Three Second Memory Mythology

(a life imagined)

Call me crazy, he says (so I do),
I’m going to give the fish back to the shop.
Red, and Eleven, abandoned to the pet store tanks
by their adoptive father
who loves them too much
to see them suffer, and slowly die
in the filter-less tank,
(the glass bowl bought to grow the waterlily
picked from the lake near the country winery
that windy Sunday afternoon),
the glass bowl with the oxygen
fast running out in the water.
Eleven: two slim, White Cloud minnows,
bought to eat mosquito lavae;
Red the Goldfish bought for his beauty.
In the Jeep on the way home I had held Red up
in his plastic bag of filtered water
to see the view; he would never
pass this way again, I declared,
but I was wrong, Red will look out this time,
and come back proud, returning
to his familiar Pet Store home
to boast of his adventures,
to the brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts
gathered round: the ride in the new Jeep,
the land flashing by, the brief distant hills,
the white kitchen bench, the view
of the coffee machine, the real life water lily
and his two small, un-talkative neighbours
family for a brief moment,
bedfellows for a night.
In coming weeks these things will visit him as a dream;
tales will be passed down
legends will build, assuming mythological status
fables greatly embellished,
providing schools of bedtime stories
for generations of baby goldfish to come.

National Poetry Writing Month

It's NaPoWriMo.!  I'm taking it as Poetry Appreciation month as well, and have posted poems I like on facebook over the last three days.  I'm also writing poems.  The aim is for one a day, which I've done  - all two days of the month so far.  These poems are too shy to show their faces to the light of day yet, so instead, I'll post another of my favourite poems, one that I also posted on facebook today.  People who have signed up to follow this blog might be surprised at the sudden appearance of a few (perhaps many) posts this month, in contrast to how often I usually post, while those who are fb friends might feel that they've seen the poem somewhere before.     I learnt it walking to work and back, years ago, and revised it on a road trip round Western Australia with a dear friend.   Thanks to Australian poet John Allison for this treasure:

Towards the Horizon

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.
(Emerson)

In Swedish it is synkrets—
sight-circle. And the evidence of eyes
is that space is curved
and that the membrane of the sky
arches over us
and arcs around the blue silence
at the edge
of vision.
There we find some sense of equilibrium,
poised between the lyric
lift and epic weight
of our existence and the world’s.
Birds migrating in their lines and skeins
find it perfectly.
The line of equality and that of the horizon
are the same, said Leonardo
marking out the shape of it on paper.

We talk like this, turning
every thought into the filaments
which thread the space between our words
until that silence
fills the lattice-work of light,
until that blue of distance comes up close
and pours itself into
the apertures that suddenly appear,
these openings from the world into a world
awakening—
your eyes are the horizon
and this side of them
nothing ever will be quite the same again.

Becoming Minimalist

Again and again it keeps coming up for me: the challenge to become minimalist, to practice simplicity.

I am a hoarder by nature and by training; the fear of not having enough drives me.  When I pack for holidays I fear being too cold, too hot, too under-dressed, too over-dressed...  I am sensitive both to temperature changes and to people's responses to and impressions of me.  No wonder it is hard for me to take just one small bag!  At work I teach an advanced level ESL class, and an academic preparation class - but who knows when I will teach Elementary or Intermediate, Discussion Skills or Pronunciation, Business Vocabulary or Social Issues again?  No wonder I have multiple boxes and folders crowded around my desk.

Yet last year I spend six months of the year house-sitting, moving every three to four weeks, coming back to my base at my sister and brother-in-law's house in between.  In each move I carried a car-load of goods - enough clothes for work in different temperatures and as the season changed, for going out on weekends, for concerts or parties planned and not yet planned, for swimming or for bushwalks; though I drew the line at hiking boots, the hair-drier almost always came with me.  And moving days were exhausting - cleaning the whole house I was leaving, packing and unpacking.  If anything, the year left me with a desire to minimise.

A few blogs have encouraged me, most notably Becoming Minimalist.  I have in fact been "trying" to reduce for the last couple of years.  This year I finally have the sense that it is possible.  I am just beginning the journey, perhaps I will never be an expert at it, but I finally feel that it is actually possible.

Faith Unfurling

We grasp,

tenuously,

this wonderful life.

We hope,

tentatively,

in days of joy.

We dance with freedom,

we sing through sunlight,

we laugh under blue skies.

We hold within us, 

carefully,

this awareness of pain,

this piercing suffering,

these plummeting depths

that we once fell to;

that we may again fall to.

We are free,

we are strong, 

we are bold,

we are creative.

We have been hurt,

we have bled,

we have cried

bitter tears.

We are creatures of strength

creatures of frailty,

lovers of the morning,

familiar with the night.

We are beset by fear

yet we stand tall

faces upturned.

Despite all we have known,

because of all we have known,

we believe.

Sunset at Wynnum

Into Wild Poetry

The weight of inspiration

lies heavy upon me

on this Monday morning.

Commuters on the train, we sit,

iPhones, Androids, Kindles in hand,

along with a lone newspaper reader, a single guidebook peruser,

three who journey apparently disengaged,

(or more engaged)

-  and your poetry strikes me,

sweeps me away.

I have not had my coffee.

It is too much,

it is too beautiful; 

my soul

is not prepared

for the sparks that fly

for the hope that springs;

my mind, 

lulled heavy by late nights and early mornings

wants to sit quiet

in its shell

- nothing expected,

expecting nothing.

I pause to reflect.

A tiny, burnt orange spider,

two millimetres in diameter,

weaves swift, tortured, repeated circles

across my clean white page;

endlessly, persistently seeking a way out.

I watch him till he finds 

the end of infinity,

slips over onto, into, a forest of a hundred paper edges

holding poems between them;

journeys into the unknown.

We are both learning this dance,

weaving our steps

from familiar circles

into wild poetry

today.

The Stories We Tell

"It is not what happens to us that has shaped us, it is the stories we tell about what happens to us that have shaped us."

So said poet Joel McKerrow this morning, to around 20 of us gathered in the old community house in West End, the house that has heard so many of our stories, so many of others' stories, over the years.

How right he was.  The same truth has been stated many times in different ways by many different people:  what we believe about our lives creates our reality.   For the past does not in fact exist, only our memories of it - individual and collective.  I have a friend who is naturally an optimist, her sister a pessimist.  She says she had a wonderful childhood; her sister claims to have had a terrible childhood, yet they grew up in the same family, in more or less the same situation.  The stories they tell themselves are all they have of their childhood, and both are, in a sense, right - the only childhood they have had is the childhood that exists in their memories, whether wonderful or terrible.  Memory, said a friend this morning, is a creative event. We recreate the past, and every time we do so, we get further from what actually happened.  This is hard-wired into us - the telling of stories, the recreation of the past - it is what we live by.

I have a chance to reflect on this every time people ask me about a significant broken relationship in my past,  which they still do, now and again.  But what happened?  they enquire - curiously, caringly, and every shade in between.   What did happen?  I ask myself.  Which version of the story shall I tell today?   Was it emotional immaturity?  Was it independence?  Was it lack of commitment?  Was it inability to understand?  Was it that we were not right for each other?  Was it that we did not love well enough?  Was it that it was not meant to be?  Was it the best thing?   Was it was it was it?  It was all of these, it was none of these, it was a thousand other things, it was none of them.

Can I choose the story that I tell?  Do the more positive stories (It wasn't the right thing, at the right time) comfort me, or leave me unable to change?  Do the negative stories (It would have worked, if only...) challenge me to change, or leave me depressed and regretful?

I come back to the words of Brother Roger of Taize.   Why dwell on what hurts, both in ourselves and others?  Yes, why indeed?  If memory is always a creative event, why not choose, why not create, the best version of a story to live by?

I'm still working out how to do this.