Imbolc                                    Waxing Wild Moon

Here’s a revelation it’s strange to have this late in life:  I enjoy learning for its own sake.  Now I knew that at one level or another before, it’s true, but here’s what I’ve just learned.  After I finished my workout this evening, I went back to working on Latin translation.  At first I approached the Latin like school, do the work, get it right, then do more work, get it right.  So on.

But tonight as I sat there puzzling out the meaning of the sentences and the word endings, I realized I was having fun.  This was no longer a goal oriented, hoop-jumping exercise, but something I simply enjoyed.  Like, I don’t know, playing checkers or basketball or chess or dancing.  Strange, huh?

Maybe it’s always been this way for me, I don’t know.  It feels like a secret, something I shouldn’t tell, but there it is anyhow.  At 63.  There’s always something new around the corner.

Kate and I had an African evening.  We finished the first season of the HBO series, The First Ladies Detective Agency.  We read all these quite a while ago.  The casting for the series is spot on and seeing the Botswana setting makes the stories come alive even more strongly than in the books themselves.  After we finished the last episode, we watched Duma, a story of a South African boy and a cheetah he raises from a cub.  It has the usual boy reluctantly returns animal to the wild, the animal comes back for one last hug sort of plot line, but with some unusual depth added by his long journey from Capetown back into the bush with Duma, the cheetah and a man he meets in the bush.  Both of them are well worth  watching.  Not my usual dark fare, but good anyhow.