Right now there are lots of secrets emerging in my garden - courgette flowers blossiming under huge green leaves, hortensia flowers slowly turning blue and pink, first tiny hard green tomatoes and tiny little apples budding on our tree. It is a time of discovery, hope and joy for us as we watch the beginnings of the food that we hope will blossom and grow so it can nourish us later on in the season. Very exciting.
We are learning new things about the sexuality of flowers and the pollination needs of squash. And always more bugs and pests and how to keep them off our Pak Choi and salad. We are nervously preparing to leave our garden for a little while and crossing our fingers that it will be well taken care of and we'll come back to red tomatoes and a bumper crop of courgettes, cornichon and tomatoes.
And then there are the other little hidden gems, tiny droplets of rain hanging on the leaves after a thunderstorm, a snail snugly tucked into rose petals (damn that photo didn't work out) and little elves running in and out of the clover and the trees delighting in the summer sun.
Once again I have the pleasure of being a featured entry on the great writing site Hour of Writes.
I participate regularly with this project for several reasons. Firstly, it's a bit like doing a weekly writing workshop, a prompt is given and it takes my mind where it will go. It's not the way I work all the time but I have found it to be a good discipline. Secondly, the feedback. It's always nice to have some feedback on your writing. The poems I put up on Hour of Writes don't always end up being my final version of that poem. Sometimes the feedback I get can help me with the tweaking phase of poetry writing which usually takes me way more time than the initial draft writing. And thirdly, I enjoy reading what other people have to say about the weekly subjects which are often very thought provoking. There's a wind range of writing approaches being showcased on Hour of Writes and it's a pleasure to peruse them.
So anyway, you can read Twenty Eight to One here. It's the featured entry by tinyfeetandbluebirds under the heading The Greater Good.
I own an inordinately large number of notebooks. While some people have cupboards full of shoes and others have toy trains or souvenir dolls, I have notebooks. Most of them are covered in scribbles, drawings, poems, lists, stories, addresses, names, books to read, places to go and things to see. They are something of great beauty to me and I never throw one away.
When I pick one up it is my very own time machine transporting me back to the time when it was The One. Battered and bruised, carried with me everywhere, slung in the bottom of beat up totes and hauled out in cafés and on trains, at the park watching my kids or over dinner with friends. The pink sequined number I wrote in French in the year I was studying psychology. Or the little muji Kraft books I had when the children were small and space and time a luxury. A Little Book of Sunshine, a gift from a friend that is growing, crammed full of words that refuse to be silenced. They are all special and I keep them all. Even the cheapo supermarket panic buy, grabbed when I forgot to pack one or ran out of space. Even the ones I used for morning pages when I tried that idea out.
The other day I pulled out one of my current 'friends'- yes I have more than one notebook on the go these days. It was totally blank and a friend asked me if I always write on blank pages. Yes oh yes oh yes when I can. I love the scratch of the pen across the unwritten empty page. I love to fill that space. I love the way suddenly something appears out of nothing and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, that something is good, worth reading again, worth keeping.
Oh and when there are no more blank pages? Then I write all over every inch of everything, filling the pages until they are black, scribbling on the curling corners of paper napkins and till receipts, even metro tickets and playing cards.
Here's a photo of my current favourite, from muji - they really do have great notebooks. And in case you're wondering, yes I do give my kids a lot of notebooks too. They have these ones and the larger model for painting in - the paper is nice and thick. There are zap books for doodling in the car and homemade concoctions with weird and wonderful paper for creating in and of course many many beautiful notebooks that just grabbed my fancy. And yes, we keep them all. They are a record of our lives lived on the blank pages of our days.
Check out my poem over on Hour of Writes about life and death. Yeah only the light issues! It's the featured entry from tinyfeetandbluebirds. Lots of other great stuff to read there too. Maybe you'll feel inspired to have a go too, here's this weeks prompt:
