Space

How much space makes a home?
Four walls, a roof and somewhere to lay my weary body. . .

I look at the heaps of clothing washed and dried, waiting to be sorted and tidied away into my drawers or hung in the shaky skeletal cage I use as a wardrobe.  In the corner, behind the door there is a growing mountain of dirty laundry held within a blue IKEA bag.  It will be washed and it will join the heap.  My little table and the top of my chest of drawers are littered with scraps, books and a collection of miscellaneous items, weird, wonderful and random. By my bed there are books, diaries, notebooks, cards celebrating a variety of occasions, some lego and other ornaments.

There is barely enough space for my possessions.
Some I stow in boxes under my bed.  In the dark I forget to remember them.

It does not take much to keep me but if there is one thing that I miss, it is having a workspace. Upon this workspace I could order my disorderly papers and if would offer me the comfort to read and write as I please.

I want my organised mess to spill over my desk- not the floor and cardboard boxes.

My room is a warehouse of stored ambition, discarded and or disused materials.  Writing, reading, coveted books and fading script, it holds the ghost of yesterday, last month and last year.

What I need is an eye for this storm, an epicentre for this quake of thoughts and hopes and plans.

The Empty Pages

12/01/14

I leaf through the pages of my notebook rediscovering snippets and smithereens of unfinished or scratched writing.  There are pages with multiple incomplete entries; stories, poems, observations and quotes both classical and modern.  The first block of pages are filled perhaps with a tenuous link, thought or theme.  This runs dry and the white swells until it engulfs the page.
The white page stares blankly at the pen.
Flick forward and it becomes apparent this is a pincer attack-the back of the book is also filled with an eclectic mix of writing.

Sometimes there is an obvious discrepancy to warrant this meandering.  A story starts at the back and movies forward to prevent it being interrupted or butchered by the random influx of ideas and sentiments charging from the front to the back.  The information at the back is sometimes more relevant to daily experience or current circumstances; e-mail addresses, letter drafts but even these are sometimes littered with forceful digression bursting into my thoughts.

Every notebook I have starts at the front or back, drifts to the other end and starts the push towards the middle.  What will be the last printed piece?  A random thought or observation or something more precise like an address or directions?
I cannot say.
I drift on to a new notebook.  All of them unfinished but with their middle pages burning white, their outer edges daubed in black and blue-the depressions of mind and soul upon the paper.  I sometimes feel a pang of guilt looking at these unfinished notebooks.  Such a waste of paper, surely?

Perhaps my mind fills in the ditches, building walls to keep me in the middle.  The straight and narrow narrowing.  Although I am worried when and if I extinguish the white light of those empty pages I will never need to pick up that book again and thus I forget.  I forget the things I have written and how I felt, along with ideas good and bad.  It is a diary of sorts and it spans many moons.  The very book I write this entry  in carries a stamp from 2011 to 2014 and still has pages to spare.
This story is not over yet.

Sniffles and catnaps

I have been keeping busy or trying to.
I've not been very good at relaxing lately but I never was.
I often only take time for myself when I'm procrastinating as odd as that may sound.
A mind that seldom rests and that doesn't sleep well is a recipe for disaster or at least some minor hardship.
Sniffles are a prominent danger.
How can one avoid such a debilitating condition?
Healthy eating and good sleeping are one way to reduce the risk.

I believe I will never get used to rising early.
I wonder will I wander around for the rest of this life always in a dazed stupor of various levels of fatigue.
It's the sleep or lack thereof that gets me, hindering my immune system that undoubtedly struggles in the germ incubator that is school.

Thankfully there are weekends but they are buffered by five days of early starts.

Microscope

We seldom stop and look around us, look up, look down and take in every facet, every eroded and aged surface as the meandering river of time rushes by.
There is so much beauty immediately before our eyes but we trivialise it and take for-granted that which is right in front of us.  Instead, we fantasise about the other, the erotically exotic pastures just out of reach.  There is so much more to be seen in the here and now than we actually see.  The buzzing computer behind our eyes a blurry mess of opened and abandoned tabs, multiple progammes running at once; a drain on power and all at a poor resolution.  The human being is a complicated creature, fragile and stubborn, curious and careless.

A young boy I tutor took my hand excitedly today to show me the present Nikolos had brought him.
A white and black scientific microscope.  He ushered me to sit on the couch by the coffee table while he plugged in the apparatus and popped open his box of glass slides.  He had collected a few new samples over the weekend.  He adjusted the lens and then offered to share this microscopic universe.

The various glass slides held cells of different organisms.  It was an exhibition of the life aesthetic; an onion that resembled a forested dream-scape, grains of salt that may well have been a cluster of asteroids and other wonderful intricate designs within cells.

He is excited; keen to put life beneath the lens and scrutinise its delightful complexity.  A multiverse of wonder within our grasp.

Forever A Student

There I was; typing, copying, and pasting my worksheet when I realised I was in my element.
Browsing the depths of the internet looking for the perfect image to complement the incredibly complicated simple tasks I had put upon paper.

I was enjoying it.
I was happy to put time and effort into this worksheet; editing the language to make it more accessible. There were boxes to be numbered, crosswords and word spirals, pictures to be coloured, a story to be read and a song to be sung.

I enjoy searching for, reading and examining other's foray into lesson plans and student worksheets.  Every teacher is an artist searching for a new means to communicate a theme or topic to a hungry audience, an audience that is desperately seeking an interpretation relevant to their life and existence.

I am forever learning new tricks. I keenly watch my colleagues and peers, taking a note of their approach, the resources and the reception.  I ask too.  I ask questions and I ponder out loud.  I read and I read often and I complain even more so.  But in complaining and opening myself up to criticism I am also learning.

Life is a learning curve.
I'm staying in school.

I don't know if I can ever leave.
My mind is buried there under a messy pile of lesson plans and uncorrected papers.

The starfish children

02/12/2013

There are creatures that lurk in the Vienna Christmas' markets.  These beings weave between the legs of hapless would-be shoppers and browsers, tiny things not coming above the knee mummified in a cushioned membrane.  These creatures are the starfish children.

They come in different colours and shades but they have one consistent physical feature and that is that their static bodies resemble the celestial pentagram.  

Their parents take great pains to wrap these babies up and shield them from the cold.  

Layer upon layer upon layer of clothing until the child resembles the Michelin man more than any other mammal on Earth.

Their movement is a fascinating spectacle.  Unable to move individual joints like the elbow or knee, these children move their entire body in a zig zag motion, swinging from side to side as they shift their weight to each foot and pivot their entire body.  

They rush off to the next exciting wonder, be that something hot, sharp or inedible.  They tend to loiter under steaming mugs of punsch and mulled wine.  Perhaps it is the aroma that attracts them or their taste for danger.

The starfish children float through the crowds at the markets, giggling and gurgling and sometimes they are eerily silent.  They love mischief and impulsively dash into the path of unwitting spectators.

Thankfully, their parents come and swoop them up and off before the starfish children become agitated and decimate the wooden market huts with their gummy jaws and high-pitched shrieks.

They are a creature one should be wary of.  Look out for them.

Steady thoughts carried by locomotives

I haven't read much lately.
Any time I plan to sit down and open a book my mind wanders.
Even if I get to the point where my eyes scalpel words from the page they fall asunder, spun out in the blender of my mind.  I cannot focus and when I try to read, the words fall into the abyss of pointless procrastination.
However, recently I have come upon a remedy.
The comfort of transit; when I am not squashed between the sweaty bodies of Viennese commuters gripping whatever my hand can reach and my fingers can wrap around, swaying with the crowd like a leaf in the wind as the u-bahn, tram or train grinds to a halt or squeals into motion. When I am seated and comfortable, gliding through Vienna to and fro, I find the carriage a cradle for my thoughts; rocking and rolling over the metal tracks, steadying my wobbly mind and allowing me to read and write.

Maybe it is because I have little else to do and I shyly refrain from staring at the nomadic disposition that is the commuter, maybe I have become bored of the scenery flashing by me or maybe my tired mind relishes the moment to turn off the outside world and immerse my consciousness in a book, nursing the lines as they waft off the page.

I am not sure why it helps.
It may simply be that a still body cannot ignite and propel a mind into motion.