Month: November 2014

thoughts about things – fear, courage and tenderness

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Today as I was walking along, I realised that the breakthrough moment of becoming a pianist and being brave to play the piano to other colleagues had actually started much earlier than I had identified.

It all started on the ballet retreat.

To sum up, I discovered a ballet retreat, signed up for it immediately, and then (after months of patient waiting) there I was, a total beginner, doing three hours of ballet every day for a week.  And the rest of the time, I drank tea and ate chocolate in bed, reading.  Oh, and I played the clunky piano I found in a room that was mostly uninhabited by other guests.

Somehow, I now realise, this mixture of rest, beauty, gentle movement, strong movement and tranquility allowed me to connect to some deeper part of my own feelings and real me.  Playing the piano for fun (and practice) during the retreat was completely different from playing it at home at the end of a tiring working day.  I was not on guard in any way; my defences were down.  And some hidden, ancient part of me took advantage of this temporary truce to peek right out and join the rest of me. And I think that that increase in substance is what is showing in the rest of my playing, increasing boldness and expression.

And perhaps its also showing up in other places, in my writing, in my work, in my friendships.  It’s really quite intriguing, and very joyful.

Perhaps we need to encounter tenderness to discover the courage to face our fears.

ten things I love about blogging – seventeen day review

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OK, so I know seventeen days isn’t a conventional review period, but I am brimming with reviewing thoughts about writing my extraplorer blog, and having missed the more traditional one week and fortnight review moments, I can’t wait any longer.

Here are my top ten:

1. Somewhere to share my writing ~ I have been writing a journal since I was sixteen, poems since I was six, and all sorts of other bits of writing, but I have not really had a space to share it.  I have read one or two things to close friends, but then some of my attempts to share things have met with a wall of silence, and this has made it feel hard to believe that what I am writing is ‘real writing’.  By setting up this blog as a series of fragments, I have been able to hop over the hurdle of ‘real writing’ and just write, which I love.

2. Writing ~ I can never understand authors and writers who say that they hate actual writing (or even sometimes that ‘everyone hates the writing part’).  I absolutely love it.  For me it is like falling in love, and hearing beautiful music, and watching children play and the dawn when the snow has just fallen.  I love love love it.

3. Readers ~ Of course this is ridiculous, but somehow when I decided to start the blog, I had forgotten that people might actually interact with it.  I had readers in my mind’s eye, but I had forgotten that readers would jump out of there and turn out to be real.  It is quite amazing that people are reading what I write (see point 1 above).  Thank you so much!

4. extraplorer ~ I also love the name extraplorer, and now I have had the idea for a secret blogging identity, I have had some follow ideas like making little cards with ‘extraplorer’ on them to help people who would like to read something like this to find it.

5. ‘Penscratcher theme’ ~ What a great word!  The minute I saw ‘penscratcher’, I knew it was the one for me.  I love the word and I love the layout.  I love customising.  It’s so fun being able to say ‘yes’ to this and ‘no’ to that (and much much easier than designing a website which I’ve had to do for work and was laborious and very time-consuming).

6. Paying attention to things ~ This is one of my favourite things about writing – it helps to encourage you to pay deeper attention to things, and it also helps you to be brave.  There is a reason that a pen also connects with a sword and with a scalpel and with a torch.  It makes it possible to go deeper into things, to venture into dark places and take a look around, to understand more and even to do battle for things that are important (like beauty, and hope).

7. Learning about blogging ~ Now that extraplorer exists, I would like more people to be able to see it (again, if they would like to).  It’s fun to check our tips and work out what I might be able to do (and also helpful to be clear about what is not possible, given my other commitments).

8.  Becoming more creative ~ Having a space to write is making me stretch out creatively.  As I wrote before, creating found poems has been immensely joyful.  I’ve loved starting to think thoughts in writing and then follow the thought to the conclusion.  I love having a thought pop into my mind ‘passion opens doors’ and to have a place to explore it.

9. Secret identity ~ I feel a bit funny that I have not told all my own actual (lovely, fun, kind) friends about my blog, but the chance to try something in a totally fresh place is very invigorating.  For a while I worried about it in case I was not being brave enough, but no, I think sometimes a new land is an important place for growth and transformation.  It is a liminal space.

10.  Being connected to a new world ~ I’ve been a bit reticent about social media use because I feel sad when it’s used badly, and I feel protective about myself.  I use it for my work, but we could say I am a mixed-speed adopter.  Writing extraplorer has made me comfortable with taking time to find my place, my path and my pace, and taking the time to find out how to be wholehearted means I am really loving it.

So hooray for blogging, hip hip hooray!  And thank you WordPress for making something wonderful and fun.  And thank you people who are curious about extraplorer…

found poem – Stockholm, spring 2013

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In February the living stood still.

“I will so enjoy living in my cabin that I will probably end up dying here”
As though he had been able to predict the future,
he died on the beach below the cabin.

Rejoice

The birds flew unwillingly and the soul chafed against the landscape as a boat chafes against the pier it lies moored to.

Born originals, how comes it to pass, that we die copies?
Happiness hates the timid.

The trees stood with their backs turned towards me.
The deep snow was measured with dead straws.

Il faut travailler.

The footprints few old out on the crusts
Under a tarpaulin language pined

These shoes belonged to Selma Lagerlöf
who gained inspiration for her first book,
The Saga of Gösta Berling,
while taking a walk during her time at teachers college.

One day something came up to the window.
Work dropped, I looked up.

“How pitiful to strive to be someone or something in the motley crowd
of 1.4 billion two-legged tailless apes,
running around on our revolving earth projectile”.

You will often find the poet sitting at the piano.

Early in life, he had learnt to live in a state of constant preparedness to move.

The colours flared.  Everything turned round
The earth and I sprang towards each other.

What did you learn for the future?

Notes on locations:  Tomas Tranströmer exhibition at the Nobel Museum including his poem ‘Face to Face’, Le Corbusier exhibition at Moderna Museet, Poster.  Other lines are taken from other sources in the Nobel Museum including quotations from Albert Einstein, Louis Pasteur, Edward Young, Eugene O’Neill and Alfred Nobel.  

found poems thoughts

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After discovering/creating my first found poem, I found that there were two other poems present in my photos from cities I visited last year.  Somehow, working on these has been one of the most joyful things I have ever done with my writing.  I love the idea of poems lurking all over the place, and it takes a person to connect with them and make them visible to other people.

This collaborative approach to being alive is a thread that runs through a lot of my work.  In surfing, while the sea is beautiful by itself, the presence of a surfer makes a wave into something else.  The interaction of the the surfer with the forces of the wave reveals something that is powerful and profound about how we live our lives in  collaboration with our circumstances.  We are not defined by circumstances, but we are always living our lives within them.  Finding the most beautiful way to relate to our circumstances takes vision,  power, grace and practice.

A found poem is an example of a beautiful relationship to the world around us.

things I want to tell my children but might forget – having breakfast

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Having breakfast

I am going to tell you about my favourite breakfast and then see what is interesting about breakfasts.  In fact I’m going to tell you about two favourite breakfasts.  One is an everyday favourite, and one is a special day favourite.  You might wonder which one is the actual favourite, and this is in fact a revealing question, because what it shows is that sometimes what is best is not about the actual thing itself, but about how things fit together.  So, first of all, my favourite everyday breakfast is Yorkshire Gold tea with skimmed milk and multiseed bloomer freshly toasted in a Dualit toaster (set to 2) with butter (not very much) and Tiptree Orange and Tangerine marmalade.

What is yours?

A breakfast is a kind of handshake in the mouth.  When you get out of bed, you use your sense of sight, seeing your room, smell, smelling the fresh air from the window, hearing, hearing sounds from outside and touch, touching the bed clothes with your hands and the floor with your feet.  The only sense missing is taste.  It is when you drink your tea or eat your toast that the world becomes part of you (breathing air makes it become part of you, but it is not as feel-able as eating).  It is like with a person’s hand that you hold in yours for a moment, and that makes a connection point that is like a bridge to the person.

And this is why it is so important and delightful to have a breakfast you really love.  You want your first big connection to the world to be a joyful one.  And the other thing is that it should not be too much of a big event.  It should be gentle, and it should fit your day.  The favourite everyday breakfast is in many ways very ordinary – it is just toast and tea.  It fits the ordinary-ness of most days, because it is simple and calm to make and eat.  It is also a good breakfast because it requires just a little bit of waiting; waiting for the kettle to boil, and waiting for the toast to toast.  These small delays ease the pathway into the bigger events of the day.  But you might notice that it is very specific; a particular tea, and a particular marmalade and a particular toast, toasted in a particular way.  If you pay attention to tastes you will find that you like a particular kind of thing.  It is part of being a unique person.  You might not always be able to have the thing you want, but when you can, you should.  Different people like different things, and we can celebrate this at breakfast, whereas at dinner, we might like to celebrate everyone participating in the same thing.

So that was the favourite everyday breakfast and the favourite special breakfast is French baguette with butter (not very much) and soft apricot jam.  To have this breakfast we would have to teleport to France.  Have you been to France yet?