Dealing with the Ogre in our lives.

Last Sunday it was our harvest festival at church and Shammy (my student minister) and I told a variety of stories about people struggling to survive in conditions of drought and famine and how we help them. As part of my address I told a parable that I have heard on a few occasions lately.  When I hear a story more than once I tend to think that something is trying to be heard and it was so with this particular story.  It is called “The Ogre Story” and comes in a variety of forms. The story I told goes like this:

One day a villager is walking by the river early one morning. 

                                      
                                           

The villager looks out into the water and sees a baby floating down the river. Horrified he races into the water, grabs the baby, and brings the baby to shore. The baby is fine.
Relieved, he  looks back into the water and sees another baby floating down the water. The villager again dives into the water and rescues this baby as well.
Once more, the villager looks into the water... and sees dozens of babies floating down the river. The villager calls out an alarm, and the entire village comes running to the river to rescue as many babies as they can before the water carries them away.
The community mobilizes to save the babies from peril. But, no sooner do they save this set of babies, than another dozen babies are found to be floating down the river, in danger. No matter how many times the villagers save the babies, there are always more and more babies floating down the river that need to be saved. 
                                                       
It turns out there is an ogre upstream that is throwing babies in the river. 
                                                            
The babies keep on coming because nobody is going upstream to stop the ogre who is throwing the babies into the water. The villagers are mobilized, they are doing things to help and they even get quite good at helping and providing for the rescued babies; but (and this is a really big but) there is one real problem they're not addressing. The root of the problem is that they are not travelling upstream to tackle the ogre who is throwing the babies into the river.

I am sure that it is evident how this tied in with the question of aid for communities with problems such as drought and famine, and it was a good story to tell in this context but the story has stayed with me.  It has nagged at my mind until I suddenly realised that there is a much wider application for this story.  We all have in our lives an ogre upstream chucking babies into the river and we may have become quite adept at dealing with the babies as they float downstream, but are we dealing with the root of the problem?  


How many of us venture upstream to tackle the ogre in our lives? 


Do we even recognise the existence of the ogre?  I am not so sure that I do.  At the moment my life seems good.  I am doing a job that I love, I am developing new and exciting creative skills with my hobbies of quilting, knitting, painting and poetry writing and I have people around me that I love, and who love me.  But in spite of all this there are things that niggle away at the back of my mind threatening to bubble to the surface and upset the equilibrium.  

I need to find the ogre that is upstream in my life.

I am not sure where to begin but feel inspired by some words of wisdom by Rumi:
Heart, you are lost: but there's a parh
From the lover to love, hidden
But visible.  World's blaze round you.
Don't shrink; the path's hidden, but yours.

          
The path to find that ogre in my life may be hidden but with the strength of my faith, the love in my heart and the goodness of life that is with me at this moment the path will hopefully become clear.

The words I want to write . . .

Having been at summer school all week there has been a plethera of words, everywhere we turn there are words, words and more words.  Always thought provoking, always stimulating but always too many to absorb so maybe it was me being perverse that made me choose to go to Nancy's writing workshop this afternoon - as if my brain hadn't already had a surfeit of words.

Writing remains a challenge, unless of course it is for a sermon, but creative stuff still scares me in spite of all the groups I go to and all the times I sit down and try to conquer my fears.  I know they are irrational and that there are words inside me wanting to come out.  Nancy spoke to us about metaphor and simile and then told us to go away and write - so that is what I tried to do and eventually this is what came out.

The words I want to write . . .                                  

The words I want to write are yours,

sounding better to my ear

than words that drip from my pen.

I find the voice in my heart

is evading me once again.

It happens all the time.

the pen hovers above the page

the mind is blank,

Yet. . .

something inside aches to get out.

The body, it too speaks lies.

I am a different me,

not the one you see

or that gazes from inside the looking glass.

Would that it reflected the inside me.

Writing now,

I shut my eyes and

breathe in,

deep and slow.

There are no pictures 

just an eternal darkness.

No stars,

pinpricks of light,

to pierce the gloom.

They are trapped,

trapped deep inside;

wanting to escape

not quite knowing how. . .

Once more the pen hovers . . . 

still . . .

I breathe again . . .

Pen,                 poised,            above the page,

in ready expectation.

There is nothing . . .

No thing at all . . .

The words I want to write are yours

You – the one with the voice.

(of course the voice is mine!!)

If you want to write about . . .

Yesterday saw me at writing group once again.  I am feeling less insecure about putting pen to paper and find I look forward to the monthly creative writing session with Norm and Robin, who certainly challenge us in our writing.  We started with a debate about capitals at the beginnings of lines of poetry wich proved quite lively and I remain firmly on the fence - it depends on the poem and the poet and I always did like e e cummings.  The debate found us looking at various poems - DULCE ET DECORUM EST and DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT, to name just two.

Then the challenge. . . .

Norm always sets us a challenge.

We had read Paul Simon's lyrics 'IF YOU WANT TO WRITE A SONG ABOUT THE MOON' and the transcript of an interview about how he writes his songs that he did with Norm in 1984.
Then Norm asked us to write our own 'If you want to write about . . . ' but the challenge didn't stop there he gave us each our own individual subject.
I knew he was going to challenge me as he paused before he said 'The Power of Three'. I gulped and a couple of people who know I am a 'Unitarian' Minister laughed.  To give him some credit I don't think Norm knows about Unitarianism - he just knows that I'm a minister. So he probably thought the subject would throw up some profound religious stuff; and I suppose that if I had more than five minutes to come up with something I would have written a poem that spoke about how three is alien to me in so many ways and that for me it is all about one. But sometimes I try to keep the ministerial me separate to the writer when I am in this group.

So this is what I wrote:

If you want to write about the power of three
then think about a cube.
Each face a dimension on it's own
ironing out the flatness of your world.
If you want to write about the power of three
move away from the limitations of the page
and its' two dimensional reality.


And if you want to write about your life
then think about duality;
up and down,
forward, backward,
in and out;
three pairs that point inevitably
to . . . not three . . . not two 
but one, the one that is me!

After the writing we shared our poems and there was considerable surprise when it came to mine - I think everyone had also expected something religious.  But after the session, for the first time people started asking me about Unitarianism and how it was different, and why was the 'power of three' so funny in my context.  They were truly interested in why I hadn't written religiously.

So thank you Norm, and you know what

If you want to write about Religion
don't and you'll speak about it anyway.

Openings . . . & . . . Closings

Recently I have attended two writing workshops and one activity was to look at opening sentences and closing sentences.  We were talking about novels and stories but today I just picked up a collection of poems and started looking at the opening and closing sentences of those. Some of you may know of the phenomena about being able to read words as long as the first and last letter are correct regardless of what comes inbetween - try it if you don't believe me - and I wondered if this idea can be extended to poetry.  I am not saying of course that one can get the whole poem from the first and the last but I wondered if the poems could still speak to me in some way. . .

 I was quite surprised by some of results. - (Oh and I cheated a bit because punctuation in poetry is something else. . . if it is there at all that is!)

Here are just a few.

'Meeting Point' by Louis Macneice

Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.

. . . . . . 6 verses inbetween . . . . . .

Time  was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.

'Bleep' by Jackie Kay

I am the unreal voice speaking.
. . .

. . .
See my nose, it used to be a tomato.

' What the Chairman told Tom' by Basil Bunting

Poetry? It's a hobby. 
. . . 


. . .
Go and find work.

'This Compost' by Walt Whitman

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
. . . .

. . . .

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

Norman's question in the workshop was - does the opening sentence make you want to read more?
My question is - does the opening sentence connect with the closing one, do they speak with one voice?

Of course this is all just musings. . . . it is me tring to avoid working!!

Oh yes and here is an example of the word thing!!

Arocdnicg to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm. Tihs is buseace the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amazing isn't it!!

Reflection on an exhibition

On Tuesday 5th July with some fellow ministers I visited the Rene Magritte exhibition at the Liverpool Tate.  This is the resulting reflection I wrote on my return.

Reflection on an exhibition 

Today I wandered through another’s thoughts…

looked with a stranger’s eyes

into a landscape of dreams . . .

 a world where shrouded lovers kiss, locked in a blind embrace. . .

where day is in the night and night within the day

– together –

playing with the light,

the time,

the space . . .

where birds fly in the clouds and clouds float in the birds –

perception all awry . . .

What is reality?

Suspend disbelief. . .

Realise the impossible . . .

Here thought is made visible.

In the paint anything can exist and

it really is raining men and

a woman offers up a pubic kiss.

Looking up the umbrella contains the clouds

inside, outside, in . . .

The artist thinks it into existence 
and the art is poetry in the making

portraying the imagined,

unimagined glimpses of reality,

hidden in surreal landscapes of the mind . . ,  

creative thought. . .

Mystery lies under the visible reality of the world. . .

Real life is always something else,

something that does not exist.

What is unreal now. . .

 is . . .

“For the first time my eyes saw thought.”

“. . . I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.” 
The artist said.

“The image is just a picture

and had I written 
“this is a pipe”

I would have been lying.”

I looked through someone else’s eyes today

and all I really know is . . .

This is not a pipe.
 .......................................................................................................................................................



some images that inspired this poem: