Oh Tree of Life!
Haloed in white
Dare I approach?
Roots snake beneath the earth
Encompassing the world
All flows from and to you
I would climb to your boughs
Looking up and down
Simultaneously
As above, so below
We all stand alone
like you, a sentinel to time
The sight of you bids me cry
unbidden and disconsolate
yet comforted, I am found
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
Coffee
Dark, rich succour
Shortbread biscuits
Melting with the flavour
On my tongue
The morning painted with
Sweetness and faint spice
These habits and addictions
Re-awakened, just begun
Passing bakery shops
On my travels
Takes me instantly back
To childhood glee
Holding in small hands
A cream-filled
Pastry concoction
Feeling a pleasure simpler
And more profound
Than any found in adult life
Flipping through food journals
As I fill in time
Salivating over
Recipes I will never cook
Remembering restaurants
Candle lit dinners
The discovery and delight
My life is small
Contained and simple
Rounded not with a little sleep
As the Bard would have it
But by food
And in these rich
Memories of sustenance
Find so much that is creative
So much that is good.
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
Suddenly it happens again, perceptions distort
Distance is further
Nearness is closer
And I am on the edge of a memory
that ever eludes me
Hovering, hoping to keep the moment
just long enough to recall
Strangeness descends, like wildfire
so important, so lost
Always failing, relativity returns
With the bittersweet opiate
Of forgetfulness
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
When I was in my early teen years one day I stayed home from high school because I was unwell. Sometime in the mid afternoon of that day my mother came to rouse me from my sleep, saying ‘Helen! Hurry! Come and look at the sky!’
Now my mother was not an overly dramatic woman. She was not in the habit of promoting communing with the wonders of nature either. So I was quite curious as to what would create this level of excitement, exhilaration and urgency in her. So I followed her dutifully and then for long moments, we both stood in the lounge, looking out the window, transfixed by the sight that had precipitated her unusual request.
There, in the sky, looming large and ominous, was the most perfect cloud formation I had ever seen, or have ever seen since. Without a hint of exaggeration I can report I remember it to this day, and that it was the most perfectly formed image of the god Poseidon – as depicted in ancient statues – that I could ever imagine. This wasn’t one of those ‘squint slightly and lean to the right and you might make out something vaguely approximately something other than just cloud’. Oh no. This was without fault, without ragged cloud edges, fully intact. His flowing beard, eyes like perfectly formed alabaster, outstretched arms dramatically encompassing the scope of his sight below.
We lamented not having a camera to hand to record this image. We knew no-one would fully believe us or recognise the sheer strangeness of what we were seeing. We stood in awe until, over time, the image started to break apart and waft away on the wind. Dis-assembling the god as he retired to his celestial realms.
Two days later the outskirts of our coastal town flooded. To this day I remember how I knew from this how ancient tribes believed in gods and omens. A flood following the visitation of the god of the sea…..
While my secular, sceptical mind might think that this was a coincidence – albeit a magnificent and artistic one –the other side of me still dissents. And vehemently.
Every time a major storm hits, lightening crackling and splitting the sky with marvellous illumination, or thunder rolls a deep, bass note across the land like a god clearing his or her throat, I know that sense of the more, the numinous, the spirit.
I feel the ‘intelligence’ lurking behind the majesty. A sly, shy presence that need not proclaim or prove its existence beyond this pageantry. That is enough. I commune with my forebears in this terrible, wonderful mystery. And I dream.
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
With words and phrases cast a spell so bright
Beguile the senses with such lyric charm
Through sonnet form or ballad so delight
That even hardened hearts must be disarmed
So musical the rhythm and the tone
To tempt a soul to deeper meaning here
To even turn the key to hearts of stone
Or make the greatest doubter yet revere
The power of a deftly spoken rhyme
Is greater than the message it contains
So now the memory that lasts through time
Ensures it is the form which best remains
You need no revelation then to say
The poet gathers words and starts to play
© Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
Sitting in the hairdresser’s chair
mid process,
my hair spiked by
colouring agents
Purple swathes against beige
I look like I’ve been adorned
for a tribal ritual
Frankly it’s vaguely frightening
And how the lights play
on my visage
making me look, I swear
twenty years older than I am
makes me worry
always at this moment (every time!)
is this the real me
while my sense of how I look
more normally
is just an artful delusion?
Well, perhaps
Yet I know
even should this be,
when this ritual is complete
that illusion,
if that is all it is,
will thankfully return
sweetly coiffed
as I rise to go
Not there yet
I free float in familiar anxiety
Speaking of which
I look for a moment
at the washing basins
which look for all the world like
modern, sleek, artful renderings
of medieval torture devices
A rite of passage
that must be traversed
to reach the end
of some essential trial
And the irony hits me
All the convenience, simplicity
and ease of care
that I derive from shorter hair
can only arise
from three sisters – Time, Patience
And Complexity
in the hairdresser’s chair.
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
You are old my dear
You are cold and drear
To the devil your soul is sold, it’s clear
The clock will chime my dear
One more time this year
Then be silent forevermore I fear.
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
I love a good story as much as the next person, and well I remember loving fairy tales (the scarier and bloodythirstier the better) as a child. My mother would read to my brother and I when we were young, and we loved this time and the wonder of it all.
But I didn’t know then what I know now – those stories are a psychological sucker-punch. They carry within them more material for false dreams and psychological meanderings, for hours spent no doubt on psychiatric couches, than their deceptively pretty covers suggest. They are a mental time bomb, a form of pre-programming for a life that is so unreal and un-life-like as to set us up for perpetual confusion and disappointment all down the years.
A writer, Colette Dowling, was really on to something in the 1980s when she published her book ‘The Cinderella Complex’. It chronicled the lives of women who put their own dreams and ambitions perpetually on hold while waiting for their prince to come. It very accurately showed that this fairy tale, so innocent in its deceptive guise, was really a proto-type for a Stepford Wife like existence, and worse yet – for aspiring to such.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not the only psychologically lethal fairy tale gem. Oh no! They are all like that. And the only differential is what story you most relate to – what one will haunt you without your knowledge and inform the more stupid choices you make – particularly with relationships. Choices you make which, in retrospect, make no sense at all.
Sleeping Beauty suggests a life of complete female passivity(to the point of being comatose) makes you a beautiful prize for a prince. Rapunzel says grow your hair long, look beautiful and unattainable (find yourself a very high tower to live in, for instance), and another prince will obviously come along. God forbid you actually do anything – exert any energy, pursue any kingdoms of your own.
I would go so far as to say that those particular three – the deadly triple threat of tales – are responsible for that terrible ‘The Bachelor’ TV series and all those women who think they fell for someone they just met, who treated them badly. And all because he was the prince on offer and all they had to prove to be was the most attractive of all. (Actually, throw Snow White in with that lot too, and all the temper tantrums in the show would probably align with the Wicked Stepmother from that tale…)
And don’t get me started on the inherent ethnic stereotype issues in these little mental health grenades…
Some others:
Jack and the Beanstalk – climb high enough and kill some monster or other and you can get rich. A good prototype for the corporate world if I’ve ever heard of one, and about as realistic!
The Child Rolande – creepy story about being abducted to the fairy world – bit like alien abduction stories, and certainly one to stir the darker and deeper recesses of the hearts of anyone unhappy in their home life. Pick me, they cry! There’s always something better, somewhere, or with someone else…..a recipe for a restless, discontented life of yearning.
For me, it was Beauty and the Beast. God help me. Looking back at my relationship choices there is a definite flavour of finding the beast and stupidly thinking caring and love would turn him into a prince. Beasts are beasts, for the most part, right through. In the end, my particular favourite fairy story really just encouraged really, really, really bad taste on my part. Hopefully I’m older and wiser now – but I still sense this weird attraction to the bad boy persona at times – old enough to just see it and not act, hopefully. But it’s the fairy story, I swear.
Heaven help me, I love a redemptive arc!
Of course, it does beg the question if the stories create our patterns or if we are drawn to the story that will best portray our own inner desires. Bit chicken and the egg really.
But I can’t help but think if I’d never heard Beauty and the Beast I might never have believed the fallacy that a true, loving heart beats behind the breastbones of men who – looking at all evidence of their natures, actions, words and so forth – have barely got a heart, let alone one that beats for anyone other than themselves.
So fairy tales should come with hazard warnings – read at your own risk. They say what we learn in childhood stays with us. Sad then that some of the most bloody and culturally suspect stories are the bed time fare for most children. Or that we love those stories so much in those early years, before we understand what we are hearing.
What about you? What was our favourite fairy tale, and do you think it tells you anything about your life and choices so far?
When I first starting blogging about three weeks ago and began to find other blogs to follow I saw many posted thank yous at around this time of a blog’s life and I thought how lovely that was.
What I didn’t realise is that this need to acknowledge the generosity and comradeship of the blogging world seems to rise of its own accord at about this time as you realise – I think with genuine surprise – how special this collaborative and supportive environment is.
At my work there is a lot of talk about collaboration and collegiality, but probably not many actual examples of it. Here it seems to rise out of the nature of the connection. Writers and artists and philosophers and dreamers sharing their thoughts, creations and beliefs in a way that is mutually supportive and inspiring. It’s truly amazing and humbling. Life had tended to make me a cynic about a lot of things, but this is so refreshing, I too have that need to say ‘thank you’.
For me, one of the most striking benefits of blogging is that it is providing a very real sense of expanding my horizons. And this made me realise how much, through my own choices, I’d limited them. My work – which I will never outline in any detail here because I want it separate to this world – is very intense and often political – in the office politics sense. Last year, I realised, the total of my life was my work, with some socializing with friends occasionally and otherwise watching DVDs and reading. It was a comfortable life, but a narrow one. And in its own way that was stressful and I didn’t even realise.
Now I find my day is book-ended by blogging and reading and sharing with other bloggers. It is something I look forward to at the beginning and ending of each work day as it takes me outside of that narrow world and puts me in something that has so much more meaning. And on weekends I have even more time to spend in this atmosphere.
And I find this makes me care less about the machinations of my daily working life, and that is a wonderful, zen-like feeling!
This has brought a balance to my life I didn’t even realise was lacking. So something that started as a re-birthing of wish to create is, in a sense, re-creating me. Maybe that is the ultimate alchemy of creation itself.
But it couldn’t happen without YOU – all the people kind enough to read my work and generous enough to share of yours. The amount of talent I’ve come across in just these past three weeks is staggering! So let me join the chorus of appreciation and thank you all for your support and friendship.
Words can’t really express what it means to me – even though I’ve just spent almost 500 of them trying!! 🙂
Rich Bastards Incorporated
Smug and self satisfied
Counting their riches
Drunk on their pride
Failure’s their talisman
Profit from grief
Got the predictions wrong?
Act like a thief!
Better to prophesise
The weather next week
Nothing much left in
This world for the meek
Evil is tempting
Impossible credit
No matter your sacrifice
They will still get it
Too big to fail they say
Too small to share
If there’s a buck to make
Sure, they’ll be there
Rich Bastards Incorporated
Won’t care about you
Devils don’t want your souls
Money will do.
(c) Helen Valentina 2013, All Rights Reserved
Like most people, I have a number of sides to me. The most interesting one probably emerges through my writing, hence this blog. I love to read, and also to write, and so this is a way to share both.
Gravatar image credit: (c) iStockphoto.com/Lobsterclaws
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