One Year

Many friends...

Yesterday was Happy Substack Birthday to me - the one year anniversary of my first Post.

At the time I started here it was an experiment, and it could have been a brief one because after 22 years of not publishing my work I had grown quite accustomed to ….. not publishing my work.

The me who had previously published Poetry and short prose pieces - and won awards for it and found a small place in the small world of Australian literature - seemed long ago and far away.

That guy.

But … I had never stopped writing, and my remarkable lover and life partner - who had fallen in love with that guy long ago - kept telling me, in her patient and gentle way, that the guy she is still in love with is in fact still that same guy.

Think of us as these two seagulls I photographed recently (you have to look closely).

They look unremarkable from a distance, and they are, but there is a reason they are sitting together, after flying around me while I explored their intricate coastline. I have no idea what that reason is - (maybe rebecca hooper could tell you because she does know a whole lot about the natural world and explains it gorgeously) but seagulls do generally pair up and they often stay together for life.

If Rebecca does not know then Kendall Lamb surely will. I met Kendall here just recently and I am slowly sampling her delectable writing about nature, and people, the way I eat wild berries hand picked in the sun - thoughtfully, deliberately and with reverence. You should try some! (Both berries and Kendall’s words).

Meg is my other seagull, and I have learned that she is also a remarkably wise seagull whose ideas are invariably good. We adore flying together, or sitting together, or as we recently did - whitewater rafting together in mid Winter.

This was another one of Meg’s very good ideas. Can you see why I love her?

(Click here for the art version of the waterfall)

And her equally good idea, as it turned out, was to have a look at Substack and see if it might be a place where I felt comfortable sharing my writing. (As Meg would tell you, our lovely friend Bernadette Geraghty was here first, and that’s how M first saw Substack).

So I gave it a go, starting one year ago yesterday with Coda, a piece I had written a year or so before that while sitting in a little park in Montmartre, Paris, by the Je t’aime wall.

Because, for me, it’s almost always all about love.

Though looking back I can see that right from the start I was also intrigued by the opportunity to combine image with text - Poetry, Prose, Photography and even a short video clip. Before long I realised the obvious - that Meg and I could do joint work of words and art - a mixed media act of not so abstract love which attracted us in turn to people like Susannah Violette - both artist and sumptuous poet all rolled into one, and Plein Air Poetry - the collaboration of Alexandra Macintosh (text) and Brad Davis (painting) which brightens each week.

Love appears often in my work. Love of my lover; love of my children and family; love of the natural world and the intense, sometimes excruciating love of life itself. Like this gorgeous, enormous Goanna I came across last Summer in the bushland near our home.

Who could not love her?

At first I was playing, and in fact I still am playing because play is about experimentation and exploration and there is so much more to write about and discover in both the physical and metaphysical realms.

What I had not expected to discover here but did was … friendship. The immediacy of interplay between Writers and Readers, most of whom are also Writers and/or Artists, has facilitated the creation of a community, and in that community I now have more friends than I do outside of it.

My good friend Jed Moffitt was one of the first. A talented Jazz Musician (and he can sing!), Jed likes to say he is new to this Poetry thing but his words will tell you that his soul is not. Poetry that often appears delicious and playful but usually contains something serious - the woody seed within the juicy mango. Plant it, and something will grow.

In my case Jed planted an idea. We were having a private chat on Substack - another experiment for me - but a storm was raging outside and the sea was calling me and I dashed off a slightly mad paragraph, with an apology, then ran away to have an adventure by the ocean instead. The next day Jed wrote: “would you do me a favor and turn those last two segments into a poem… and publish it as a piece?”

So I did - sort of - and the result was Splash Zone, a prose poem in part and a story in words and photographs which possessed me as I wrote it and which told itself in ways I had not planned - ending with a secret I had never intended to disclose. Splash Zone is now, currently, my “most liked” post on Substack.

Sometimes one friend leads to another. I’m unsure precisely but I think I maybe ended up meeting the word volcano Rebecca Cook because I subscribed to Jed’s not so Ordinary Mind. Rebecca’s Poetry tends to erupt regularly and you never can tell what’s a gonna be comin’ up next - but you do know it will arrive with incandescent energy. Soon….. Stand well back.

I’m very good at not talking, but Rebecca tells me she is incapable of silence so we make odd friends, but good ones. Other friends were more inevitable because of our shared love of nature. Kate Bown - who lives in Lutruwita (Tasmania), that heart shaped fragment of long gone Gondwana. Kate’s adoration of mountains matches my own - no easy feat - and her actual feet have climbed many of them, while her words take others with her. So do the wonderful words of Ash Kilback.

Also Alex Dawson, who venerates the life she finds around her and writes of it from a place of love, but Alex can confront the hard things too. Somewhere in her busy life she also manages to encourage other Poets and is even labouring over a whole book of “Poetry Based on Facts About The Natural World.” Upon Learning That will be out soon,and Alex has generously included one of my own works.

It seems less obvious that I would be befriended by a Yorkshire Sheep Farmer - (that is, a Farmer of Sheep in Yorkshire). Not that I have anything against sheep, or Farmers - though at age 18 I did get so wet walking in Yorkshire that I gave up on England and went hitch hiking around Europe instead, so I still feel a bit down on Yorkshire.

The links were photography - unlike me Dave Mead is a master of landscape photography - plus music (he either has great taste or we both have terrible taste) - and humour (especially the absurd).

For that final reason this vid from the beach at Yamba near where we live is especially for Dave, who also loves the ocean. In this case, the ocean was acting a little strange, but so were the humans (and the laughter you hear on the sound track is me):

Geographically, my friend Richard Frame is more likely to run into Dave than I am, and although he lives in the UK his School of Blue originated in the vanished African nation of his youth that Richard still struggles with in his dreams, while wrestling in the daytime with the political madnesses of the present - tyrants, wars, famine - the daily horrors on the news.

Two of those looked like they might consume other friends I have made here. Nazish Nasim and Mahdi Meshkatee were both dodging bombs and missiles just a few months ago - and not of the metaphorical kind. I group them together initially because of that fact but they are each unique. Mahdi, living in exile now, while trying to gain, or regain, some hope in this world - seeing those around him, perhaps, too clearly, while searching Philosophy for a coherence the world does not seem to possess.

Nazish - fellow lover of life; who dreams of oceans in a place far from the sea. A Mother, who writes of that state with such grace and depth that even a man might begin to have the glimmers of understanding. Also a romantic, with story and poetry drifting like the fall of peach blossom on the wind.

Then there is that other romantic - but above all mystic and Alchemical - the mysterious S y l v i A 🌞 K a l i n A whose words need to be heard as well as read. Trust me on this - you won’t regret it.

All of these people have been both generous audience and inspiration. Sometimes, they have been my conscience.

Rajani Radhakrishnan writes luminous Poetry - but often about dark things, and not just of the imagination - but the real monsters stalking the world: violence, hate, genocide….

Rajani reminds me that a Poet has a duty to write about those dark things and to speak out against tyranny, oppression and the kind of propaganda that calls truth “fake news.” I have written political poetry before and I had been trying to write about the genocide in Gaza for months, but for a Poet who wants to climb mountains and write of love and beauty that felt impossible. Rajani gave me the courage to finally sit down and make myself write War Crimes, and record it also, ill though it made me. The fact that the murders continue - daily - is nauseous.

I can still climb mountains (if my knees allow me) but I don’t have unlimited energy so I don’t know where my friend Martin Mc Carthy gets his indefatigable reserves of energy from - maybe it’s the Guinness. Soon after joining Substack I came across Martin - he was unavoidable! Basically, wherever I found good Poetry there was a comment from Martin already there ahead of me - and always generous, always warm, always emanating sincerity. So I looked him up, and there I found his own Poetry - warm, gentle as Irish Summer rain - and suffused with the love he writes so often about. And one day I found Martin applying his words to my own work, and it was - I admit - a pleasure, and then another new friend.

Recognition is a tricky drink - it’s easy to imbibe too much, even small amounts like this. Just today the equally generous Hazel Allen kindly included me in a list of Poets she suggests are worth reading. Did that make me feel happy? Of course! So did winning a few Awards back before I stopped publishing, but every time something like that happens, I also reflect back on why I write.

I have a few answers, but after a 22 year public silence I can definitely say “It’s not for the recognition” - even though occasional recognition does feel pleasant.

I write because I live. I write because words are welded into the way my synapses connect and they flow through me as a wave flows through a sea cave - roaring and surging. There may be times of relative calm but there is never surcease and I want none. My words will keep flowing until my ocean evaporates, and then I will be gone.

Until then I will keep writing - here or in other places - even in my Notebooks. I will keep reading too, and I will keep loving and offering love.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude and love to all I have mentioned here - so many good, good people met and befriended in just one year. Thank you, and deep, deep apologies to the others I have omitted. ( Rob Riley - another great guy!)

Space and time are just insufficient. I am truly sorry.

Most of all I owe a debt of love and gratitude to Meg, who has helped me in so many ways and who sleeps as I write this - late into my night. She will be there in my morning - the second and brighter sun rising into my day - and she may paint, and I may write, or we may do neither.

But we will definitely love.

I hope you do too.