Have Yourself A Minimalist New Year

 Because part of the joy of minimalism is how effortlessly it starts, from the simplest musical pulses, and how from there it grows into a tuneful noise of epic proportions by engaging with musicians who range from the least to the most skilled/experienced where the noise each musician makes is of equal value to the end result. 

I Am Attracted To Food

as much as the next man,
but often recipes defeat me,
particularly those in weekend
lifestyle magazines where a chef
who owns a restaurant
takes something simple
and makes it complex
by adding hard-to-find ingredients
to reinforce his master chef credentials.

Given the odd flavours these cooks throw in,
to make themselves see more impressive,
I almost expected to find his kitchen sink
listed as one of the ingredients
he added to added to make the dish seem special.    

  

The Written Off Life

 I was born wrong for the world
I was raised in, that I was meant to inherit.
There men were men, and if some of them
were bullies, and others got drunk,
then 'a bit of bullying never hurt anyone',
because bullies were never hurt by anything,
and they were the measure of everything.

According to the them only the folks
who nursed grievances ever got hurt,
and they hurt themselves
more than anyone else. 

The only kind of male who mattered 
was hierarchical in character
where whatever else he was, was always boss
of his own world. Particularly when
that world disagreed with itself internally.

I was egalitarian, a male of a type
that went unrecognised, where
for my sense of fairness to be believed
it needed internally consistent behaviour.

I found my greatest consistency as an adult
when I endured being written off by employers
who required me to have an experience
that they all expected other employers to provide.

I was 'too soft' in my inexperience
to be the sort of aggressive team player,
who was fit enough to fight against
the opposing teams of other employers.

My life's mission has been to make do
and patch up the leftovers
rejected by harder men and women.

Worse lives happen at sea,
where the tides wash away
more than men ever remember. 

Meet The New Realism

It is just like the old pessimism,
but it is clearer eyed and more self renewing,
the better to set tighter limits on false hopes
and diminish cheap optimism.   

 

My First New Year Card of 2023

A rather jolly image of hope for the year to come,
in all the ways it combines hope
with the allowance for mistaken outcomes.

 

Lough Neagh Has Gone Green

From agricultural waste and pesticides
seeping from the land into the water.

And also from local government no longer having
a dedicated department to look after all the waters,
all the loughs and rivers, in the modern N. Ireland. 

This lough was formed by the giant Fin McCool
supposedly scooping out the the earth and throwing it
at a rival Scots giant, and missing but creating
the Isle Of Man between Ireland and Scotland.
I wonder what angry green giant, what driven reformer,
can restore the waters to health and fitness for fish,
and for human swimming in? And when can they start?       

 

My Memories Of The Quakers

I remember well the Quakers meeting house,
and Quaker meetings, I attended as a teenager.
The building was so old the government bade it
be preserved, and yet it was so plain inside. 

Quaker politics were critical of government,
the government of the days I that I knew,
and every other era, from the 1650's onward.
This made them attractive to many,
who were looking for more than to rebel;
they sought a more enduring rebellion. 

Rebelling seemed like the easy part,
what was harder was finding the flow
of meetings where the silence should come
from our insides until we were invited to speak
but then only through the spirit. To the uninitiated,
meetings felt like solving a spiritual crossword
where they did not understand the clues.   

What the meetings make clearer
to the newbies there was how full of noise
our heads were, which the more experienced
were ill prepared to explain, to help them
quietly dispose of the aural clutter,
which the experienced mostly hoped,
would pass if those newbies stayed the course
which they would complete in other places.  

Nowadays I have no family.
I live alone in the country,
and I like quiet more than noise,
and some noises more than others.

I like the Quakers most,
when I met them socially, in town,
where, by pure chance,
they had a spare ten mins
and we could find a quiet spot
to have an impromptu meeting.  

Between me and the screen,
I have now what I lacked then
the more open meeting place
through which to guide myself
past all my own old noises,
towards the quiet that seems restful.

This blog is dedicated to the memory of Keith Nichols and Sue Hethershaw, two very particular people I met at the Quakers, without whom I would not be the person that I am now.