just passing through

I feel I should say something to all the people who find themselves here because they have googled Chagall and/or Ferlinghetti, not to mention Leo Sayer. I didn’t know that my humble blog would light up with the promise of something I am clearly not going to deliver. Also, if you happen to be looking in, sorry to the person who googled ‘reading the signs of marital breakdown’. I trust you found what you were looking for elsewhere. Mostly people who land here by accident move on, but some have stayed to have a look, and I find myself pleased by this. Why? Don’t answer that. I won’t either.

For most of my life I have been a wanderer; not so unusual now for people to move around a great deal, but when I was young it was my experience that those around me, my peers, were settled people who belonged to the place where they were. The I Ching has on a number of occasions (new year) seen fit to pronounce that “the wanderer has no place to lay his head” and I nod, feeling like Clint Eastwood in one of those films where he chews his cheroot and walks into the sunset to the sound of a single note from a harmonica. I was born under a wandering star. It didn’t suit me actually, I would have preferred a star that was fixed, a little time to find my bearings, but there it is; and I got used to it, the wandering, and now I am restless when I find myself too settled, even though this is better for me. I am used to being in the playground on the margins, looking on at the skipping rope turning for the “all-i-in together, if you miss a loop you’re out” or bouncing the ball against the wall, making friends with the stragglers, moving on just when I’d negotiated a place in the rope queue, to begin all over again in a new playground. I have often been warmed by the kindness of strangers though I don’t depend on it.

This is by way of introducing myself, dear googler who may or may not have a place to lay his/her head and be bouncing a ball on the edge of where we skip around in cyberspace. Or it is perhaps by way of putting up another post when I am not at all sure I have anything to say. Where the signs peter out, poetry begins. Or not.