24>Great Unblinking Eye

Am trying to write. Its a lot easier than it was. I got jammed up with words at university. Stuffed full. But had no narrative for them to serve. It was painful I remember. Constipated and disconnected.
I got instead into the pure physical around me. The rocky shore, the hedgerows, the wind-blasted tops of hills. And sang to them. Simple, structured songs, enjoying the discipline of rhyme and breath.
I made up songs for my children, about potties and sweeties, and came to relish reading storybooks to them at bedtime.
 Words were winning a way back into my life.

When I was a full-time child, I had had an ambition to be either a poet or an ad-man: a coiner of slogans. I didn't mind which.
So my next creative word format made sense, as I devised names and descriptions for the things that I made: Safe but exciting handles for customers to grasp.
Then came the internet, and websites, that ever shifting quicksand of possibilities. Many creative lives were squandered there.
An appendage to my website of my wares was called missives, and was where I started to formulate and express my ideas. I remember them as being rather dense, angry works, as I struggled  to work out how to get out of the cage.
Then there were the online forums: Sanctuaries for bores and obsessives and fanatics, sporting silly code-names and a tenuous grasp on sense. I soon fled from attempting expression there.

Emails themselves were a great way to dare new ways of writing.
A wet evening would all too soon be gone composing one.

Now there are the social network formats, the tribal email.
And this wonderful, pure form of vanity publishing, the Blog.

Maybe nobody will read this one.
Potentially, everyone in the world, with online access, COULD.
And I don't have to care.
There is no box of poesy going dusty under my bed.

Because that idea- that larval flow of thought has been expressed. It is hardening now.I am done with it;
Can move on.
For that cage I was trying to escape from, was myself.

I remember my father's terse, wise observations on things.
They were a scaffolding that kept him sane and good in an unjust  and devious world. But they became an impregnable castle, a citadel in which he eventually imprisoned himself.

We are elaborate creative plumbing.
There are many modes of expression: sex, paint, gossip, clothes, gardening, violence, politics, an endless list.
But we NEED to express.
If we don't, our bodies will. An implosion of tumours and cancers and ulcers.
If your guides are on your case, they will offer you a chance to break your patterns with a few timely disasters.

As you convalesce or lick your wounds after a break-up or break-down, you have been given a chance to ask Why? And to explore and try to express both the pain and the answer.
You are on a unique, and special journey.





So, praise be this screen. This unblinking eye.