This morning the air is already warm. It carries strong floral notes and the scent of someone’s freshly brewed coffee.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a small animal in the sky. I say it is Ronnie jumping for joy with a pompom crown. Midsummer seemed to creep up on me this year and a late evening photo seemed one way to acknowledge and celebrate it so off I went to lie on the patio under a waxing crescent moon to capture this photograph.
All in all the week was gentle and quiet. Joys included delivering copies of the group poem to the residents at the housing association, feeling physically better after a recent hysteroscopy, drafting poems about said procedure so that it is set down out of my head, finding out during a conversation with a friend that there might be an audience for said poems even though I thought they were possibly a bit niche, getting back out into the garden.
It’s fair to say I have been on a bit of a go slow. My body has been telling me to take things gently and I have listened and been kind to it. This meant it felt particularly lovely to have sun on skin whilst being physically active in the garden at the weekend. And it also felt good to be reclined in a chair at the end of the day, with a favourite tv programme after a lovely catch-up chat with a friend. It was at this point that I realised I had not brushed myself down fully after gardening when I discovered a crispy yellow myrtle leaf tucked neatly behind my right ear during said relaxation time. It was very weedy under the myrtle so I decided this was giving me the perfect opportunity for some sit-down gardening after lots of the ‘up down heave-ho’ kind of gardening so I bum-shuffled round its base removing the blades of grass that had sprung up. And to be successful in weed removal my head was right in there amongst the leaves.
So I can now consider myself to be going about my daily business again and it feels good. I even bought myself a cake to celebrate this fact.
There has also been time for reflection and I have taken time to reflect on the same experience through two different lenses… the lens of poetry and the coaching lens. When I write confessional poetry I love the cathartic nature of the setting down and the rawness. I hear the words reflected back and see the human experience of the moment. When I think about the coaching lens I think about the helpfulness of the forward-thinking nature of coaching. How saying things out loud to a thinking partner can be far more productive than listening to the repeated thoughts of an internal voice. Saying things out loud in a coaching space helps with a more efficient and proactive untangling of thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It was the coaching lens that enabled me to swap months of dithering for minutes of action. And it’s the poetic lens that lets me set down the experience for others to read.
And for this week’s poem my thoughts having lingered on being glad it wasn’t a creature behind my ear got me thinking about the summer when I was seventeen and me and a friend were carrying out some scientific research about the insect populations of different small islands. Here’s a poem that sets down that experience:
We were only seventeen
when we rowed the boat
between the islands.
Free to decide what we were looking for,
trusted with oars on the water.
We set our jam jar traps at night
returned for them each morning.
When one island had more harvestmen
than any other creature,
and one island had none,
I was intrigued.
We talked of investigating
predators and terrain
while collating our counting.
We were eager to find the reason,
thought this would earn us our white coats.
On the morning it rained,
I slipped as I got in the boat
for the final time,
knocked every jar over.
We watched all our creatures
scuttling, mingling.
Back at base I knew enough
to lie on the tally charts,
keep our results in line.
But we couldn’t get them all back
to their own islands
and you never told.
Sue Finch 