Category: Thoughts

My thoughts and views. These may have no relationship to reality.

Posted on

This is a ramble on how I think and feel.

Success is the holy grail to which we are expected to aspire. Be successful; realise your ambitions; have, set, and commit to our goals; be all you can be.


And could it boil down to something as simple as BE. You BE.


Out of being comes the experience of internal and external senses. Judgements arrived at and opinion formed, but with the realisation that everything is a head game.


How open are you to the influence of others and to what extent are you guilty of trying to be that really influential person.


We are unique yet some strive to be members of one or more tribes. Religion, politics, fashion, sports as spectators, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. We can be obsessive members. We think that the tribe will protect us, but it can end up controlling us, and not to our benefit.

Posted on

What’s up with me?

It’s too bad that I am the way I am. It’s a curse and a blessing. I have too many interests and I have too many interests. The blessing and curse as one.

Posted on

What is Hint Fiction?

hint fiction (n) : a story of 25 words or fewer that suggests a larger, more complex story – Robert Swartwood

That’s the definition as given by one of the leading lights of modern ultra short fiction. Does it go far enough? Possibly.

Hint fiction is not a posing of a what-if? question. It’s the barest of bones of a story; beginning, middle, and end. An oft quoted example is by Ernest Hemingway – For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn. A tale of death, sorrow, and moving on, perhaps. You have to fill in the blanks.

It means the reader has to do more work than with most other fiction. The piece therefore becomes a joint creative effort; the writer and the reader in the most intimate relationship of shared thought.

Posted on

This Lowrider is Already Broken – A talk by Noah Levine from Against the Stream

Noah Levine is a Buddhist Teacher working within the American Theravaden Tradition. I have found his talk entitled ‘This Lowrider is Already Broken’ very uplifting. It puts forward the position that even when a child is born you know that it will die as you will and that fancy new smart-phone or car or whatever will brake. Every living being will eventually die. Every thing will brake. The universality of impermanence, that is change, is the only certainty we have. So we should enjoy those moments in life and the pleasures we can get from our artefacts, knowing that one day they will be gone, and one day we, our friends, our children and on and on, will be gone.

Take joy in the moment.

Live now not in the past or the future.

NOW

Posted on

Wondering Quietly What To Do?

Nanowrimo has been great. I’ve done little writing but have felt liberated knowing that how I perform is down to me.  We react differently to pressure and sometimes ignoring it is the best thing to do. Common placed advice can and often does work. However sometimes there is a need for a different kind of strategy, a different way of thinking. Is that not how we break out of the mold, that prison of convention too often trodden. Is it not better to follow the road less traveled?

Posted on

Process or Progress?

Working from front to back

Top to bottom

Systematic, following the flow

Knowing what to do

Worry about “how to” later

–

Commit pen to paper

Make the idea manifest

Once it’s there in front of you

It can be improved

–

Work with something rather than nothing

Whatever you want to do

You can only become better by doing it

Again and again and again

–

Proper practice

Deep practice

Pushing the boundary

Find the limits of possibility

Try the allegedly impossible

–

Frameworks and structures

Instead of limiting

Can offer support.

Posted on

A thought for this evening

It’s high time for high tea

Tummy telling tales on me

Taste buds tantalized by tempting pastries

Tea brewing, masking away

Soon to be devoured in the usual fashion

Posted on

Why I write? Why do you write?

I can at least attempt to answer the first of these questions.

I write because I can clarify my thinking through the placing of pen on paper. I can express my emotions and remember that I did feel like that. Sometimes I feel so cold towards people that I need my poems to serve to tell me that I’m not that cold and distant. That I’m part of the human family and that I share the universal human condition which is simultaneously frightening and comforting.

The inevitability of death the only certainty we can plan for, the rest is up to serendipity and our own belief in ourselves…