Morning Manifesto

Notice the birds. Recognise their song. And join. Click minimize. Smell the salt water and consider where sea meets shore, sifting order from chaos. Watch a dog scamper for a ball with undivided soul. Make yourself smaller. Be astonished by the repeating waves. Scan a horizon line and some headlands. Try to understand  seagulls. Feel patterns being swept onto sand as swirling clouds step aside to introduce sunlight. Click minimize.

Restore yourself down. Consider the cycle of flowers. Reject worry. Look into the blue and watch the daytime moon balance in silhouette. Forget details. Feel small. Breathe deep the sky into your tiny lungs. Concentrate on footsteps: bodies held by gravity, bass drumming lightly against an orbitting planet. Held in space. Sample the growing swell on the shore. Pat that passing dog. Let the sand caress your footsteps as a plane slides past above you. Click minimize.

Accept a sunbeam on your face. Walk slowly. Ask yourself why the air seems so pure today. Watch a dancing robin. Be joined in the movement as birds pirouette through air currents. Accept the joy of their flight. Let a fly land on your hand. Walk beside a golf course and listen to the echo of order. Click minimize.

Life is not a tall order from the ground. Marvel that all you can see is a glimpse. That you are eternal.

Click minimize.

Finally, attempt to grasp that you are small but beautiful...  

Posted for

Theme Thursday and Imperfect Prose

A day in Alnmouth

The pearl of a recent "family and friends" holiday is finally found after a series of rather damp, rainy "stay indoors" sort of days. When the dry weather arrives, with the sun even threatening to pop through the clouds, we head for the village of Alnmouth, situated on the beautiful, unspoilt Northumberland coastline. Ours is not the first visit by Northerners. Previously named a new town under Norman rule in 1150, it was apparently destroyed by Scottish invaders in 1336. Hopefully our brief sojourn will not do too much damage...

There are few signs of destruction as we take up position on the golden shoreline, stretching for miles as far as the eye can see, with the postcard-friendly Coquet Island standing stage right of the horizon. A cool breeze pulls the children into the fast approaching waves: over and over as if being rewound, then fast-forwarded, their brightly coloured wetsuits hop in and out of the lolloping white breakers.

I am holding a "Thomas the tank engine" kite and the strength of the wind provides a constant tug on my hand. The pull is reassuring, as if I'm somehow plugging into nature via the kite's string. I imagine a surge of natural energy, as the wind's current pulses through my body and transfers back to earth via the icy, lapping waves that I'm kicking through. The buffeting sound pounds relentlessly on the kite's plastic. Waves trip to shore and the refreshing smell of seawater is somehow reassuring.

Away from the water's edge, one man is having trouble breaking in a black pony. Like a bronco in a rodeo, she fusses and swishes her tail, unwilling to let nature take its course.

After more paddling, some stone collecting and the important discovery of a snail, we are ready for a simple beach lunch. Sharing sandwiches, we pin down our travel rugs in the face of an increasingly blustery wind as clouds are sent spinning across a clearing blue sky.

Soon the sun is shining as we indulge in a spot of  beach cricket, where the main challenge, at first, is to ensure that the stumps remain upright. We wedge a red boulder against them to keep them intact and soon the ball is free-wheeling away from the bat as a youngster hits a crisp cover-drive across the flattened sand.

A short stroll around town is next on the agenda. We head down Pease's Lane towards Dandelion Cafe, whose bright yellow logo has lured us magnetically away from a more traditional coffee shop. Straight ahead of us as we walk is Alnmouth Village Golf Club. A golfer professionally sizes up, then sinks a long putt on the beautifully manicured green. As if he's just won the Ryder Cup, he collects multiple high-fives from his playing partners.

Sitting in the bright conservatory of Dandelion Cafe, we sip lattes and munch through some large slices of cake, comparing notes on how relaxed we feel. The children are happy to mix cake, ice-cream, water and sachets of sugar into one stupendous, scientific experiment, whilst the "grown-ups" reminisce and mull over  bygone days.

In the bar, local artwork, all vibrant blue skies, remind us of the present and we head back outdoors to catch the rest of the day. As we walk back along the gravel track, dissecting beach and golf course, the swell of the breakers provides a perfect soundtrack.

Soon our cars are swallowing us back into the pace of modern life and we are heading back to complete the last part of the holiday, but the day spent in Alnmouth has been one to remember.

posted on theme thursday- recollections.

mobile immobile

a world on your fingerprints
clenched like a hand grenade
cyberspace messages
creasing your lips
you're causing diversions
unfazed while a passer-by
trip-wires away from
a virtual time-bomb
you're: surfing haphazardly
liking distractedly
blacking reality
out for a bit
controlled by a microchip
hypno-robotic charged
rendered immobile
when a lamp-post is hit...

Click to see mobile distraction in action here.

Posted  for Theme Thursday-Distraction

Lunchtime Down the Strathy.

Frenzied gulls, their wings windmilling, circle over stubby, marooned, foraging ducks. They  scrabble and scramble for discarded tokens of bread from the lush dandelion-speckled grass. Swans extend prehistoric necks and, like mechanical diggers, thrust their orange black beaks into the ground. A constant chirrup cracks across the rippling loch. A toddler, in a military run, makes his break for it, thighs pumping high across the tarmac. His quest for freedom is stopped by a vigilant mother, although it is his trailing father who finally scoops him back into the family car. Flapping in the breeze, a saltire flag protrudes from a brick tower, garrisoned in the water. A pigeon comes up close, begging for a bite to eat. When a man and woman get out of their cars to have a chat, it is time for me to get back into mine. A new afternoon is beginning...

copyright Alan Knox

For: Theme Thursday

(It's) All Good

This late May,
Summer left a calling card
Sitting on our patio
Newly born.
Seed cake pecked away,
Shadows share an aviary,
Cappuccino frothing
On Saturday at dawn.

Early June rainfall,
Floodgates open us,
Current swell swirls back
A letter from St John.
Building a reading list
Pianoing the dusk back
Tapping two golf balls
Across this lawn.

All good things
Beginning to begin again:
Spiriting us skylines,
Freshly unknown,
Excavating soil
For the smile of an alien,
All good things
Are yet to be shown.







Written for Theme Thursday

Full Circle: the Transit of Venus and a Diamond Jubilee...



The SDO satellite captures an 

ultra high-definition image of the transit of Venus

 across the face of the sun from space

 According to the Guardian UK online, it's "a rare astronomical event that happens when Venus travels across the face of the sun and appears as a small black dot on its surface". Transits happen in pairs, 8 years apart, followed by gaps of  121.5 and 105.5 years.  It's therefore been a privilege to live through two of these, in June 2004 and this week, on Tuesday 5th June 2012. The next one is due in December 2117, so in case you can't stick around to see it, here (on the right) is one memorable image from Tuesday night.

              

The idea that our sister planet Venus should be circling the sun, should of course, remind us of the orbitting that our own planet is currently doing. As you read this, you are precariously balanced on a ball of rock that's apparently moving around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. If you suffer from motion sickness, then please take a moment to recover...

We rotate into night after around 24 hours. We orbit the sun in one of our Earth years. In that time we move 940 million kilometres through our galaxy. To borrow a metaphor from Owl City, it seems to me that we're riding "a disco ball just hanging by a thread."



...Meanwhile, on planet Earth, on the same day that the transit of Venus was due to be seen, on some tiny islands called the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. It's only the second time a British monarch  has reigned for sixty years. As I watched some grainy footage of Queen Victoria's 1897 Diamond Jubilee, I marvelled at the massive display of patriotism that accompanied that event. And, after some years of apparently losing popularity, it seems that affection for royalty has come back into vogue in 2012.

It's true that in life, sometimes things come full circle. The Diamond Jubilee Regatta on the River Thames was the largest of its kind for centuries, reminding us of a bygone era. The Diamond Jubilee concert combined some fresh faces with others who have not been seen for a while, returning them to our consciousness and reminding us that their music has accompanied the evolution of life in the UK over the past sixty years.



The 2004 transit of Venus from
the Flagler Beach Pier in Florida



Then, in the Diamond Jubilee Service of Thanksgiving from St Paul's Cathedral, London, the words of a timeless poem, Psalm 19, were revisited in song. Transmitted live across the islands that my feet are fixed to, the sentiment brought me back to the transit of Venus and the Earth's almost invisible rotation and orbit of the sun. "...The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge... In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun...The sun rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat."

In the eight years since we last witnessed a transit of the sun by Venus, all of us, like the planet itself, have been making our way through space at an astonishing speed. Yet, when things come full circle, it's good to stop, take a breath, and reflect awhile about where we're going next...

(This post was written for Theme Thursday 7th June, 2012 on the theme of "Full Circle".)