Category: Creativity
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The epiphany
sunlight and shadow two deer bounce through the marsh spiked gorse in yellow dress seed pods brown and empty moss-laden branches, beardy wisps rusty tin can hazel strands droop by the dyke willow herb curlicues broken crockery bits vibrant green rose leaves empty whisky bottle white village on a sunlit hill water mirror dazzle clouds…
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Sharing the notes . . .
It’s intriguing, it is, how a shared set of thoughts becomes something else altogether when someone else thinks along with you. My notes on our walk a couple days ago raised a comment, and in the ensuing email conversation the concept of ‘poetic process’ came to light. I had to confess that I couldn’t see,…
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Sleeping on it . . .
It’s a commonplace, isn’t it, to sleep on a problem, hoping to awaken with a solution. As we went to bed last night, I was wrestling, somewhere in my subconscious, with a poetic problem that I thought I’d resolved. My dreaming mind thought otherwise. A better resolution than I’d even considered woke up with me…
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Notes on a marshland walk
For my joy this morning, I can’t do better than to relay some contemporaneous notes of our afternoon walk yesterday. Who knows, one day these notes may find their way into another poetic effort, perhaps less formal than the sonnet of my previous joy. But for now I’ll go with the joy I have in…
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The wonder, and joy, of a remembered dream . . .
Never mind the actual dream events, I thought to myself earlier this morning, it’s the conflation of strange but contemporary circumstances that has sparked a graceful note from my subconscious. That note is like an admonition from my listening, watchful alter ego: yes, you do have an imagination, somewhere within. I have no real wish…
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History as grist for story . . .
Long ago, when we were young(er!), we visited Sicily several times, falling in love with the island. On one of our holiday adventures, we persevered and actually found the mausoleum, high up on Mt Venere above Caselmola, where the doughty Florence Trevelyan reached her last resting place. Not many tourists, we figured, actually make that…
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A trip down memory lane . . .
I had cause yesterday to renew my mental acquaintance with the research fields of my youth, adult and middle-age experience. Now that I am old(er!) I have to traverse back some two decades to remember some of the epiphanies of my research endeavours. After finally being redundified from my postdoc passions at the hoary age…
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Snow on distant hills . . .
My beloved says, of snow, that she enjoys it from far away, in a scenic setting. Up close and personal not so much. Perhaps you have to be born into a snowscape to love it for itself, for the feeling of it. However the context, its presence heralds the cold. We passed below many snow-covered…
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The joy of a clever idea
One of the reasons I get quite grumpy around this time of year is that I have to deal with siting the annual Christmas tree. We’ve had so many live ones in, over the years, that there’s no more room in the garden to plant any more! So this year, with great reluctance, I agreed…
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A joy of wonder . . .
In one of my writing groups, the monthly task has been to do a piece on the deep significance of something very small. The writing should embody the meaning, rather than telling us. I decided to write something about my discovery of an iconic piece of LEGO. I was pleased (I confess that I am…
Roads to Joy 