Roads to Joy

I look forward to the first of the month rather more eagerly these days than I have in the past. That’s because VisualVerse.org brings out their new visual stimulus on that day, and they’ve been kind to me over the past six months. My little writer’s archive is growing, but more important is the broadening of perspective that different challenges elicit.

I felt flummoxed by the visual stimulus yesterday, however. A compost heap? Really? With a hand-painted sign, in German, that I had to ask Google Translator to help me with: roughly, You’ve made it! You are at the Kiez compost bin. It was only after I read the accompanying explanatory text, which subscribers receive in their email notice, that I began to think seriously about responding to the challenge.

There are a variety of thoughts racing through my mind, all compelled by the change that the Visual Verse folks are undergoing this month, as they move from their office in Berlin to take up residency in Melbourne, while maintaining a worldwide presence. It sounds complicated, but then change is life, isn’t it? And I guess that composting is an inexorable part of that cyclical change.

And that’s the delight of the mundane. Finding something unique and fizzing to explore, in the things that we experience every day. If we don’t pause to consider, to reflect on these things, then life really is a chore.

Today we thought we’d get ourselves over to the developing community gardens at Garroch Hall Estate, to see what the volunteers are getting up to. No doubt there will be a compost bin in the picture somewhere, as all good gardens should have.

It will probably be like allotments across the country, and there’s a certain joy in predictability too. As well as in finding the ingenuity layered within the routine. Perhaps I’ll wait, let the ideas percolate through my wandering synapses, until we get back from our foray, before I sit myself down for the dedicated hour of writing which I’ll hope will result in my monthly submission to VisualVerse.org.

They may like my effort, or they may not. It matters not, really. What matters is the creative response, the piquant essence of what my mind might bring to the challenge. I can already feel the joy of anticipation building.