Category: poetry

what a difference a week makes

Yesterday I went out to the local shop at lunchtime. I was in a bit of a hurry as I had come out of one virtual meeting later than expected and had to hurry back for another. But I got to the shop, bought the couple of things I needed, and set off home before I realised I didn’t have my phone.

I paused in the middle of the street and did a quick mental check of pockets and was shocked to realise there was no way I’d dropped it or left it in the shop: I must have left my phone at home.
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rumours of spring

My co-author, Lucía, and I are still working on the final pieces for the third of the Modern Pagan Prayers books, which will include pieces for each of the eight festivals of the wheel of the year.

We’re definitely on the home straight, but the last few weeks haven’t been very productive, not least because it’s not particularly easy to write about summer and harvest time in the middle of winter when temperatures are sub-zero or the wind is wuthering and the rain is soldiering down.
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ten thousand saw I at a glance

It’s the last day of February, and the daffodils are in bloom. Perhaps there aren’t ten thousand visible at a single glance, but there are certainly a great number in all different spaces, from public parks and private gardens to pub yards and churchyards.

In view of the fact that tomorrow is St David’s day, I have been collecting photographs over the last week.
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desire towards the ‘otherness’

This last year, as there haven’t been any opportunities to go to meetings in person, I’ve been doing a lot of “virtual networking”. I used to attend face-to-face events regularly, and after the first couple, I was reasonably comfortable walking into a room of strangers and starting a conversation. But it’s been difficult to re-create the atmosphere and dynamic of a physical meeting in an online situation.

It’s certainly all a lot easier than it was back in spring last year, and everyone is a lot more confident about being seen on screen, but the hosts are still uncertain who will turn up and how experienced they will be in the virtual world, so they often fall back on fairly simple ice-breaker activities.
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flowers & fences

Yesterday, I ended the blog post with a photograph of rose hips craning their necks to reach between the uprights of a black iron fence. It made me think just how many such photos I have, of flowers and fences.

I don’t actually have many photos of anything on the computer I’m using at the moment – they are mostly copied off onto an external drive- But even among the few that I can access quickly, I have found enough to confirm that, as a general rule, plants appear to want to escape the caged confines that humans impose on them.
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