Month: January 2025

The New Year Welcome 2025

colleen Poetry

 New Year – 2025

A new chance at beginnings
like a path of snow without a footprint or a sandy beach with out  a track
not even from  the seagull or crab. 
It is a calendar without a crossed day. 

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us,
new, untouched, full of things that have never been . . .” – Rainer Maria Rilke

So we gather on the eve and wait for the clock to turn over  . . . .  and for one breath we stand.

How long that breath, that moment, that day , only we know.

And then at the next beat in this fast moving, loud and in-your-face world, with all its tensions,
we walk  alone over the sacred uneasy threshold , into where we are overwhelmed
once again with the work that needs to be done, in  our relationships, our families and our world. 

How long we make that one moment is what in some terms is called statio

Statio is “an ancient mystical practice of pausing intentionally in the in-between to create sacred space.

Statio is the pause that makes a threshold, a moment both of waiting and readiness.
It invites us to cultivate hope, courage and resilience by resting right there in the gap,
to find strength in stillness, to gather ourselves in this space between breaths,
even when exhaustion and doubt tempt us towards fear.” from Waymakers.

For me  this 2025  first dawn drew me to set out along the beach near our small get-away on the Central Coast of NSW,  to take in the sunrise of the new year. 
But it was the surprise  of a family of fairy wrens flirting  on my paths and in the scrub by the way where they flitted about giving me a delightful exhibition of males and females and a fledgling. 

 

In the background, the ocean, the blue sky’s vast embrace and the pelicans gliding at the entrance fishing the outgoing tide. I had to smile at the poor fish they survived life in the lake, probably for months, they survived the journey down the channel with fishermen on both sides of the bank out to lure them and at the last leg just as they make the ocean the line of smart pelicans scoop them up into their huge beak.

We enter the new year with a broken world, burdens of war in many guises, the reality of misinformation, disinformation and  the use of chaos  like a river in turmoil becomes muddy the world stirs fear in people and nations’ minds  and the power of Oligarchs  to set the world’s agenda. The world, now a multicultural village dependents on each other until someone wants more than their fair share and greed shows it ugly head. 

And so we  have work to do and as a Daoist i am reminded;

Check your balance, mind, body and emotion. 
The inner power only comes when you are aligned  as one –
your mind ordered,
your feelings at peace
your body aware
then  the inner power will gradually arise
like the morning sun
into the core of your being. 

Tranquillity in a small piece of the world  at peace Black swans and an egret: 1st January 2025

May 2025 bring the peace most of the world craves, hopes for, works for, prays for, wishes for. so we can live in happy carefree groups and bring up our children without fear.

How lucky in one small space,

along Tuggerah Lake

2 spoonbills, a pelican and a white egret

all feeding in peace

day one of 2025

 

 

 

 

New Year Mystery by Colleen Keating

colleen Poetry , , ,

 

New Year Mystery

Black garbage bags, knife and gloves murmur mystery 
as the two of us stride out along the berm of the lake 
past the pelicans fishing the channel on the incoming tide 
past the cormorants, gulls and Little terns at the edge
pause to admire the delicate grey heron in the bull rushes.

It was further along the littoral shore amidst the swamp oaks
where day-trippers, overnighters, drifters had left rubbish –
a place to use our power  to help in the one small way we could.

Yet the day expanded into a bigger mystery. A whimper
from a plump, fluffy kookaburra  alone on the ground caught 
our attention. In the tree tops there was kookaburra mayhem
The chick stayed like a statue until i moved closer and it lifted
of, flapped its way onto a low branch. An hour later on the walk
back, looking more like an orphan, it remained motionless
with more the pose of an owl. There was still noisy agitation
from the large palm, not a kookaburra laugh but a droning call
and  here we were powerless to help.

Colleen Keating

   

Julie Mehretu (A transcore of the Radical Imaginatory) The Experience by Colleen Keating

colleen Poetry , , , ,

Picture above  – The New Dawn

Julie Mehretu

(A transcore of the Radical Imaginatory)

Images crowd our minds, thoughts scramble . . .
This overload of information you use multilayered 
to blot out story, our words, thoughts, judgement  . . .
we are left with the blur  . . .sweeping lines, 
shapes,  stencils, that disrupt and interweave 
within the frame

Where is space 
in this world for the soul?

Shadows mingle on the hanging canvass
each viewer a presence, smudged, smothered,
each of us shading the overlay.  
Image after image is transformed – 
morphs into the abstract

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to roam?.

Images crowd in to be our burden – Californian fires, 
flames, firestorm, Grenfell Tower torching sky- 
humans, ethnic cleansing, Rohingya conflict,
trail of black ash, the Burning Bush  that consumes.
Image after image 

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to be free?.

You overlay, overlay to transform. 
Blurred towards abstraction. Each physical event 
experienced and now you remind us this is not us , 
this is not our world. Even as I step close 
in search of a bird, a feather, even wisp of a wing 

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to fly?  

                                                                                                                                               
Before the canvass titled New Dawn I weep.
Darkening, with pace of time, race for information 
what do we know? What have we done? 
Our tiny ones have only a small place 
of gold horizon to be born and spread their wings.

Where is space  
in in this crowded noisy shattered world? 

Is it you who give us the space within, no words 
of containment, no pidgin-holing of our being, no longer
reduced to body, skin, national identity
rather a trajectory for a more complex way
to imagine a better world.  In this motion 
are we on the verge of collapse or the brink of transition?

A space where our soul 
can breathe and love again. 



There are myriad positive and negative aspects to the world we are living in.
It’s overwhelming.  . .the accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate.
I am deeply committed to the language of abstraction as a place to negotiate
these complexieites and contradictions from a nuanced and subjective place – Julie Mehretu

 

The Magritte Experience by Colleen Keating

colleen Poetry , , , ,

René Magritte

‘There is more than what one knows’  M.

Memories are water, deep, brooding and primal
with eyes closed, seeing  another way

who knows 
who

 The crow perches 
 holds the question

The thought is the image – apple thought, cloud,   grey 
everyman  
brush – paints ideas  . . . reality is senseless 
as is god  

Time folds into itself 
it is all here,   from eternity,  forever  

Familiar is no longer 
as  pipe is not  pipe

the bird perched on top of the cage 
still the question

The dove of the sky  holds the clouds 
with hundreds of other I gaze at gazing

no word . . .  no

My daughter, laid low with a broken ankle 
asks to live vicariously through me 

and seeing it through her eyes is seeing it twice 
doubley asking the question

 

         

Magritte’s trademark images of clouds, seascapes, bowler-hatted men,  pipes, apples. 
Some complained theat his work is anti -painting  – cultivated for its unreality and strangeness.

Surrealist painter and provocateur René Magritte  created some of the  most memorable images of the 20th century.
In a way with his slanted way of seeing he reveals the mystery and poetry embedded within seemingly
ordinary objects and everyday settings.