Awakening

April 14, 2022April 25, 2022 ~ windinmywheels ~ 4 Comments

Build it, and it will come
Empty out a drawer for someone
They will fill it
Share your work every day
People will find it
Walk and your legs will strengthen
Open your hours and your days will fill
Speak as though you’ve arrived
And reality will realign

Brianna Wiest
Salt Water

Spring’s awakening in Edinburgh is wonderfully underway and I’ve been out and about early. Delicious coffee and cake @kates_edinburgh preceded one of my favourite sorts of morning: an amble – in no particular rush and in no particular direction. This is a city that ‘offers itself to your imagination’ (as Mary Oliver might have said of it) – no matter where one roams. Birdsong everywhere speaks today of their having ‘arrived’ (again) and of the energetic building of nests in empty spaces. A beautiful new coffee shop shares its work every day and ‘people will find it.’ My legs do grow stronger, and hours are containers for rich colours and conversations. I speak of my thankfulness and – awakening thereby – the realities of a new season do indeed ‘realign.’

Yes, everything

November 23, 2021November 23, 2021 ~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments

click on all images once / twice to enlarge

They said ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
Wallace Stevens
The Man With The Blue Guitar

I’m slightly coy (I don’t know why) about admitting that since yesterday’s post I’ve continued hour upon hour to be entranced by the idea of the imaginable – of design, of Galway Kinnell’s ‘everything flowers from within.’

I mean, imagine repeating that to young children, from as early as possible: that what comes forth from people’s imaginations – their own ‘designs for life’ included – are, literally, among the great wonders of the world.

And then imagine that being repeated in adult lives, over and over again, a repetition that would forever stretch their own imaginations: that you continue to have endless possibilities for creativity, in every second of your life, if you will hear the sometimes quiet voice of your imagination.

And then imagine really believing this yourself / myself. The thought sets heart and mind and soul alight: indeed our very bodies react to it. We know that our capacity for imagination is without limits – and we want to get on with the creative business of imagining some more.

Every single image in this carefully curated collection today contains dozens (at least!) of design elements that started out life in imagination, human, or that of The Great Imagination, flowering from within.

If you’ve time today, or in the next day or so, make a cup of something you love. Sit down with it and then spend a couple of minutes with each of these photographs. What’s going on in your imagination as you stay with them? Can you feel energising welling up? Warmth? Wonder? Delight? Which stir you most? What sights, sounds, people, animals, come to mind? What new moments are you going to design, to bring into the light, by the time you’ve finished your hot chocolate? May the joy of your own design flower from within you – today.

Taste and see

March 13, 2019April 3, 2019 ~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments

some people can dream
up a birthday cake out of
their imagination

173

Boxed?

February 9, 2019April 5, 2019 ~ windinmywheels ~ Leave a comment

where might our inner
lives lead beyond the bounds of
imagined boxes?

141

Repeat often

February 8, 2019April 5, 2019 ~ windinmywheels ~ 1 Comment

slow down – close your eyes
for ten seconds – then name the
colours you might paint

140

Night light

January 16, 2019 ~ windinmywheels ~ Leave a comment

it’s a wonderful
world in which teddy bears read
us bedtime stories

SRM – MM Haiku 117 Day 147

Envisioning

January 11, 2019January 11, 2019 ~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments

what would you place in
this minimalist space to
make of it a home?

SRM – MM Haiku 112 Day 142

Interlude | just for the joy …

November 19, 2018April 3, 2019 ~ windinmywheels ~ Leave a comment

‘Do you ever just close your eyes on winter evenings to remember summer?’ my friend asked me, earlier today, with a wistful look in her eyes. ‘On winter evenings, certainly,’ I replied, ‘and pretty much most mornings, too.’

Sure enough, I’m an advocate of living in the present, but part of the joy of living now is time found here to re-member the past, thereby inspired to breathe deep today, and begin to imagine and to shape the next second or two, as we do.

So here’s a little revisiting Summer ’16. You’re invited to stay here, now, for a little space, and – hopefully – some present grace …

Radical

I’ve tried to count
your petals but lose
track each time
around and recall
that numbers never
touched my senses
with clarity of cold
or warmth or taste or
touch or sight or
scent or sound and
after rain this late
summer morning

I note that tall
and elegant you’re
not much of an
accountant either
and for you too
life is celebrated
sometimes by each of
these but in the main
by radically returning
your searching face to
life-raising energy
in sunlight

SRM

From dust

March 15, 2017March 16, 2017 ~ windinmywheels ~ 2 Comments

click images to enlarge

It was warm and we were ambling. Glorious cloud formations floated in the blue dome above us and I suppose I must have been waxing lyrical a bit! ‘Where does your imagination come from?’ my friend asked. ‘From dust,’ I replied immediately. ‘Or, to be more precise, from dust flecks in my eyes.’

Everyone’s experienced them. Perhaps lying in sunshine, on a freshly mown lawn in August. I didn’t know then, as a very small boy, about the Hebrew vision of Creation formed out of dust. But, in company with summer daydreamers all over the world, I could see – behind closed eyelids – little floating flecks of dust (or whatever it is that floats there) and thus began the habit of a lifetime: ‘watching’ a Creator’s playtimes. The beginnings of meditation, one might say. Knowing with a faith-full certainty that there are colours and causes, glories and great wonders, lights and shades of darkness, silences and sounds, warmth and coolness, profound music and mysteries, that are already ‘accessible’ to us long before we complicate our lives by straining (or training!) to see, or hear, or smell, or touch, or taste.

And in that garden ‘knowing’ I learned that faith is about something deeper and greater than humankind could possibly draw ultimate boundaries around. So, for me, our philosophical, political and religious convulsions, and our loves and hates – important though they be – are situated in a space much larger and freer than we usually inhabit.

And here, and there, in the poetry of eternal creativity, I anticipate, I imagine, and whether my eyes are closed or open, for me and for all of us, I hope. Today’s flecks of dust – ourselves and all created things – will be reshaped for the joy of creation.