Into the Forest

Today my mood lifted considerably after I spent a few hours wandering around a pine forest. There's nothing like exercise and fresh air to lift the spirits. I just have to remember to deal with some of the underlying issues which are still there, even though I feel cheerier.

It was a beautiful frosty morning. As I drove through the countryside there were some very picturesque scenes, however I didn't ahve time to stop and take photos as I had chosen bed over leaving early, and unfortunately the best views were from the motorway where there was no stopping.

This is the forest I was walking around in:



and the closeup of blackberry leaves shows the frost:



This was the reason I was walking around the forest:



The girls were participating in the New Zealand Secondary School Orienteering Championships. My job was to patrol part of the course and make sure that random passers by didn't steal or damage the expensive electronic control boxes (the blue part on top of the stake by the orange flag). Unfortunately, the day before, idiots had taken eight of these along a pathway - they are of no use to anyone else, it just spoils the fun. Today though, there were no problems. And a good time was had by all.

Grumpy on Friday

Today I am feeling grumpy over something that is so trivial that I'm not going to share the details. Two things, actually. They make me feel lacking in social skills, probably because I am. (That's why we blog, I guess). I was thinking about those polls that ask if you could go back and change something in your life, would you? Well, I could answer that I want a different husband, or a nicer house, or more travel, or to have a better job, but would I be happier? Probably not.

There are people on earth with better lives, and there are others (the vast majority, no doubt) who are worse off. And what would really make my life better would be to learn how to inhabit the life I have with more grace and generosity.

In the meantime, to cheer myself, and the rest of you, up, here is a spot of sunny yellow. This odd little building is a vintage clothing store, whose window display caught my eye while I was driving to work. Fortunately, I carry my camera with me more and more often these days.

Photo Thursday: Weather

It's Photo Thursday over at Create a Connection. Katherine (with a K) has asked us to post a photo that reflects the weather in our neck of the woods.

To digress a little, there are things I love about my life at the moment. I am actually enjoying working full time for the first time in around thirty years. It's nice to go out, feel I'm doing a useful job, and come home knowing someone else is putting dinner on the table. They do say a change is as good as a holiday, after all.

On the other hand, I feel a little like I imagine my daughter D felt when she first started school. This wonderful self contained child who never before in her life uttered the words "I'm bored" would be saying them the minute she set her foot in the doorway. It has something to do with being told what to do all day, I suspect. It drives creative thoughts out of the brain. Although I could find fifteen minutes a day, at least, to write or for other creative pursuits, I seem to need a lot longer than that to shift gears. It's easier by far to spend the evenings doing laundry, ironing, tidying up or other mindless chores.

So I haven't written anything for a while (which is why I have nothing for Poetry Thursday). My main creative outlet at the moment is photography. Though my photos are rather quick snaps. Still, I like taking a few minutes, when something has caught my eye, to stop and take a photo. It reminds me to look at things with fresh eyes.

Now, back to the weather around here. Cold and wet. This poses a challenge as far as taking photos goes, because I don't think my digital camera would be too happy being out in the rain. However, on my way home from work yesterday, I had stopped off on an errand. When I got back in the car, it was dark and there was rain on the windscreen. So before I drove off I took photos of the streetlights. The rain seemed to do something strange to the lights in the camera - fortunately I wasn't seeing these effects with the naked eye, because it would have been difficult to drive!

One with the traffic lights green, and one where they had turned red:

Not as Cold as it Could Be

The forecast snow failed to eventuate. Though I think Chiefbiscuit has had some in her part of the country. The lack of snow doesn't mean warmth. I woke this morning to a bright sunny day, which means a hard frost. The water in this birdbath was still well frozen over at noon:



The sun doesn't reach the backyard in winter. There wasn't just frost, but a series of little waterdrops on the grass had frozen solid, like hailstones



and on this fern:



I am feeling lucky. My daughter and I went to see "Paris Je T'Aime" ( a series of "small neighbourhood romances" set in different areas of Paris) on Friday. I had free tickets which I had won by entering a giveaway on the website of the New Zealand Listener magazine. Buoyed up by my luck, I then went to the website of the Montana New Zealand book awards and cast my vote for reader's choice. This puts me in a draw to win $1000 worth of book vouchers. The next job on the list is to go through haiku I have written for one deep breath, and see which (if any) can be rewritten to a 5-7-5 pattern, for the haiku competition I previously mentioned - the prize for this one is a set of all the poetry book finalists for the book awards. (Those reviewed in my previous post, plus the three that are in contention for the best first book of poetry, which I actually preferred to the three in the main competition).

Poetry Thursday: A Clutch of Poetry Books

It's Thursday, and that means it's time for poetry. Or at least it does, after I spend the day at work, eat dinner, do the dishes and a pile of ironing. Thursdays are turning into a busy day. It wasn't helped by my adventures getting a cup of coffee when I got home. I put the coffee in the cup and held it under the cold tap (I make my coffee in the microwave). The water hit the coffee and shot me in the face. There was air in the pipes, because P had been working on the plumbing. After I cleaned up the coffee from my glasses, the bench, the walls, the floor, the ceiling ... then I made another cup and relaxed for a bit.

I have been reading the three books that are the finalists in this year's Montana book awards, in the poetry section. This is for books published in New Zealand in 2006. They are quite a diverse bunch. Firstly, The Goose Bath by Janet Frame. I have to confess I haven't got very far through this one. Unlike the others, it is a very fat hardback book. Janet Frame, who died three years ago, is one of New Zealand's finest fiction writers. However, although she wrote a great deal of poetry, she published very little of it in her lifetime. As the preface shows, she didn't really feel at ease with poetry, and didn't know how to edit it. She stored all her manuscripts in "the goose bath" which was the large concrete base of a fountain, previously used as a bath for geese. They were left, rather deliberately apparently, for others to edit after her death. The book will undoubtedly be the basis for a PhD thesis or two. However, the poems are often full of false starts, and seem rather raw. There are flashes of brilliant language - it would probably be a good book to dip into, but I have to return it to the library. It is possible that it will win, because of Janet's reputation, but I'm hoping it won't. Not least because there is money attached to the award, and it would be nice to see it go to a living writer.

The second book is One Shapely Thing by Dinah Hawken. This is a slimmer book and contains not only poems, but also two sections from her journals, written after 9/11 when her husband was working at the UN in New York, and in early 2002 when they were together in Geneva. I'm always a bit uneasy about published journals. I see journals as a rather private thing, where one is free to dump all sorts of things without censorship, and it seems to me that they become rather self conscious if edited (as surely they must be) for publication. The journals do however cast some light on her thought processes while she was writing the poems. That helped, because the poems didn't really grab me straight away. I thought they might, because they are often concerned with the natural world, and I usually like poets who write on those themes - Mary Oliver, for instance. Dinah's, though, seemed rather more obscure, and perhaps detached. There is a poem called "The Company of Stones" which was written to accompany an art exhibition, and published in the catalogue. I should like to have seen it there, as I think that my understanding would have been enhanced by seeing the art work that it was written for.

A number of poems were written while she occupied the Poets in Workplaces residency at the Wellington Botanic Gardens. One of my favourite poems from this section describes in its last section an oak which has fallen over and continued to grow, lying down:

We love your love of the horizontal.
We wish that we too
could fall down in a Garden,
stay fallen, and still thrive.

Perhaps with a little more time with this collection, I might grow to appreciate more of her work.

The final, and slimmest volume of the three, is The Year of the Bicycle by James Brown - so titled because it was written when he was Victoria University Writer in Residence - each weekday he cycled to work, and in the weekends he took to the hills. The blurb on the back describes them as "exuberant, intelligent poems". They certainly do not suffer from an excess of adjectives. I think I would describe them as masculine and active. They start on very matter of fact. I find myself starting a poem thinking "well, so what?". And then the poem draws me in with a witty turn at the end, adding a subtle twist to what seemed at first rather ordinary.

For instance, one poem starts:

The fact of the matter is
I was born at Palmerston North Public Hospital
at 12.40 a.m. on the first of April, 1966.

and continues through the history of the poet and the city until we read

Lots of famous people come from Palmerson North.
Alan Gregg, bass player with popular band the Mutton Birds,
was once asked if he had roots in jazz. He replied
that he had roots in Palmerston North.

I have often wanted to use that joke myself,
and last week I got the opportunity when someone asked me
where I thought I was coming from.

I come from Palmerston North. We are a modest people,
but we are fiercely proud of the bustling, go-ahead city
at the heart of the Manawatu Plains.

In sci-fi movies, people often go back in time in order to try to
change history. This is impossible. You cannot change the past.
And nobody from Palmerston North
would want to.

It was once said (if anyone can give me the source of the quote, I'd be grateful), that the word "bicycle" is not suitable ever to use in a poem. Poetry has changed since then, and there are plenty of bicycle poems in this book. Of the three, I think it is the one I'd most like to see win. I have to admit though, that I would like to see next year's batch of finalists - books published in 2007. I have several likely candidates in my collection, all better than this year's finalists - but then, this is probably about the first review I've ever been brave enough to write, and it's only one opinion. (If you click on the links given for the writers, you'll find other views.)

More poetry at Poetry Thursday

Snippets

1. The weather forecasters are warning us of a possible 20 cm (8 inches) of snow at sea level in the next few days. That must be why a certain clothes retailer has invited me to preview their new spring collection. I'd rather look at warm woollen jerseys. Which universe do these people live in?

2. I have been using library elf to remind me to return my library books on time. I can highly recommend it. Unfortunately today I picked up the wrong pile of books on my way out the door to work. The books due back today were left sitting on my desk at home. I figured it's cheaper to pay the fines for returning them two days late than to pay for petrol for a special trip to the library.

3. Our local newspaper is running a contest for Montana poetry day. It's for haiku on any topic. The prize is a complete set of all the nominated poetry books. I might enter. I just wish they wouldn't insist that the haiku have three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. See this article in Wikipedia which explains why.

Sea and Sky

As I said in my Thursday post, I'm obsessed with the sky lately. Here are a few photos from the last few days:


This is taken from an upstairs window in our house, looking west


and this one is looking southeast over the hills - the only hills for miles around, with the full moon rising behind cloud


Not long after sunrise this morning, looking northeast

Today I went orienteering at Leithfield Beach,and after I finished my course I went down to the littoral zone to take photos (no, littoral, not literal. I've been fascinated by that word since I discovered it. It means the area where sea meets land)


Looking south, you can see the dim outline of Banks Peninsula (Christchurch City is situated where the peninsula meets the plains) behind the "flung spray and the blown spume". (If you can identify that poem and its author, leave a comment to say so).


The first half of my course was in this pine forest on sand dunes. It's quite tricky, as there are all sorts of little bumps and hollows in the dunes, so it can be easy to miss the one where the control is hidden. The rest of the course was easier, with long runs across open paddocks (at least, the navigation was easier, but since I'm not much of a runner, I was at more of a disadvantage than on the parts where the navigation is tricky).


This is the Pacific Ocean. The nearest land to the west, apart from an occasional island, is South America. A long, long way to the west. I think that sky is magnificent - always something new, it gets me every time.

Eight Things About Me

Chiefbiscuit has tagged me for this meme. The rules are:
First:
1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each participant posts eight random facts about themselves.
3. Tagees should write a blogpost of eight random facts about themselves.
4. At the end of the post, eight more bloggers are tagged (named and shamed).
5. Go to their blog, leave a comment telling them they're tagged (cut and run).

So, what can I tell you that is in the least bit interesting? (Other than things I have revealed before). I think I am going to be truly random here.

1. When hanging out laundry, I like to colour co-ordinate the pegs to the garments. I confessed this to a co-worker once, and she laughed at me.
2. I have a strangely shaped fingernail on the ring finger of my right hand. It happened when I squashed it in the cake cupboard door when I was three years old (no prizes for guessing what I was up to).
3. My masters thesis was called "The rearrangements of p-quinols." It's in our bookcase. My children spotted it one day and exclaimed "mummy wrote a book!" (I can't remember anything about the rearrangements of p-quinols. I guess I could always read it and find out).
4. I love quiz shows. When I was about thirteen I auditioned to be in a quiz team to compete against children in other countries. I just missed the team. They asked guy questions like sports and engineering. When the quiz went on air, I listened and found I knew more answers than the boy who made the team. They asked more literature questions and no sports.
5. I don't own a single pair of jeans.
6. I rarely wear make-up.
7. I'm hopelessly unathletic, but I love the outdoors, and I enjoy orienteering (okay, my regular readers knew that already).
8. I can touch my nose with the tip of my tongue.

Fact number nine: I know enough mathematics to figure that if this meme has been around for a bit, and the first person tagged eight people, who each tagged eight people, who each tagged eight people, and so on.. well, most of you have been tagged by now.
So I'm going to break the rules.
If you haven't been tagged, and you want to do it, leave a comment to let me know, and I will come and read your eight random facts.

Poetry Thursday: About Leaves and Clouds

Lately I find myself obsessed by skies. Skies that are purest blue, or thunderous grey. Pale grey skies with just a hint of sunlight breaking through like mother of pearl. Sunsets that are flame, or coral, or salmon. Skies that are tinged green where blue meets gold. Clouds like flaked fish, or in wave-like formations. Skies that are never the same from one day to the next.

I think it's the flatness of where I live that makes the sky look so vast. Not for nothing was an anthology of Canterbury poems named Big Sky

I try to photograph the sky, but the format isn't right. Sky photographs should be long and thin, and spread right across the room, instead of being confined to a 6 inch by 4 inch frame. And then, there always seem to be buildings and electricity wires in the way.

I look, and try to remember exactly what the sky looked like, but I never do, except in very general terms. We just don't have the memory for clouds in the same way as we do for faces. There are six billion faces on earth, and the human brain is equipped to distinguish each from the others. (Although I have trouble, myself, with twins). It's just as well that we can't do this except for faces. Our brains would be so huge that our necks couldn't hold our heads up. I'm visualising cartoon figures with tiny bodies and enormous heads. Not a pretty sight.

Thinking about clouds reminded me of how a couple of years back, I was pondering similar thoughts about the shapes of leaves, and wrote this poem:

The Shapes of Leaves

Oak I know, and maple,
three or four varieties.
Chestnut, poplar, willow,
the speckled ngaio, waxy taupata,
and kowhai delicate as raindrops.
A dozen or two altogether,
maybe more.

Think of faces – of the six billion
on earth, they say, most of us
can distinguish each one
and name hundreds

Consider how each tree
bears a cast of thousands - each leaf
as individual as a face,
the tip curved more or less,
a nick, a tear, the pattern of veins
as individual as a thumbprint.
Imagine knowing each one –
think of spring, not as the return
of the familiar, but a welcome
to characters entirely new
Imagine the grief each autumn -
the farewell to countless old friends,
the showers of golden tears

*******************************

More Poetry Thursday contributions here

Making a Difference #3 and Other Assorted Stuff

I loathe and despise polystyrene packing trays. It seems as if every butcher and supermarket in this city use polystyrene packaging trays for their meat. I can avoid them, though, if I take a little trouble. Monday is the day I work two jobs, changing over at lunch time. So, I stop off at the "Mad Butcher" where I inspect the weekly specials, and then I can place an order to be collected on the way home. My meat order includes the magic words "no polystyrene". He was a bit bewildered at first as to how I wanted it packed. Since I buy in bulk, I just get him to put each cut in a large plastic bag, and then at home I repack it for the freezer, in the plastic bags our bread comes in.

I've also discovered another butcher where the meat doesn't come prepacked at all, so you can purchase the amount you want without the cursed polystyrene. I'll probably continue to buy meat in the polystyrene trays sometimes, though, since I'm always looking out for specials. I have to balance saving the environment with saving my budget.

******

I'm happy to know that we are past the shortest day of the year. The 22nd was, I believe, 1.3 seconds longer than the 21st. Now, several days later, we must be up to about ten seconds longer. I can't say that I've actually noticed a difference, yet, but it's comforting to know.

After a cold week, Sunday was surprisingly warm (winter warm, not summer warm). I love the golden light of the afternoon sun in winter. I don't know if it's really more golden than summer, or if it's psychological. I suspect it is because of the lower angle of the sun. Here's a photo from my Sunday walk:



By Monday it had turned cold again. I walked to work this morning and saw that there was snow on the hills I had been walking on.

******

I think blogger has Alzheimer's. Even though I tick the box, "remember me on this computer", every so often blogger insists that I sign in again. It irritates me.

Heritage Week

Victoria Square was the original market square of Christchurch, so for the opening of Heritage Week a marekt was held there. The theme this year is "Pacific Pathways", highlighting the different ethnic groups who have made Christchurch their home, and their pathways to New Zealand.

There were stalls - mainly food stalls, but other goods as well - displays of photos of Unesco World Heritage Sites, performances on stage from various cultural groups, and a number of people dressed in Victorian costume, roving around and playing traditional games



such as skipping



The unicyclist was very competent



I thought the young African girl was beautiful



More photos to come

Hagley Park

I wanted to get a photo of the cherry trees bravely flowering under the bare branches (see my previous post), with autumn leaves fallen all around them. That's when I discovered why I havent been taking so many photos lately. It's cold. and damp. There are large stretches of the park where there is no parking, or where all the parking is full of commuter cars getting free parking for the day and walking to work. So I had to drive to where I could park, and then walk. I drive past the end of the park every morning, and often see beautiful light effects looking to the east where the sun breaks through low clouds like mother of pearl. But thats in a "no parking" area. I did see nice light effects there yesterday morning, but by the time I walked back around, there was nothing but even grey cloud.

Oh well. Here is one of the cherry trees - almost finished flowering now. I wonder if it will set fruit? The photo doesn't really do justice to the fact that all the other trees are in the season of autumn or winter.



And this is the last photo I took for the day - it had just started to rain again. I realised that not only do I not like the cold and wet, my camera doesn't. So the photo was taken hastily before "red umbrella lady" disappeared from view and before I put the camera away. I was disappointed to find that it had come out blurry. Maybe it evokes the rainy day better that way. What do you think?

Winter

Some days in winter start crystalline with frost, and then become bright and clear. Today was not one of those days. Today was gloomy and grey. It was a driving-to-work day. By the time I was on my way home, all the cars had their headlights on even though it was theoretically not dark yet. I drove through the park. Some trees were bare, others were still half clad, like ragged old bag ladies.

Strangely, there are small cherry trees blooming in the clearings under the large oaks. I think maybe they have been raised in greenhouses and recently planted out, confusing them about the seasons. They looked way too pink and pretty huddling in the gloom. I wanted to tell them they shouldn't be out after dark. I wanted to tell them to go home, their mothers would be worrying about them. Instead I drove on home. I hope they survive the frosts.

It's Cold...

In the morning I jump out of bed and straight into a hot shower. Then before I can get too cold, I put on bra and panties, a thermal singlet (vest), a brushed cotton shirt and brushed moleskin trousers, a wool/angora vest* on top of that , then a woollen cardigan, shoes and socks. Before I leave the house I add a woollen coat, thick sheepskin gloves, and a woollen bobble hat.

At that point I'm ready to walk to work in the frost, and if I walk briskly enough I arrive warmer than when I left home. Or, I'm ready for a game of strip poker in a warm house. If I can find one.

*I'm trying to be trilingual here. New Zealand English, UK English and American English. Hopefully all my readers can figure out which garments I am describing.

Making a Difference #2

As I said in a previous post, I have decided to make one change in my lifestyle each week that will benefit the environment. This week I have continued to walk to my new job on Tuesdays and Thursdays (thus benefitting my waistline and mental health as well!). My new focus this week is on packaging.

I noticed that our local branch of Lush had a promotion on their solid shampoos. By taking in one empty plastic shampoo bottle for recycling, I was able to get a free sample of solid shampoo, which needs no more packaging than a small piece of paper. The shampoo seems more expensive than the brand I usually use, but if their claim that you can get eighty washes from a hundred gram bar turns out to be true, it will turn out cheaper.

Lush is a wonderful shop to walk into because it smells delicious. They aim to use as little packaging as possible - besides solid shampoos, you can buy solid conditioners and solid deodorants. The latter are free of chemicals such as aluminium, and I intend to try them when it's warm enough here to actually need any.

Links:
There are stores in many countries with associated websites, but if you go first to their US site you will find links to all of them - just click on the national flag.

Poetry Thursday: Winter

This is my first completely fulltime week juggling two jobs. It's just light when I leave, and dark by the time I come home. We have had frosts the last few mornings, so I stride out wearing a woolly hat, sheepskin gloves and a warm coat. This morning I hung laundry out before I left. The cold bit into my fingers and made them ache. When I arrived home I found that P was planning roast pork for dinner, so I baked some muffins and biscuits to take advantage of the oven being on (one of my power saving measures). After dinner it was my turn to do the dishes. Now I'm ready for bed. So I am posting an old poem from six or seven years ago which seemed appropriate as I gazed at trees in various stages of dress as I walked to work this morning. Many are completely bare. But this tree in our garden is still covered with beautiful scarlet foliage:



(I think it is a liquidambar, though P. claims it is a maple. But then, all the other maples have lost their leaves already).
Strangely, in the park I drive through on my way to my other job, there are newly planted cherry trees and they are all covered in blossom. But the cold tells me it is definitely winter, not spring. Definitely the time of year for warm flannel nightgowns.

Into Winter

The oak struts
across the stage of the sky
She flaunts her red garments
and tosses them at her audience
winking over her shoulder

The slender birch in the corner
slips her yellow dress from her shoulders
and climbs into bed

While the pines on the hill
keep their prickly green nightgowns
buttoned firmly up to their necks
all through the winter

**************************

More Poetry Thursday here

Head in the Clouds

The temperature has been plunging in the last few days, but on Saturday it was sunny and it was forecast to be fine for most of Canterbury. So on Sunday morning I set off north for an orienteering event with another club member. This is one of our further away maps, about an hour and a half drive from Christchurch. Within an hour we had run into heavy drizzle turning to rain. By then, however, we had committed ourselves so we continued.

Orienteering events are not cancelled except for extreme weather conditions such as hurricanes, or snow chest deep on the course. (This is not for the protection of the runners, of course. It's just that the controls would blow away in a hurricane, and in chest deep snow the first runners would leave tracks that would give an unfair advantage to those who followed!) So I donned thermal long johns, a polar fleece sweater and a waterproof jacket and set out. The more fit and athletic club members were much more lightly clad, stripped for action. It was a score event. A normal event sets a course to be completed in as fast a time as possible. For a score event, you go out for a set time, and visit as many control points as possible within that time, choosing your own route.

It was held on a farm in rolling to steep hill country with outcrops of limestone rock. I climbed up from the start/finish tent to the top of one of these outcrops, from which I later took this photo:



ran (or rather, walked) along the limestone tops:



then across a gully, up another limestone outcrop, then across a valley, collected some controls around the hills on the other side, and finished down through the pine trees in the first photo, visiting the final (for me) control at the end of the pond before returning to the finish.

I had chosen the 60 minute option (choices were 45, 60 or 90 minutes) and returned with a minute and a half to spare. So I was well satisfied that I had neither wasted any of my time allocation nor incurred penalty points for finishing late. And the rain had more or less stopped, though it was still very cold.

Runners finishing along the farm track in the valley:



In the evening I watched a documentary on the possible events when the world's petrol supplies start to run out - possibly as early as 2016. Scary stuff. And the next morning I picked up the newspaper to read about the opposition to a very large new wind farm being planned in the south of the country, in Central Otago.

I do understand that there is a great love for the landscapes of "Central", which are bleak in their beauty. And I am not well-acquainted with the particular area where this project will be located. Still, some of the arguments don't seem to be valid. For instance, there is a suggestion that wind power is too expensive and that global warming is better mitigated by more effective emissions filters on fossil fuel power stations. However, whether or not they burn cleanly, you can't generate power from fossil fuel power stations if the fossil fuel has run out. And as for the cost, as it gets scarce, the cost of petrol and diesel will skyrocket. I love walking in the hills, but personally, I don't feel that wind farms detract from their beauty.

The documentary claimed that there would be a very difficult time while we adjusted to much higher fuel prices, and great scarcity. And that then when we adjusted life could be "rather nice". Personally, I don't see it. Yes, we will have to slow down, and not rush here there and everywhere. And that could be "rather nice". But I can't see that it would be "rather nice" to be unable to get to a hospital when needed because there is no fuel in the tank. Or to find that greater numbers of people are freezing to death in winter. Or many of the other possible problems.

In New Zealand at the moment we have around 50 - 60 % of our electricity generated from renewable resources (mostly hydroelectricity and geothermal steam). At least in that respect we are fortunate. In other respects, being isolated and dependent on imports in many areas, we are not so fortunate. It would seem to me that the more electricty we can generate from renewable resources, the better. And at least you can build a wind farm without drowning a whole valley, as a new hydroelectric power station does.

Shameless Lions

I have adopted a lion from the Shameless Lions Writing Circle, created by Seamus at Shameless Words. He is one of 48 lions from Lyons, France. I first discovered this writing circle on Chiefbiscuit's blog, and was wondering whether to participate when I spotted this fine fellow among the lions not yet spoken for. Of course I knew straight away that he wanted a home on my blog, where both patchwork and poetry are welcome.

I have named my lion Florian, which seemed a fitting strong and masculine name, with a touch of the floral.

Members of the circle have been asked for a piece of writing - poetry or prose - maximum 48 words, to celebrate their adopted lion.

Here is mine:

Don't snigger. I am not what you think.
The women who made me had little,
but they chose only the best pieces
for me. They knew what it was
to fight. They sewed fierceness
and strength into every stitch.

Making a Difference

I have a new job in this street:



It's my third this year. I still have job number 1 which is 18 hours a week. Job number 2 lasted two months (no, I wasn't fired, it was meant to be temporary) and now job number 3 is for 20 hours a week which means Wednesday and Friday are job number 1, Tuesday and Thursday are job number 2 and Monday is half of each.

(Just to be clear: some of you thought I was doing three jobs at once - no, I was doing no 1 and no 2 together, and now I am doing no 1 and no 3 together. In both cases, the two jobs add up to a fulltime job which is no more than a lot of others do, but still a shock to the system after fifteen years of fulltime motherhood, a few years of study, and about eight years of working parttime)

Busy, busy. Strangely I don't feel more tired, I feel energised, although I am getting less done outside of work. But the hours I do have are more productive. And I feel useful, as we really really need the money. P. still hasn't found a job, and unfortunately I can't earn nearly the hourly rate that he was earning, but part time accounts jobs are way more abundant than full time IT jobs.

The new job has its compensations. For instance, I get to walk there along the river and through this reserve:



Since it's the middle of winter, I leave home just after sunrise and leave work just before sunset. Sunsets like this one:



Actually, this is Thursday's sunset, which wasn't nearly as spectacular as Tuesday's sunset, but I didn't have my camera with me on Tuesday.

It feels good to be able to walk to work for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it helps the environment. In fact, I've been wanting to make an environmentally friendly change of some sort each week and blog about it. Not to be smug about what I'm doing, but as a way of making myself accountable. Especially since I wrote a couple of weekends back about how the answers are never simple.

I do believe that it's easiest to make changes when there is self-interest involved. I had been enjoying walking on the hills all summer, and now it is too dark to do that after work. And I'm not a great fan of jogging on roads and footpaths, I find it too hard on my knees and heels. The walk to work is just about the right distance - around half an hour each way. That's an hour's walking each day, though only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

So, the title of this post refers to making a difference in a number of ways - making a difference to the environment, making a difference to my weight and fitness (I hope), and making a difference to the family budget. And hopefully, I will see some more spectacular sunsets.

Poetry Thursday: Summer Break

The ladies at Poetry Thursday are taking a summer break. This doesn't mean no Poetry Thursday, it just means no prompts, so we are free to talk about poetry in any way we wish (which we are, anyway, since all their prompts are Completely and Totally Optional).

It seems a bit strange to be having a summer break in winter. But then, our winter has been a bit strange so far - remarkably warm. In Christchurch it was six and a half degrees (Celsius degrees, which are almost twice as big as Fahrenheit degrees) warmer on the first day of winter than on the first day of summer. In summer there was Antarctic melt water coming up the coast, and bits of icebergs floating by. So perhaps global warming will mean cold summers for New Zealand. I hope not - I hope last summer was an aberration.

Back to poetry. The Montana New Zealand Book Award nominations have been announced - this is New Zealand's major book award. There are three books in the poetry category, and three in the "best first book - poetry" category. So I decided to borrow them all from the library and see what I thought. It just goes to show how popular poetry is (or isn't) that I was able to get all three nominated books in the poetry category straight off the shelves, without placing a request.

The books are "The Goose Bath" by Janet Frame, "The Year of the Bicycle" by James Brown and "One Shapely Thing" by Dinah Hawken. By next week I may have read enough to give an opinion on them. The awards are for books published in 2006, and judging by two poetry books that I have bought this year, I suspect that 2007 is going to be a better year for New Zealand poetry. We'll see.

In the meantime, the James Brown book reminded me of a workshop our small poetry group arranged with James Brown a few years back, when he was Writer in Residence at the local university.

One of the things we talked about was list poems. I can't actually recall any titles or authors of the examples he gave - I do remember one was a very moving list of "things found on a roof" written shortly after the events September 11. He had us write lists, and then we each contributed one item from our list to a sort of group "pool", after which we wrote poems containing some or all of these items.

The items I used were, as I recall, Wellington, a ginger cat, white curtains and the book "Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex but were Afraid to Ask".

Here is the poem, which relates to a trip I made back to Wellington, the city where I was born and grew up (and where Peter Jackson's film studio is located):

The Whole Story

“Remember the house in the bay” she asks,
“the only one with any flat land?
Peter Jackson bought it. Sometimes he lands a helicopter there.”
I know the one. It’s across the road from the beach
where we used to keep our red dinghy.
I’ll walk round the bays and take a look,
maybe I’ll stop at the dairy and buy an Eskimo Pie.

The cottages nestled against the cliff haven’t changed,
except for new paint, and the four wheel drives outside.
A curtain flaps at a window. On the sill a ginger cat sleeps
beside a book that offers “All You Ever Wanted”.
I reach the dairy. It’s now a café crowded with people.
I turn back. A jogger pounds the sand.
My sister says she once saw Michael J. Fox there,
but it’s only an anonymous short man.
Back at the open window I find the cat has jumped down
into the nasturtiums. Now I can see the whole story:
“To Know About Sex But Were Too Afraid to Ask”.

A Winter Walk

We are having a long weekend here - happy birthday, Your Majesty! (I believe her real birthday is in April, but the first Monday in June is when it's celebrated in New Zealand. I think June was the birthday of an earlier monarch).

The warm weather we have been having all autumn is continuing, though it cooled down a little over the weekend. Still no rain. The first day of winter (June 1st) was 6 degrees warmer than the first day of summer! And I think I spotted cherry blossom when driving through Hagley Park - I need to stop on the way home from work this week and check whether my eyes were deceiving me.

Yesterday I went for a walk up the hills with my camera. I'm a bit tired of the standard "view from the top" or "landscape with sheep" shots, though. So I looked for something else.

The way the sun caught these grasses took my eye. It's a colour shot, though it came out almost monochrome.



I clambered up a bank to get up close and personal with the remains of an abandoned car:





I've had trouble photographing spider webs. I realised that of course, the autofocus on the camera doesn't "see" the fine web, and focuses on the background detail instead. I need to get out the manual to find out how to override the autofocus. In the meantime, I fooled it by holding up a finger and locking the focus on that, then removing my hand before I took the shot.



My favourite "rock with a personality", which I've photographed before



but not from this angle, in which he looks rather sleepy:

Sunday Scribblings: Town and Country

Anyone who reads my blog regularly will have a fair idea of where I live by now. Do I live in the town or the country? Well, here is the view from the back upstairs window of my house:



Those hills are only about ten to fifteen minutes walk away, if I want to walk in the countryside. On any weekend, there are probably as many people walking, jogging or mountain biking on the hills, surrounded by sheep, cicadas and magpies, as there are on a city pavement.

In the other direction, on the north side of the house, it is about half an hour's walk to the edge of the city centre, where there are libraries, cafes, museums and art galleries. I'm a city girl at heart. But it has to be a small scale city, one like this in which the countryside seeps in and around and through the city, with green spaces everywhere. This way, I have the best of both worlds. I can be in touch with the natural world without the hard work.

On musing over the phrase "town and country", I realised that they are not two different things. They are both two aspects of one thing - places in which man has tamed the landscape. In the city, it is mostly a built landscape. In the countryside, it is a tilled and cultivated landscape. I think "country" and I see fields, fences, crops, domestic animals. To me, there is "town and country" and then there is wilderness. Those special places that we can go only as guests. Tangled forests, rugged mountains, unmodified grasslands such as savannahs, tundra and prairie, and the great frozen stretches at the North and South Poles. These places are shrinking, but they are precious, and we need to cherish them, even though we don't feel at ease there.

More musings on "town and country" at Sunday Scribblings

(This is my 300th post. I'm amazed!)

Awards and Competitions

It seems it's award and competition time of the year. (But then, perhaps the season for awards never really stops). In the news, firstly, a New Zealand girl reached the semi-finals of the United States national spelling bee.

We didn't have spelling bees in New Zealand when I was a child, which gives me mild cause for regret because I would have done rather well. They seem to be a new phenomenon in the last few years. And the winner of our national contest gets sent to Washington to compete there, which I think is a little odd for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it's the United States national spelling bee, not the International Spelling Bee. But secondly, because we don't spell things the same. Presumably Kate swotted up on words like "plough", "theatre" and "favourite" before she went, learning to spell them as "plow", "theater" and "favorite". Or more likely, these words are too simple for the contest anyway.

Apparently Kate's "heavy accent" gave the judges some problems - they debated for several minutes whether she had said "g" or "j" when she spelled "jardiniere" - finally they had to ask her for another word that began with the same letter.

Come on now - New Zealanders don't have heavy accents - it's Americans that have accents! Given the regional variation, New Zealand accents can't be any more difficult. Just unfamiliar, I suppose. We hear American accents of all sorts on TV so much that we are used to the differences.

Actually, my favourite spelling story relates to a New Zealand family that lived in the States for a couple of years. Their daughter came home from school and announced she had scored 19 out of 20 on her spelling test. "Over here", she said, "they spell Revolution with a capital R".

Also in the news recently is that New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for his novel "Mr Pip". The Christchurch City Libraries blog celebrated the win in slightly inflated terms, declaring the book had been named the world's best book. The last I heard, the Commonwealth excluded a few of the larger countries of the world, including the United States, and a very large portion of the non-English speaking world as well. Still, it's a noted achievement, which leaves me thinking it's time I read the book (though no doubt the library now has a large queue to borrow it, and my book buying funds are a bit limited).

It had me thinking about a passage in a short story I read, called "The Life Coach". **

Erica wonders what book Anna is reading and Becky promises to ask. She rings back later that week:Snow Falling on Cedars.
"You're kidding? Anything else?"
"The Shipping News?"
"Oh dear."
"Well I liked it, especially the movie. And there's..."
"Let me guess. Captain Corellis's Mandolin."
"White Teeth actually. She couldn't really get into Captain Corelli."
"Becky, that's a book club reading list from eight years ago. She's a fraud."

Well, I haven't read White Teeth myself yet, and I presume it's still worth reading if it was worth reading when it first came out. I'd like to think that good books last more than a year or two. A couple of the others mentioned are on my book shelves and I'd be happy to re-read them. Do we just have to read the newest, latest thing?

Speaking of book clubs, I've noticed a disturbing trend when I've been browsing in book shops. some books now come complete with "book club reading notes" at the back. Looking at the notes, they seem to offer discussion questions at least as bad as the worst any of my school teachers came up with. If I were to join a book club, I'd want it to be like my poetry group. No set questions, just honest discussion of the personal impact of the book. I can't imagine joining in a club where we discussed set questions from the back of the book, as if we were thirteen years old again.


**The quote above is from a book called "The Six Pack", which was the result of a competition for New Zealand book month last year. The winners, judged anonymously, in categories of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, get a substantial cash prize and the book of six winners is sold for $6.00 which is fantastic value given that no other paperback can be bought in New Zealand for under $20.00 these days.
Five of the winners are chosen by judges, and the sixth is chosen by public vote. This year's entries can be found here.

Photo Thursday on Friday

Over at Create a Connection the Photo Thursday topic is water. Specifically, Nino asked for summer water images but it's winter here. Actually, it doesn't feel like winter as we have just had the warmest May on record.

I'm a bit late with this - that's the penalty for being asleep when the other half of the world is awake. I suspect the topic was posted while I slept on Thursday night, and then I've been at work all day.

Here are a couple of photos I took of the estuary, very near the open ocean, when I was returning from orienteering a couple of weekends ago. I had a little trouble with the second one as the sun was just off to my left, shining on the camera lens, but I thought the low afternoon sun was quite atmospheric.

Poetry Thursday: Rivers

This is more or less the first poem I wrote, that is, the first poem I was satisfied with from the first poetry workshop I attended as an adult - I'm not counting poems from my childhood and teenage years. (There was a long gap after that while I played at being a scientist and then a stay at home mother).

We had three prompts which I combined in one poem: "drought", "river" and "ice". Since the Poetry Thursday prompt for this week was "rivers", I thought I would share this one.

Drought

Here where the winter rain
froze in the cracks
and pushed until the rocks
came tumbling down

Here where the spring swollen river
with the strength of young love
swept me off my feet
and I fell into the cold, sharp shock

Here now the river has grown old
lies shrunken in a stony bed
the grasses withered on the banks
and the rocks feverish in the hot sun.

****************************

More river poetry here

Life Lines

Over at Poetry Thursday, Jim Brock has invited us to share lines of poetry that are particularly meaningful for us. In Jim's words:

lines, by a poet that stayed with you, that you could not let go for the life of you, and then in a paragraph (or two), describe a moment when these words arose in your life in which they brought you understanding, insight, solace, reconciliation, or comfort.

To me, reading this, I felt we were being asked to share not just favourite lines, but lines that whether literally or figuratively, saved our lives. And at first, I couldn't think of anything. I didn't feel that poetry had affected me that much. I've had a comfortable life, after all. I'm a fairly level sort of person. I can balance a cheque book, come up with a rational explanation for most things, and a practical approach to most problems. I was bullied somewhat in primary school, (being a bit nerdy), but I remember my family and my childhood as happy. I think of myself, I realised, as one of those egg-shaped childrens toys with the weighted base, that wobbles when pushed but never falls over.

I have always had enough to eat, a roof over my head, access to medical care when I needed it, books and education. I've been married to the same man for (gulp - is it really that long?) thirty five years. Our children still like us, as far as I can tell.

And then, if I do have difficult emotions to deal with, I don't turn to poetry for solace. When I was younger my approach to crisis was to sleep a lot. More recently, I find the most effective way of getting through is vigourous uphill walks.

Thinking about this, I realised that it's my lack of needing to be saved that poetry has saved me from. My ordinary, steady life. Poetry has taught me to look for the beauty and wonder in things. And the strength, and the power, and to listen to my emotions even when they talk in whispers, and go underground after an hour or so in the spotlight. Poetry reminds me to be human.

As for the lines that stick with me, I can't say why exactly. But here they are:

I married the way moths marry
I married hard

by Olena Kalytiak Davis, from a poem called "In Defense of Marriage"

(I found this poem on the wonderful Poetry Daily website, a few years back, but unfortunately as they only archive the poems for a year, it's not online any more. I believe it can be found in her book titled "And Her Soul out of Nothing".)

For more life lines click here

Time for a Photo...

We are having a wonderful mild autumn here. Since the early settlers introduced trees from various parts of the globe, some are bare already while others have barely started turning colour.

I took a stroll this afternoon and took these photos:

Some extra seating has appeared at the local bus stop!



A closer look. Perhaps someone thought they would wait in comfort.



This tree/shrub on the nearby corner always seems to glow at this time of year.



I feel privileged to live so close to this beautiful river:

Simple - Or is It?

We all want simple solutions. It's easier if there are nice neat rules. For instance, I've had global warming on my mind a lot lately. What can we do to help the environment?

When my children were at school they had a speaker on environmental issues who told the children that they should bring their lunch to school in a lunchbox rather than a plastic bag. The thinking of course, was that the kids who used plastic bags were using bags that their mothers had bought, and that were thrown out after one use. My children took their lunch in plastic bags. So the other kids hassled them about it - the simple rule was "use a lunchbox". Actually, I never bought a plastic bag. They used the bags that the bread came in, and folded them up afterwards, into their pockets, to reuse the next day.

Then there's car pooling. It's better to have two people in the car than one, right? Well, on the days I drop my son at university on my way to work, we use more petrol than the days when I drive alone. I have to go a kilometre or so out of my way, and if I didn't give him a lift, he'd catch the bus.

Low energy light bulbs are better for the environment, right? Except that there is the worrying reports that they contain mercury, so what happens when they end up in the landfill?

And then there's food miles - locally grown food has to be better, surely? I don't know. If I want tomatoes at this time of year, should I buy New Zealand tomatoes or those flown in from Queensland? I suspect the Australian tomatoes are grown indoors and the New Zealand ones in glasshouses. Do they use fuel to heat the glasshouses or do they rely on passive solar heating? Unfortunately that information isn't widely available. (If you're in Britain, do you buy local tomatoes or those shipped in from Spain?)

We have kerbside recycling here, and of course I put my paper and plastic out for collection, but I can't help wondering about the amount of fuel used in the trucks that collect it from households, and then the shipping of the paper or plastic to wherever the factories are that reuse it.

I'm not advocating doing nothing. Sometimes things are simple. And sometimes it's more complicated. There are things we can do to simplify our lives - manage on less (less goods and less mindless activity), but there is no substitute for information and critical thought. Thinking is something that we shouldn't try and simplify.

More musings on "simple" at Sunday Scribblings.

Poetry Thursday: Writing About the Past

Since my poetry group are beginning to talk seriously about our next book, I decided to go through my files and print out all the poems that I might potentially include, with a view to editing them and arranging them in an appropriate order. It's interesting to see what topics and themes tend to recur in my writing. I'm thinking that one way of organzing most of my poems would be chronological - not the order in which I wrote them, but the order of the subject matter.

There are poems that stem from my interest in genealogy, and which are either about my ancestors, or about imaginary ancestors. There are others that arise from incidents in my childhood, or from my own children, either when they were very small, or when they were older. Then there are more immediate poems, often about places I have been orienteering, or the hills close to home that I explore on foot. And some are harder to classify, being a mix of recent observations, the beauty of certain words, all sorts of trivia floating around in my head, and a dose of imagination.

Early on in my poetry writing career, I submitted several poems to a certain literary magazine. The rejection letter that came back told me, among other things, that beginning poets often write poems based on nostalgia, but "I prefer the here and now". This set me wondering about the here and now. What is it? If I walk in the hills, and think about what I've seen, and then write about it that evening or the next day, it's not "here and now" any more. It may be the recent past, but it's past. If I sit in a coffee shop, and write about what is in front of me, by the time the words are on paper it is past - even if it's only five seconds. So, everything is about the past. And at the same time, everything is about the here and now - what is here and now in my brain. Any poem is the world filtered through the mind of the writer, and the mind contains it all in the here and now, though it has been gathered up in the past.

Even the words we use were learnt in the past. One of the poems that was rejected was apparently "nostalgic" because it bore the title "What my Science Teacher Told Me". Well, it included a bit of scientific information I had learnt in high school, but it was actually about my thoughts on relationships as I was experiencing them at that time. Our brains like to mix everything up!

This poem, for instance - is it about the past or not? My greatgrandfather is clearly in the past, but the poem is about the experience of looking for the spot where he was buried, which was very recent when I wrote it.

Looking for Samuel

Samuel Arthur Wiltshire 1861 – 1905

I count down rows, across plots
to the number in the cemetery book,
a missing tooth in a jaw full
of crooked gravestones.
What did I think I would find?
I tried to tie an anchor around your neck.
Forgive me. There is nothing to keep you here
No concrete slab to roof you over, keep the rain
from you. No yew tree sending down its roots
to prise your femur from your pelvis,
nor flesh-nourished rosemary
carrying its aroma across town
on the nor-wester. May your bones rest.
Your hollow sockets gaze at nothing
but earth and sky. The rain has long since
dissolved your flesh, trickled rich and brown
through aquifers to creeks and streams.
Old sailor, you mingle with rivers
and return on the ebbing tide
to the sea,
to the sea



Samuel's unmarked burial plot in the Addington cemetery, Christchurch.

Posted for Poetry Thursday

More Orienteering Adventures

This is the map of the orienteering course I did on Sunday. The event was much closer to the city than the last one, on this headland which separates Lyttelton harbour from Christchurch city:



Looks like gentle friendly territory to run on, doesn't it? Well, partly - in fact the course planner was very kind to us - but then there were controls like this one:



You may need to click on it to see the details. At the foot of the large rock is a runner and an orange and white control marker. The marker has a punch attached, to clip a card to show that you have been there. Each of the numbered circles on the map represents one of these control markers which has to be found and clipped, in order. You can see another runner approaching the marker from the top of the rocky cliff. From where I took this photo, the control is easy to spot. It's not so easy coming from the direction that the runners were coming from. Did I say runners? Some of the younger club members are like mountain goats, but I was certainly not running for very much of the course. I think I did manage a slow jog in one or two places.

Despite the fact that I am way fitter than last year, my time still put me near the tail end of the field. But I had a good time, and still had enough energy left to go and help collect controls at the end of the day.

On the way there I spotted all sorts of views that I thought would be ideal to photograph on the way back. But by the time I was heading home, the low afternoon sun was glaring fairly much straight into my camera lens. This shot is taken from further back along the headland, looking out over the fringes of Christchurch city. The seaside suburb of Sumner is just below, and beyond it is the estuary of the Avon and Heathcote rivers, with the long spit of South Brighton separating the estuary from the sea.

Poetry Thursday: A Small Smile

This week's prompt at Poetry Thursday was "humour". It was suggested that we might, for instance, take a joke and turn it into a poem. While I don't think any of my poetry is laugh-out-loud funny, I do have a few poems that are in a lighter vein and might perhaps induce a small smile or at least a twitching of the corners of the lips. Here is one, that results from the insect problem we have in a home that is rather full of stored paper of various sorts:

Everyone’s a Critic These Days

Silverfish are eating my words
I look in drawers for notes I made
and find ragged paper.
Holes appear in the middle of my poems

ilver ish r ating m wor s
ragged pap

Silverfish hide in damp corners,
emerge up the plughole,
scurry behind the bookcase.
At night there is one crawling across the pillow.

silverfish hide scorn
night scrawl

Silverfish are eating my words
and shitting them out in small gritty piles
behind the furniture
and in corners of drawers

Words are turning themselves
into insects and crawling off the page
They mock me in slow anagrammatic dance
Silverfish are eating my words

liverish sword
vile feat
evil tears

*******************************

And as a bonus, here is a small poem that resulted from the random prompt generator at the Poetry Thursday site. The words it gave me were "flock", followed by "abacus". I'm not sure if this counts as a humorous poem, but it does depend on a pun:

You can count on
a flock of birds
perched on the telegraph wires
like beads on an abacus.

******************************

For more humorous poetry, visit Poetry Thursday

Shopping

After being "in my head" for all of April, with NaPoWriMo, I felt the urge to make something. I'm sending off job applications and with fingers crossed that something turns up, I'm feeling the need to update my work wardrobe. Especially since I've lost 14 kgs in the past eight months (about thirty pounds), and most of my clothes are rather loose. And it's so long since I sewed my own clothes that I'm not too sure what pattern size to use any more.

However, I do have some multisize patterns in my possession, and I have some fabric stored away which wasn't very expensive, so I'm going to make some shirts to test out the patterns, and then I can look for more "business-like" fabric when I get the fit right.

So I headed off into town this morning to buy buttons, and poetry. The poetry book I was after is "Blame Vermeer" by Vincent O'Sullivan. I'm heading off to bed to read it, shortly.

In the City Mall there was a girl with a basket of something. It looked as if she might be soliciting donations, or something like that, so I was carefully looking away. Others were hurrying past, too. And then I realised what was in the basket. Chocolate! Samples of Fair Trade chocolate, to be exact, and very nice tasting chocolate it was, too.

I wasn't impressed with the poetry selection in most bookstores. About half a shelf tucked away in some obscure spot without its own shelf title, mostly. For example, New Zealand poetry tucked in at the end of New Zealand fiction. And then, a good half of the poetry was those collections, often sentimental and awful, of "ten poems to change your life" or "poems to read at weddings and funerals". But I did eventually find the book I was after.

And I had a nice time walking around town on a sunny autumn day, poking around in interesting shops like Cherry Blossom and Blue Earth. Shops where I'm not likely to buy anything (Japanese fabric covered journals for $40, anyone? Beautiful, but I'd be scared to write in them) - but it's fun to look, once in a while. And to smell the beautiful Blue Earth soaps and massage balms.

And even though it's autumn, and the leaves are falling from the trees, the flowers in the pots on this balcony didn't seem to know that.

My Photo

I've put this photo up so I can add it to my profile as per instructions on blogger. The only problem is that when I follow the instructions and then try and save the profile, I get an error message. Grrr. Maybe I'll try again later.

Update: I should have read all the instructions. There are two URLs with a photo on blogger, the first is the large version and the second is the small version. Using the second one worked, the first must have been above the size limit.

The photo is in honour of my new haircut. And the autumn maples in our yard, which are losing their leaves fast. (Although the one in the background here is still greener than most).

I've been tweaking my blog a bit lately. I also added the poem that gives the blog its title to my profile. And I updated some of my links. What I really want to do is to come up with a fancy graphic for the header, but I'm a bit nervous about trying in case I mess the whole blog up.

Random Acts of Poetry

It's Thursday again! And now that NaPoWriMo has finished, and my second part time job has also finished, I have some free time to get things done. Which means that I am getting nothing done. I guess I can forgive myself for a week of zoning out.

However, among my e-mail was Eric Maisel's "Creativity Newletter". In it he suggests an interesting exercise: "take your medicine". In other words, treat your writing as if it's medicine - not that it's something nasty, but schedule it four times a day - fifteen minutes at 8 am, noon, 4 pm and 8 pm. Once I would have said "I can't write four times a day". NaPoWriMo has taught me that it's easier than you think to sit down and write. And fifteen minutes is not that much. It's possible to write for fifteen minutes in my lunch break, on days when I'm at work - and if I'm working, or driving, at 4 o'clock, well, I can do it when I get home, and again in the evening before bed.

Not that I have written four times a day, but I'm beginning to recognize that it's possible. I've been writing in the morning, mostly my CV and job applications. I've been writing at lunchtime, and this is when the Poetry Thursday randomizer is just what I need. I can't work on editing my poems, because I like to read them aloud when I do that. And I can't work on my family history, because I need all my research material at hand. But I can noodle around and brainstorm for ideas, and that's what I've been doing.

On Sunday I was orienteering, and this is the poem that resulted, using one of Poetry Thursday's random prompts "copper". I wanted to put a Common Copper Butterfly into the poem, but I had to admit that there weren't any. I managed to sneak the word in, anyway.

Running in the Alps

There is nothing spectacular here
except the mountains, which surround
this level basin where we run
in all directions through the pines.
The ground is carpeted with small
unnamed plants – mosses, lichens,
shrubs so low they form a thin cushion
that supports our steps. In the clearings
the fine seedheads of grasses a foot high
gleam copper and gold in the autumn sun.
We make tracks through them, believing
they will spring up again at the next rain.
But I avoid treading on the white flowers
scattered like stars in constellations
among the flat scrub. Tiny flies and midges
dance in the cool still air, and there is no sound
except footsteps and distant cicadas.
My brother once employed a man
who left out little unimportant words
like “not”, when writing his reports.
Let me never assume I know
which are tiny unimportant things.