These snowdrops came out a few days ago. I saw them one day and intended to go out to photograph them the following day. However, the best-laid plans can go awry, and the next day it snowed.

The snow was swept away by the rain the next day and so I went to visit the spot again.

I didn’t worry that the snow would freeze and kill them, because snowdrops are hardy enough to withstand freezing. On the way I wondered though whether the snow would have flattened the little flowers.

They were fine, however, and I was able to photograph them.

William Wordsworth described snowdrops in his 1820 poem of that name:

“…I see thee bend thy forehead, as if fearful to offend.”

And Mary Robinson described them in similar terms in her 1791 poem,

“…why droops so cold and wan thy fragrant head?”

Peter Pan and Tinkerbell
I don’t see them that way though. I don’t see them hanging their heads, but rather they remind me of the costume that Peter Pan wears or the dress that Tinkerbell wears in the novel Peter Pan – or at least in the Disney film version.

The hems of their costumes seem to have been cut in a zig-zag with an exaggerated pair of pinking shears.

In chapter three of the novel, J.M Barrie describes Tinkerbell as a fairy who mends pots and kettles.

Tinker
The derivation is from tinker – someone who works with tin. And of course, the word tinker is used to describe those wandering people of Irish origin living mostly in Ireland and Great Britain and who traditionally made their living from mending pots and pans.

It makes me think of the ‘You little tinker’ as a way to tell off a child who misbehaves.

Children’s Rhymes
Then there is the counting rhyme: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.

We used that rhyme and also one that involved holding out a fist with the thumb uppermost while someone went around the group counting One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four. Five potatoes, six potatoes, seven potatoes, more.

Either rhyme ended with ‘You’re it.’

Pinked
When I was making the caption for this last image, I wondered whether pinked was perhaps a word that described the kind of edge made with pinking shears. And indeed it is.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes pink as meaning ‘with a saw-tooth edge’ and mentions that it comes from a Middle English word meaning to thrust, as in he pinked his opponent’s shoulder with his sword.

All good useful stuff to help ward off the still dark February evenings.

To send the snowdrop image as an ecard, click the image at the top of this article.

I have just been watching one of Don McAllister’s screencasts from his series of very useful tutorials at ScreenCastsOnline on how to get the best out of your Mac.

This week’s show is about John Gruber’s Markdown and about various text editors that can use it.

What Is Markdown?
Markdown is both ‘plain text markup syntax’ and a software tool that converts plain text markup to HTML.

In plain English, it is a simple way of writing an article that contains the code to make text that displays with formatting and that can also be displayed as a web page.

For example, it can make bold text and italic text, as well as headings and links.

MarkDown is built as a plug-in for the Moveable Type blogging platform and as a script that is built into various text editors.

About Text Editors
Text editors are small programs that run on your computer.

That means that you can use them to write an article for the Web and save the article as a draft on your machine. Then you can come back to it later, work on it some more, and then publish it online.

And all the HTML formatting needed to enable the article to be read by web browsers is already built in.

I could write HTML coding in a text editor, but – and this is a crucial ‘but’ – Markdown text is easy to read, whereas HTML code is not. This is a major attraction of Markdown.

But Why Do I Need Markdown?
Many blogging platforms enable you to write articles with a Visual Editor. This blog uses the WordPress platform, and it is very easy to write and edit posts directly in this blog using the built-in Visual Editor.

That means that I can write text and format it to make headings, bold, and other kinds of text formatting – and I can see all the formatting without having to see the HTML, which is tucked in the background.

So When Is MarkDown Useful?
Well, until I saw Don McAllister’s screencast I didn’t think I had much use for MarkDown.

Therefore, I had never really looked at the code syntax.

However, when I saw the MarkDown code today, I recognised it as the code that MadMimi uses to make its email newsletters.

This is relevant to us because use MadMimi for our email newsletters.

Until today, I thought the markup language in MadMimi was its own proprietary language.

Working Offline
Being able to work on email newsletters offline is very useful to us because it opens up a whole new dimension for composing newsletters with MadMimi.

And using easy-to-read Markdown, makes it even more attractive to use.

Now we can write drafts in a text editor on the computer without having to work directly on the Web in MadMimi.

Text Editors
As I said, there are a number of text editors that can use Mardown syntax.

One free one is Notational Velocity and I am experimenting with using that at the moment.

I am also trying an alternative fork development of this program, called Notational Velocity Alt which has a separate preview window that I like. That means that I can see the markup in one pane and the formatted text in another pane.

MarsEdit
However, my preferred editor is MarsEdit.

In fairness, it is much more than just a text editor. MarsEdit also can send articles directly to a number of Web platforms, including WordPress.

Madmimi (like Notational Velocity Alt) has a preview pane in which the formatted text can be viewed when the Preview pane is set to Markdown.

This makes it very easy to see and check formatted text ready to paste into Madmimi.

Here in this screen grab you can see an earlier draft of this article written in Markdown and shown in formatted text in the Preview pane.

You can see that the formatted text at the bottom is easy to read, but so is the Markdown text at the top.

Conclusion
It is much more relaxing to work in a text editor because we can just turn on the editor, type something, save the draft and put the article on one side.

Then when we are satisfied with our draft, we can paste the Markdown-formatted text into MadMimi.

Then all we have to do is check that everything looks OK and then send out the newsletter!

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A Buddhist Verse
In the ‘Exalted Sublime Golden Light Sutra’, there is this verse that talks about a number of impossibilities in nature:

When white lilies grow
In the Ganges’ swift currents,
When crows become red
And cuckoos turn the color of conch,
When palm fruit grows on the rose-apple tree
And on the date tree mangos form,
At that time a relic the size
Of a mustard seed will appear.

The Ganges In Varanasi
Now, it just so happens that my husband David and I saw the Ganges River this past spring as it flowed through various cities in India.

However, as you might easily conclude – never in our travels did we see ‘white lilies grow in the Ganges’ swift currents’, as the poem here proposes.

Relics The Size Of A Mustard Seed
A few weekends ago, however, we did actually see a ‘relic the size of a mustard seed’.

In fact, we saw a number of clusters of them – and it happened here in the cold summer weather of the city of Leeds rather than in the heat of India.

Sacred Objects From Buddhist Masters
We saw these relics at an exhibition called the ‘Maitreya Project Relic Tour: Sacred Relics Of The Buddha’, sponsored by the Jamyang Buddhist Centre in Leeds that was being shown in the Leeds City Museum.

The exhibition of Buddhist relics included some donated by the Dalai Lama. It was qualified as a rare collection that included relics of the Buddha and of masters from different Buddhist traditions.

Remembering Majnu-ka-Tilla
We were interested to see what these relics were. As we stood in the subdued queue of people waiting to see them, David and I spoke to one another about the Buddhists we had met in India.

We recalled in particular the lovely practitioners of the faith that we had seen in Majnu-ka-Tilla, the Tibetan enclave in Delhi where we had stayed for almost a week when we were in Delhi.

In Majnu-ka-Tilla we had stayed at Wongden House, a friendly hotel with airy rooms that looked out at the Yamuna River and the fields and huts on the riverbank.

Life In Those Alleyways And Byways
Once you leave the hotel, you go through winding, unpaved alleyways and paths where colorful prayer flags, handy Tibetan crafts, mom & pop food shops, clothing stores, phone outlets, and corner pharmacies. Even an Internet cafe or two dot the streets.

As you walk, you often pass Buddhist monks radiant in their simple vermillion robes. Everything and everyone winds down to the very wide boulevard where bicycle rickshaws and some auto-rickshaws (if you are lucky enough to find them!) transport you to the local subway station and from there you can get to the heart of Delhi.

Once in the center of Delhi, you’re back in the thick of it, of course. You can see everything from the ancient to the new in terms of transport, as this photograph of the city traffic reveals:

The Community As Our Refuge
The commercial center of the exiled Tibetan refugee community, Majnu-ka-Tilla is a quiet, peaceful area that offered us respite from such chock-a-bloc traffic and the frenetic, all-guns-blazing hubbub that is Delhi.

Wongden House also has a marvelous small and simple restaurant on its premises where we ate several times.

There one night we met some Buddhists who were passing through en route to a retreat. We asked them questions about their way of life as we ate delicious Tibetan noodle soup called ‘tenthuk’ made with vegetables, steamed dumplings called ‘momos’, and vegetables that sizzled on a huge bed of lettuce.

Visiting The Buddhist Exhibit
Cut from that experience of the Buddhist culture in Delhi this past spring back to the exhibit that we saw recently here in England.

Before entering the exhibit, we were asked to take off our shoes. After that we entered a large, dimly-lit rotunda where calming music was being piped in. The lights were low as all of us museum goers progressed forward on a narrow plush red carpet.

On one side of the queue, people sat on chairs and mats. Some assumed the lotus position as they meditated.

On the other side, a monk dressed in beautiful vermillion robes blessed people who came one by one to kneel in front of him. He placed a golden vessel on each person’s head, which we learned also contained some relics of the masters.

In the center was a large golden Buddha, golden bowls lined up in a semi-circle, and a number of exhibits in glass cases.

As we wound around the table, we also saw a copy of the Exalted Sublime Golden Light Sutra, the same book from which I chose the verse that I used to begin this article.

What Are ‘Relics’ According To Buddhists?
The highlight of the show were the relics of the Gautama Buddha and of other masters.

We discovered that ‘relics’ is the word Buddhists use to describe the bits of hard, pearlized balls of bone that are found in the sifted material that remains after a holy master is cremated.

We saw about 10 glass cases filled with delicate bowls that had about half a dozen or so or fewer of these gleaming remains.

The Two Usual Sources For ‘Pearls Of Wisdom’
And so I wonder: Is this where the term ‘pearls of wisdom’ first came from?

The usual answer about where this phrase comes from is that the phrase is considered to come from two sources.

The first source is considered to be from the Christian religion, specifically from Matthew 7:6 in which there is a reference to casting pearls (that is, the wisdom of the gospel) before swine.

The second source is from James Russell Lowell, the nineteenth-century American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat who referred to the poetry contained in the classic Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as follows:

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the title that the nineteenth-century writer and translator Edward FitzGerald gave to his famous translation of about 1,000 poems.

The poems were originally written in Persian and are attributed to the Persian poet, mathematician, and astronomer Omar Khayyam who was born in 1048 and died in 1131.

A Possible Third Source For The Expression ‘Pearls Of Wisdom’?
After seeing these relics recently, I now wonder whether they are in fact a third source for the expression ‘pearls of wisdom’.

I asked this of a Buddhist monk who was there and she said that Buddhists believe it is only masters’ remains who yield such relics. However, I do not know what experts of cremation would say about this.

I do know this, however: Although we can use the term “pearls of wisdom” sarcastically, at its heart the expression is meant as intelligent advice, commentary, or instruction that someone imparts to others.

And does that not sound exactly like what the Buddhist teachers and masters strive to do throughout their lives?

The tiny silver- and cream-colored ‘pearls’ glittering so perfectly in their glass cases with the photographs of lovely, smiling Buddhist monks from whom they came next to them makes me think that this derivation seems like it may well be possible.

And so as the poem at the beginning of this article stated, it may well be that flowers don’t bloom in the Ganges, that crows are black and not red, that mangos certainly don’t form on date trees and the like – but we did see a good number of ‘relic[s] the size of a mustard seed’ that came from the bodies of Buddhist holy leaders.

However, whether it’s a bit of magic fluttering in the air a bit or the result of what a truly spiritual person’s remains can leave after his or her body leaves this Earth – well, that I do not know.