...from the sieve of her hands...

Sorry haven't been here for a while. Trying to go forwards...Hope you are all well and using up the last of the year well. During the week I got onto a tube in London feeling very tired and despondent, as you often do cramming onto a tube at rush hour, and without a book to read I stared up at the adverts and amongst them was this poem. It is called 'Prayer' and was almost in answer to one in that moment, and was so lovely I thought I'd put it here. I hope you think so too...

PRAYER - Carol anne Duffey

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre

Sonnet

Not sure why, but this poem seems appropriate today.

Sonnet to Orpheus

Oh you gentle ones, every once in a while step
into the breath that is indifferent to you,
let it be parted on your cheeks,
behind you it trembles, reunited.

Oh you blessed ones, oh you whole ones,
you who seem to be the beginning of the hearts.
Bow of arrows and target of arrows,
your smile beams eternally with tears.

Do not fear to suffer the heaviness,
give it back to earth's weight:
heavy are the mountains. Heavy are the oceans.
Even what you planted as children,
the trees, have long become too heavy;
you could not carry them.
But the breezes... but the spaces...

Be grateful for the freedom to see other dreams...

Psalm 91 for my sins, this for pleasure. I wish I had written it...

To An English Friend In Africa
— Ben Okri

Be grateful for the freedom to see other dreams. Bless your loneliness as much as you drank of your former companionships. All that you are experiencing now, will become moods of future joys. So bless it all. Do not think your way superior to another's. Do not venture to judge, but see things with fresh and open eyes. Do not condemn, but praise when you can, and when you can't, be silent.

Time now is a gift for you. A gift of freedom to think and remember and understand the ever perplexing past and to recreate yourself anew in order to transform time.

Live while you are alive. Learn the ways of silence and wisdom. Learn to act, learn a new speech. Learn to be what you are in the seed of your spirit. Learn to free yourself from all the things that have moulded you and which limit your secret and undiscovered road.

Remember that all things which happen to you are raw materials. Endlessly fertile. Endlessly yielding of thoughts that could change your life and go on doing so forever.

Never forget to pray and be thankful for all things good or bad on the rich road; for everything is changeable so long as you live while you are alive.

Fear not, but be full of light and love. Fear not, but be alert and receptive. Fear not, but act decisively when you should. Fear not, but know when to stop. Fear not, for you are loved by me. Fear not, for death is not the real terror, but life magically is.

Be joyful in your silence, be strong in your patience. Do not try to wrestle with the universe, but be sometimes like water or air, sometimes like fire, and constant like the earth.

Live slowly, think slowly, for time is a mystery. Never forget that love requires always that you be the greatest person you are capable of being, self-regenerating and strong and gentle--your own hero and star.

Love demands the best in us. To always and in time oversome the worst and lowest in our souls. Love the world wisely.

It is love alone that is the greatest weapon and the deepest and hardest secret.

So fear not, my friend. The darkness is gentler than you think. Be grateful for the manifold, dreams of creation, and the many ways of the unnumbered peoples.

Be grateful for life as you live it. And may a wonderful light always guide you on the unfolding road.

Landsdowne

If ever you get around to reading this, I just want to say thank you for listening to me. It was a relief to finally tell someone about my book like that last night, maybe I should have done it before. The sandwiches and spritzers were good too... Good luck with selling the rest of your tickets...

...I turned a corner

Today it was the smell of lilacs that got me. I turned a corner, on a road I'd never walked down before, quite close to home, and bang... There I was a child of seven or eight again, dragging her feet on the way to the big houses under the railway bridge, where on some Sunday mornings, a tiny lady who lived in one of them sold us rhubarb, and bunches of mint for potatoes. Delicious smells...but before we got to them, we walked with our huge bundles of rhubarb along a crescent-shaped road that was full of (what I now know to be) lilacs, and the smell cleared everything else from your mind. For a while, everything...One of the saving graces of childhood. To this day I love lilac - the colour, the smell, the look of them...and of course the way they make my mouth water for rhubarb crumble.

Robert McKee - STORY Weekend

I am at a writing course this weekend, given by the legendary Robert McKee — the Los Angeles writer of the book STORY. He is an amazing teacher. I did the London course 2 years ago too, and read his book (a month or so before my own book came out), but it has taken all this time to absorb what he had to say on the level it needed to be known at; I feel like I am finally mastering story, and all that instinctive way of writing is being tamed by proper plotting and structure. I am really excited that bits of the craft are finally slipping over from right to left brain; very excited... But as he says in his book, no matter how much you think you've got it sussed, you can't do it properly until you have actually done it!

Here's something I re-read from his book last night, and which has stayed in my head all day. It's commonplace but something that really hit home...He says, once you've mastered the rules of story and the conventions of the genre you have chosen to write in, put away the rules and "Write only what you believe. Write your kind of story. The kind of story you’d stand in line in the rain to buy." What fantastic advice... '...the kind of book you'd stand in line in the rain to buy." (well, actually he says "...the kind of film you'd stand in line in the rain to watch." because his course is also for screenwriters, but it's relevant for all forms.

Just a word of warning if anyone is thinking of going to his next course (and he does them in countries around the world)...Two years ago I got lambasted by him because my phone went off during the first day of the 3 day course, when he had forbidden us to have phones on in the auditorium. He fined me £10, the total sum of money I had on me for lunch, but he made me hand it over. (To this day I swear I don't know how my phone switched on, as I'm convinced I turned it off...). I was emotionally raw because my book was about to come out, plus all that ugly stuff that was going around about me at the time, false and malicious though it all was, had finally got to me, and so the emotion his 'telling off' brought about almost knocked me for six. I wouldn't have believed it possible to feel that much over 'relatively' so little...I must have been holding all that emotion in for all that time waiting for my book to finally go public, and there in that lecture theatre I almost went into meltdown. I had shut myself down over the years, especially all those months that I was living in the car, and almost never cried anymore, about anything.... But during the 3 days of the course, I couldn't stop. I just couldn't hold back the tears, and in fact it got so bad, that on the afternoon of the last day, as we all settled down for the screening of Casablanca, I had to leave. The crying was silent of course, or as much as I could make it, but it felt like a hand had passed into my chest and was squeezing my heart over and over again, big fist-sized handfuls of it, kneading it over and over like dough, and I almost couldn't see for the tears, or breathe for the pain of it. And although no one else in the lecture theatre seemed to notice (who doesn't cry at Casablanca?) it felt like somehow he knew...I don't know how, but it felt like he did...and as he passed behind my seat as he briefly left the theatre for a few minutes while we continued to watch Casablanca, he slowed down and seemed to look directly at me and tears were just streaming down... He must have thought I was mad...having a slight overreaction anyhow...I think he recognises me this time too. Maybe I am just imagining that, but... Anyhow, this year I have been smart enough to leave my phone behind — for that read, so terrified of it happening again that I didn't dare bring it along...The man's a genius, but you don't want to see his dark side...So be warned, if any of you decide to go to his next course, and I would absolutely recommend it, switch your phones off! You have been warned...

Here and there

I'm sitting here typing this under blue skies. The busy city street below my window is full of the smell of warm blossom and, now and then, when there is the occasional lull in traffic and all you hear is the slow swish of trees from neighbouring gardens and the call of birds in flight, you can close your eyes and think yourself almost anywhere. I love days like today.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well...

All feels right with the world today.

Last night I made, and froze, a banoffee pie, a mound of gooey loveliness to be eaten at the weekend. The rain has stopped. The first purple bud of the desk-plant I bought last year has appeared overnight; I have just re-read psalm 23 and using my brand new keyboard have written the start of the first poem I have written in what feels like years. Also the magnolias are out and there are only 2 clear days left between now and the end of Lent. Coffee is fast approaching...And, just for today, it feels like nothing else matters.
Today I feel like someone has just given me a long, cold drink of water.

I hope the sun is shining where you are.

Lost in translation

I just found a widget that allows readers to translate this blog into other languages. It is over on the links bar at the side. I don't know how accurate it is, so if anyone is fluent in other languages, it would be good to know.

The sun is out so I'm off on my bike to get a few miles in before the rain comes back, or my legs cease up completely.

P.S.
Apparently the Google Translate widget was very bad, so I have taken it off.

Out of sight jigsaws, and sushi...

It seems only yesterday that I wrote in here that I had given up chocolate for Lent...Well, I've done it again...Chocolate AND coffee this year, so my nerves are on fire — constant red alert. Only another 35 days to go though (apparently Sundays don't count as Lenten days!).

Anyway, I really can't believe that it has rolled around again, and that Lent is here. Time has just slipped away.

I should be keeping an eye on time...making sure it doesn't just pass me by. It is not just me saying that, apparently it was a direct message from angels for me. So I was told anyway...

When I got back in touch with my dad (Brendan) again, the time just before I ended up living in my car, he heard about a woman in Ireland who was a mystic and received messages from angels. He got in touch with her. I don't know to this day what he said to her, but he had her telephone number and urged me to call her, saying she would be expecting my call. I didn't know what to say, and wasn't going to, but one day, feeling very foolish, I found myself dialing her number.

A softly spoken Irish lady answered, but it clearly wasn't a good time for her — I think she was in a hurry to pick one of her children up from somewhere (yes, she also has children and lives in a modern house in a modern part of Ireland). She said she had received a message for me though — that the angels had given her a message saying that I had many talents (haven't we all!) that I was in danger of wasting, and that time was running out. She said she was very busy and couldn't talk but that I should give her my address and that she would write to me with the message.

I thought she was fobbing me off, but I gave her my address in Newcastle anyway and a few weeks later a letter did arrive. It took up only one side of paper and repeated the message from the angels: saying that they stressed that I needed to be particularly careful about time, and not to let it slip past. Which at the time I thought was a very strange message, even though that is what I have always tended to do in my life. I was a bit disappointed in a way, of all the things that angels could tell you...especially me in the lost and fragile state I was in at the time. She also gave me the name of my two guardian angels. Names which weren't in English, but which, even though I was sceptical of the whole thing, I still found a bit disturbing seeing written down in the letter.She said all I needed to do was call the name and ask them to come down and they would. I remember rolling the sounds around my tongue and for a few days finding myself silently saying them. But then I got frightened of what I was doing and tried to forget them — which, unfortunately, I have now succeeded in doing. (Though I think I still have the letter somewhere.)

I'd never met this woman myself. All I knew was her name, and her voice...

Then yesterday, in a local bookshop, I squeezed past a couple pushing a toddler in a buggy, and as I did so knocked up against one of the bookcases. A display book, standing face-out on the edge of one of the shelves, threatened to topple. It was a new hardback book with a very nice light cover. As I reached up to straighten it, I instinctively read the title and then my eyes shot up to the author - because suddenly I knew who it was. It was her. The woman with the message for me from the angels. She has a book out, an autobiography called Angels In My Hair. Her name is Lorna Bryne, and she is apparently Kosher — for those who believe.

Brendan still has her telephone number and gave it to me again yesterday when I told him. Though I wouldn't dare call her again. But how odd...Time did run out for me in the end and I ended up in my car. So in a way the message was right. And then I wrote an autobiography. An autobiography which was there right at the right time in publishing in a way. And now the person who gave me that message has written her autobiography too - with many more books to come it seems. It gave me shivers standing there in the bookshop holding it in my hands. Kind of...sort of...in a way...mysterious...

You can get yourself in a state of mind where things start to feel like proof. As if someone is laying a trail... constantly saying: Now do you believe? Now do you ...? Now...? How about this time..?