Lifescape

Outside my window, the hoar frost has settled on a grey, damp, winter townscape and it won’t lift, I think, for some days. This day is bleak and chilled, with nothing much to recommend it; people shuffle about in coats and scarves never quite feeling warm enough. This is how it feels for many of us at the start of 2009: we live in a frozen, financial world; war seems, once again, to be spluttering into life in Gaza; people fear for the future.

However as we enter this New Year, I have found myself to be on the hopeful side of the street. I am a little surprised by this, and thankful to both the people who love and sustain me. I am also a little grateful to myself for being able to experience the moments of joy and wholeness that give me this sense of perspective on my world. For the time being, at least, it seems possible to hope, to see through to my creative self and to live with some sense of space and silence.

One of the things that characterises hopelessness, for many, is the inner clamour and conflict about how they feel they should be in the world. Another is some kind of layering of watchful, anxious need that seems to settle on our lives (a little like the hoar frost), muffling passion and calling and making our deeper dreams and wishes appear opaque, obscure or even unattainable. This wanting and despair seems to emerge from the myths of our culture that tell us how we should live our lives – the social and religious injunctions that give a kind of twisted meaning to what, otherwise, has the potential to be wonderful, wise and beautiful – if only we can allow and notice it.

We know, from the integration of the wisdom of countless teachers and writers from, literature, science, religion and beyond, that joy – or wholeness – doesn’t depend on what we have learned or been told we are supposed to be doing, achieving or needing, but on some simple, wholesome things: good work, meaning, love, a sense of presence – and woven through it all, an emerging, renewing sense of a ‘soul’ being made. These elements, together with a trust in our own inner direction and growth can make all the difference.

Of course, on other days, doubt, fear, anger, ambition, pride, blame, self-doubt and hopelessness can get in the way of the sense of presence that makes all this possible. The way to experience joy and appreciate the beauty and wonder of the world is to allow our presence and attention to come through this difficult emotional terrain. Though it is a simple idea, it is a profoundly difficult piece of disciplined lifework – joy is not a permanent state – it is transient and changeable and all the more beautiful for it.

Likewise we should recognise that bleakness and despair are also transient; that joy is possible if despair is faced, not turned away from and ultimately resisted in joyful acts of activism, love and engagement with the world. One day soon the hoar frost will give way to crisp, cold, bright winter sunshine: Spring and all its promise will be in the air.

Poem of the month

Secularity

I’d like to defend emotion against the benefactor of spirit, for
Feeling as we do, we are not part of your constituency -
Nor does wonder (the best of emotions) belong to you.
Beauty, therefore, is neither barbaric nor the function of the eternal
(Though the blank, hollow-eyed version is seen regularly in bulletins).

On the park bench, meanwhile, the nominal sceptic sits in the rain,
Staring into a mazy, bloodshot sky, showing a subtle appreciation of
Osmosis and a Spartan denial of the oligarchy of faith.

So I’d like to defend random variance, quirky, stickleback foresight and
Mortality and, in doing so, fly a tattered flag, not in prayer, but in reverence
To quasars, hummingbirds, river dolphins and the microscopic generalities
That created this poem which, in wishing you well on the journey,
I’d like to dedicate to your unfolding, unnoticed, neglected soul.

Secularity is taken from editions 1 published by creative thorp and available now for purchase at £8.50 plus p & p.

Please check out my other website and projects: creativethorp.com and editionspoetry.wordpress.com for news of other activities – including the publication on my editions series of poetry pamphlets. You can also download two pdf. flyer brochures on talks, workshops and consultancy support I can offer – wellbeing with a difference and development with a difference.