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.