Roads to Joy

The word ’emerging’ is one of my favourites. Perhaps because it always makes me hark back to our music promotion days, when the delightful Emerging Music agency, run by Ken and Sue Bradburn, provided us with a never-ending stream of artistes to entertain at Allendale Village Hall. There’s such a lot of potential in that single word, that humble gerund that is at once a noun, a verb and even, as with the agency, an adjective. Maybe that flexibility conveys its strength.

I don’t know why the knapweed leaves caught my attention, earlier in the spring, except that they were clearly different. The iPlant/PictureThis app on my phone was able to identify the weed by leaves alone, so that I now have a before/after pair of images to illustrate the ’emerging’ concept.

I like to use ’emerging’ in lots of different contexts, and I’m using it rather freely these days as I embark on another local history project, a social documentation of the past twenty years of a philanthropic service organisation, the Allendale Lions Club. It’s a joyful enterprise because it revisits adventures in community growth and participation that many of us members experienced together. The project is based on a new blog: ALclub.uk to be precise. Of course, it’s still emerging itself, but the idea is that we shall re-create twenty years of club activities in the next twenty months. A year in a month of blog entries. Just now, at the end of July, we’re finishing up 2003. It’s fun!

And so projects seem to emerge, sometimes unexpectedly, as we move through our days. It’s an odd sort of joy, perhaps, to herald the beginnings, to believe that joy will be possible from such humble startings, but that hope too is a kind of emergence. Auguring a phoenix-like re-appearance from desuetude.

Well!

With that kind of verbal flourish, not entirely dissimilar to the purplish-pink of the knapweed blossom, I shall move on into a cheerful morning!

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