Sometimes it’s good to feel bad
Sometimes we rightly feel sad
Let it all float by you
Decide what you have to do
No,you are not going mad.
Life has its upside and down
Sometimes a lover may frown
Take hold of the tiller
Wild sea will not kill you
Nor will the study called brown
Let your own partner feel blue
It’s not all the fault of just you
Their life is half private
Don’t try to deny it
We all have a soul to renew.
The title may sound odd especially to a Westerner.All our childhood we are exhorted to work harder at school.
Could try harder
is a phrase written on many children’s school reports.Wasn’t it horrible getting those reports.I once got,Fairly good at times,for my art report…:)
However “trying” is often an attempt to do something the wrong way.We can’t do everything by willpower.All we can do is to be attentive.And relaxing helps with this and also with depression which many creative people suffer from.They think it is neccessary to suffer,but is it?Try the relaxation methods below or listen to music.Ideas will flow in by themselves after you do this.I find it helps me.Also I find accepting depression may lead us to learning any lessons that out unconscious is sending to us.Depression makes us stop and learn.
http://www.allaboutdepression.com/relax/
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From Mike Flemming’s Blog.Copyright
I’d like to be a child and play in snow
Crack the ice on puddles in the road
The brittle bones of age can’r risk a blow
Green as little branches, children grow
Their minds are open to the world’s rare gold
I’d like to be a child and play in snow
In our nature, hardening is a flaw
Though bones are done, our minds can still be bold
The brittle bones of age can’t risk a blow
Bend like willow, bow with sacred awe.
For this life is the greatest story told
I’d like to be a child and roll in snow
We struggle on, we learn, we come to know
The love and friendship can’t be put on hold
The brittle bones of age can’t risk a blow
Hear the angels singing clothed in gold
The stars shine out like candles overblown
I’d like to be an icicle to show
How heat can melt the hardness at our core
Glenn Gould died young, in 1982 at the age of 50, but the Canadian classical pianist made great contributions to the world of music in his short life. He did it in part by starting young — so young, in fact, that he first felt the vibrations of music played for him while still in the womb by his mother. She’d decided even then to raise a successful musician, and her plan surely worked better than she could ever have expected. Young Glenn had perfect pitch, learned to read notes before he learned to read words, entered Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music at age ten, and grew into the very archetypal image of a musical genius: eccentric and often difficult, but possessed of almost otherworldly skill and distinctiveness.
Those qualities came out nowhere more clearly than in Gould’s relationship with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he described as “beyond a doubt the greatest architect of sound who ever lived.” Even listeners only casually acquainted with Gould’s work will know his recordings of Bach;s Goldberg Variations the first of which, recorded in 1955, shot him to stardom and became one of the best-selling classical albums of all time.
Four years after that, the National Film Board of Canada documentary Off the Record, just above, captured his playing on film in the clips at the top of the post. “When Gould is not on tour or recording,” he spends most of his time at his retreat, a cottage on the Shore of Lake Simcoe 90 miles north of Toronto. Here he works on the piano he favors above all others for practicing: a 70-year-old Chickering with a resonant, harpsichord quality recalling the instruments of the time of Bach.”
There, in that cottage in the small community of Uptergrove, we see the 27-year-old Gould play Bach’s Partita No. 2, vocalizing along with the distinctive mix of forcefulness and delicacy issuing from the instrument that he never chose, but mastered to a degree few had before or have since. “His ambition,” the narrator says, “is to make enough money by the time he is 35 to retire from the concert stage and devote himself to composing.” In fact Gould put live performance behind him just five years later in order to pursue with more focus his own kind of pianistic perfection, which he continued to do for the rest of his life.
I’d like to thank all of you who have read my blog this year.And also I’d like to thank my collaborator Mike Flemming for allowing me to use his beautiful photographs.
http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/
I like writing poetry so I would do it anyway but I am very happy if someone has read it and esoecially a comment or a criticism to give me the chance to improve what I have written
As most of you know,2017 has been a very hard one in Britain though nothing compared to many parts of our human world.
We had some serious terrorist attacks,two on London Bridges, one at Westminster near our Seat of Government.A policeman was also killed,Now if you read that you may think it’s not too bad.But everyone who dies early loses their life, their world, for everyone has a unique world and we lose their contribution to our society, the love they give their family and friends, their presence in our city and country, our security.
Many young people died in an attack in Manchester and later we saw Grenfell Tower on fire and learned many,many people died in their flats.It did not help that Boris Johnson had closed 14 fire stations in London.It was terrible for all of us here but especially for people living in Notting Hill to know people close by were dying and firemen even broke the rules to go inside but they could not get to the top.
We know now dangerous materials were used as cladding.Nearby the wealthy lived in the areas where ordinary people used to live
This shows us what it is like in war torn areas and I hope makes us more sympathetic to the poor and to refugees,Remember,it could be us or our family.
Thank you all again.I hope to continue writing and I hope making you interested in what I write about and perhaps inspiring you to write or paint or take photographs
http://www.elizabethmoon.com/writing-block.html
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Early in your writing life, the commonest cause of stuckness is your own lack of technical skill in writing. You know what needs to be said, but you can’t figure out how to do it. Like a beginner trying to build a house with only a hammer and saw and a pile of lumber, you have to work harder to accomplish the same structure. Writers can’t go out and buy a new writing tool–there’s no store that sells a “viewpoint transition chisel” or a “flashback installation kit.” So, when you get stuck this way, you have to make your own tools–by writing through the problem. Identify what it is that you can’t do, then read books in which it is done well–and then go do it. The exercises often proposed for getting past writer’s block may also work because many of them actually sharpen your writer’s tools. It’s fine to figure out a way to work around a skill you haven’t developed yet (such as the ability to handle multiple major viewpoints) as long as you keep working. Sometimes you can jump past the stuck point, and leave it to be solved later–by the time you finish the rest of the book, you may have developed the skill you need to clean up that bit.
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There’s nothing on this page until I write
A word and then another word and more:
Such sentences may bring me to delight
No sense is quite as needed as our sight.
Moral blindness is by most deplored.
There’s infinity on this page I write
I have pondered in the early winter nights,
Whether there are senses we ignore.
The expression of the sensed conveys delight.
Could there be, unseen, a different light
We might see by if we sought its door?
There’s blankness on this page until I write
The possible encounter, through a rite,
With God whom we and angels do adore.
My senses then might bring me grace and light
In the soul, oh, deep within that core,
Who shall, patient, find the unknown door?
There’s an opening upon this page l write.
Can other words, on other tongues, invite?
Where shells are fractured by the ocean’s blows
We soon learn what being alive demands
To bare feet on sunny days beckoned
The warm wet trickles in between the toes
Underneath the shallow pools lies sand
In whose sums is our living reckoned?
Calculation, not so bleak it shows
We learn by pain, true living makes demands
God allows the abacus unchained
To sum us up as if we are unknown
Underneath the pools, are these his hands?
Who will be allowed and who detained?
Like refugees, we come to love alone
We try to be alive, despite the pain
Our hearts are fragile shells, not heavy stones
We, soft flesh, enraptured by framed bones.
Darkly on the beach we humans stand
The fretting waves cry out with love’s demands
The heavy snow clouds menace from the East
No sun, no light,no golden joy,no thought
Where are our wise men, where is our feast?
On moorlands they bring down befuddled sheep
In deep snow drifts they are smothered , caught
The heavy snow clouds brood over the East
Is there wisdom in the human beast?
Does intuition tell? Where is it sought?
Where are our wise men, where is our feast?
In Siberian wastes, the child Christ speaks
Oh, be now our creative word, sweet Lord
The heavy snow clouds protect him in the East
The feast is here but shared with those the least
The currency is not what rich men bought
We do not see the women, nor the feast
For freedom and for dignity we fought
Yet empty we must be before our God
The heavy snow clouds gesture from the East
Here are our wise women, here our feast
I was thinking that the voice I now speak with is not my real voice.I have just read that I am using ” eye dialect” when I misspell words to make them sound like they do in my childhood dialect.
Outside owa house ‘t new umbrellas drip
~Wun is red and wun is pretty beige
They’re wa sunshades, t’weather’s hit a blip
If A wer a child A’d sail a ship
‘u stamp in pools u’ water in mi rage
Outside owa house,’t new umbrellas drip
Times there were Mam’s moods ‘d got a grip
Then it wu quite ‘ard t’ re-engage
Hide owa sunshades,mother’s ‘it a blip
Mam wer clever but she lost her top
The hint of h’ mad sayings had no gauge
Outside owa house ,’t new umbrellas drip
Nuns told me off for speaking in my voice
To get to Oxford, I must Me erase
Now I am a foreigner down here
No self, no mam, no sisters,just mi feah
Why,I almost bought a Harris Tweed skirt until I saw it was only 19 inches long.This puzzles me.Harris tweed is thick woollen waterproof fabric.If your skirt is 19 inches long what do you wear on your legs? Why bother with a hot skirt that barely covers the thigh? Very mysterious
I almost bought a poncho till I realised you can’t wear a cross body bag over one.
Cashmere knickers are in short supply.I blame the Royals
I spent so long wondering if I should buy a cashmere sweater, I burned a pan.That kept me warm!
Harris Tweed is very good.if you live on Harris.My husband had a jacket years ago.He nearly died on the Tube.Maybe it might have been a good thing.See a new way to kill yourself without appearing to.
Cause of death: Harris Tweed bra, Arran sweater,Tweed jacket,Tweed overcoat and plastic mac.Suspected wool thief.Human moth
“This is also, however, a book for the 21st century. What concerned Gibbon was the clash between faith and reason; for Nixey, the clashes are physical ones. This is, fundamentally, a study of religious violence. Her cover displays a statue of Athena deliberately damaged: its eyes have been gouged and its nose smashed, and a cross has been etched into its forehead. The story of this defacement is told in her prologue and reprised in her final words. The events happened in Palmyrain the late fourth century, when some of the oasis city’s magnificent temples were repurposed as sites of Christian worship. Her choice to begin in Palmyra is, of course, a careful one. When she speaks of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the Syrian city by “bearded, black-robed zealots”, the reader thinks not of marauding fourth-century Christian fundamentalists but of television images from recent history. “There have been,” she writes, and “there still are … those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends.” What is revealing about that last sentence is not the connection she draws between savage practices in Christian late antiquity and in the name of Islamic State but the phrase “monotheism and its weapons”. Many modern commentators like to speak of religious terrorism as a horrific distortion of religious truth; for Nixey, monotheism is always weaponised and waiting only for someone to pull the trigger.”
Xmas is a merry time
Except for poets who have bad rhymes
Write free verse
Let form be cursed
Always end with a last line
I get a lot of letters from people. They say: “I want to be a writer. What should I do?” I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it.
– Ruth Rendell
https://geediting.com/the-120-most-helpful-websites-for-writers-in-2016/
To make the list easier to navigate, the entries are broken down into 14 different categories so you can jump right to the area you are looking for.
The 14 categories are:
Looking for some inspiration in your writing? Writers in the Storm is the answer to getting you back on track. This easy to navigate website contains a well-developed writing blog filled with tricks of the trade, as well as an extensive resource list to guide you in the right direction.
Writers Helping Writers is more than just a blog filled with useful tips to enhance your writing. This website also includes book reviews on various writing topics and an impressive “One Stop for Writers” library which provides all the resources you’ll need through every step of the writing process.
Known as the nation’s largest nonprofit that serves creative writers, this digital version of Poet & Writers magazine is the jackpot of writing resources. Along with an extensive library of articles, you can also connect with other like-minded artists to share ideas and gain insight into your work.
Leg by Katherine
“This was well known to the ancients, who we like to imagine as being a lot less smart than we are. “He who learns must suffer” says Aeschylus:
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
While Mary sat in the kitchen on a large pine chair looking at Hotter’s latest shoe catalogue,Annie was creeping up the garden path in a pair of turquoise suede elegantly heeled shoes matching her teal tencel culottes and matching blouse.Round her neck was a large lump of amber on a gold chain handy for beating off muggers or lustful men
Despite the heat she was in full splendour with golden beige tinted moisturiser from Langone of Lyons on her lovely complexion,pink eyeshadow from Yves St Current and dark brown boot polish as her mascara had run out and she’d not been out for a while to buy more
Annie ran the last few yards and darted like an eel into Mary’s 1970’s kitchen.
What on earth are you doing,dear? Mary asked her.Those shoes look unsuitable for leading anyone up the garden path.Mind you,I do like them
Oh,I’ll explain,Annie said huskily.
I told that therapist across the road I was living with you.
What exactly do you mean by living,Mary asked anxiously.
Well,he said yesterday that anyone who lives alone must be lacking in some way.Except for him of course as he had full analysis with Alfred Zion.
You mean Wilfred Bion,Mary told her.
Zion,Bion,what’s the difference?
It shows your lack of education,Mary told her.Not that education nowadays makes much difference when almost anyone can get a 1st or 2.1.After all would you pay £90,000 for a third class degree in Aeronautical Engineering?
That’s not quite what I would have done, said Annie.A degree in flirtation and pleasing men would be more up my street.And cooking of course although I once did have an interest in Hebrew and Aramaic.
It’s not a way to progress in a neo-liberal economy,although reading the Hebrew Bible is always interesting.Personally I prefer that to the New Vex-a man.The stories,the love songs,the action.Mary’s round eyes gleamed with intellectual life and a bit of languorous lust
How about God? Annie asked her.
He seems to have changed as he related to his people.But he was a friend despite being an abstract concept.Though one could hardly call him a concept as he is inconceivable.
Mary’s voice faltered as she was stunned by her own articulacy and wondered what she might say next that could offend millions around the globe.
You should write a book,Annie said kindly.
I think I am ill-equipped to write about God.And ,also ,I am saddened to see how his own people have been treated.I can’t dwell on it over much as I already feel weak and weepy.
Why what have you been doing,asked Annie.
I have been sorting out clothes to give to the hospice shop. I’ve got a big bag
full already and 2 bags of newspapers and rubbish of various kinds which somehow creeps into my bedroom… tissues,cotton wool, old hairbrushes.I am hoping to get it nice and neat before my sister comes to see me in August.And no doubt she will not be happy even then.She’d like me to buy a small new house with a lovely bathroom and kitchen. But I don’t want to leave my neighbours behind.If I won the lottery I could get the neighbours to move as well.Love thy neighbour etc
And now I realise I have far too many pans despite burning several.But it’s a big decision for a woman who was famed for entertaining friends with scorching Beef Vindaloo and lemon mousse that tasted like rubber.Giving that up is a big wrench.
Why can’t you carry on, asked Annie.
Carrying on is precisely why I can’t do it.Now I am a widow the wives of my former colleagues and my own women friends are afraid I will steal their husbands.
Emile miaowed in ecstasy as any talk about the love lives of his family were always intriguing.He was hiding as usual behind the stone flour bin.
Don’t you see,said Annie.If we pretend we are living together then you can mingle with men without suspicion.
This is beginning to sound like a spy story,Mary told her.And do not drag me into a character part in the play based on your romantic love for that psychoanalyst.
He looks ugly and boring to me.
Oh,that’s just a projection,Annie told her.You are defending yourself against acknowledging how much you long to lie in his arms and let him smother you in kisses.
Well,said Mary,I see you have been reading Freud for beginners again.
Or is it Freud for Dummies?
Mary recalled how nice her dummy used to taste when it was dipped into a jar of malt and codliver oil.Maybe that is the answer,she thought.
I’m going to Mothercare,she called as she ran out of the house in her green trainers and denim trouser suit.See you later.
Annie sat in the kitchen wondering how soon she could see the psychoanalyst again without being accused of sexual harassment.Even old age has not deterred her from seeking a replacement for dear old Stan.A few tears ran down her cheek and Emile jumped out and sat on her knee.
I saw, while half asleep, her face was gone
She faded, like the river mist at dawn,
From the gallery of my sacred ones
Ungrounded by the loss, fearful, forlorn,
Skinless like a worm picked off a lawn,
I saw, while half asleep, her face was gone
Do not leave me, do not my love scorn
Lost and gone are my beloved ones
I am human in both ghost and form
Heart constricted, lungs convulsed with pain
Haunted and bereft of human warmth
I saw, while half asleep, her face was gone
I shall have no mother but that one
Now I have become a dried out corm
Lost and gone are all my precious ones
Like a little leaf from its plant torn
Gnawed by slugs, fragmented till unborn
I saw, while half asleep, all trace was gone
In the holy space of my heart’s ones
Small pasta
Frozen peas
Cream optional………
or Natural yoghurt
Grated cheese
Butter if desired
Any small frozen vegetable can be added to pasta
Boil the pasta and drop in peas for 4 minutes.Drain.Add cheese ,butter /cream/yoghurt.Put onto a warm plate. Eat with cherry tomatoes or whatever you have got
A peaceful solitude can be a joy.
A softer breath, a slower beat of heart.
While our minds are happy unemployed.
As it was for growing girl or boy
Before the throes of adolescence start
A peaceful solitude can be a joy.
When puberty arrives it is no toy
As, from our families, we soon will part
Though our minds are happy unemployed.
We do not wonder what our life is for
Or try to write a CV super smart
A peaceful solitude, remembered joy.
Tormented people can be a great bore
Unless we love them fully from the heart
Their minds are never happy unemployed.
I wonder who knocked down the apple cart
Thus God cried out and topped the EU chart
A peaceful solitude can be a joy.
When our minds with God are unemployed.
When we’re born, it’s then we see the Light
After travelling squashed and so malformed
Through a tunnel like those fairground frights
With no-one else to keep us well informed
No bus stop,no rail station,no train track
There’s only one direction, which is out
The walls themselves gyrate behind our back
Some are struck and stuck by fearsome doubt
The head is squeezed, the brain protests with fear
The body’s like a fish stuck in a spout
Here there are no fall back engineers
No drain inspector, plumber to call out.
Yet by luck or fortune most emerge
To light a-dazzle and to love amazed
A silence rich with love and full of joy;
The silence after waking at the dawn,
May be both anchor and a steady buoy
Yet often we don’t know what we seek for:
The latest dress, the perfect English lawn?
We forget this marvellous essence, full of joy
We murder by ignoring love’s own core
We do not see the buds which are new born.
We want an anchor yet we want our toys.
What is most arresting is the awe
We feel when we survive deep grief again
Find silence rich with love and full of joy
Out of Nature, its Creator calls
Taking in her arms what caused us pain.
Being both an anchor and a buoy.
The silence underneath the silence calms,
Stills our breathing with reviving balm
Perfect silence rich with love and joy
Shall be our an anchor and shall be our buoy.
https://gettingmore.com/work/terrorisms-roots-lie-in-economics
The roots of terrorism lie not in the mosques that stretch from western Africa to the Himalayas, but rather in refugee camps, beggar-laden streets and rubble-strewn villages where food is scarce or rotten, diseases are poorly treated and hope is reserved for the afterlife.
My travel to more than 60 countries makes it clear that economics, not religion or politics, is the source of terrorists’ power. This includes as a Jew working in Arab nations for the U.N.
Poverty and lack of meaningful choices create millions of sympathizers and supporters for the few murderers. Many of the rest just don’t care; for them the U.S. is far from their daily lives and provides no comfort.
This means a violent war on terrorism alone – without providing a better alternative for supporters will fail.”
| synonyms: | absurd, ridiculous, foolish, stupid, ludicrous, farcical, laughable, comical, risible, hare-brained, asinine, inane, nonsensical, pointless, senseless, insane, unreasonable, irrational, illogical; More |
| antonyms: | reasonable, sensible |
| synonyms: | excuse, false excuse, ostensible reason, alleged reason, plea, supposed grounds;More |
Under what pretext are you doing this stupid thing
I never heard of Pre-texting.Do I phone to tell them before I send a text?
He keeps prevaricating.
Ask him to get on with the varicating asap
Your behaviour is preposterous.
Wait till I get posterous then!
I have prepaid dinner
Do you mean prepared?
Yes,I pared the carrots but then decided to take you out.I prepaid the bill
Isn’t that a bit weird.You don’t know how much we will spend
I do know how much we won’t spend!
Are you blackmailing me?
That is racist.
But everybody says that.I saw it in a thriller.
Is that a proof?
Not yet but it might be a pre-proof.
Then we have post-proof.
Don’t post it on a church door or we might have another Enlightenment
Seems like we may need one.
But it might just get nasty.
You mean it’s not nasty already?
Well,I’m all right,Jacques.
I am not French.
Not yet
https://gettingmore.com/work/why-must-we-hate-ourselves-so
Extract
We have created a society so broken that almost anyone can buy guns and kill the most defenseless among us, while adults go on national television and say gun control laws are fine.
We let children grow up seeing the most grotesque forms of violence in video games, cartoons and movies — beheadings, mutilations — and yet it causes a national uproar when for a few seconds an actress’ breast is exposed on TV, that is, the body part where mother’s milk comes from.
Whether on the sports field or on the street, trivial arguments wind up in fistfights or worse, and dozens join in. We speak horribly to each other in stores, in restaurants, in travel, and then wonder why our country drops to 7th in competitiveness because we no longer give each other our best ideas.
We solve our problems by conflict in almost every aspect of our lives – families, business, politics, social settings, and everyone seems to think it’s OK. “Tude,” for “attitude,” for being rude to others, is considered cool. There are whole TV shows about it. The most visible role models fight other people to vanquish them. And then we wonder why confused people think it’s OK to kill children.
We kick people off planes with odd clothes and accents but forget that most big crimes are committed by those who look and speak just like us, taught by our own culture of violence and conflict. We’ve killed or exploited so many innocent people abroad, and wonder why others retaliate against us. Trillions of dollars that could be used for our own progress is wasted on wars we could have solved in other ways.
It is not necessary for our enemies to beat us. We are beating ourselves. We cannot even agree on a set of national priorities that helps most citizens, and we cannot even agree on how to best spend our limited funds. We are going over a cliff and are too busy bickering about it to put on the brakes or swerve out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, rich people steal billions of dollars from those scraping by and financial institutions mislead us all and it’s treated as an intellectual exercise for policy discussion. In other words, hateful behavior might somehow be OK, or OK enough to debate about it.
We are capable of so much that is great, in the arts, in science, in human relations, but it is all but drowned out because we can no longer judge right from wrong. We tolerate a system that once would never have been acceptable. When the history of our civilization is finally written, it will say that we deserved what we got, we reaped what we sowed. Because, ultimately, when things went bad, there were not enough good men and women who stood up, at whatever personal effort, and said, ENOUGH!
(This piece was published on Huffington Post.)
Another cause of stuckness hits writers with a trickle-feed imagination, those who can’t outline because they don’t know what happens until they write it. If you have this kind of imagination, and you are an energetic writer, then you can expect to overrun your inspiration repeatedly. When you do, you will feel “lost” or “empty”. Two strategies may help. First, be sure to stop writing before you run out of steam every day–save a little for the next day, so that you know what’s happening when you start the next session. Second, when you’ve overrun your primary vein, jump ahead in the story and see if you can find another vein to follow for awhile. You may end up having to circular-file a chapter or so, but you will enjoy writing something more than sitting there waiting for the bucket to fill.
