I’ve been celebrating the “energy” in a friend – how it alights upon the borders of the lives of others, and also upon their inner lives, and their senses.

Rather like the occasional conjoining of the rainbow-reflective bubbles my grandchildren love to blow on sunny summer days – as their parents did before them, and my siblings and I, and our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents – the energy in us and in all creation is always and everywhere gliding into the orbits of life-energy in others.

And sometimes the connection raises a smile, a sudden awareness, an appreciation. Even where eye-contact is ordinarily avoided. Even in the rush and tumble of the steep-rising elevator in the London Underground station I rose upwards and out of the other day there is, sometimes, marvellously if fleetingly, a deep, deep recognition of a oneness, a unity in and amongst extraordinary diversity. In the sense of poetry’s meaning “to make something” every expression of life is a unique and distinctive contribution to the richness and precision of the poetic.

In the process of writing, your energy gradually begins appearing in every line; eventually the lines don’t resemble anyone else’s because they are all composed of your energy

Robert Bly

Your energy – which is also shared energy – variously expressed, through you and through me, underground, and upwards and onwards, to the highway and the light.