This creeper grows on a high wall on Upper Quarterdeck Road in Kalk Bay. I've passed it many times over the years, but it was only one day earlier this year that I really noticed it, and it's graphic beauty. And then it was only a few months later that I allowed myself the time to photograph it (with just the right amount of greenery, I think), and it was still more weeks before I finally loaded the RAW files onto my PC and processed them.
At the time I thought I might like to print it as a wallpaper to cover my bedroom cupboard doors; it's funny how some things that are solely for our own personal pleasure frequently get shunted to the bottom of the To-Do List.
And that just reminded me of this post from Brainpickings, George Eliot on Leisure and the Seedbed of Our Modern Restlessness, about how leisure is "now under siege from the unrelenting cult of workaholism and productivity that has only grown in ferocity":
Over 150 years ago, "in her debut novel Adam Bede, Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, speaks with remarkable prescience to how the modern relinquishing of leisure in the service of anxious productivity is squeezing the essential livingness out of life:
'Even idleness is eager now — eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes... Old Leisure was quite a different personage… Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure.'"
In another linked Brainpickings post, Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher’s Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism, Maria Popova continues that we "have come to see the very notion of “leisure” not as essential to the human spirit but as self-indulgent luxury reserved for the privileged or deplorable idleness reserved for the lazy."
And on that note, since I have nothing pressing for today I'm not going to make up some busy-ness, I'm going to go and sit in a local cafe with a view of the incoming front, drink coffee, read and be. (If you're in the 'hood, please feel free to join me!)