story

mid-point

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Maybe I reached the mid-point.

All hell broke loose anyway. Trained as I am to look for symmetries in literature, I look for the same symmetries in the stories of my own life.

Often there is a turbulence around the most important point.

Something is trying to break in or out and something else is resisting it.

It’s exhausting and my own choices will be the flap of the butterfly’s wings that make completion or collapse.

Or at least my own choices are all that I can affect personally; destiny, other people, circumstances are not for me to decide.

In the middle of the turbulence I must summon everything within me to hold steady to what I know is most true, most full of hope, most kind.

If I hold steadier than the resistance presses on me, the depth of something else will break through.

I will be past the mid-point.

I still may not know what the something else is until much later.

The turbulence will persist for some days.

shift, nearer

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Yes, I went a little bit silent. Despite the sweet encouragements of the wordpress world (‘you’re on a [insert number here] day streak!’ I got absorbed into another direction.

I have been making a rhythm path into my creativity, but also, I notice now, my living.

As my creative practice is continually also an investigation into the nature of existence, the living and the art are closely intertwined. Deep shifts have been going on in my own deep life, old stories have been moving to take up new positions, new stories may or may not be being born, but they will only be able to be born if space is made for them.

Such a work is one of great tenderness and almost perpetual bewilderment, perseverance yes, and perhaps this is why this has been such a focus.

But now the shift has completed, or is completing, and then a new space is opening up. As usual the space comes with a sense of dizzying exposure alongside the delight. What will fill this space, what discoveries will get made, who will arrive to commune with it, how to protect it? It is a space for tiny flutterings and glimmerings yet as with all tender spaces most likely the giants of the land will be waiting to sneak in forbiddingly.

So I go gently and write and try to inhabit peace and trust. And to soak up and reveal in the creativity of a moment of blossoming freedom that comes rarely in life and is a gift of great power and beauty.

rim

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
Can you feel it too?
A certain kind of danger.
A lure.
A vat of swirling hate; all the discouragements of my life
kept
Waiting, rotting, writhing.
Clamouring.
L’appel du vide.

I am teetering and it will take only the most
infinitessimal inner shift to fall,
I gasp.
Precarious in my very breathing, existing fraught with
concentration.

It’s calling to me now, I hear you,
‘Oh poor you’, ‘no change’, ‘it always fails’, ‘what a
pitiful and lonely unreality; you continue to delude yourself’.
Perhaps you are what is most true?

Hell, I tell myself.
I WILL NOT GO IN THERE.
I will not keep company with dread, defeat and deep
disillusion.

My story will be different.
Only I can make it from another thread.
Those voices lie.

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
And I will not fall in there.
I steady myself.

in the wordsmith’s workshop

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Following a magical visit to the goldsmith’s workshop, now it is the wordsmith’s turn.

The wordsmith had visited the goldsmith’s workshop to help her with some writing because she does not find it easy to tell her story.

The wordsmith took the tools of her own trade with her to see the goldsmith – just a little silver laptop computer and a warm heart.  As the goldsmith talked, the wordsmith captured certain phrases, facts and stories.  Using questions wrought from the wisdom of experience, the wordsmith tugged at tales and pulled at pauses, and waited patiently in silence, knowing that in time precious nuggets would emerge.

Which they did, sometimes one or two, sometime more, with their own timing and rhythm as the goldsmith remembered, lit up, hesitated and shared.

At last the wordsmith shut her laptop, said goodbye and left the goldsmith’s workshop, ready for her own process of mulling, refining, and seeing what remained.

The wordsmith allowed the goldsmith’s stories to swirl around her imagination, and at last, sat down again with the goldsmith’s words, ready to start work.

As she pondered, she let the most important themes come to the surface.  Then she worked with them, adding little facts here and there from her notes; unwinding and bending phrases to become small facets of love and delight.  She brought the goldsmith’s passions and heart for people into a setting where they could be more easily spotted.  She highlighted the goldsmith’s bravery and pioneering spirit.

At last the wordsmith was finished.  She did a last check over her work, and then ‘ping’ sent it to the goldsmith’s team.

And then today, she visited them.

The goldsmith had loved the finished work.  It had helped her to recognise her own self, remember her great joy in her own work, its value and many riches.  It had helped her to see past the struggles and weariness, to regain her vision and strength.

The praise from the goldsmith’s team delighted the wordsmith.  She too suddenly realised the treasure of her work, its power to make things beautiful and full of wonder.  She felt encouraged in the middle of a day of challenges, and renewed for her own adventures into the unknown.

And now the goldsmith and the wordsmith are hard at work, in their workshops and at their desks, making…

found poem, London, autumn 2014

~ extraplorer ~ 1 Comment

When was the last time you had a first time?

I forget where we were.

Desire or restlessness?
Sheer frustration inspires new design;

I can’t remember where we were, I mean.

Design solves problems.
Robin Day cleverly extended two short pencils lives
by joining them together
with a piece of metal tubing.

Every stone tells a story;
not a multiple choice.

I had a strong interest in housing,
the relationships between our homes and ourselves being a particular area of fascination.
However, this is an emotive subject and managing the enormity of the scope has probably been
my biggest challenge.

Bringing joy to everyday.

Now my heart turns to and fro,
In thinking what will the people say.
They who shall see my monument in after years,
And shall speak of what I have done.

everything that is letting happy in and other things life don’t give itself

Membership makes a difference.
Charity was born of the marriage of Poverty with Abundance,
and certainly it cannot come into existence
without the presence of the two,
side by side.

Unite in good cheer.
Engine rooms this way.
Make bold moves;
hop on hop off.

And the eyes of them both were opened,
and they knew that they were naked,
and they sewed fig leaves together,
and made themselves aprons.

take extra care of children

You never know what you are going to find.
I had to look at everything.

Notes on locations:  This is a more complex poem than the previous found poems. In order, the source texts are from: advert (Bakerloo line, Paddington, southbound), poster for concert, posters at Design Museum (DM), DM, overheard fragment of conversation, Robin Day studio replica at DM, advert, exhibition subtitle, James Christian quoted in DM (abridged), poster, Inscription on Hatsheput’s obelisk (DM), scrawled answer to question ‘What is good design?’ at DM, writing on a wall at Tower of London museum, quotation on fence around building site near Stonecutter Court, Starbucks poster, Sign at Tower Bridge, scrap of paper at DM, Routemaster Bus, Genesis 3:7 quoted at ‘Woman Fashion Power’ exhibition at DM, sign on tube, two fragments of David McCandless’s talk for the Royal Statistical Society, pattern on a scarf (DM).