Virginia

Tags

2017, 20th century, 5*, chess, inside, retirement, society, teaching, thought, Virginia Woolf, writing

                                              Virginia wanted
                                to dispense with tale-tell-all
                rough-carved and ugly in ungainly moves
                                across the cornered chessboard

                                              but what
                                of the train of thought she thought
                as more essential than denouement
                                and in and in she went

 

retirement #9: I understand this much: that Virginia Woolf was nurtured in, but wanted to bridge out from, the more of [patriarchal] social imperialism; it has waited this long for me to appreciate her need and courage whilst emerging from the more of unattributable results/problem-solving-backwards managerialism in what should be public (not political, not (someone’s) personal (career)) service (not done-deal) into retirement, in an era when it all seems to be lurching horribly right again; read the whole sequence as it extricates itself from customs: in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …

 

 

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20th century wormhole: to rescue something
retirement wormhole: strain
society wormhole: darkness
writing wormhole: brown corduroy shirt / and dark redwine tie

 

weight

Tags

2017, 8*, anatta, April, beauty, breeze, career, circle, clouds, countryside, identity, lesson planning, right angle, seeing, stone, stone circles, teaching, thought, time, view, work, world

                                                              April clouds are stone
                                              foreboding over the countryside
                                                                                   placed in circles across the land
                                                                                              over millennia

 

 

                I had wanted
                to follow thought and view

                at right-angle
                to all the world

                to find it beautiful
                in all its stark

                to lose my weight
                in perfect shifting breeze

                but had to work
                and plan the bend

                and case the sight
                and lost my sight

                (and gained some weight)
                I … had to work

 

retirement #8: when you slip out of a career and look back on what was achieved, there is only a quiet and drifting cloud to contemplate although the experience of working through it was of unworkable stone which you knew all the time shouldn’t be the case, but it was, it was; read the whole sequence as it drifts across the skies: in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …

 

 

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beauty wormhole: Sylvia
breeze wormhole: 1968
career & identity wormhole: strain
clouds wormhole: the // orange rose
seeing wormhole: Day Out
stone wormhole: reprieve
teaching wormhole: seen but not heard
thought wormhole: handsome
time wormhole: time travel
work wormhole: holiday
world wormhole: reading // unstirred

 

handsome

Tags

2013, 4*, Carol, face, grey, hair, handsome, London, love, passing, portrait, thought, travelling, walking, writing

                                I’ve said it before
                but she doesn’t get my writing anyway

                                but after a day of travelling
                side by side and making thinking adjustments and

                                allowances for passing
                circumstance, whether she’s aware of it or lost

                                in open-eyed wondering
                her grey curls coruscate handsome around her face

                                and dark behind her neck
                                              still

 

 

 

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Carol & London & travelling wormhole: Day Out
grey wormhole: vastly
hair wormhole: my seat // now
love wormhole: singsong chant
passing wormhole: somewhere
thought wormhole: seen but not heard
walking wormhole: reprieve
writing wormhole: the // orange rose

 

seen but not heard

Tags

2013, 3*, career, children, creation, identity, managerialism, sidelined, teaching, thought

                                seen but not heard

                I expected to participate and share
                in the discussion and very endeavour
                to which I had offered my thought and creation

                not side-lined off somewhere
                out of the way of the grown-ups
                and told I was valued only if I whinged enough

 

 

 

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career & identity & managerialism wormhole: retirement
thought wormhole: comfy

 

comfy

Tags

2016, 7*, basement, cafe, career, change, comfort, communication, doing, dream, Karmapa, letting go, lifetimes, past life, realisation, service, smile, thought, time

                comfy

                how did you think
                that I would not know
                what you are doing

                said the Karmapa; of
                course: and I had been
                acting despite that he

                might, so I dropped it
                all like a past life and
                nipped down to the

                dank basement to
                sort things out pursued
                by his head-shake smile;

                carried his drinks
                in the café, carried his
                bags when he carried out

                the stacked dishes before
                I even thought of it,
                simple service with no

                career prospects, all the
                busy and long day until
                things moved on beyond

                all recognition and
                I realised I was wearing
                his slippers; how will I

                get them back to him,
                remembering his lingering
                smile before I acted

 

retirement #4: from a dream had 16th-17th December, written down 171216; the present Karmapa is the 17th recognised incarnation; the sorry tale of Mark Redford and his Teachers; the forwarding ways

 

 

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career wormhole: monument to vainglory
change wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – … as the new town marches in
communication wormhole: poessay III: jijimuge
doing wormhole: neither nude nor / descending a staircase
dream wormhole: sleep now
leting go wormhole: within
lifetimes wormhole: tired
realisation wormhole: ah … // oh … // meanwhile … // … // tha ya ta …
smile wormhole: Prajnaparamita // Maitreya
time wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – intemperance

 

passing below

Tags

2014, 5*, awareness, being, blue, cafe, gaze, life, notice, passing, realisation, sky, Storrington, streetlight, talking to myself, thought, traffic, windows, writing

                what do I want in life
                what shall I write

                but I gaze out the window
                across the streetlights hanging

                in the blue blue sky and
                realise I cannot keep the thought

                I already have in mind and
                need to take notice of the traffic

                passing below

 

 

 

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awareness & writing wormhole: con / sum / mate
being & thought wormhole: within
blue & sky & talking to myself wormhole: love and precision
life wormhole: not / the Catcher
passing wormhole: balance
realisation wormhole: traffic lights and broad avenue
streetlight wormhole: sleep now
windows wormhole: this aching // and spacious dichotomy

 

within

Tags

2013, 5*, being, breathing, distraction, letting go, meditation, space, thought

                                                getting
                                better at meditation
                isn’t a matter of having less thoughts –
                                distracting or otherwise –
                                                or even
a matter of being seduced by them and following them deadened wherever they go
                                                or not

                                                it is
                                about the space
                to breathe within
                every fibre of their being
                                whether they are frantic
                                                or calm
                                                or not

 

 

 

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being wormhole: not / the Catcher
breathing wormhole: just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …
distraction wormhole: because
letting go wormhole: Prajnaparamita // Maitreya
meditation wormhole: out!
space wormhole: con / sum / mate
thought wormhole: passersby

 

passersby

Tags

2016, 6*, architecture, artist, blue, buildings, façade, finials, ghosts, Granada, identity, others, passing, rooftops, self, Shantideva, sky, smile, streets, superhero, thought, walls, wandering

                “acting like an apparition
                  with no sense of self”; not

                martyring myself an apparition
                because no one recognised my

                self; let me wander the streets
                and plazas parrying every foil

                in my head, swinging up
                facades and leaping rooftops

                with closed-lipped smile
                to greet the passersby; the

                artist sits with his back
                to the wall to finish

                the finials opposite with just
                touches of blue sky

 

the quote is from Stephen Batchelor’s translation of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara (V, 57) which I was reciting as my holiday reading; the ideal and the model, the should and the example; how to be amongst other (and amongst others), it is not the finials, so much, as the sky before which they reach …

 

 

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blue & passing & thought & walls wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – snow
buildings & streets wormhole: traffic lights and broad avenue
ghosts wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – … as the new town marches in
identity wormhole: I
others wormhole: Clea
rooftops wormhole: ‘hope for things to come’
Shantideva wormhole: inbreath
sky wormhole: be
smile wormhole: new-found love – poewieview #36
superhero wormhole: zero

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – snow

Tags

1967, 2016, 9*, alley, axe, birth, black, blue, classroom, echo, eyes, faces, fields, garden, grey, hate, hazel, ivy, kitchen, leaf, life, love, mist, morning, passing, pigs, pink, Ramsden Heath, Robin, silence, sky, snow, sound, speech, step, sun, teacher, thought, ugliness, vertical, waiting, walls, white, windows, winter, witness, woodland, yellow

            snow

            waiting;

            ruffles beneath the trembling ivy,
            divergent verticals in the hazel coppices;

            silence;

            reverent steps, and in the cavernous
            grey of high hangs the faintest, pink;

            baton;

            on a woodland bank a single lesser
            periwinkle holds up a blue flower,

            by the wall a solo leaf descants to the ground
            and a snowflake touches the cheek;

            turn;

            the black background of the woods
            a million flakes seen,

            in the classroom thirty pairs of eyes
            drift across to the window

            and the music teacher holds
            his sentence;

            thought;

            leeward black, and fields of white, if
            we were to hate everything that

            included rip and tear of any ugliness,
            there would be nothing left to love;

            morning;

            through window panes the sun
            is a flat yellow disc viewable

            without hurt to the eye,
            mist divides land into borough

            and alleyway stepping crunch from the
            steam kitchen into the sparkling garden;

            piggery;

            at the bottom of the garden,
            piglets stop snuffling around and stand

            looking, like little pink statues, then …
            hurtle across the yard barking at the sun

            (the sow had rather build her nest in the
             corner of the field, one morning

             she was there, an army of piglets
             lined up at the milk bar

             the most ridiculous expressions
             of content upon their faces, and

             a robin on the solid water
             of the cattle trough);

            witness;

            the ch-nnk and bite of axe in log
            bounced across the fields to the woods and back with

            such clarity I expected it to continue
            as he laid his axe aside, “Morning”,

            “Morning”;

            it is not winter that dispels life,
            but life that dispels winter

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow

 

 

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black & blue & echo & eyes & faces & fields & garden & grey & kitchen & life & love & morning & pink & silence & sky & snow & sound & sun & walls & white & windows & winter & yellow wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow
faces wormhole: “The Lady from Nowhere”
passing wormhole: trying to focus / on walking
thought wormhole: Clea
waiting wormhole: returning home handsome

 

Clea

Tags

2016, 5*, brick, circle, claim, Clea, direction, Dormammu, Dr Strange, eyebrow, fingers, fire, gaze, head, identity, looking, morality, obligation, others, path, play, rhyme, self, space, spell, stars, thought

                                                              Clea

                     she is made of circles and stars
                     but gazes only from brick-lined

                     tunnels that hang in space – portals
                     of thought – then eyebrows frown

                     to look, and fingers splay in fanned
                     direction; she will dispel the tiresome

                     play of self and other – claim to
                     claim, rhyme to spell – and obliged

                     a morality to stand firm on its
                     own two feet, despite paths that

                     lead in ribbons and head of open fire

 

through the portals hung in space from Strange Tales #s 126 & 127, by Lee & Ditko

 

 

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Dr Strange wormhole: “The Lady from Nowhere”
identity wormhole: just one, open, nerve,
looking wormhole: let it all go
obligation wormhole: true nature
others wormhole: even / a second
path wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – … as the new town marches in
play wormhole: Jericho
space wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
thought wormhole: time