Something Beautiful

18 Ramadhan 1433

Unusually for us, at least for this fasting month, we popped out after Ishaq and enjoyed a cuppa at a pleasant little cafe along West Coast Road. It's opposite the petrol station there, and that was our first destination, to fill up so Noi can use the car tomorrow. On the way there, and coming back, I was playing my tape of Seamus Heaney reading his collection Electric Light and I was reminded of how monstrously good his reading is - utterly beguiling. His rendition of Perch, one of the early poems in the volume, did the shivers down the spine thing for me. There's a line in one of the 'classically' based poems that speaks of the cure of poetry that cannot be coerced and I felt that cure simply driving along and listening. (Hope I quoted that reasonably correctly. My copy of the poems is in KL so I can't check.)

So what with that and the pleasure of sitting with my teh tarik and my lovely wife on a warmly gentle evening when even the roar of traffic along the west coast seemed quite subdued, I got to thinking of how much beauty we are capable of creating as a kind of pale but highly satisfactory reflection of the beauty that has been created for us. In all our attempts to give shape to things and make something special I sense a version of ibadah, the Islamic term for worship or service, however distant or faint.