July Blog 2020
Small is Beautiful
More than 4 months into lockdown, and with more free time than ever, it has been so hard to focus on anything of weight. Short timeframes are all I can muster because life’s on hold. The future seems a hazy intangible thing and I cannot find the words to describe it, so I focus on the here and now, the minutiae and cycles of daily life.
I have become strangely obsessed with patterns of light, rain, and sound.
The landscape of my daily walks, especially trees, water, clouds, birds fill my days. I’m on speaking terms with the jewel-coloured pheasant, and the family of hedgehogs who have taken over the garden.
I find reading anything beyond 200 pages is nigh on impossible. I started well then hit the wall by end April. Now I read only short stories and poetry – perhaps stretching to a novella on a good day. My guilty lockdown pleasure is buying poetry books. I defend this with what I’ve saved on haircuts, train fares, socialising, and dental appointments.
But it’s that period before sleep that has become an unmissable evening ritual:
10pm Feed the hedgehogs.
1030pm Spend time with Billy Collins who keeps me awake with his bedtime chat and poetry. The cat loves him too. She appears like a genie when she hears his voice and curls into the crook of my arm. She watches the tiny chat emojis, the hearts and smiley faces as they soar heavenward on the iphone screen. Her favourite poem is ‘Langour’.
11pm Write my Corona Virus Journal. Not a day has been missed. Words swing between sadness, weather, rants . . . and food . . . and anything that has touched me that day. I draw hedgehogs and moths in the margins, or sometimes write a Haiku.
1120pm Write my Poem a Day. This began on June 1st and I’m just shy of 60 poems. Totally raw and on the hoof. None edited. Some might have potential others are likely destined for the bin. But reading through them gives me a renewed sense of the rise and fall of our lives. Life’s footprint has become smaller in so many ways. I tell myself every day that small can be beautiful before I fall into dreamtime. In the morning I look for the little things.
The poem ‘Langour’ is from Billy Collins Nine Horses Collection (Picador, 2003)
