Peace be with you (c) June Perkins all rights reserved
Just wanted to share a recent photograph hinting at some of the amazing clouds and sunsets we have been having.
We head into the holidays with a lot of progress in repairs in our area from the cyclone, but still a long way to go for full recovery, what must it be like in Christchurch and Japan!
I think I’ll contact a couple of friends and invite them to guest blog. I follow their story on facebook and check up on them there.
Busily working on some projects for next year, and looking forward to the holidays with my family.
The school year is over today and looking back I am so proud of my humble kids for their achievements with my daughter winning academic excellence champion of her whole school four years in a row, and my youngest son winning most overall improved. My eldest son won a geography award and completed a research project and wonderful presentation on the physics of guitar.
When you consider what they have been through that is pretty amazing they have kept everything up and been able to excel under adversity.
We are all looking forward to next year and what the future brings. We dream and plan, and reflect. Peace be with you and yours.
Cloud studies (c) June Perkins, all rights reserved
‘My year in 25 pics” – Photographic Journalling – June Perkins
I was introduced to keeping journals in my primary school, but from the very beginning I kept a public journal and a private one.
My public journal was full of tales of excursions, interesting food and the mundane things of everyday life. My private journal was where I poured out where I felt about the world, family, my annoying brothers and how I was getting along, or not getting along with my parents.
Teenagers. I remember the intensity of my teenage self, writing page upon page as if her life depended on it.
I didn’t keep these journals – they felt like excess baggage when I left home and I destroyed them. I wanted to move on into adult hood unencumbered by my childhood writings. It makes me sad to think I threw my childhood and teenage written self out, how fascinating it would be to meet these two beings today and see what they were truly like.
I do remember some of my entries though. I would write in ‘purple’ language inspired by Prince and the album ‘Purple Rain’which a friend of mine was into. I didn’t actually own the albums just listened to them at her house. I wrote in shades of purple pen and used abbreviations similiar to text speak, and littered with hearts.
I would count the number of times my favourite crush looked at me, as it this all held some deeper meaning. What a funny thing I was, but I suppose many girls do this.
Sometimes I would write of my dreams for the future – mostly I remember wanting to be a writer and own a typewriter – this was before the advent of laptops.
Today I keep a blog, and a notebook journal. I still like to feel the pen scrawling across paper.
My spaces are private and public. I keep some of what I feel to myself but often share what is private because I feel it will help someone somewhere with their journey.
So I write about dealing with life, small towns, parenting, and every now and then undertake ‘research’ either from observation, history, travel or other books.
Sometimes I write songs, and they are a mix of private and public experiences. Yet I don’t always have to live in my own experience, because sometimes it is good to imagine beyond.
This is why writing ‘fantasy’ interests me. Here I can be inventor of worlds, people and events, create symmetry and explore all that interests me. It is not important for the reader to understand me, but more that they can inhabit the world that comes into being in this kind of writing.
Sometimes a break from the ‘self’of writing in autobiography is a very welcome writing space. Here I am the little girl walking on the wall not merely pretending to be Joan of Arc but actually being here in a speculative fiction piece where she walks around my neighbourhood looking for a cause.
So there you have met the beginnings of my journal, imaginary, private and public. Today I mix these writing palettes and add to it multimedia and cyberspace. I hang onto my written creations, and file them, box them, disk them, and return to them. Every now and then I discover or am given childhood writings. My Dad saved a poetry collection from my childhood and gave me the exercise book full of handwritten and typed poems. I enjoyed meeting my childhood and adolescent writing self.
My imagination conjures these two beings and reexamines the lost pages until the journals appear in front of me. I can still open those pages because I am the one who lived the life that wrote them.
Today photography plays an important part in my journaling.
In the last few months I have been mostly privately writing poems about the experience of Yasi and its aftermath.
I haven’t been sharing too many of them on my blog or anywhere for that matter but here are two recent ones, which are about the experience of being more fully recovered and whole since the cyclone.
I am developing both of these into songs and recently sang Shadows into Light to the Licuala Winq Writers.
11.11.11 November Song
I’m thinkin’of the houses that lost their rooves
All the world’s children who lose their homes
I’m thinkin’of the songmakers tryin’change the world
Dylan and his questions blowin’ in the wind
All those November songs we sing
All those moments happenin’right now
Songs come now clear the pain
Wash away memories in the rain
I’m seein’ the buildings slowly rising up
I’m rememberin’ things that came and knocked them down.
I’m thinkin’ of people healing broken hearts
Practical angels giving people their wings
I’m thinkin’ of red poppies for each soldier lost
Grieving young widows and what wars cost
Can’t stop dreaming
Can’t stop believin’
Can’t stop buildin’
Must go on hopin’
For
love
answers
life
laughter
dreams
calm
and peace
Tree Reaching - June Perkins
Shadows into Light
There are days when you can play
with shadows to see the light
You can find these on the journeys past cane and
fallen down trees
Life has corners you can’t see
Twists and turns
Still photography
Sometimes we don’t see connections
We go and miss
the shimmering
Sometimes we don’t see the beauty
We’ve forgotten how to feel
You can chase the sunlight across the window panes
Where do you find the happiness buzz? Where do you find words and images to express this?
I ask myself this when I am having days that seem challenging.
I know that there are people both worse off and better off. Nothing is gained by comparisons of guilt, privilege or pity. Riches come and go, poverty could crush someone and yet some people will always find happiness regardless of what life does to them.
What makes you happy might not make me happy and vis versa but still to think and write of the happiness we feel is to alter the dynamic of all the writing and reality of misery in our world.
I acknowledge, sadness, grief, misery and all those things that come to all of us at some stage but happiness – I welcome! Happiness and joy make so much more possible. Yet my happiness should not be someone else’s misery!
Sorrow for anyone without happiness motivates me to seek something to make them happier. Although we all know people who are bottomless pits of sadness and negativity and for them we have a big challenge to find a salve to their sores. This is where creativity can play an integral role.
So for my top list of happiness:
1) Doing something caring for others – that will make a difference in their lives.
2) Finding news words and music for a song
3) Seeing the positive in every situation and learning virtues from it to enact in life
4) Remembering that a deeper purpose motivates – for me we are all put here to know and love God, the great spirit and this means seeing beyond ourselves but also working on true knowledge of our selves
5) Being with my family and close friends and doing fun and constructive things together that help change ourselves and the world
6) Listening to inspiring songs and watching inspiring movies
7) Gardening and weeding and thinking about this as a metaphor for life
8) Writing, blogging and creating collages – just anything creative and imaginative with words, images, and now video.
9) Listening to interesting stories
10) Having a vision that leads to a plan and action…
Just how do you find inspiration in your writing? This question always intrigues me because so many people say ‘I have nothing to write about. ‘
Although I am not a gambler and never will be, I do gamble with words. I will write about anything that pops into my head and see where it takes me. Of course not all of this will make it into my blog or facebook, but it does keep my mind nimble and open.
One way to really fire myself up is looking at photographs of my family’s activities and our garden or nature walks. I find myself floating through the images like some creative sleepwalker walking through dreams. The constant theme here is gardens, and I then think of ‘secret gardens’, my mother’s garden and all the gardens of my childhood. I free word form and move onto colour, dimension, shape and think of every tropical plant I know. What is the symbology of the flowers? The photographs heighten my memory of the visuals of a scene and I can use it like a writing notebook to inspire some words.
Another way to move my mind into a creative space, although sometimes it is just too much to do this when the news is particularly depressing, is to listen to news broadcasts and surf the net. At the moment the hot topics are the apology of the Queen to Ireland and planking. Planking is a craze that is killing people, as they seek a more and more outrageous picture. Planking is making yourself look like a plank, flat and dead and posing in an outrageous place, like a balcony or a fence. It has been becoming more and more deadly. I expect a television show to have a planking incident in it very soon. Maybe someone will write a short story about the day in the life of a planker. The police are not impressed and many want it banned.
For some reason I think of a trip to a gallery where we saw photographs of a man taking his shoes for a walk like a puppy and also his photographs of people’s reactions. Maybe people should take actual planks and place them somewhere and that would be hopefully safer, although perhaps they would find a way to make that dangerous too.
Another way I look for things to write about is to read- internet or physical books on any topic that appeals whether it be poetry, geography, recipes, inspiring and funny quotes. I am idea surfing. I can’t imagine anything more fun than this. I have started to carry around a notebook and jot things down in it. It is another treasure trove. Do you ever have rhyming hour? I do, sometimes I find I can rhyme endlessly or have a beat in my head that won’t quit and I simply have to stop and write when that happens.
Today I found the story of Gauguin caught my eye, and all morning I had been researching, or procrastinating, and something in looking at his paintings sparked a story idea. It began in a simple way and then layers appeared and I knew this was the writing wave I had to hop on for the day.
It was glorious to overcome my writing inertia. To say – yes, you can and must write, but you also have to learn to float, and surf, creative walk and then the words will come to you. Epiphany! These are moments of epiphany.
This week has also been a week of working with the power of the edit. I spent a whole day editing something and lost myself in shaping, pruning and making every word work. Now this is something I don’t really do on my blog – I freely admit it. The blog is free flow, working writers journal, meditation, resource. But what if I took the blog and polished it, shaped it, made a book out of it. I can see that this is well and truly possible.
Ah the gift of the blog. It teaches me to write everyday and that the stories will present themselves if I have the faith to look for them.
June Paisa Perkins 