Counselling and Mindfulness
Psychology, counselling, mental health issues, writing, poetry – and maybe more
Words capturing feelings
Like drawing the Mona Lisa
With hopscotch chalk
On a gravel path
Whilst the model grimaces, coughs
And rearranges herself
Finally leaves, as clouds mask the sun,
Dances in the rain
And returns, soaked and uncooperative,
To scowl at the artist
And even then
Just as the outline form seems right
The rains wash eveything away
Other patterns form and reform
And the hapless artist
Can only watch
And drop is useless tools to the ground.
I received a link to on online diary website I had forgotten I ever joined. It has taken me back to Viet Nam…
Beethovens Ode to Joy is beginning to sound recognisable, although he probably never envisaged the distortion from the amp or the effects of the whammy bar . I’m also getting to grips with a jazzy version of Happy birthday for Munch’s big day in only three weeks time. Two already – hard to believe.
Im teaching full time now. So the book is grinding to a halt. Who am I kidding? It ground ages ago. It’s not really a writer’s block -more a writer’s apathy. This project is in danger of slipping out of sight and mind. I just can’t get to it.
Sometimes I just look at my daughter and I think, ’That’s it. I’ve achieved. Anything else I do from here on in is a bonus.’ And it’s not a bad thought.
Thoughts on this, 12 and a half years later…
This, your first communion,
Gives no assurance of celestial reunion
It’s a yoke you choose to wear
The empty promise of unheard prayer
Its tenants and rituals offer only confusion
I’m feeling tarnished and somewhat complicit
In this indoctrination, this illicit
Eight year old’s promise of servitude
An abuse of childhood, crass and rude
This institution is humanity’s deficit
This is no tool of education
This is simple subjugation
This supplication to the divine
Subjecting the child, a crime
Colluding in foolish fabrication
Perverse, this virgin creed
A cloak for mankind’s greed
Grown of nomadic superstition
Deaf to rational petition
Not a solution, not the one we need
A god who needs your pledge of devotion
And delights in such frivolous commotion
Lifted not a finger nor cried
For all the babies which today have died
He feels not, cares not, lacks emotion
This ritual, this cultural veneer
Superstitious nonsense to mask the fear
Of no purpose beyond that which YOU create
You have no need of divinity to make you great
Your life, you can learn to better steer
Trees are flying, blurring into the past
Metaphorically, literally
The train tracks its clanking route too fast
Trees are flying, blurring into the past
But the fuel it’s using cannot last
Are we seeing reason, finally?
Trees are flying, blurring into the past
Metaphorically, literally
Folkestone, England. June 2017
I was challenged to produce a list of ten ‘must-reads’. With the proviso that I have issues with the concept, here it is. Of course, this would be a different list were I to write it again tomorrow, and this list is restricted to fiction. I may produce a non-fiction version if I’m pressured enough…
Theses are not in order; that would be too challenging.
David Mitchell – The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Nikos Kazantakis – The Last Temptation
Richard Bach – Illusions
Donna Tartt – The Secret History
Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Hermann Hesse – The Glass Bead Game
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Terry Pratchett – Small Gods
Oriana Fallaci – A Man
Milan Kundera – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Of course, now I’m frustrated with what I had to leave out, and I’m sure I’ll wake up at two in the morning with an absolute inclusion which I forgot to include. Such is life.
What would your list look like? Feel free to add it in the comments…
Following the format of the Rondeau – 15 lines, three stanzas, 2 rhymes and 10 syllables per line. Here goes nothing…
For the first time it felt like coming home
After so many years on the roam
A seemingly simple trip to Cornwall
A family reunion for us all
It remains the county I’ve always known
I’m returning, in some sense fully grown
A sense of oneness I at last condone
Memories plunge in like a waterfall
For the first time
Childhood beaches washed with sea-spray cologne
Reminiscences yielding up the throne
Demons fading now once and for all
Acceptance and peace hold me in their thrall
For the first time
Saulzais, 17 May, 2017
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