Lynne Rees's Blog, page 10

Sometimes it's the science...

You have such potential, I tell the small oak tree that Tony found sprouting in a damp corner of the lawn, dropped there by a bird, I guess, or perhaps, now I think about it, from one of the oaks the railway men cut down some years ago, to clear the track, then brought the logs up to our barn, the thought not entering anyone's head that this was not an end, only a beginning.
I draw the line at showing it the photo I took this morning of a great oak sweeping its low branches across sunlit bluebells and resist the weaving and unravelling of any stories of its possible future, after all none of us want our paths mapped out for us by others.
But look how the light on those young leaves illuminates the pulse of chlorophyll. Sometimes it's the science that breaks open our hearts with gratitude.

Poem: Getting there

Sometimes when I get there it’s as if there’s not where I want to be at all, despite the signs along the way convincing me of the destination – sunlight illuminating a patch of lichen on a roadside rock, a man in a hat who looks a little bit like my father.
But then I realise I am no longer there, but here, and all those signs were not signs at all but celebrations of the passing here. That all points of departure and arrival and every step of the journey are all here. Now. Here, I am. And again, I am here.

Poem ~ Getting there

Sometimes when I get there it’s as if there’s not where I want to be at all, despite the signs along the way convincing me of the destination – sunlight illuminating a patch of lichen on a roadside rock, a man in a hat who looks a little bit like my father.
But then I realise I am no longer there, but here, and all those signs were not signs at all but celebrations of the passing here. That all points of departure and arrival and every step of the journey are all here. Now. Here, I am. And again, I am here.

Poem: The light at the end of the tunnel

We do not always find the light
at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes
the tunnel spills us out into shadow,
the light still a distant destination.

But isn't light often more of
a perception, what we choose to see,
where we choose to stand?

Perhaps that is why some days
I am running through darkness,
and others running through joy.

Poem ~ The light at the end of the tunnel

We do not always find the light
at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes
the tunnel spills us out into shadow,
the light still a distant destination.

But isn't light often more of
a perception, what we choose to see,
where we choose to stand?

Perhaps that is why some days
I am running through darkness,
and others running through joy.

Poem: Stay

Again this morning
you are looking at the world
through a rippled lens of water.

Things are the same
but not the same, the familiar
is unfamiliar, there is a distance

between what you knew
and what you know now. Do you
trust in the world? Or do you let go?

Stay. Behind
this obscuring veil so much
joy born of so much memory.

Poem ~ Stay

Again this morning
you are looking at the world
through a rippled lens of water.

Things are the same
but not the same, the familiar
is unfamiliar, there is a distance

between what you knew
and what you know now. Do you
trust in the world? Or do you let go?

Stay. Behind
this obscuring veil so much
joy born of so much memory.

Prose Poem: Chi

Amongst the walkers and talkers, the joggers and the stationary phone callers she is sitting on a stone bench facing the sun, eyes closed, her palms cupped in front of her as if she is waiting to receive something. Perhaps it is just the warmth of the sun’s first rays she is grateful for, the breeze off the ocean’s boisterous waves with its lick of salt. But I think of all the other waves we cannot see – electro-magnetic, light below infra-red, above ultra-violet – and all the things we don’t yet understand about our world and where the thoughts and memories of everyone who has ever sat in that place, their anger and dreams, their regrets and hopes, might be stored.
And I remember a meditation class from years ago when we all closed our eyes and let our hands gather the air in front of us into a smaller and smaller compressed ball and Yes, we said, we could feel the tension there, an energy pulsing against our palms, our fingertips. Was it true? Or did we imagine it because we wanted it to be so?
At the other end of the beach the volleyball players are leaping and diving across the sand, slapping the ball over the net, high-fiving each other’s success.  All of us are holding out our hands, sometimes empty, sometimes full.

Chi

Amongst the walkers and talkers, the joggers and the stationary phone callers she is sitting on a stone bench facing the sun, eyes closed, her palms cupped in front of her as if she is waiting to receive something. Perhaps it is just the warmth of the sun’s first rays she is grateful for, the breeze off the ocean’s boisterous waves with its lick of salt. But I think of all the other waves we cannot see – electro-magnetic, light below infra-red, above ultra-violet – and all the things we don’t yet understand about our world and where the thoughts and memories of everyone who has ever sat in that place, their anger and dreams, their regrets and hopes, might be stored.
And I remember a meditation class from years ago when we all closed our eyes and let our hands gather the air in front of us into a smaller and smaller compressed ball and Yes, we said, we could feel the tension there, an energy pulsing against our palms, our fingertips. Was it true? Or did we imagine it because we wanted it to be so?
At the other end of the beach the volleyball players are leaping and diving across the sand, slapping the ball over the net, high-fiving each other’s success.  All of us are holding out our hands, sometimes empty, sometimes full.

Haibun: Deerfield Mile

There are the walkers with coffee. There are the plodding joggers and the sitting sunrise watchers. There are the hand-in-hand walkers and the couples who walk an arm’s length apart. There are walkers muffled up in hoodies and runners pumping their bare arms. And old ladies, in ones and twos, weaving and winding from kerb to kerb as if they might still be dancing in a 1950s ballroom with the one they loved.

And, of course, there are always the ‘let’s-all-spread-across-the-sidewalk-and-take-up-as-much-room-as-we-can’ walkers. And dog walkers. And a woman who must have splashed through the ocean’s shallows, standing one-legged at her open trunk wiping sand from her feet. And a man wandering the boardwalk with a phone in his hand, who could be waiting for someone. Or even for himself.

And here’s me, trying to remember to keep right not left but forgetting when I run back to the beach, and spit some water onto the rocks, which way the wind is blowing.


sunrise
all of us
in this
together