Tara Heavey's Blog

The thoughts that move through me,

Are waves in the ocean,

Stirred by deeper forces,

I can but try to fathom.

They threaten as

They awe-inspire,

Constancy in motion,

Unable to stop them,

I just go with them.

The ancient sands of time,

Are what they roll onto,

This beach on which

A thousand souls have perished.

But I will not go under,

These waves will not drown me,

All I have to do is ride them,

Like a white sea stallion.

Let me write my way out of this.

Out of this city of devastating blows,

When there is nowhere else

To go

But the pure, blank page.

The last refuge,

Like the church of old,

A sacred place, where you dwell in protection,

From the outside world.

That threatens as it pulls,

That cannot invade,

At least in here,

If only here.

Where the good can come and congregate,

Against the bad,

Where we can re group,

And band together,

Chanting with our pens,

An incantation,

Against the forces that are banding up against us.

But they will find that they can not penetrate.

This strength that stands on the shoulders of giants,

And sings to future generations.

Of where we stand, in this our story,

And of how we will march forward.

Footprints on the sands of time are not made by sitting down.

They are when you’re a writer.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower – Albert Camus

She resisted us so long. Tried so hard not to write this. Not wanting to descend into cliche. The enemy of the fiction writer. All autumn long, she resisted. (All fall long, in deference to our maple and sequoia friends Stateside).

But she just can’t bloody help it. She’s been in the forest with us, you see, and we were showing off so damn much, we made it too hard for her to ignore us.

Look at our leaves as they glitter! Vibrant reds, rich golds, every shade of ochre, as we rain down on her head with heartbreaking elegance.

The finches move among us, darting and preparing. One lone dragonfly glides confidently by, we haven’t yet told him that summer is over. And the hornet hovers, so gravity defying, still but moving, a mini miracle, a horizontal masterpiece, glittering also.

Fairy toadstools gather, in clumps and villages at our feet, some turned orange and pointing upwards, like little umbrellas on a windy day.

We are awe.

We are silence.

A golden silence that surrounds and takes over.

The clouds, the light, the birds. The humble fly rendered incandescent, by this mystical light which captures us all.

The spiders cast their silver nets, hundreds and thousands of them, across the dormant gorse, as it congregates below us. The fox finds shelter, in this season. We wish him well, will be here for him.

Just as we will always be there for you.

As we whisper in our oneness.

The secrets of the ages.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon in his

Riding

‘The Windhover’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Read the whole poem, I urge you, I dare you.

I am tempted to transcribe it all, but that would be stealing from a dead man. But perhaps he wouldn’t mind.

I am contributing to his immortality, after all, a process he began with his poetry, probably not quite knowing what he was doing at the time.

He and I are connected across the ages now, holding hands across the page as I gaze in awestruck-ness at the kestrel — the windhover — as she exercises dominion over all she surveys. She is mistress of the sky, queen of the very air waves, in her element as I can only dream to be.

We think we’re smarter than her, more entitled to our segment of Earth, but she is unhindered by such arrogance, knows who she is without considering, she is all intent and instinct. Knows what she wants, knows how to get it, unshakable in her purpose.

The way she hangs suspended, then swoops down with such grace and ease, there is no flaw in design here, no cloudiness of vision. No thinking at all to get in her way. Just pure, crystal clear intention, laser focused unmuddied desire.

I long for such clarity.

I could never capture the glory of the kestrel the way that Hopkins did. Even he could not capture the true magnificence of the bird, which defies all words. Like the painter who tries to catch the light as it pours through the gaps in the leaves:

Shivelights and shadowtackle — Hopkins, again.

The most skilled artist of all, can only ever realize a pale imitation of the real thing. Because you can’t be in a painting the way you can be in a forest. That 3D, 4D, 5D experience, when the breeze blows through you, the birdsong fills your senses, the scent of sap that permeates and the crunching sensation beneath your feet. And surrounding you, enveloping you, the colour, the beauty, the light. Your eyes are changed by it. Your pupils contract to let in the blue as you and the sky become one.

I want her as my power animal. The totem of my soul. She can guide me in her gliding, in her riding of the air.

And I, in turn, will try to be true to my own wild self.

I know just how T.S. Eliot felt when he wrote down his words.

Not that my words are anything like his.

But I know the sacred combination of inspiration and application. How when you write about yourself, you write about every person under the sun. Writing provides that interconnection, for those of us who can find it a challenge to make a connection in ‘real life’.

We find our real life, our real, real, life on the page or on the screen. A realer life than we have ever known. It courses through us, along with the words that create their own independent universe — constellations on the nib of a pen or on the tips of our fingers. Rolling us to Eliot’s “overwhelming question”:

Oh do not ask “what is it?”, Let us go and make our visit.

(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

Visit it today, that place deep inside, that place that is always there.

Your sacred place.

Calling you.

Are you moving in the direction of who you really are?

Are you even moving at all?

Are you stuck in that same place that you’ve been in for so long, that sucks you in like sinking sand and prevents you from making progress?

You will know this from how you are feeling. From where you are on life’s crap-ometer. The worse you feel, the more stuck you are, the more you keep thinking those same old thoughts of gloom and unworthiness.

This drags you down even further. Now you are up to your neck in it. The feeling is so heavy.

You think you are being sensible, eminently logical. But you won’t get out of this pit by focusing on “reality”. What the world at large has taught you is by and large wrong.

You can only get out by looking at where you want to be. By exercising that weird and wonderful imagination of yours. By concentrating on your desires, by feeling your way in to them. What would if feel like to be so free, to float up like a balloon? That quick sand you thought was so real, to fade away into nothingness. You can kick you legs and you can move and instantly tell when you’re being dragged down again.

Like when you’re watching CNN.

Or when you’re focusing on what you don’t want.

When you’re talking to that person again, the one that sucks out all your energy and leaves you so deflated. They get on with their day, feeling so much better at your expense, while you can barely raise yourself from the chair.

The good news is you can pull yourself our of this quagmire.

You can throw yourself your own rope, you do not have to wait to be rescued. You are Cinderella, Prince Charming and The Fairy Godmother all rolled into one.

Begin to think more elevated thoughts. One thought after another, like stepping stones, gradually leading you to higher ground.

Treat yourself with kindness.

Know that you can’t save the world without saving yourself first.

Know that it is not your responsibility to save the world but simply to make yourself happy.

That by elevating yourself, you elevate all of us.

That by moving in the direction of who you really are, you take us all with you.

Closer still to that magical place of freedom and joy.

So you see these two roads

Paths –

Tracks –

How ever it is your inner eye chooses to visualize them.

They may be roughly similar or they might be vastly different. Either way, you are the one that has to choose — you and no one else.

Oh, you can ask for advice and when you do, it could come thick and fast. We humans love to give advice, dispensing wisdom like confetti, if it’s not our own lives that are affected. And you might also receive unasked for advice, from say a parent, spouse or parent-in-law, (see how I kept that gender neutral)!

The trouble with advice is that everyone has differing opinions, each has his own point of view, regurgitated from various incidents from their own lives and coloured by their own preferences and prejudices. So why ask? And crucially, why pay any attention? (Hint: don’t).

So what are the alternatives? You could always listen to that still, small voice inside, the one that seems to have all the answers. The one that you can hear through meditation, on a long, slow, quiet country walk. Or when you first wake up in the morning, or just as you are drifting off at night time. When you’re driving. In the shower (hint: don’t bring pen and paper in the shower with you). Any time when the monkey-mind has settled down.

Or you could take a different approach. Decide that whichever path you take, the journey is going to be magnificent. The reason being that you are going to be taking yourself with you. And who you are is a magical creature, spilling over with ideas and firing with joy on all cylinders.

So whether lined with dense undergrowth or clear and arching upwards, it doesn’t matter which path you take because you’re fully aligned with yourself.

So where are you in your life?

Is it where you expected to be? Do you have everything your heart desires?

I hope the latter is true for you. The former is unlikely for most of us. Because how can any one of us predict the vastness of life, as a child or as an adult?

Our preferences change wildly over time, which is how it is meant to be. It’s what gives life its sweet unpredictability. It’s what stops us from being bored. The excitement lies on the other side of fear. It’s only by jumping out of the aeroplanes of our life that we can truly appreciate the views on the way down.

I would never jump out of a plane for real, by the way. Only if it was on fire or if somebody pushed me. But I have jumped out of my share of psychological planes. Some of them were on fire at the time.

Lucky for me, physical courage and psychological courage are two very different things. A fear of heights doesn’t necessarily preclude you from reaching dizzying heights in your own personal life — from daring greatly. Courage comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s just putting the words down on the page. Pressing publish after bleeding your own truth.

Having everything your heart desires is overrated anyway. Yes, it’s great to get what you want — wonderful, in fact — time to revel in the satisfaction. But haven’t you noticed that once you get what you want, you start looking to the next thing that you want? There is nothing perverse in this and it doesn’t mean you are ungrateful. It just means you are being human.

We are hard wired for growth — constant movement and change. If this were not so, we would not have evolved as a species. So next time you reach your goal and you are only satisfied for what seems like ten minutes, (try and stretch it out a little maybe), don’t waste any time beating yourself up about it. Instead, realize that as a human being, this is what you’re hardwired for. This constant glorious expansion. Don’t bother looking back. Focus on the path ahead. The views are stunning.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works – Virginia Wolfe

You don’t have to be James Joyce. You don’t have to be Virginia Wolfe either. James Joyce has already been James Joyce, Virginia Wolfe has already been Virginia Wolfe. They’ve done their work on this Earth. Not it’s time for you to do your work — the soulful, inspired work of being you.

 No one else has your voice.

When the words flow through your pen onto the page, or through your fingertips onto the screen, they are your words and no one else’s, borne of your own life experiences, your own character, your own inner being and knowing. That’s the way it’s meant to be and we need your words. We need your unique point of view. We’ve already had James’s and Virginia’s.

Enrich the world with your words, if you know yourself to be a writer, if you know that this was what you were born to do.

You’ve heard that the pen is mightier than the sword, now use it not to pierce but to heal, to enlighten and uplift. By doing so you become part of the evolution, the forward motion, the upward spiral.

Writers throughout the century have known this, although surely no-one told them. Did you know that you are standing on the shoulders of giants? That the same impulse that pulsed through the writers of old pulses through your veins too. This compulsion to share, to explain and to be known. To contribute to the human race’s understanding of itself while wrestling with your own understanding. Why is it that our best ideas flow through the ink, as the blood flows through our veins, as the rivers flow to the sea, all part of the mighty life force?

Leo Rivas on unsplash

We are here in this physical form for a relatively short time and we feel we are here for a reason. And we attempt to solve these mysteries by writing about them. It’s a way to communicate, a way to connect, a way to sift and sort through the mysteries of our being. We might never come to the end of it, which is perhaps why this compulsion exists, a forever quest for understanding, always something to know. Inner discoveries to be made as exciting as an unknown Pharoah’s tomb or a part of the rain forest as yet unpenetrated. This inner wilderness is ours for the taking.

All you need is a pen. A humble sheet of paper.

So rest on the broad back of James. Allow yourself to be exhilarated by the artistry of Virginia, but use them as a launchpad for your own unique genius, for the words that are waiting to spill out and transform.

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race – James Joyce

I saw a butterfly today. Half her wing was missing, but still she was flying.

She didn’t seem to mind — or even notice. I thought of the quote by D.H.Lawrence:

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without having felt sorry for itself.

There’s a thought: self pity doesn’t exist in the entirety of nature, except in us humans. Neither does self analysis, for that matter, and still the creatures seem to get by fine without it. If my butterfly had a navel, she wouldn’t waste any time gazing at it. She would be far too busy flower hopping, from fireweed to knapweed, surely relishing the colour purple. And skittering about on the airwaves, doing her best to impersonate a flower petal come free, glorying in the sensation of the breeze on the wings that she does have.

Our cousins with roots don’t do too badly either. Think about those lilies of the field. Sit around in the field all day, but they don’t lack for anything.

When a tree dies, he slowly gets absorbed back into the earth, the earth from which he came. In the meantime, he provides a habitat for a multitude of flora and fauna, before becoming perhaps a source of heat for us or a beautiful table to eat upon. I wouldn’t mind being so useful myself. So uncomplaining and accepting.

There seems to be a teaching here. Something about the subtle art of allowing.

I might listen.