I am prone to writing thank-you letters, and here’s part of one from a decade ago, which included some draft poems-of-present-moment-experience, which are below.


Dear Joanna

It was a joy to spend the weekend in your caring presence at Grantchester [at a workshop ‘Here I am’ given by Joanna Watters].

I had been quite uncertain about whether I would find this approach [see a summary of radical acceptance here] useful, but here’s the proof:

rather than feeling elated but wrung out (as sometimes happens to me after workshops) I felt calm, contented, rested and very alive. Thank you so much for your guidance and wisdom!

I left my “thoughtbook” behind at Grantchester but now that P has reunited it with me, I thought I could share some of the things I wrote about from “deep listening”.

Words while sitting on a drain outlet, Grantchester Village Hall:


I'm sitting by the path
I'm out in the world
watching the world go by.
I'm writing in my book
I'm resting
I'm waiting.

❁

I'm the doorkeeper for this lunchbreak
I'm the watcher of the workers, concerned for a Queen Wasp
who has lost her way out.
I offer to help her find her way
(even though I'm afraid of being stung, I over-ride my anxiety
because the Wasp has as much right as I do
to find her nest, raise her young, feed her family...)

I offer to rescue her (she's panicky now, sensing
our movement in the Hall);
I watch myself being brave,
I see my self-justifying as
I move to take responsibility...

but Joanna, instead, opens the window lights,
easily twirls the winder at each window...
and the birdsong floods indoors
from the outside, where I want to be...

and the Queen Wasp can rescue herself -
as if she was ever, lost
(it was only I who was lost)
and Joanna, laughing,
accepts my smiling hug
because there I was,
"rescuing" again ...

... when I am free to go outside;
when I am free to sit alone;
when I am free to spill the words;
to relax the jaw,
to rest the smile
and to sit with the day's-eye,
the daisy, and hear the Great-Tit chime.

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁


Day's eye, daisy,
dozy daisy
day's eye, open
open to sun
open to Sunday
open to opening
open to being open
          to being opened...
open to being
          to being as I am...

Here I am.

© Kathy McVittie     5 April 2014,  © Kathy Labrum McVittie 10 March 2024

Which speaks to you the most?

And finally I’m just tucking in a more recent scribbled Quadrille, which I wrote in March 2024 for the week’s quadrille challenge from dVerse – containing (as asked) the word ‘slumber’ in its 144 words – and then slumbered before I could post it.

Way through

A slumber does my spirit yearn;
It howls, my dear, for thee.
It asks not what thy labours earn,
Nor whether thou art free
To pleasure arm-to-arm again;
To scan the Milky Way --
May you the sweetest life attain!
Come rest, young cub, and play.

© Kathy Labrum McVittie 4 March 2024