Kiwi On The Loose

I seem to be at a T intersection in my life.
To the right are things that I have held to and believed, without seriously wondering too much about, and in believing them, felt noble and to have some privileged handle on truth; and attached happiness to my holding of them. Latter times in my life however, those beliefs and some who hold them have used them to slash me so that I am a man marred beyond recognition to myself. To the right is an old me, a black & white world,  faith tenets I wondered about, and life maybe not lived as the inheritor of some huge grace given to me so freely. To the right I wonder if I had really lived in freedom, since goodness and well being were in the end purely the confluence of beliefs and actions, based on laws carefully disguised by grace. To the right is a narrow corridor, in black and white with streetlights blazing the way, the only colours being a touch of blood red..

To the left is an unfamiliar architecture, there are not as many right angles and straight lines, the street lights glow red and yellow, green, purple sage and orange. There are mythical creatures on the streets,  people running stalls full of food I have never tasted or seen, they wear clothes so different to my own, and there is in the road a wonderful meander so that one cannot see around the bend. The left turn is an invitation to exploration and freedom from straight and cutting lines, from dull lifeless processions and predigested thoughts. The holy places on this street have curves, minarets, fountains, statues, turrets and pools. They do not have frontal signs tossing wise tid bits to the masses, or proud patriotic flags flying high like an armies standard. Instead there are long multi-coloured tassles floating in the breeze like they belong to the pavillion of a king, there are kites and balloons floating above a gathering of clowns, jesters, dancers and acrobats.

Looking right I see a long line of largely colourless flags on high poles merging incrementally with the sky,  bold street signs tell travellers truths they already know. The crowd walks like a platoon towards the light way distant. People nod and pat each others backs as they pass asking the time.  Christ supposedly walks this way, among the throng, maybe dressed in desert storm camo, maybe welcoming home soldiers from the battle for His cause in far off lands, maybe shaking hands and singing with His hand across His heart, God and country are one.

To the left are things I am yet to discover, about life, about faith, about God and about man. About life , the cost of love and the colour blue.

Reflection on the intersection.

As I stand and look at the intersection, at my life right now, I can see that the right turn was a later addition. (now I am an expert by watching many excavations on sky of historic sites). Once there was no intersection, the road naturally meandered left. Some force of man, some desire for difference, some insecurity, some unspoken difference with the maker, some need for control, some voice for the creator; one or all of the above created the right turn and tried to blend the choice as if it had been there forever, as if in the beginning it was the natural order of things. Many on the road turned right, to the cheers of intersection onlookers, they entered the straight line for home, merged and followed.

I turned left, into the embrace of gypsies selling wonderful hats with red velvet hearts attached, to be washed by colour and laughter, beneath a sky of floating tassles.
I turned left to keep being a creation, destined for good things, to get the colour back into my cheeks and lose weight by the intrigue of the next bend in the road calling me forwards.
I got off the couch and started to live.

© BlindPoet Oct 2011

I have always believed or at least found myself living and acting out the belief that the wide road is the easy road, the one most travel in any society, religion or belief system. If everyone is going one way I am suspicious and look in the other direction and wonder why.  If everyone thinks this way or that way, I wonder at what the other options are, and not just to be obstinate, or like some kind of I did it my way Frank kind a person. To me it seems the way of the world. People do not like to think, and generally society, the media, religion and western culture doesn’t really encourage thinking and diversity……..but pretends to. Processed thinking is like processed foods. they are not good as a solid diet, in the end they may give you serious health issues. Natural is best. But factories can’t do natural….there would be no profit. Nor is there profit in individual thoughts…………following a different programme…….

In my own way I have been on that colourless right road for lots of my life. I have been right minded, right handed, right footed, right winged, right with God, right with men. Now I wonder about that position of being right! The extremes of the people on the right road have made me examine the intersection and see some truths that I held to so strongly were in the end, man made. That once, the road carried on to the left.

At 54 it is unsettling to see the ugliness of well meant choices I have grown up making……..I do believe in wisdom and not all the road to the right is wrong. Rather it is like Jesus in the temple confronting the things man had made and invented in that space for his own gain, and the rules he had interpreted to make himself the benefactor of the wisdom………..Jesus threw them out of the temple. The enemies of Christ were the religious right, the pharisees who made others lives misery by interpreting the law and enforcing their view of God and faith on others. they started the right road……………they stood at the intersection pointing the way down it, arguing for that being The Way……..scaring people into walking down it

I am turning left…………and wrote this on a piece of paper as some kind of record as to why…..

No man is an island
But I try to live on one
All roads lead to Rome
But after many roads I have never been there
All things happen for a reason
But I an still waiting to find out
Everything works out in the end
But I keep living in between
The jury is still out
But will they do justice
Justice is a woman
But is she holding scales or a sickle?

© BlindPoet Oct 2011

All days are different, all days are the same. Life has not been the easiest of adventures lately, like since Christmas. LOL. But today I realise again that  only I can really make the changes that are needed in my life. Yes I weigh more than I ever have, yes I can lose weight before it kills me anymore. Today I can do something about it, yesterday I started doing something about today after I got off the scales at the gym.
All days are different because each one has the potential to be different, because of what I do.
All days are the same because it is me that lives them, no one else.
You always take the weather with you. It is me who makes the calls that will create change in my life, much needed change.
No I do not do this alone, I believe in something far bigger than me, and I also believe I am part of a community, a family, a fabric of friends.

Today is a new day.
Today is the start of a new me…………….it’s my call.

I don’t know if anyone can relate to feeling stuck in a place, for too long, waiting for the changes that never come, like looking down the track for the train that never comes around the bend.

Poems About Home
A new Archive

Maybe Over Time

Time rolls slowly over gentle green hills
slowly like a red wined carpet
unraveling for some long awaited prize
vintage personalities watch graven faced
legends of the fall
it’s all more of the same

Time rolls South down the Ruakaka Straits
way too slow for speed cameras
Light from The West wing
like a goodnight kiss
crouching on Whangarei foreheads
arms falling into the sea
poking old fingers into old sky
the old woman has seen it all before

Time rolls slowly beside blue sea curves
past the bay windows, past the tall pines
past the gorse clumped camping ground
hiding mothers breasts
sucking the last of the all day sun
from the sand
before dinner

Time rolls South; yawning
past the Caledonian memories, 
past pipelines and past pipers
onto Brynderwyn’s toes
up onto the clay washed skyline
leaving Te Tai Tokerau (The North)
one last look back at the old woman’s fingertips,
one last glance east at pinioned islands roosting.
eyes on the road

gone
time rolls south
down the shadowed incline
humming Auld Lang Syne
a bus with no brakes

despite all this beauty
it’s all more of the same.

© BlindPoet Sept 2011

There is no doubt that hard and difficult times create good soil for growth. It’s like compost that essentially is made up of dead and dying things. There is no doubt for those of us who process life with words, or live life thru our feelings and senses and who do more than our fair share of pondering things, (maybe more than is wise but it is our makeup ), there is no doubt that difficult times in our lives create a fertile seed bed for writing. For growth.
Maybe it’s like the blues, music that resonates with the chords of human existence and the experiences of being a human are born out of pain. They are born in the nitty gritty of life. Growing isn’t always a nice experience. The words that come from growing experiences will not always be pretty or paint pretty pictures. I am a mess when I wake up in the pre mirror dawn.

I recently discovered several writers that I know will really feed me on this journey called life. American writers Annie Dillard and Frederick Buechner. Gems. Here is a Buechner Quote from his book A Room Called Remember.

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
— Frederick Buechner (A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces)

We can have an aversion to deliberately revisiting the past and reflecting consciously on what it has taught us.
I have ordered some books by these people and am really looking forward to reading them.

Sometimes I have moments of rebirth, when the penny drops about something, call it an ahaaaa moment or that eureka discovery, it feels like newness. I love those kinds of moments and in truth I would like to have more of them in my life. [ I will make this personal as my counsellor helped make me aware of how much I say we, when really it is better that I own it, it is my perception and discovery so I should make it mine.]
I would like more of those moments, not just about safe knowledge out there in or about the world, but the moments that come close to home, moments about me, when I see clearly, even if a glimpse about how I operate in the world, or with others, and how the world has shaped me or I it. How I fit or make sense or don’t!
Moments like these, are like when I feel the crispness on my skin of a beautiful evening or morning in autumn or spring accompanied by smoke, I feel it and know that change is happening in the world. I feel it sensually, outside of just my mind. It reminds me of when as a kid I had cultivated a length of hair and at my parents instigation it was all trimmed back to short back and sides by percy the communist barber. On the chair and on the way home, you felt the cool air around your neck and ears, with the tickle of hair down your neck. Change is kind of like that for me…………..it sneaks up on me after a comfortable time, and when it happens I can feel it tangibly, inside where I live or outside where I live. I like change.

Such was that moment on the Colfax bus in Denver when amidst the chaos of American politics ( it was just before Obama got elected in 2008) and the absolute massive-ness of comprehending America to a little kiwi, it was in that moment that I did the previously unthinkable. I found myself thinking how glad I was for the English Parliamentary system, how glad I was for the comparative reservedness of the English demeanor, how glad I was that I had somehow been planted as a life in New Zealand.
It was a moment where I decided I had a preference from having lived amidst a possible comparison. When you know why you like what you like, or why you are who you are or why you choose this or that or don’t maybe, why you think and believe this or that, and why you prefer this or that………those are growth moments. I either seek them out by thinking, or they come as a by product of reflection on circumstances and life as it surrounds me.
Sometimes growth like this is forced on me by my own negligence.
So I for the first time in my life had a real sense of being different because of the good things I had to thank England for. It sat well with me.

It’s funny how I catch myself changing. Like somehow I don’t think or expect that i will…….and then I find myself thinking something new………or rediscovering something I had thought in another seemingly distant time. This weekend in New Zealand was a 3 day weekend. I have always found those kinds of weekends to be something very wonderful. So wonderful in fact that once again I owe the Queen a debt of gratitude for being the Queen, and having a birthday to celebrate.
I have not always felt like that. I in the past have had intense dislike for the class system and the aristocracy. Where position is by virtue of birth as opposed to merit and earning respect. I have realised that those thoughts have changed as I have grown older and in a poignant moment travelling  down Colfax on the Colfax bus in Denver I can remember looking out the window and feeling a welling up inside as I for the first time in my whole life found myself glad for my English heritage and roots. I would like to explore this in writing this week. I feel so many words and thoughts inside me at the moment after lots of thinking and wondering about things.I want to write again.
 They will not be easy for some to digest or accept or want to understand, but I am convinced that the honest and unfettered sharing of how the world seems to me, and my openess to how it seems to you is the basis for good discussion, true compassion, understanding and change as we shed the things we hold so closely but often don’t risk examining as truths base our lives on.

Watch this space.

Graham

I have found myself lately having lovely feelings about the fall of winter. While the air feels like a thick wine velvet curtain against my cheek as it falls across my face on the earths seasonal stage.  While standing at my sink washing dishes and staring out the window to the back section, the apple trees losing leaves, the trimmed lawns and the olive tree still looking like its summer………..I feel deeply happy and most blessed to have a home, a roof over my head for winter, soft chairs to sit and think in………..a stove to cook on and a fire to light. Never has a winter felt more welcome, as I stand and look out the window. Deeply touched by the red velvet cool on my cheek in passing.

I don’t know why I have lost the words to write on my blog here for the last forever. But inside my heart I am finding words again. It was really good last November to publish edition 1 of my writing over the last 10 years Poetry for Flightless Birds & Broken Things. That was kinda cool for me. Now with the slate cleared I have more words that have formed and will be sharing them soon. Writing is such a wonderful thing to be able to do. So wonderful in fact that I am passionate about the healthiness of it for all people. And by writing I actually just mean being able to put pen to paper or type however slowly like me, and that mark having meaning or representing something you would like to say to others or yourself and record it. I literally mean the beauty and power of being able to put marks on paper or a screen. I definitely do not mean how you put words together or how we use them…………..I mean the ability to mark something with a symbol and for it to record some kind of meaning.

I had an experience last week as I fleshed out some ideas about Bin Laden’s death and the media preoccupation with that and a tornado in New Zealand. I had had a really stink day, and as I wrote on my FB wall of all places regarding my thoughts and feelings I suddenly felt really wonderful and free. In fact inside my head it was like I was standing on a plain in Africa among tall grasses watching the sun go down behind far off hills on a gorgeous evenings beginning. It was a feeling of freedom and space and it was all in my head. I had that realistaion of what I already knew,  that really your mind is this place of incredible freedom, and my wrestling and writing down my thoughts re the tornado and the media hype, and the stupidity of the Bin Laden execution and the media pre occupation with it and the gross details, getting that out created this wonderful space. Also was the realisation that no matter what is happening in your life or the world around you there is a space you can enjoy and flex muscle in and that is your mind. That space is your very own and you make it what you want by what you fill it with and do with it. Sounds weird and everyone else has probably worked this out but that night I felt it and saw it in a new way………..and it felt good. We are not encouraged to think, and to think differently in this world we live. Advertisers, and the media machine all want to channel us in a certain direction or predigest our information intake. Standing on the plains of my mind in a land rich with diversity watching the sun go down was beautiful…………….

There’s been silence across the plains of space for several months, and though I write mostly for myself and to use up my quota of words and enjoy seeing them fall onto the page, there are times when silence is like a pregnancy, there is always something happening.
Yes I have learned that there is always something happening. Silence can be still and subtle, sometimes loud like the thunderous rush of a waterfall in a canyon no one ever visits or sees. Noise does not have to be about an audience and so silence does not have to be about the lack of an audience, or the lack of sound.
Silence can happen amidst all the noise in the world.
My silence is possibly more like a solitude of the soul. My soul with its own words that no one will understand not even myself at times.
There’s been a lot happening in my heart ( that deepest of all places that we live and hunker down to watch our own ‘This is your life’ programme). I feel like the rafter coming through some dangerous, turbulent,unknown and uncharted rapids in a river canyon never explored, and I have emerged in sunlight finally and still deep waters. And you can never predict when you will come into the still water when you haven’t traveled this canyon before.
The stillness is more than the arrival of summer and the sun on my skin, it’s more than nearing the end of another year.
This weathering some un-chartered territory and getting through it somehow into the sun and still waters is all about grace to me.

None of us really likes to lose control of our lives, or to do something that has an outcome we cannot quite see. Sometimes we feel like we are going on a predictable journey and then whoa, a wild card comes in from somewhere or there is an unexpected detour and we are in the rapids out of control or on the road and lost, not knowing where this will end up or how it will in fact end. There’s the dread of potential pain on arrival.

To be sure there is a feeling of loving adventure and risk, and that’s usually calculated risk, but to jump without a parachute or enter the rapids without a paddle……….most of us don’t. We stay in the plane, or attach ourselves to someone else with a chute, or we climb around the rapids on good old earth beneath my feet styles. We like to keep life under some mild form of control or predictability.

The reason is that deep down we do value our lives.
Deep down we believe in our value on earth.
Deep down we are also afraid…….

When we have unexpected or the old periodic tune ups that life brings with the adventure of living, we get through. Maybe with a limp or the feeling of rawness that won’t go totally away, but it can feel like the arrival of spring when you get thru it. Its like you have been experiencing winter in your soul for the first time and you haven’t known when spring will arrive. You lose track of just how long the dam winter is and climate change has ruined everything, you know springs out there but you guts on day after day not knowing.
Then one morning you wake one and the ice is melting, bulbs poke hope out of the soil and you know spring is here, and you feel the light. You smile inwardly and your step quickens, somethings changed.
This too has passed, the winter of the soul, and you don’t understand the whys, and wherefores but you can laugh again and the sound of your laughter makes even you stop and listen as you realise that something has returned that was lost.
That is grace to me, that goodness that I don’t understand.

That belief that gives me courage to know that in the next rapid filled and dark canyon, I will not be alone.
Grace will be with me.
He is Grace. His grace is sufficient for me.

I was busy with my work at lunchtime today, when a package arrived for me, delivered by my daughter. The courier guy knows she is my daughter so saved an extra stop by delivering it to her work. One of the benefits of being a legend in my own mind or maybe my daughter is the legend in his. Whichever way something lovely crashed into my day unexpectedly.
I hadn’t ordered anything from anyone, I was on a pretty thin line of credit while I was saving.

There it was.
A large parcel wrapped in that brown paper that always feels and smells like an old childhood friend.
My heart smiled. This was a surprise indeed.

I found my way into the wrapping and once inside realised it was from my wife.
and it was a Fathers Day gift and she was 7000miles away.

Yes my eyes watered.
 A gift that had begun it’s journey so far away in a thought and ended up in my hands was special indeed.

I read the card, my eyes resting on every lovely word.I felt so loved.

Suddenly I realised that I had forgotten it was Fathers Day, that I was a father and that it was a Fathers Day for my own father as well. Whew!
It was Friday and I still had time to get a card and send it to him Fastpost before 5pm.

Not only had the parcel left me feeling warm and loved, it saved me from forgetting my own fathers special day.

My Dad if fact is always special so no extra special day is needed, but I in the chaos of my life and love, I so lose track of things like Fathers Days and birthdays. Call it what you will, I know it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just the wiring in my brain that don’t help me keep track of things like others.

So come on Fathers Day, and I know two Dads who will be really happy.
Me and mine.

A lovely Friday surprise.
Thanks Q.