Live session 18/5/20 ~ Fear, with Stafford and Keats

This Glasgow Women's Library event kept some of our writers busy today but it look fantastic - click the picture to link to 5 days of events >>>>>

Just a small group gathered today to explore the insidious fear that seems to be seeping into our collective psyche; as Sheila says, "No one realised it was going to be a lot easier to lock the nation down that it will be to unlock it."  Our first prompt came from William Stafford's poem:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

One and all agreed that we couldn't exactly make sense of the whole poem but we were able to take heart from it, particularly the last line that assured us:

"That's the world, and we all live there."



We finished the session with a shorter timed writing; prompts being individually chosen from John Keats' poem:

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
   Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I wish Keats was in my group to reassure us all that our creativity should be considered "rich garners of fully ripened grain". I would say:

Oh to look upon our THINGS TO DO

as "richly ripened grain".... Go on and write... don't hold back!

Love your gifts and live your loves, in fantasy or touch.

Then stand upon indifferent shores until you know

it matters not that much.

Looking forward

During one of the recent sessions we indulged in some street party planning. Here we have two very different pieces that both capture the trepidation with which we approach that elusive exit from lockdown.... when will we ever "coorie in" aboard the barge again?

Heading away from home
by Sheila Buchanan

It’s a wild goose chase
Filtering an abundance of facts
Delivered every day to keep us tethered indoors
Search the clear blue skies for the flocks flying over
We struggle with this new normal
Filled with a human perplexity And losing our own controls

In the hope of heading out of home again
I know what I know Distorted by a new reality
And mindful of an old existence.

Street Party
by Lou Terry

A street party for the end but
How will we know when it’s the end?
That nothing will come slithering back
To suffocate us?
Who should we believe?
The donkeys who led us here,
Or the unprotected lions who tried to save us?
Lions led by donkeys
Yet again ...
When will we take over
And be led by lions!?
Then I’ll party in the street..

Some darker ruminations...

Sometimes our work takes us to darker places and these too are important to explore. Sheila's piece follows Mary Oliver and Mary's arose after the Poems for Refugees book - these were selected for the anthology by a variety of artists after the horrors of 911.


Dark heart of a story that is all the reason for its telling
by Sheila Buchanan after Mary Oliver's "The Chance to Love Everything"


The dark is dark long after the sun has set
The light has energy; its spectrum splits into many colours
Each with its own absorption.

The dark heart is heavy and weighed down
With no people to tell us the story
In years to come will we know the dark truth.

The heart can be heavy or light as a feather
It beats reliably without tether
It beats without knowledge of stories untold
Doubt is the reference to be welcomed not feared

The heart will skip a beat
Be light hearted it’s the only way
With The chance to love everything
as the moon shines over the light sky.

REQUIEM FOR 9/11
by Mary Lazou  07/05/20

The cries and screams of shattered dreams
The scorching heat beneath my feet
That choking smoke - I have no wish to burn alive
So raise my arms and through that window dive.

Suspended for a moment in the sky
My life in seconds flashes by
Now plunging downwards to the ground
Too stunned to utter any sound.

Soon to keep my rendezvous with Death
Upon my lips, your name I whisper softly as I draw my final breath.
"Love is all and all there is" I sigh
For us denied the right to even say "goodbye".

For all watching World  confusion and an everlasting sorrow
My pain today but surely yours tomorrow.

Live session 11/5/20 ~ Trees by Herman Hesse

Today's writing prompt

a kernel is hidden in me

was taken from the remarkable 100-Year-Old Love Letter to Trees by Herman Hesse. It was brought to my attention through the marvellous Sunday delivery of "Brain Pickings" by the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova. This week she features an art video taking you on a virtual tour of Kew Gardens while  the dulcet Natascha McElhone reads - this is a highly recommended escape from lockdown! This project of Natascha's film is called Wander, and this is episode 4.

With a little time to hand near the end of the session we sought out a second writing prompt from "The Weighing" by Jane Hirshfield:

only the strength we have

A typically powerful and moving collection of pieces came out of both prompts today (come back to this blog to see it) - a mixture of fear, compassion, frustration and uncertainty that seems to be the result of our locked down status.

Water Story aching to be out on Loch Lomond again...

I am moved to share with you a sound piece of advice I received from a wise woman in Zimbabwe after I called her this week in a floundering state of angst.

Stay Sharp
by Sonia Pereira

One would have to be an incredibly realised being to know what's actually going on amidst the magnitude of forces and influences from a multitude of dimensions impacting this existence at this time. Given that, it would seem the best orientation would be to be as informed as possible keeping an open mind and also bearing in mind that in a wounded, fragmented world there are all manner of distortions at play.

We cannot in any way predict what will unfold here in the interplay between the polarities of 'this is the evolutionary leap' to 'this is the ultimate dystopia in the making'. Neither is that far fetched and certainly either are plausible/possible. We don't know... 

Perhaps the more important question to ask rather than trying to project into the future from the place of not knowing is:

What am I aligned with?
What am I giving my life force to?
Fear, separation,  blame and judgement    OR     love, connection, inclusivity and empathy?

My personal belief is that this is what will ultimately influence what is to unfold, not our argument about what is true or not true... we don't know! Be informed as best you can - inclusivity means listening to all points of view without adhering to any.... an open mind knows it doesn't know anything for certain and thereby remains alert and responsive. A closed mind that thinks it knows is much more likely to get hoodwinked or blindsided.

Stay sharp people!

However this major disruption unfolds one thing's for sure - we're all in this together so let's take a breath and stay grounded as sensibly as we are able.

Twilight and Mary Oliver words

Twilight 
by Aileen Paterson

The terns hover over the estuary at dusk, plummeting into the water. Turnstones fly in a flurry of white wings before settling into the shallows. Twilight is the magical time when all the people disperse and the tide recedes to leave a shoreline for me to wander on. Trees become silhouettes against an amber sky. The beach is abandoned except for the birds. My feet make soft footprints in the sand. The water has woken from its sleep and glimmers with hope. I walk home and hear the owls calling and a dark shape swooping high in the air over the fields. Dusk clings to my skin and infuses me with magic, the sunset caught beneath my skin.

Photo by Aileen Paterson

Using Words from Mary Oliver
by Kay Ritchie

Times turned strange.

Days seemed weeks.

Weeks seemed hours &

after months locked down,

when only watching seasons

saved our sanity,

autumn comes &

wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

(where planes once sliced through cloud, streaked skies with crystalled contrails),

are heading home again.

A plump of v’s.

Black on blue.

Their honks & hoots,

like those we made each Thursday,

surely signal hope.


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


influenced by Mary Oliver’s "The chance to love everything"
by Kay Ritchie


this may be the first story

shared amongst us all

this plague-time-telling

whose dark heart

left an ancient ache &

there are many reasons for its passing

down to children

and to children’s children

and their children’s children’s children

for the world stood still for once &

took a look

at what was going wrong &

people learned to take more care

to be aware of others

of themselves &

of the planet

so let’s not be the first to

forget

Live session 4/5/20 ~ Poems for Refugees

Today we made a difficult journey towards our awareness of suffering in less privileged parts of the world. This might usually be considered an armchair approach to altruism, but the unfolding implications of Coronavirus on international economic activity are devastating. I guessed, correctly, that these concerns would be lurking among Water Story writers as much as they are with me, waking me in the small hours with fathomless despair.

Writing prompts drawn from the anthology POEMS FOR REFUGEES (Jarvis and Haywood) were called on to help us invoke such worries in the hopes of pouring positive energy towards situation so far from our control:

September 1, 1939

by W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

from which we used the prompt

children afraid of the night

Spared

by Wendy Cope

from which writers chose their own prompts

Midway through the session Tara led us through a 5-minute mindfulness session; these have become part of our regular Monday mornings and go a long way to stopping the slosh in our brains! Thanks Tara!

To ease out of the intense emotion of today's subject we noted some trivial afternoon activities only to discover some concerted insustry:

Tara will clean the fishpond for Samuel the fish, Aileen begins art journalling! Helen has some serious sounding dyslexia reporting to do but will reward herself with the last brownie, carefully hidden from her husband and son. Sandra will deal with some clutter and Sheila, an abstract painting... I was mortified to confess my much lesser ambition of eating a roll and sausage till Giovanna joined me in the realms of humdrummity with a clear determination to do no more than make a coffee. Kay will lie on the floor and Pat will exercise for just two minutes while Mary cuddles her cat. 

Now that's more like it!

Word processing skills came up and it occured to me that zoom might be a handy opportunity to show some basic settings... which I duly did while sharing the wrong screen. Rather than create a fact sheet I will zoom this in another session soon. 

Finally the group asked if I would share my blog about Peccadillo's journey to capture waters of the 5 canals of Scotland.... here it is. Thanks to one and all for another rich session.

Clyde to Caledonia

 

Rannoch Moor and Shed Bodegon

Roaming on Rannoch Moor
by Pat Sutherand

Seasonal chameleon, backdrop for epic history, epitome of bleak. The world saw the moor in Skyfall, but seeing is a poor substitute for standing there, breathing bog myrtle air, transfixed among the cries of its marsh-loving birds.

Winter freezes the tiny Lochans and the burns tinkle under ice. Horizon peaks are snow shrouded; mist hangs heavy over the rushes and silence rules the icy vastness.

Spring is a latecomer to Rannoch Moor. Its herald is the curlew making its  nest among tussocks, sending its come-hither song through warming air.  In Summer the moor tumbles through rain and sunshine, the network of waters flashing  mysteries in signals.  Treeless in Autumn, without  gold or scarlet relief, the moor is lonely, sinking into its history.

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

In the absence of a Rannoch Moor photo I am sharing promised photos of MY shed. Many of the zoom sessions have been taking place in our writers' delightful sheds... Here too is my attempt at a "Bodegon"... a still life.
 

SHED BODEGON
by Cap'n Bev

Ah my shed.
Hopeful queues of things to do
a mix of screws
and here, a scented pile of sawn dust.
A rusted file, grinding paste,
ancient as this precious fid and darning tool
from which, atop my happy stool,
I long to coax old shine.
Dull, white glow of snow seals up
the sleepy garden window.
Ardent Tits inspect their old box,
but here’s another partly made.

Magic spell of sanity
laid out upon the table
awaits my incantation
to make, fix, sing and do… waits…
till I am well and better able.