I’m Back

Wow! It feels strange to be writing in my blog again after so long. I notice I still have an audience and people are regularly looking at my old posts, so I decided I should pull myself out of my reverie and start posting again. The Weekly Photo Challenge had been my main prompt for posting and upon its demise I lost some of my enthusiasm. I also started a new site for my business ‘Perth Emmett and Healing Therapies‘, although I haven’t done many posts on that either!

When I look back to why I started my blog, it was to write. The photos were almost a cop-out, even though they perhaps took almost as much time to take, choose and prepare as the writing did. I still have lots of political rants in me, many photos and thoughts from my more recent travels, and some gentler more exploratory words I’d like to write.

So here’s a little taster …

Reverie or Sleeping Buddha?

Siem Reap, Cambodia

 

Anticipation

The virgin pages of an unopened notebook.

Time to write.

Time to savour new thoughts and words.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/anticipation/

Platitudes and Silence

Staring through the window I sit

nursing a mug of tea.

The swish of tyres after recent rain

and the squawks of  parakeets

foraging in the flame tree

are background noise to my thoughts.

Thoughts of disbelief.

Thoughts of anger.

Colours mute as the sun descends.

Long shadows fall across the yard.

My phone beeps, more news.

I don’t look.

Enough bad news for one day.

‘Atrocities believed to have happened on Nauru.’

Believed to?

How can a government be so callous,

so cold,

so lacking in compassion?

I don’t want news.

I want answers.

But I don’t get answers.

All we get are platitudes

and silence.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/silence/

 

Notebooks

I think even if I was never to be published my notebooks would be a witness to my writing. More tangible than the digital word and more private in that they were never meant to be read by anyone other than me.

There were hardback books, soft books, large books, small books, exercise books and note pads. In the beginning I diarised and doodled, sometime I’d stick in a ticket or something meaningful – to me at least. Other times I’d try to draw something  that I had failed to describe in words or had been unable to record in a photograph. Fragments of the story of my life.

Even after our first computer it still felt good to fill a page with words, especially the private words only I wanted to bear witness to. Over the years it wasn’t just one computer in the household, but laptops and other devices appeared. My digital efforts increased as the pen lay dormant. But I was always drawn to a  beautiful notebook, I’d run my fingers over the blank page and feel the weight of quality paper.

Now I flit between both worlds. My writings are more capacious and based in fiction. The words often need rearranging, the pages change as the editing takes over and I find I need the speed of a computer. Those immediate thoughts or sparks of ideas I have to write down when I’m out and about, fill the small notebooks, leather-bound or fabric covered, chosen carefully for their beauty and size, that take turns to sit in my handbag. Sometimes these jottings are transferred to join the longer stories and manuscripts that build up on my computer, or they join the growing pile of memories and stories that line a drawer, a cupboard and a shelf of a bookcase.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/discover-challenges/witness/

Feet

 

 

 

Beneath the reddening clouds

Water turns steel grey

Sun soaked dark rocks

Beneath the feet

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/beneath-your-feet/