Why hello

and Happy New Year

Hello,

Do you choose a word of the year? I do and I usually struggle to find my word. This year though, it was really, really easy.

I got an email earlier in the week from the London Writers Salon which started with an extract from a conversation with the poet Mary Oliver, who I have recently become obsessed with.

“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.”

Solitude. Concentration without interruptions. A place to chew pencils. The ideal conditions for creativity. Conditions that are totally elusive most of the time to ordinary people. So my word for 2022 is solitude coz this is absolutely what I am craving and what I somehow need to learn to create for myself.

Mary Oliver. A few weeks ago I listened to a podcast about writing that discussed the need for writers to read lots of poetry to write better descriptions, so I upped by poetry reading and in doing so discovered Mary Oliver. I listened to a BBC programme about her and her work which is just beautiful, listen with tissues! The programme includes a reading of the poem “Wild Geese" and it got me hooked on Mary’s work. I wish it hadn’t take me 51 years to find her. Equal access to the arts hey, that’s a discussion for another day.

Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

I think, we are all just in the family of things while the world goes on.

Happy 2022 my friends.