Thinking About Mountains

Five Things I'm Doing

I am looking at the first draft of my memoir Handmade and realising I’m not satisfied with it. I’m wondering how I can make it better. How I can make it the best it can be. I am seeing lost threads, dropped stitches that need picking up, places in which the pattern has been lost and new words need knitting in. I see places where the text needs unpicking, as well as new possibilities in the titling of the fragments. There is still work to do.

I am reading The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden. I’ve nearly finished it. It’s been quite a journey. I’m glad I didn’t know anything about it before I began. I didn’t like it much at first. The protagonist Isabel is hard to like but after a while I began to see it as a Vermeer; domestic, interior. Later as a Dutch landscape painting. It surprised me with its sensuality and eroticism. It surprised me even more in the revealing of its deep historical context. It’s beautifully written and truly worthy of its place on the Booker longlist.

Thanks to a lovely and creative friend, I’m reading and re-reading Flare by Mary Oliver. It speaks to me on so many levels. I have set myself the task of re-imagining it, making my own poem.

I am thinking about suitcases and what to park for my much anticipated writing retreat at Casa Ana. It’s just over a week now before I leave and I’m thinking about meeting the mountain again. Below is the beginning of a long poem I wrote to the mountain on my first visit in Nov 2022.

The mountain at sunset..

1

let the mountain receive you, let the sun lay its flat

face on your thigh, let the dog bark muffled in tree

the houses hide, let sun pattern stone

scrolled iron, spindled wood, a ravine curling inward

on the way to somewhere else

let the green lemons ripen on the tree

outside Eithne's door, yellow butterflies weave

the balustrade, stone and pole

let the bird call, sweeah sweeah sweeah

and the bee humm, and fall away, humm

and fall away into the note of the breeze

I find a note in my notebook. I’m not sure where it came from, maybe a podcast, it’s about climbing the wrong mountain, the one designated for us by others especially our parents. It’s about ticking their boxes not our own. Beside it, I have a note that tells me to write something about stolen joy.

As always thanks for reading

Avril x