Seaside sunset,
setting
setting,
cloud.
Shapes, shadows shift,
surf splashes,
seagulls
screech.
setting
setting
Silently secrets
settle.
Silhouettes stop,
sunlight shimmers.
setting
setting
Sounds soften,
speakers shush.
setting
setting
gone.
a perfect cup of tea, made by someone else, right to the end (into my hand)
waking up on a Saturday with no alarm, refreshed, and discovering that it is really quite early
arriving at the beach to run the moment the sun comes out after the rain
making an illicit diversion to the department store on the way to work and being welcomed with smiles, chocolate, fragrance samples and a hand-massage
using a pretty-and-robust umbrella on a rainy day
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.
I have made it
out the back
drenched, half seeing
inert from sustained effort –
wave crash wave crash
crash again.
Salt water in my
ears eyes hair nose mouth.
I am meant to be
here to catch
my wave.
I can’t face it now.
The paddle out has
terrified and
exhausted me.
I beg the sun to shed
a ray on my
frozen hands.
It doesn’t.
I keep one eye
warily
on the horizon
lest an errant pilgrim
should catch me out.
I would be done for.
Breathing and
lying flat, a hidden
alchemy restores my
senses, turns despair
to quivering hope.
A wave! Perhaps I
could consider it after all?
I lurk, trying to look
interested, but
in fact avoiding any
drift to the take-off zone, wish I
looked braver, but
don’t.
I wish I had a
fruit pastille.
For the first time
I am aware of
other surfers
like me, probably,
looking braver than
they feel.
But all of us are
out here, waiting.
I sit up, salute,
and turn to make a
full assessment:
sun, sea, wind
position, rhythm,
sets, self.
I inch forward,
put myself at risk
of drowning,
paddle gently,
invite adventure
with a tentative
inner nod.
The wave heaves me
back and then
thrusts me forward.
In a moment I will
tip
out of control again,
at the mercy of
instinct and
every hour of practice.
Sensation of falling…
Will I make it or wipe out?
…
Thoughts about things
As someone I met on holiday said to me the other day, ‘you’re very analytical’. I love thinking. I love the way that thinking both expresses and creates the world, how your thoughts can shape your experience and enable you to make good choices and avoid traps and unearth more beautiful ways of seeing things.
One of the things I’ve recently realised I want to do is to capture how I understand some things, because I would like to just to hold still, even for a few minutes, thoughts that I experience fleetingly as butterflies. This is the tricky thing with thoughts. Quite often when I express a thought, someone says, ‘oh you mean …’, and I’ve noticed that even if they paraphrase my thought really quite carefully, I still feel, ‘no, not that’. So there is a risk with writing these thoughts down that in print they stop being the alive creatures of my inner world, but I have decided that the risk is worth it. Even if they are not exactly the living thoughts of my own life, they might be something else beautiful. And of course, in my own thinking they all live happily together. They are not a thought chart with lines and directions of power or control, they are a thought sea; you never quite quite know what is there, although you sometimes glimpse something amazing that lives near the surface, or even sometimes hops right out.
When I think of one thing, it’s often quite like all of the friends of that thing try to crowd in too. ‘Me too, me too’ they say, trying to just a little bit elbow themselves into the limelight. So I am going to tell all those thoughts that they will have to take it in turns. I am going to try to give one thing at a time its moment in the limelight, but let’s all be aware that the others are humming with excitement very nearby and so while one thought is getting attention, the other things near to it are important too.
extraplorer 