Thresholds Project take two

 

Today, as I thought of the constant rain and the humidity sleeking the leaves outside, and of my safeness and shelter inside, I started thinking of the Thresholds Project from a while ago. It came to nothing, as D and I were forced to move house suddenly, and a few other things went agley.

I wondered now, if I shouldn’t try a less ambitious version. Maybe print, instead of video? To those who agreed to submit before I flaked out – would you like to submit now? I know I’ve been thinking of what might have been, what you might have chosen to send.

To new writers and poets of differing stripes – would you like to be involved? Check the link for more details.

 

I’d love to throw a real, IRL really real reading, but since most of the writerly people I admire are states-or-Canada-side or elsewhere home and abroad, and I am in Edinburgh, it would not be a satisfying event. It would probably be me in a pub drinking a nice whisky or two, reading your poems/flashes/pieces quietly but enthusiastically to myself.

BUT ANYWAY. Submit to wheresthebread[@]hotmail.com. Ask any questions here in the comments or to that address. And thank you for your patience with me.

Flowers in the dark

 

I don’t know what type of flowers these are (wild garlic perhaps) – they are growing along a side path to a wealthy and hidden mews/servants’ quarters housing development across the road from Loch Lomond. My friends and I were staying at the adjacent youth hostel, a former mansion built in 1866 and given to the people by a group of American G.Is who stayed there during the war and fell in love. The grounds are gorgeous in that slightly overblown, just clipped back into order sort of a way. The mansion itself – well, that’s for another post. But here is a picture in the grandness of the dark:

 

There is something a little unsettling about flowers growing in the dark, I think. Though they do all the time, those which cannot entirely close up their petals. I’m thinking of boundaries again. 10.30pm. Dusk, when these pictures were taken, is so long, it is like another form entirely – day, night, dusk, dawn, each given their full place in Scotland, in Summer.

 

 

It’s something I missed while living in the states. NYC in Summer is the most accepting or kind at dusk, but this time is contracted, happens at 8 or so. The gloaming is an unsteady time when everything is beautiful in a poignant way.

 

 

Perhaps I’m embuing it with symbolism equivalent to the Cherry Blossom season in Japan, I do not know enough to say (only that I would love to go to Japan, to the mountains, to see early morning blossoms falling slowly in a moment that seems to extend into infinity and is in fact so brief). Perhaps there should be a little light mist or smirr too. Perfection is sometimes an element of the weather.

 

 

 

More on the mock-castle and adventures in hillwalking another time, when I’ve fully recovered from the whole thing.

Signal Clear

Moss growing in the words carved on a grave flagstone, Dunbar. Contrast turned way up to help with reading

I have been trying to read what the stone above says on it – Here lyes haste Patrick…who…this life…take(?)… – if anyone is good at decoding the worn and the moss grown, please chime in (like the bells of a cathedral). I am interested in those spaces mutated by time and nature, the worn, the seeded, the words interrupted by lichens and the washing away of stone by the weather.

 

This in contrast to the living spaces some of you have so kindly shared. It makes for an interesting and incomplete dichotomy, between the living line (word brush pencil) and the dead.  In both, the continuity is change: Lyra’s train seat which she leaves and returns to, a seat which is hers and different each time.  Anna Fonte’s chair, which is still in the picture as it once was, now moved (that makes it sound terribly serious). Think of your papers, ephemera,  work in motion, creativity manifest. The changeability and constant of human needs and wants: for a light-soaked view; for home comforts; for the sweet consolations of pets at our feet; for a good drink of water; for our words and images to mean, endure, be transferred on.

 

I think of how I am constructing characters who must always place and replace themselves within this frame, of the living and the remaining and the sometimes terrible inevitable pace of change. I think of how they must make their peace, and how hard that is sometimes.

 

For myself, I think of how much information I am taking in on a daily basis – how many words, how many sights that fire, overfire my brain.  Which is my way of coming to – how I need a short break, after all these encounters. Insightful as they have been, I need now to sit and think, instead of search and see. Not for long, just to give myself time to read the words and the images with due diligence, instead of at break-neck. I’ll be light as a ghost till then, back to full solidity at some point next week.