Therapy, Peter Lomas said, was less an attempt to treat a sick person “than to find one’s way through the false ways in which a person may live, and help him to experience his life more truly”. To do this, the therapist had to do everything possible to create an atmosphere of “trust, respect and flexibility”.
Eva
“Anger can be borne – it can even be satisfying – if it can gather into words and explode in a storm, or a rapier-sharp attack. But without these means of ventilation, it only turns back inward, building and swirling like a head of steam – building to an impotent, murderous rage.”
Eva Hoffman Lost in translation.
Walking with Water
Heart lifting news! My poem “Walking with Water” dedicated to my daughter Beth Cullen will be published in June edition of The Bezine!
Walking with water
When I was a child I believed God lived in the skies.
It was the only way God could see everything
God was everywhere his proximity was frightening
I walked the mountains searching endlessly
I know I wasn’t alone in these beliefs
I’ve written fifty years and a day, written as they say
without knowing whether my words are listened to
so I walk these mountains listening to your words
I walk old pathways following mountain trails
I sing my words I sing my song to silence.
Jacques Benveniste
believed water retains
on a molecular level
a memory
that triggers antibodies.
His hypothesis remains unproven
but his conviction stayed firm
until his end came.
I reflect on our indifference
to the way we walk on water
we float on strata of sandstone
once beaches and layered memory
water filters and holds
breaching the surface
springs and dark pools.
And I walk endlessly
on the draining land
beneath my feet
examining the new
examining the past
walking with water
walking with love.
Erw Beddau
has been desecrated
a place of burial
long forgotten by men
it was still there
when I was a child
amongst the panorama
of the plateaus uplands.
From those heights today
I cast an eye to the valley slopes
and see in the distance
where Errw Beddau had once lain.
The spring, the well,
it’s clooty tree remain.
It was said of the well
which stood
in that funerary landscape
of twenty five burial mounds
its spring water cured
ailments of the eye.
In this age of blindness
I sense an irony here.
If I could only see it now
I tasted its spring water
many times long ago
when I was young
walking winding trails
in the steepness of the day
Erw Beddau
the acre of untouched graves
remained a story hidden.
And I crossed the silence
of the high slopes
following
parish roads and bridle paths
and when these ended
the intricate web of trails
of hefted sheep
mapping out
describing
the lands contour.
Do we mould the landscape?
Or has it formed us?
Walking with water.
Walking with love.
When I was a child I believed God lived in the skies
I walked the mountains searching endlessly
I wasn’t alone in those beliefs
I’ve written fifty years and a day, written as they say
without knowing whether my words have been listened to
so I walk these mountains still listening to your words
words and teachings no longer listened to
I walk mountain trails following old pathways
I sing my words I sing my song to silence
Walking with water.
Walking with love.
.
Dedicated to my daughter Beth Cullen who walks with water, walks with love – who achieved so much in Ethiopia with the Karrayyuu pastoralist community and our shared love of past essential knowledge!
Valueing
Writing today about a walk with my daughter along a river bank and discovering Bastard Alkanet. An old source of rouge but also of henna. Afterwards exploring the etymology of Alkanet and its Moorish and Arabic roots reminded me of walking with my children when they were small asking them if they could recall the name of plants and trees. And the insects we’d see on our walks through the dunes to the beach and the sea. Its something I still do. Passing on a love of nature and of the earth is a heritage that has great value. You can tell when an artist walks into a room by the way they see. I cultivate a small plot on the side of a hill where everyday there is so much to see. Overhead the sharp cries of a pair of buzzards conducting immaculate Immelmann turns without having read any book about First World War fliers. The Buzzards upward glide still manages to disturb the Ravens from their nest and fly out from the oak to protect their chicks and start circling on updraughts too.
Achievement
He always thought getting up out of bed was an achievement!
Cutting the orchard meadow before full sun
I always set the mowers blades high and they stay that way through the year. The orchards sward stays green and lush through the height of the summer even on the driest of years. Grass cuttings are used to mulch soft fruit bushes and the standard apple and cherry trees. This year is going to be a challenge as the rainfall has been low through the winter and the spring. Leaving the grass long slows evaporation and holds the dew in the mornings. In contrast my neighbour’s mow short and their ground is yellowing and I’ve no doubt I’ll hear the sprinklers soon. This year reminds me strongly of the spring of 1976!
I’m not tidy. I don’t cut at the edges of the field leaving long grass as hiding places for newly fledge birds. I leave daffodils and primroses stand and only cut when the flower pods are dry and rattling with seed. I collect the seeds before I cut and spread them where I think a splash of colour will look good in spring.
We choose the myths we live by
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
The power of myth Joseph Campbell
Borders
“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.
Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”
Tove Jansson
Absence
Absence
Present absent lost.
He was here there
but parts were absent
lost on an Italian beach
amid 90 per cent casualties.
Locked in a camp
with one water faucet
and 7000 thirsty starving men
waiting for red cross parcels.
He never wore
his campaign medals
or marched
up and down
Saluting cenotaphs
as old soldiers do
at the parades
each year in town.
We lived
with photographs
sealed in a black box
locked under his bed
Photographs taken
of pre-war days
Serpentine deck chairs
of Regents park
Hyde Park
Speakers Corner
on Sundays
and those friends
His memories
all gone
now then
and now he’s gone too
Lost in translation
the silence
of survivors
shame and guilt
And the inability
to talk
to describe
to anyone
Who’s never been
there, out there,
who can understand
without telling.
Without explaining
the emotion
the fear
and the elation.
Then the shame
and we his children
deal with
his silence.
sudden tempers
avoidance
of conflict and
alone in his garden.
Clinging
to silence
absence
disconnection.
Of being there
but not here
except to share a past
that came before.
He returned
but he was not
the same man
they said.
I knew only
this man
that man
not the one before.
Sometimes it was like
dancing with a ghost,
the unsaid words
the brief glimpses.
And the sound
of a knife scraping
food endlessly
round the plate.
It was always easier
to eat fast and get down
and leave than listen
to that scraping knife.
Some days you became
a grey thin shadow
discernible not solid
but there somehow.
I saw you cry
after the death of your father
but it was your anger
that came back with you.
You came to me
after your mother’s passing
but you shirked the hand
I placed on your shoulder.
Present absent lost.
First published in Rob Cullen’s Collection Uncertain Times Octavo Press 2016.
Takin time
Take time to weigh this all up
who speaks for me and mine
anybody watched a donkey
or a man on the tread wheel
take time and take it all in
people want what you can give
if you give it too freely
they’ll take it for what their lives
are worth or so they think
but today who speaks for me
and mine and us and you
is the real question
so brothers and sisters
sit back take a deep breath
don’t jump through hoops
Take time and take a deep breath.
Celfypridd 