Month: April 2023
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The origins of creativity . . .
You begin to realise, as you learn more about the area around Dumfries, that Robert Burns is quite the most important figure in these parts. What we may not appreciate, especially if we’re not natives here, is that the tales of this patch were ready and waiting for a poetic sensibility to capture and immortalise.…
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The clock’s ticking . . .
While we consolidate and settle in, another parameter of life is returning: a sense of a routine, a schedule. Since we are such creatures of habit, the disorientation when the routine has been thrown awry can be discomfiting. Just as worrying to me, however, has been the sense that I’ve taken on too much again,…
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The Joy of Living
My old friend Simon Smith has embarked on a project to curate his favourite songs in a daily blog, Simon365, throughout the year. This piece is my homage to his effort — I’m in awe of his encyclopaedic music sensibility. Yesterday evening members of the SongWave Community Choir, led by Kate Howard, were engaged in…
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A place in the sun
We are all getting older, Kali cat and us, losing a few of our wits along the way, but still enjoying the sunshine. Kali is especially good at seeking out, and finding, the warmest place to recline, stretch out, relax. Yesterday morning, before she found this sunshine-warmed hammock, I spent hours clearing Harry Hymer, our…
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The Enchanted Loch
This month’s VisualVerse.org stimulus reminded me of nothing so much as the times I have spent with pondlife under a dissecting microscope. And then I remembered what we call the enchanted loch, beyond from the viewing bench at the top of the temperate rainforest next door, down the path’s right fork, through a couple of…
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The ‘inherited’ garden . . .
When you move, in my limited experience, you tend to leave one garden in place, and pick up the next in your new residence. I have heard that some people so love their gardening efforts that they uplift everything from the site they’re vacating to transplant into the new one. But that’s not the normal…
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The value of symbols
I can’t think of anything conveying much more symbolism than a suspension bridge over the Ken Water to the graveyard on the bank beyond. We are, each of us, suspended on a kind of bridge between the life that went on before us, and the life that will go on after we are gone. Of…
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Catching up is good . . .
I think that moving is especially fraught because everything is in disarray, all around, and it feels like you just can’t settle down to a normal task. It’s all just accommodating to the new space, putting things here and then then, and then back again. Testing out new living arrangements, fixing a few things that…
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For International Haiku Day, what else?
Our new-to-us garden faces west, so that the sun rising in the east illumines the space beyond the shade of the two extension peaks. I’m sure that there must be a quiet haiku to develop, as a kind of textual representation of the early morning scene before me. Oddly enough, I was writing haiku earnestly…
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The delight, and relief, of humour
A couple years ago, I attempted to write a humorous poem. I’d have to say, I’m not renowned as a comic turn, though I have experienced a few exalted moments of shared laughter at my own expense, during our folk club days. I finessed and titivated my poetic efforts, as helped by friendly members of…
Roads to Joy 