The trees are dying
Leaves yellow, brown,
drop, rot on paths,
trodden underfoot.
The air is dank,
Sullen November
skies weigh
wearily on the eye.
Passers-by,
preoccupied,
gaze into middle
distance, dodge
all greetings.
The birds have
given up and gone
south; anywhere
but here.
Is this what my
summer beauty has
come to?
Dare I ever hope
for more?
The year is ending.
It is time to say goodbye:
To missed opportunities
(new ones will come),
to old patterns of friendship,
to stages of life
that I may not know have gone forever.
It is time to say thank you
for each delight:
Quiet evenings playing the piano,
noisy evenings with friends,
a new neighbourhood pub,
a delivery of beautiful clothes,
chatter of small children,
wisdom of older relatives.
It is time to ask for forgiveness:
For moments when I did not
reach out a hand of friendship
or of grace.
For sniping comments in asides,
for shortcuts,
and holding backs.
It is a time to let go:
To release expectations of others,
to shake off expectations from myself,
to accept what was not accomplished,
to let tears carry away loss,
to set down burdens of false responsibility
to shed the hopes of the old year.
It is time to turn around:
To open up to new hope,
to summon energy and courage,
to breathe in delight,
to laugh in anticipation.
It is time to welcome:
New adventures, new beginnings,
new people and new seasons of old friendships,
challenges bigger than ourselves,
darkness we must face and overcome,
every opportunity to bring beauty,
to offer kindness,
to overlook a fault.
It is time to step forward:
Into what we do not yet know,
into what we have not yet seen,
into what we maybe glimpse from a distance,
into what we know and long for, or even dread,
into each new day, a gift,
It is time to beckon and embrace
who we will become.
Perhaps you had no idea
when you tinged your wand
on a ‘like’ button,
to ‘follow’,
when you clicked a link,
that you held my dream in your hand.
I’ve been here twenty-four days precisely
and my life has turned
upside down.
Maybe we none of us
know the meaning
of what we have
unleashed.
Creatures hidden unseen
for a hundred years
have opened their eyes,
blinking,
to the new light of day,
and breathed in
reality, and discovered
welcome,
have coughed up the old
poison apple,
started dancing.
I crept in here
away from the glare,
under the radar of a stasi
I never knew were there.
How did they come to rule
even a corner of my
universe?
Perhaps you had no idea
when you tinged your wand
on a ‘like’ button,
to ‘follow’,
when you clicked a link,
that your hand launched a dream.
The subtitle to the blog ‘discovering more beauty through writing’ has also been on my mind. I wrote it without any real reflection; this in itself is important for my work. Writing is the place where I discover what I think and feel about certain things. It seems to arrive onto my journal, a screen, a letter and it’s at that point that I find out what is there. I know there are some people who mull over their work forming it in words in their mind before they write it down, but I’m not made like that. Now I think of it, it’s like brewing tea (which I also love), I’m aware of phrases swimming about in my head for a certain period of time before they pour out in a writing stream. I try to stay out of their way, because if too much conscious, analytical me gets in the way, they lose their naturalness.
There are several ways that I am discovering beauty through writing. I love beauty – in nature, in things, in people, in adventures – and over time I have come to see beauty as a place in which magical things can happen, things like hope, healing, courage, revelation, insight. In my own writing, I am trying to grow an attitude that sees more beauty in everything, but also to pay attention to particular instances of beauty, almost to amplify it in a world that is so often full of distress. In addition to this, I have found that sometimes I can write about hard things and discover the beauty in them as I write. This is because writing brings understanding and meaning, and it is meaning that can make difficult things bearable, and even redeem them and transform them into something full of honour and grace and depth. For me, this is the true magic of writing.
Finally, knowing that I might want to write at any moment increases my attunement to the present. It heightens my sensitivity to beauty all around me. It makes me be on the alert for treasure that I can catch in my writing net and bring home to nourish people with. It’s so much fun!
The minute I heard the word ‘subpersonalities’, I was fascinated to find a concept that allowed me to explore different aspects of myself as if they were actual people. The idea of different inner ‘me’s is something that I had been aware of for a little while. My name lends itself to multiple nicknames, and it fascinated me why people chose a particular diminutive (interesting word) and what it meant to them and to me. I also recalled my childhood love of playing roles from The Great Escape; I was fascinated by which role was chosen by which sibling, and by the potential revealed in those early choices. I was aware too, of the odd diversity of my reading, which over the last two or three years has encompassed all my childhood favourites, mountaineering literature from the 1950s, Russian history and culture, stories from Bletchley Park, and several times, The Happiness Project. The choices seemed so disparate as to belong to different readers, yet they were all me.
Since I started writing extraplorer, I’ve had the phrase ‘inventory of subpersonalities’ in my head as the starting point of a kind of poem. Now that I’ve had a look back at the sheet of paper where I first drew and labelled them all, it occurs to me that it might prove interesting at some point to give each one an actual voice and see what happens.
A couple of notes on the poem: The mixture of capitalised and lower case first letters is intentional as the words appeared in my mind complete with the variation in these aspects and I think it is significant. Also, originally I just wrote down the list of subpersonalities, but it seemed incomplete. Then I added the story of their discovery, but still the list itself seemed too clumsy, too concrete for something experienced as fleeting, shifting. The addition of the inverted commas made the poem coincide with my inner feeling. This makes the subpersonalities relational. You can hear the poet identifying them, rather being faced with a flat kind of list. This made the poem feel complete in a way that I felt happy with.
The inventory of subpersonalities might initially seem a bit spooky – after all we are reaching towards the fringes of our consciousness – but really it is merely a development of our ordinary everyday experience of the different roles we play – daughter, sister, worker, friend. Some of the ones in the poem are everyday – (‘businesswoman’ for example) and some are metaphorical (‘enigma code-breaker’, sadly). Each image holds a kind of magic and fascination that is big enough to grow into, or evocative enough provide a warning (it is not healthy to spend too long as an orphanage worker or speck).
extraplorer 