It’s been a while

 

 

Hi………

Well while I have not published anything in a little while, LOTS has been stirring in my grey matter as I have been exploring America and especially Denver.

Some makes me laugh and it all makes me think, and a lot makes me just go "what the ……….heck". as opposed to wtf.

I have come to some conclusions, and I don’t know if these fit mankind or just me, and its how I process life.

ONE conclusion is that you don’t know your own country until you have left it, now I admit others may have known there own country before leaving it, but I didn’t.

Experiences force me to think and process, and I spose I am like a doing that at wine and cheese speed as opposed to Pentium 4 speed .

 

So in the processing I know that I am ready to write something because far too much thinking has been going on, far too much reflection and its time to get it all out.

I have America to thank for that. What a journey its been coming to terms with it and trying to understand it. God I wish I wasn’t a philosophical deep thinking type.

Last night sitting in the falll evening sun @ Market Station downtown Denver I realised yet again that on the surface people can look the same anywhere in the world. I see faces and people types that remind me of home.The commuters spilling off the bus and over the pavement could mostly have been kiwis.

Its not until you scratch deeper that there will be differences generated by birthplace, and scratching deeper you will also find the similarities generated by simply being human.

Yes I feel some writing coming on.

Now to catch my bus.

Buses are the ultimate meeting place of humanity for me. That’s where you get to know grassroots, where the rubber meets the road, asphalt or concrete walking lifestyles, on the buses.

 

Till I return

 

P.S a blind guy on the bus yesterday shared this joke with the driver in his exiting sequence…………..

‘whats the biggest military day of the year?’  ‘march 4th’

 

From a blind guy I thought that was incredibly funny………

Moments after that there was a domestic on the bus between some Hispanics and a lady whose lunch was nearly sat on.
Then there’s the loving young parents with the baby in the walker and the fathers eyes glazed over by ‘the herb’ or something worse.
Or the black guy, so angry at something that the music in his earplugs could be heard seats away and why was he choosing deafness as a profession.

Lots to think about for me………….

Don’t Forget Your Roots My Friend

Six60 – Don’t Forget Your Roots [Official Video]
I love this video, it so captures what it means to me to be a kiwi, a New Zealander. We are unique and long may we stay that way, with all the colour that has made us us. Tangata Whenua, Pacifika, Asian, Chinese……….its all good

Belated Post

The Intersection

I seem to be at a T intersection in my life.
To the right are things that I have held to and believed, without really 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, and faith tenets I wonder about, and if really I wonder if lived as the inheritor of some huge grace, if I lived in freedom, since goodness and well being were in the end the confluence of beliefs and actions. To the right is a narrow corridor, in black and white with streetlights blazing the way.

To the left is an architecture I cannot seem to recognise, there are not as many right angles and straight lines, the street light glow red and yellow, green and orange. There are creatures on the streets running stalls full of food I have never tasted or seen, they wear clothes so different to my own, and there is a wonderful meander to the road so that one cannot see around the bend. The left turn is an invitation to exploration and freedom from straight and cutting lines. The holy places on this street have curves, minarets, fountains, turrets and pools. They do not have frontal signs throwing wisdom at men, or flags flying high, but long tassles floating in the breese. Looking right I see a long line of colourless flags on high poles, and bold street signs guiding travellers with age old wisdom.To the left are things I am yet to discover, about life and about faith, about God and about man.
To the left I am called by my tiredness of always having turned right.

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. 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 with forever being there, as if it was the natural order of things. Many on the road turned right, to the cheers of waiting onlookers, and entered the straight line for home.

I turned left, into the embrace of gypsies selling wonderful hats red velvet hearts attached, to be washed by colour and laughter.
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.
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, that if everyone is going one way I am suspicious and look in the other. If everyone thinks this I wonder at what the options are. Even tho in my own way I have been on that colourless right road. right minded, right handed, right footed. Now I wonder. the extrmes of the people on the road of choice have made me examine the intersection and see, so much I held to was 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……………

i am turning left…………and wrote this

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

Today

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.

Latest writing

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

Ruby Tuesday

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.

The Colfax Moment

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.

3 Day Weekends

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

No Doubt

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.

Hello Again

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…………….