Life: Planning, Projects and Poetry

I’ve been feeling good lately……really good. I’m brimming with energy, expansive of heart and mind and throwing myself into the projects I’ve been intending to do for ages. I’ve really been enjoying getting back into research and have started ploughing through my (unfinished) PhD on the influence of folk song and ballads on Pre-Raphaelite visual and literary culture, to see what can be salvaged from the wreckage and turned into something useful. There are some really interesting nuggets in it and what I’m now trying to decide is; do I turn what I have into a book; produce a series of articles for journals, or and this is the big one do I consider returning to university to complete it? Either way it’s all pretty exciting to think about.

I’m also underway planning a book about holistic living. It started as a recipe book but has grown organically into something broader that takes in my triumvirate of home, health and the arts. For as long as I can remember all the things that constitute a healthy, happy and sustainable home has been at the centre of my existence. I have shelves full of household manuals, cookery books and art and design books (vintage and modern) and call it synchronicity or a zeitgeist but everything seems to have come together right now for me to start work on something of my own.

I suddenly feel like I’ve got an awful lot to say and share.

Speaking of things to share; while I was sorting through boxes of notebooks I found one full of poetry that I wrote between 1995 -2003. Although much of it is pretty amateurish, there are odd ones that although not literary masterpieces -I’m no Christina Rossetti or Emily Bronte, that’s for sure- have some merit. I found the following, written in July 1998 and think it has a nice, bright atmosphere to it.

Enchantment

From earth to root
through trunk to heart,
a net of esoteric whisper
pulsing in the quickened dark,
weaves the breath of the awakened.
From heart to branch
through twig and sap,
rising to a leafy mantle
flows the light of the enchanted one,
glowing bright, within the dark.

Love and Light

Stella x

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