“The true democrat is he who with purely nonviolent means defends his liberty and, therefore, his country's and ultimately that of the whole of mankind.” Gandhi

For the past seven years I have spent three to four weeks during late July and early August in Manhattan. Originally it was to attend Actionweek, an annual ten-day Poetry Therapy and writing intensive, as part of my training to become a Poetry Therapist. Other writers and Poetry Therapists came from Canada, Mexico and Japan as well as from New York City and State and other parts of the USA. Over the years they have become close and dear friends. I keep their specifics in mind whenever anyone makes a sweeping generalisation about Americans, for what is meaningful and memorable is in the detail.

Tomorrow they will vote for their president. I have a good idea who they will all be voting for, however disappointed they might be about Barack Obama’s first term in office. I know, too, how excited they were when he was first elected. That resonates painfully - I remember my own profound relief and optimism on that night back in 1997 when New Labour won the general Election.

 I always laughed at my politically cynical mother who used to say that if they put a sheep up as the Labour candidate in the Rhondda then it would be elected. She wasn’t far wrong but she never stopped voting Labour.

 I was talking with a friend a few days ago about The Great Famine of Mao's China and the Arab Spring. She felt that having enough to eat under a tyrant was worth the relinquishing of personal freedom. I begged to differ.

So my thoughts about tomorrow’s election lead me to this - I must, a bit like my mother did,  keep faith with the democratic process and at the same time learn to stomach the inevitable disappointments. 

A Diminished Thing

Yesterday, I made the journey down to South Wales and back, and on the way home there had been some sleet and snow over the higher ground but early this morning I was surprised by the thick layer of hail stones that lay all around the cottage looking like frozen frog spawn. The planned cycle ride was off.

I decided to paint the ceiling of the small studio space that adjoins the cottage. It has been bare plaster for all the years I’ve lived here. Getting right up into the high and dusty corners I disturbed numerous spiders – those long legged, colourless types that lie flat against surfaces and play dead. I tried hard to clear them out of the way unharmed but I missed one and inadvertently painted over it. It was completely covered in a coat of white emulsion and was still up and running. This perturbed me as I dislike the thought of adversely affecting other living things. Would it survive in this ghost-like form?

I have so much empathy for anything struggling to survive. One morning I noticed that a spider had dropped into my dog’s drinking bowl. I wrote this sonnet about it.

 A Diminished Thing

(“What to make of a diminished thing.”
From “The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost)

What to make of a diminished thing in need,

that looks for all the world it has deceased?
I poured the water from the bowl and freed
the drowning spider, on the ground released.
Then took some time to watch if life returned,
if from that sodden, ragged ball uncurled
a creature more determined having learned
there are four elements to handle in one world.
Like petals know to unfold at first light,

with reclaimed stature, buoyant as if air

had blown soft breath to dry out all despair,
it resurrected with renewed delight.
I marvelled then that spiders have a soul
to challenge death and make a shrunk thing whole.

The Pennine Cycle

 

 

 

 In 1990 my mother and father gave me birthday money to put towards a custom made road racing bike. I was living in West Yorkshire at the time and decided to use a Bradford based company called Pennine Cycles. I went into their workshop a couple of times for them to measure me and to choose components and a colour scheme. I was so excited the day I went to collect the bike. It was an absolute vision.

I had always had bikes as a child and teenager. I remember my first one – a metallic blue tricycle with a sizable boot at the back. It had an extending handle that my parents could hold onto as I rode along. My first two wheeler was a two- tone blue Raleigh and I remember my father teaching me to ride it – using the age old trick of promising not to let go and then of course letting go. What a metaphor. Yes, we can usually do more than we originally believe is possible.

 I never really rode the Pennine cycle that much and when I moved back to Wales I stored it in my cousin’s garage in. One night I dreamed that she had given it away and I woke up so angry that I determined to collect it when I next went down South. Unfortunately, the garage roof had sprung a leak and the bike looked a total wreck. I felt frustrated with myself and saddened. I was very close to taking it to the scrap yard.

 Meanwhile, I was in New York at the time of the NYC triathlon and after watching the event I decided that I would like to give the triathlon a go. Then on returning home I met an acquaintance who was a keen cyclist and he introduced me to a cycling group. This led to the resurrection of the Pennine cycle. I had it re-sprayed and fitted with some new components. I had forgotten how exhilarating it felt like to ride.

I didn’t manage to get an entry for the NYC triathlon and since then they have changed the date of the event to earlier in July  and I am there each year for the end of July (probably for the best as a mile in the Hudson River never really appealed to me) but I really enjoy riding with the cycling group and I have, to date, completed four sprint triathlons in North Wales.

Harlech Triathlon 

 

A Way Home Through the Woods

 I've been in the wrong place

long enough to know I'm in the right place now.
Eddi Reader

I was born and brought up in the Rhondda Valley. I went to Swansea University and then to the University of Wales, Cardiff for my PGCE. My first teaching post was in Hampshire and the last in West Yorkshire. For most of my adult life I lived in England. 

Cynefin is a Welsh word that cannot be simply translated. It has multiple meanings – the place of our belonging, of our roots, a place where people and nature are interconnected, the place where we were meant to be.

It took a mysterious viral illness that lasted for two years, to bring me home not just to Wales but to a part of Wales that my soul had always longed for – the mountains of North Wales. I came to live in the forest at Coed Hafod y Llyn. This forest marked the final stage in my recovery. Here I found the fulcrum – acknowledging that up and down, lost and found are all essentially places along the way.

Each year I spend a month in Manhattan and love the vibrancy of the city and the spaciousness of Central Park. Every summer I camp near The Lizard in Cornwall and feel pained when I leave the ocean and the stunningly beautiful coastal path. It is the lively connection with place that makes it worth living in.

Last week I took the opportunity to walk home through the forest from a different direction and on a newly designated path. I reconnected with the pure joy of having a forest to walk home through – right to my front door.

The Rest is Silence...

As an English Literature graduate, writer and Certified Poetry Therapist, quotations have had, and continue to have, a huge significance in my life. From the time I began to read, certain phrases attracted my attention, mainly because they were congruent with my own thoughts and feelings at the time.

As a teenager suffering from the anguish of jealous love I was both tormented and comforted with quotations from Othello.

 “But there where I have garnered up my heart,

Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from which my current runs
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”

 When my mother died I wrote on the card attached to her wreath, "Nothing left remarkable/beneath the visiting moon", from “Antony and Cleopatra”, and later, on my father’s, “And you my father, there on the sad height,/ Curse, bless me now”, from “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, as it spoke to me of his sadness and isolation since my mother’s death and also of our ambivalent relationship.
 

When I first had a mobile phone, I had "The rest is silence" as my screen message. I wanted to remind myself that there is a finite amount of time "to live out loud". In times of stress and anxiety I come back to the simplicity of “Breathe my dear” and “This too shall pass”.

But the two quotations that I wish I had been aware of from a much younger age are “Know thyself”, attributed to numerous Greek sages and spoken by Plato's Socrates, and “Only connect” from E M Forster's "Howards End". So much wisdom contained in just four words.

Wild

Two weeks ago I spent three days at Ty Newydd Writers Centre on a course about three of my favourite topics  - Landscape, Memoir and Travel. I had such an enjoyable and profitable time there with twelve other writers and two inspiring and encouraging tutors. I was also lucky enough to meet Jay Griffiths for the first time and to hear her read from her book "Wild".  She wrote, "for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind".  I realised that for the first time I was hearing someone describe what it means to be wild in a way I connected with.

 

Every morning I got up early to run down to the estuary and along the coast path to Criccieth and back. Each time I saw this pair of swans feeding together.

 

Later I wrote: Up with a rising sun and into the brightening day. Running down lanes of slurried mud and moulding blackberries. Out onto the loose banks of the estuary - and there, two swans holding their own against a current intent on taking them out to sea. Bent necks, one movement, breaking through silver and gold. In this I saw the tender synchronicity of our own life together - the strength  and vulnerabilityof being one part of two.

Gwen and the Yellow Flower

Sunday, 17 January 2010




















For some time now I have seen my lovely old dog Gwen become more frail and sick. Her spirit has always been strong and part of my deep sadness was witnessing her determination to survive.















Grief is an Open Door
(for Gwen)

Look in and see all
that has been.
I took love in through
your flame and fed its fire.
The crimson rowan berries
that lined our path,
sweet fallen plums
and soured apples.
The hunger for it all.

Look out and see all
that is.
The oak tree, bare now
with crow its one dark leaf
ready to fly.
And you, my beloved,
like the one yellow flower
that refuses to yield
until it is time.





After the recent harsh frost and heavy snow the flower wilted. Gwen finally succumbed and died yesterday, January 16 2010.
Posted by Jill Teague at 14:39 0 comments