A year later,
a century later,
or a whole turn of a galaxy later,
a child was holding onto her mother’s hand and looking up at the stars. She pointed up to the sky and she said
>What is that beautiful star called? It looks like it is dancing?
The mother smiled and said
>That is a new star and it shines brighter with every year
>I would like to shine like that star, the little girl said.
I have been away from this blog for a bit, i ran out of inspiration, things to say and had a bit of a funk of what do I have to say that anyone wants to listen to anyway.
I have been busy though and following an email form my brother this morning wanting to know what me and my sister were up to (her blog) I decided this was the morning to dive in there again.
I have been working on a story called the little star. I am making puppets and taking photos of them and then doing cool things to them in photoshop. I have come a long way in photoshop since I first started using it about a year ago. Then I would labourisly colour areas and have to recolour them if it was wrong and I didn’t know about layers and selecting areas and clone tool and all sorts. My most recent discovery with it was the liquid filter…. oh joy of joys now I can do all the spirals I want!!!!!
I was standing on a kerb yesterday waiting for Marie Therese to pick me up to go out to Ballyvaughen. A car passed by with a family who were black. Mother, father and a pile of kids in the back seat, my mind wandered off on little thoughts of immigration, and how ireland is changing and how I am never here either but living in another country to the one I was born in like these folks and then I saw another child in the back of the car and I remembered on long journeys when we were little the back of the car was the best place to lie down and sleep.
Then the next car had a young man in it and I thought about my brother who drives very fast and is trying to acheive something from his life.
The next car had an older woman in it who looked like my aunt and I wondered did she drive the same way as my aunt (my aunt constantly puts her foot on the brake so the car always seems like its trying to go but she stops it with little jerks of the brake)
A few more cars passed by before I pulled myself back and realised this is how projections work. I didn’t know these people at all. I had never spoken to them or met them or probably was never going to meet them but yet seeing them triggered a little story in my head which would change when the next one came into my range of vision. The story triggers an emotion and all of a sudden I am hooked on the emotion and the story and they have become my reality.
This realisation triggered a thought of ‘mm, must write a post about this’ the mind never stops trying to create the world, thoughts are like clouds they shift and change and move and dissapear and create shapes and illusions. They take us out of the moment and into the past and the future.
I shall leave you with a quote from Joni Mitchell
There once was a prince that lived in a kingdom of shadows and rain. The colours were shiny and bright when the sun shone and the dark and gloomy and grey when it was raining, which was often. He loved it when the sun shone and he thought how amazing it would be if the sun always shone.
He had a cousin who lived in a far away land and so the prince abandoned his kingdom to go and live with his cousin in the land when the sun never stopped shining and when it rained it was a relief and a joy.
This land appeared at him to be barren at first. With so much sun and so little rain there were very few plants and the plants that did grow were tall and prickly or small and stubby and the animals were thin and scrawny from lack of water and at first he missed the greenness and bright colours of his own land. He loved the warmth of the sun though and so he stayed.
He began to look properly at the land where he was, and he realized thought the desert looked empty it was actually full of life. When he looked closer there were subtle colours he had not noticed before, pale greens and purple pinks and slow growing dry lichen covering the rocks and tiny flowers that grew and died in a day and bright red ants and shiny black spiders with hourglasses in warning red on their backs and pale almost clear scorpions that looked as fragile as water but packed a punch in their curved tails. When it rained the desert burst into life and colour and bright green singing frogs emerged from everywhere by magic and the spiny plants gave forth huge flowers.
The next time he went home to his own rainy land he looked at it differently also and he saw all the colours he had not seen before. Colours that were beautiful, not grey and sad like he had thought before. Earth colours and greens and rich colours and dark brown mountain water from the rich peat lands and mosses a foot deep that were cushiony to walk on and when it rained they glistened and shone with life. He realized that these colours were a part of him also, he had grown up with them, they were in his innermost being and in his dreams and he loved them.
He remembered when he was younger not understanding colours, being afraid of them when he painted pictures and not knowing how to use them and being clumsy with them and he realized it was because he didn’t like his own colours and he was trying to use other colours. He had to understand and love his own colours before he could understand them and use them how he wished in his paintings. He began to use these colours and to look around him for inspiration for his colours and he became much happier than he had been before. Now he can be in his own land and love the colours there or be in the land of sun and heat and love the colours there also.
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First came the in-breath, the gasp from nothingness, the awakening the awareness of being. Nothing still was, just pure awareness and stillness, waiting for the impulse to move.
Then came first pondering; A simple ?. No words as yet just pure question, a wondering of the awareness.
Next came second pondering, an awareness of ‘self’ as something different to ‘other’. In the vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world ‘self’ looked round and thought ‘I’ and ‘you’
The vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world did not say anything back, did not look back, just was, in its awareness there was no difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’
The self began to name things; self needed some landmarks to make the vastness smaller and easier to live in. Tree (big green fluffy), grass (green soft), mother (love),
The world began to turn and the stars began to move and the self was frightened. Self asked the world “Why are you so big and all? And do not pay me any attention?”
The world did not answer.
Self asked again “Why do you not do what I say?”
The world did not answer
“You do not love me” said Self sadly
Then he heard a voice inside him “You are loved little self, you exist because you are loved, there is no difference between you and me, we are, look around you at the vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world and stop putting names on things to make it seem smaller”
“Who is speaking” cried Self
“I/You are speaking” replied the voice and suddenly Self understood, the world had begun and everything, self included, was part of it. Everything was on the journey and self was there to witness and be a traveler on the voyage. Self smiled.
The stars twinkled, “Hello stars”
The rain started to fall from the clouds “Hello clouds, hello rain”
Self looked in a puddle at the reflection “Hello Self”
A girl sits on a stone on the sea shore, lonely for her friend who moved away. She sits and remembers and feels very alone. The sea is grey and the waves are endless and there is a chill on the air that makes her shiver. She makes up a story about a sea creature, the spirit of this place who also has lost a friend. This friend left the sea shore and went on search of where he belonged in the world. The sea has no answers, only shifting moods of colour and tide.
She tries to write the story to avoid the ache in her own heart and she can write endless reams of dream prose, of sea grays and blues and pangs of loss and loneliness and all from the perspective of the creature left behind who cannot leave the shore and must sit and wait endlessly for the friends return.
The creature bemoans the fact that she had ever met this ‘other’ because before that she had no memories. She thinks she might have been happy. She remembers light and darkness and water and wind and movement of crabs and anemones back and forth across the shore but no more than that. She remembers warmth and cold and the bright sun and the silver moon that changed shape as the sea changed shape and the waters inside her also were pulled back and forth.
The first real day the creature remembers in full, as a whole day, from dawn to dusk with awakenings in-between was the day the ‘other was washed up on the shore and opened its eyes and looked straight at her.
Here the girl becomes stuck and cannot go any further. She cannot imagine what these two would say to each other. Maybe she does not want to imagine. It would make too real what she has just lost and so she reads and rereads what she has already written and she skips to write the end where the ‘other’ has gone again and she is back with her creature on the sea shore mourning its loss and now awake and conscious of her loneliness.
The other is made of what people have thrown into the sea and brought to life by all the unanswered unfulfilled dreams that the sea holds for us until we are ready to receive them. The creature is the soul of the sea and can’t understand why the other would need to go in search of something that was already here.
That was then and this is now and the girl healed her heart and resolved her loss and found what she was looking for. The moon made her a gift of a silver heart, a little battered but still whole, the sun made her a gift of wisdom, the wind gave her a push out into the world and the world gave her a true friend to share her life with. Now maybe the story can be written from both sides and brought to an end. x.
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I love writing. I love putting words together and making a story. Sometimes the story comes first and sometimes the words come first. Sometimes it’s just a name and an idea. My problem is finishing it. Not an unusual problem I know. I can never figure out exactly how to finish the story. I have two finished long stories to date and lots of little ones. One children’s novel which needs to be rewritten (again) and an idea for a book that I could never quite get together involving a man named Winkle Ferrydinkle who left the shores of the faraway sea to go past the mountains of forgetting to find out what is on the other side.
I actually think writing a children’s book is harder than writing for adults. There is a simplicity to well written children’s books that is so difficult to achieve. They also have a shorter attention span and you need to catch and hold them, keep them in the world of the book. Look at Tove Jannson and the Moomin Books, it’s like taking a dip in a cool mountain pool reading her stories. The water is clean and pure and feels soft on your skin and so refreshing after the hot sun.
It has taken me a long time to actually learn this simplicity and to see it in all of the great novels and story books. We only really notice it by its absence. A book annoys us because it is too intellectual, or wordy, or opinionated, or we can feel the writer lecturing us through the characters. One of the best pieces of writing advice I gleaned from my travels was the phrase ‘Show, don’t tell’
Show us through language what is going on. Build the picture in our head of what the character is feeling /doing/seeing. Avoid ‘he was sad’ and instead remember the tempest scene in King Lear where the storm outside reflected perfectly the turmoil that was happening in the kings head. We only have words and they are tools that can be manipulated and controlled just like any other medium.
The other thing that daunted me was conversation. Man, how I avoided it. But, know what? I avoid it in real life too. I am not very good at talking to people. I am a bit of a closet recluse that only now this late in my life am I coming to really recognize that about me and accept it. I avoid people I don’t know very well, they make me uncomfortable. I am never sure about the intricacies of conversation and communicating with people. It takes me a while generally to open up, and thats fine, I am not going to push myself or feel bad about it. Thats who I am.
But… this translates into my art and my writing. This is where I push myself to be open and reveal myself. It means I hate writing conversation so it is the part of writing I need to practice most. Or maybe find my own style that doesn’t rely on conversation. Find my own way of telling things. I can think of a few authors that are dreamwriters, that write a strange world of shifting space that the people say almost nothing in. Also anybody see Belleville Rendez-Vous? Beautiful cartoon and I think there is about five words said by the characters all the way through.
A story about a woman finding her heart
A story about a dog with one eye and a curly tail and one white spot on it’s back
A story about a life
A story about a mayfly that has one day to live, it watches the day getting brighter and brighter then darker and darker and then over
A story about water, deep and clear with frogs in it and dragonflies that are bright and purple and orange and yellow. The water is a cool shaded place in the heat of the sun.
A story about a boy who loses his parents
A story about a child with a rocking horse that comes alive
A story about me
A story about the end of the world
A story about the beginning of the world
A story about the morning after an intensely emotional night. Dawn is relief
A story about a man who can’t see his own life clearly
A story about a woman who can only see her life and nobody else’s
A story about a woman who can’t stop crying
A story about a path that is uphill. The day is hot and the hill is steep. Nobody is coming to help
A story about a dragon in a dream in a book that can’t be opened until the right time is here and the right sound is made
A story about a sound made at the beginning of the universe that will continue till the end of time
A story about a story that never ends
A story about a song that the stars sing, that my heart sings and I cannot hear it until I open my ears
A story about ears, the wind, the sound of crickets, of a cats howl, of a dogs bark, of a city where the streets make music
A story of seeing reflections in water. Calm still water, the reflection is in front of me but I have to see it as reflection and see past it.
A story about how we are all connected in time and space
A story about time and space being an illusion, how we are all light and eternal beings fluidly shifting from one form to another, from one existence to another.
A story about remembering. Seeing time as a deep pool of water rather than a straight line we travel on. Seeing our continuous existence.
A story about learning how to let go.
A story about a black widow spider and a mouse in the kitchen and a dead swallow chick in it’s nest.
A story about death, about diving in, about dreams and a cat called Xoconostle.
A story about my dream with the two cats I had to choose between. One friendly and social and the other smoke grey and hardly visible and spitting fury and in defense. The fact that I knew I should pick the social one but really I admired the energy of the other, its fierceness and unwillingness to obey.
A story about love and the light that comes from the sun that gives us life and energy and is our connection to the unknowable.
A story about the unknowable.