Tag: illumination

Quietening

~ windinmywheels ~ 3 Comments
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watching a candle
illuminate a dark space
quietens my soul

Alongside a quiet watching there’s quite often a quiet listening – and we may thereby find ourselves ‘illuminated’ inside and out.

Several times today I have come across observations about the high state of anxiety that afflicts vast swathes of our humankind.

Human anxiety often arises from an acute sense of helplessness – our inability to change innumerable situations we dearly wish could be changed.

My mental chatter exacerbates anxiety and does little or nothing to help anyone. So I seek, and invite others to seek, quietening from a candle.

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Literary observers

~ windinmywheels ~ 4 Comments
Photo at Pexels

without a book I
might not look as deeply at
others’ witnessing

The light on the page often corresponds with the warming illumination within – you’ll know the feeling.

Where in the world would I be without access to books (and – just as thankfully – to blogs these days) and the observation of, and witnessing to life that I encounter daily in others’ considered words and between lines; in sketched images, photography, and world-class art; in delightful etymological rabbit holes; between a book’s covers and its silent spaces?

In my library I keep close company with an extraordinary community of writers through the ages, some ancient, many modern, all bearing gifts – and I am forever grateful to each and all who introduced me to them …

Illumination

~ windinmywheels ~ 3 Comments

hans christian andersen.png

Hans Christian Andersen by Anne Grahame Johnstone – see art.co.uk

for MWG

Green velvet smoking jacket
svelte and warm and treasured
since Cambridge
the pool of light that quickened
the grain in his oak desk was
as much a portal for him
into other worlds as was the
oak door through which he entered
his library at every
opportunity

Sometimes the desk supported
the console of a racing carriage and
at others the cockpit of
a spaceship from the pen of
Leonardo da Vinci and
at others still the pool of light
upon the desk resembled that upon
the spectacles of a tiny Rumpelstiltskin
or the chestnut hair of Lydia
the one and only he’d ever
truly adored

And his pen added a carrot-nose
to a snowman fashioned
by his father and the slowing
pace of his seventy-five year
old legs was rejuvenated as
his pen pointed brighter than
candle flame into the
archives of an always fertile mind

His eyes could appear as blank
black discs in a handsome patrician visage
when observed at the desk from
eventide street window but
only because there they gazed
inward, remembering, rejoicing
resurrecting realities borne of
fairy tales of wingéd truth

SRM