Norway is the only country in the world to conduct commercial whaling. Link

fingers of land
separated by the sea –
alone and still

maybe not a Haiku by John Holman

A friend of mine sent me this quote yesterday — wont say why (grin). It’s from ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December, 1875 — 29 December, 1926) is generally considered the German language’s greatest 20th century poet.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

On wikiquote.org I also found this variation:

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

I watched a program on the box yesterday about Robert F Kennedy and found it to be a moving tribute to the man.

In a speech, which has become one of his most memorable, Kennedy announced the assassination of Martin Luther King and then quoted these lines from Aeschylus:

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. And in our own despair, and against our will, comes Wisdom by the awful Grace of God.

I think these words are also written on his gravestone.

Makes me wonder how different things might have been.

flash fiction by John Holman