I’m travelling around lately for work; last week spending time in the city and then flying and driving to the country and there will be more of that. It’s busy but with the lens of ‘The August Break‘, it’s good to be stopping to see as I travel and to be enjoying the visual contrasts that such a week brings.
What contrasts are you enjoying now?
I drive through national park for twenty minutes each morning on the way to work. There are gorgeous trees, now starting to shift into spring mode here, water, birds, rocks, beaches, rivers. I am always focused on getting to work and while I notice what I am driving through, I don’t stop. Yesterday as part of ‘The August Break‘, for the first time on this drive, I stopped to see and took some early morning shots by the water’s edge. I will be stopping to see more on the way to work and elsewhere.
The orchids outside my front door
The bracelet that attracted me yesterday: simple, cool and calm.
These books that arrived recently that I can’t wait to get more time to dive into.
Race out and buy them too:
This I Know: notes on unraveling the heart – Susannah Conway
Instant Love: how to make magic and memories with polaroids – Susannah Conway, Amanda Gilligan and Jenifer Altman
Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking – Susan Cain
Changing on the Job: developing leaders for a complex world – Jennifer Garvey Berger
‘Blogging from the Heart‘: the e-course, the creator – Susannah Conway, the community that has evolved from the group taking the course, the reading I have engaged in over the past 6 weeks from this brilliant creative tribe, how good we look on feedly when all together like a gorgeous magazine of kindred souls – thanks Susannah for yet another inspiring and perfect learning experience that will impact for a very long time…
The Lominger Leadership Architect tool and how we are using this in my work space to define and develop the leadership skills we need for the challenging times ahead in Australian vocational education and training
‘The Light Between Oceans’ by L.M.Stedman, an expat Australian writer living in London. I finished this novel this morning as part of the Australian Women Writers’ 2012 Challenge. It featured lighthouses, a wild West Australian coastline, a remote island, language that took me there and circumstances that wrenched my heart. And yes, I cried. A beautiful, atmospheric and engaging read.
What are you loving?
I write poetry – true confession. A rarefied art if ever there was one and you wonder why you do it, what calls you, why it defines you, this thing you are so passionate about but hardly ever talk about.
Colleen Wainwright (aka the communicatrix) in a recent post, ‘My narrow, narrow bands of interest and utility,’ discusses the search for a defining way to talk about such life passions and goals and the overwhelming drive to write that is for her a connecting thread:
‘To my creative intimates—the fellow strugglers in writing workshop, or elsewhere behind the scenes—I share the only thing I know for sure: that I want to write, and that I am doggedly pursuing it, placing structures where they need to be to support it, addressing what obstacles I can see that might be getting in the way of it.’
I relate very much to these words. Poetry and other writing, the urge to create, the sense of this being an underlying connective piece, the pursuing of ways to further its creation and finding the lifestyle that allows and fosters a writing life are all key themes for me. It is not easy, especially when you have written for a long time and it has not gone very far it seems. Poetry especially can feel like a driven art with not many places to go. It’s easy for it all to go underground for a while in between other things like work and family, but it springs back up eventually. You cannot keep it down forever it seems.
This initiation into poetry started for me in an English class in my second last year of high school at the age of 16. A wonderfully inspired English teacher, Miss Furlong, chose the words of songs by Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and Harry Chapin to teach us about poetry. We listened to and studied the words of ‘People’s Parties’, ‘Twisted’ and ‘Trouble Child’ from the gorgeous album ‘Court and Spark’ and ‘Jungleland’ and ‘Meeting Across the River’ from the explosive and gutsy ‘Born to Run’ album. We interpreted these words and we wrote our own poems.
I loved these musicians already, I was good at English, I had started scribbling words like poems already, and whether it was the combination of all this or just the right inspiration at the right time, the words came out – in response and in creation. I wrote a poem called ‘Touch the Earth’ based on an elegant book of the same name, subtitled ‘A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence’ with sepia images by Edward S Curtis and statements by North American Indians compiled by T C McLuhan. I wrote a poem of deep connection with these images and the people portrayed, forming and emerging onto paper in a surprisingly sensitive lyric piece capturing what I had been reading, seeing and feeling.
I got 30 out of 30 for my response to the poetry in song of Joni, Bruce and others and 25 out of 25 for my first full-blown poetic effort. I also received some feedback and a question: ‘I can’t fault this, Terri – your perception is startling – far beyond your years’ and ‘From where did you get your inspiration?’ I don’t know where it came from apart from the book and the connection with the words of songs I loved. I don’t know how I was able to articulate responses about relationships or other people’s experiences I had not directly experienced in any way at all. But I found, from this writing experience, a way of accessing an inner knowing. I found a way of using the strength and music of language to interpret and understand the world as I was experiencing it. It opened my eyes to another level of feeling and thought, a latent talent, a lens of creativity I could see the world through. It was there already but the connection needed to be made and I was touched by poetry.
Sometimes you wonder where it will all go as you write, as you journey through crafting better and stronger poems and as you try to find a place for poetry internally and in the external world, such as through publication. I am heartened by Ted Kooser’s closing words in ‘The Poetry Home Repair Manual’ (p157):
‘I wish you luck with your writing, friend, and I hope that you’ll write a few poems that someone will want to show to the world by publishing them. Remember that the greatest pleasures of writing are to be found in the process itself. Enjoy paying attention to the world, relish the quiet hours at your desk, delight in the headiness of writing well and the pleasure of having done something as well as you can.’
I love these words. There is much valuable advice about crafting and publishing poetry in this wise and gentle book but I am calmed by the reminder to enjoy the touch of poetry and the moments that it brings regardless of where it eventually goes. The words of Sylvia Plath also echo the pleasure to be found in poetry and remind of the miracles of poetry reaching the people that it does touch:
“Surely the greatest use of poetry is its pleasure – not its influence as religious or political propaganda. Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images. I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far – among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.”
Quoted in Charles Newman (Editor) The Art of Sylvia Plath, 1971, Indiana Uni Press p 320 – from ‘Context’, London Magazine, no 1 February, 1962, p45-46
What are your reflections on the touch and reach of poetry?
Image, Dreams by jecate from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license. See Dreams link for poem accompanying the photo.
Further to the post of May 19 on my ‘seven stars’ – the blogging writers who have inspired me – I want to celebrate these stars further as I move forward. I acknowledged and celebrated them in that summary post but each deserves a bright and sparkling place of their own here in between other musings and jottings. I wish to acknowledge what they have given me, the windows they open, what is inspiring and what they offer to others. I am already sprinkling this through my posts in various ways, but they deserve more considering what they have given me.
To celebrate beauty, healing and creativity, I encourage you to visit Susannah Conway’s sites:
http://www.susannahconway.com/ In her own words: ‘This is the online home of Susannah Conway, a photographer, writer and creator of the Unravelling e-courses. A self-confessed Polaroid fanatic, she shares insights on her blog while exploring the world through her camera lens.’
http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkonmyfingers/sets/ Susannah’s photographs on flickr
You can also see Susannah talking about her creativity in a video interview, ‘Burning questions with Susannah Conway: beauty that heals’ at Danielle LaPorte’s White Hot Truth.
What Susannah gives me:
Clear open heart, beauty, creativity, something special to take away every time I read and visit, vulnerability, courage, a model for being open and creative and what that can do for other people, someone else talking like I feel about moving through grief, pain and healing, how that happens, what it feels like, creative ways to do this, reflections on light and shadow.
And anyone who takes the most beautiful photographs of her piles of moleskine journals, a box full of old penguin paperbacks she has just found at a garage sale, all the gorgeously titled books in her library sorted by colour and her poloraid camera collection is so very cool in my books and I just swoon with pleasure at the sights.
One of my most treasured posts is ‘Five years’ , a reflection on grief that has travelled now through five years. I connect through music with those I have loved and lost, and this post ends with an invitation to play a Kings of Leon song for Susannah’s partner whom she loved and lost. The song ends up being played loud all around the world by readers, including by me here in Sydney, with many tears shed all over in layers of connection.
Visit and be sometimes delighted, sometimes saddened, always touched in some special way and always inspired.
Moleskine and penguin pics by Susannah Conway and used with her kind permission.
I have been in a twilight zone this week. The twilight zone of watching someone you love being the subject of an operation, the preparation, the process, the aftermath, the lying there, the not knowing the outcome, the twilight of hospitals and waiting.
We have been there far too much these past years and know the drill unfortunately. All you can do sometimes is move things around, find ice, meet some small need, talk quietly. So much you can’t do, such a sense of helplessness.
For these times and other times of waiting, holding, healing, times when you are frozen a little and caught in that moment to moment dealing with something – my secret weapon is sudoku.
Gwen Bell talks of mindfulness in her wonderful Mindfulist blog. In contrast, sudoku at this time is a kind of mindlessness, almost meditative, a sheer focus of attention on nine numbers that helps you manage much and gives you a sense of peace. It is akin to the escapism of watching sport, the engagement with something that enables you to rest the difficult thoughts for a moment. You still your mind, counting numbers one to nine. It is highly recommended. It’s well known to be highly addictive. I’ve been there and it can eat a lot of your time, but in its rightful place, sudoku is for me a strangely powerful source of stillness and strength.
Learn more about sudoku, get your basic skills up and look at a whole bunch of great sudoku pics here at the Sudoku Pool on flickr.
Image above: Sudoku, by Jason Cartwright, via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license
Image below: Sudoku on the Waterloo and City Line, by Annie Mole , via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license
