In sun-bleached deserts, in mountain caves, on sea-sculpted rocks
the hermit slept, forgetting that the essence of being can be found in a single drop of rain.
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This post is also in Stella’s Stones
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Crochet and Knitting Meditation
When I started learning to crochet I thought of it as a relaxing, stress-reducing act, like counting the amber beads of a komboloi.
Now, looking at my hand holding the crochet hook, the wool, at the next stitch to pick up, the stitches I travelled and the one I have to travel to next, I think it is more than that. It is a process like meditation, without however the religious connotations and significance often associated with it: like counting prayer beads, but without the religion.
I was interested to see that, according to Wikipedia, there are two ways of counting the komboloi beads: “a quiet method, for indoors, and a noisier method that is acceptable in public places.” While crochet is quiet, knitting with two needles is not! I wonder whether there is a way(s) of knitting indoors that keeps the noise down!
blackbirds
Yesterday’s photographs
Halcyon Days
Metamorphosing
Shimmering haloes
As darkness falls over London,
the thick, grey curtain of rain
that drowned the city relents,
leaving behind shimmering haloes
of street lights — the night’s rainbow.
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This post can also be found here
Forest Fears
Festival of the Trees, issue 55, on the theme of 2011 UN International Year of the Forests, has been published by Jasmine, of Nature’s Whispers. It is an informative, as well as entertaining post, rich in text, visuals, and creative energy. The links are well worth exploring too, covering a plethora of work about nature, trees, forests, gardening, art, and other fascinating topics!
It also includes an alert about the UK coalition government’s plan to sell off many of the best-loved ancient forests and woodlands, and a link to an online petition to save the UK forests.
Jasmine writes:
“In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party plan on selling ALL of our ancient forests. Once they are gone, they cannot be redeemed. In order to carry out these environmentally unpopular sales, the government is rewriting laws written in The Magna Carta that have protected woodlands and ancient forests since 1215”
For more information about this issue please see The Guardian here, here and the campaign site here
If you enjoy walking in the forests as much as I do, if you care about the environment and the preservation of woodland, then this is the time to voice your concern and support the petition.
You can sign the petition online here
My short story and post appear here
waking up
Mischievous
cold wind sweeps the street, deposits leaves, sweet wrappers, a juice carton, and a chocolate box on my doorstep.
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This post appears also here
dark morning
52|250 Stella’s Stories
To read my stories published by the writers’ project “52|250 A Year of Flash” please go here
twentysix
“twentysix,” the second anthology highlighting short stories from a quarter of “52|250 A year of Flash,” is out. The editors of this writing project, Michelle Elvy, John Wentworth Chapin and Walter Bjorkman, challenge writers to produce a short flash of 250 words every week for one year. They provide a different theme each week and the resulting creative work is amazing: wonderful stories, and poems, of high quality from a prolific, creative, friendly, and excellent community of writers.
Each quarter, the editors pick and highlight in an anthology the best of the stories written on each week’s theme. The current edition also includes art work, readings, and reflections by some of the writers on their creating a particular piece and the ways they went about developing their take on the theme.
Beautifully and professionally edited, assembled and illustrated, it is well worth visiting, and reading. As you will see, the editors have put an incredible amount of work into “twentysix.”
I am honored to have two of my short stories included: on theme #25 “A private person” and on theme #26 “A hair raising story.”
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You can read the anthology here
My stories in 52|250 can be read here
The Eucalyptus
behind the stonework
behind the stonework
a spiritual space filled with
calm and stillness
.
Isn’t this exactly what we are trying to achieve with our stones?
Photo: St. Nicholas Church, Blakeney, North Norfolk.
This post can be found on Stella’s Stones
For more pictures of the area see here
New Year
Happy New Year’s Day!
Remember though …
.
a river flows
into a new year
every day
.
In a sense this micropoem plays on the theme of Heraclitus‘ Fragment 41: “You cannot step twice into the same river”
Δεν γίνεται να μπει κανείς στο ίδιο νερό του ποταμού που κυλάει δύο φορές.
From today on, though, I, along with others, will be entering the river of stones every single day for a month.
For Heraclitus the appearance of stability is an illusion, “for as you are stepping in [the river], other waters are ever flowing on to you.” However, consider the possibility of re-entering the river of stones: on the one hand, the river consists of the flowing moments of experience as represented by stones; on the other hand, each time we polish and share a stone, we ourselves change, grow through our attending to and encapsulating the moment of experience.
Happy New Year 2011!
This post also appears here
old friend
International Year of Forests
The UN declared 2011 as the International Year of Forests “to raise awareness on sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests.”
Forests are vital to the lives and livelihoods of the people of this planet, to our planet’s existence. Yet, according to UN figures, deforestation continues at the rate of 50.000 square miles per year.
A number of activities have been planned for the year, including high-level panel discussions, film screenings, a United Nations commemorative stamp series, competitions, art and other public events. Look out for them here
While the launch of the Year of Forests will be taking place later, I am posting a short story grown out of the combination of the theme of the Year of Forests with that of “Silence,” a writing prompt set by participants of the “52/250 A Year of Flash.” It was first published there
I copy my short story below:
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The Weeping of the Trees
Last spring, I hiked up Mount Olympus. The valleys surrounding its peaks are covered in black pine, beech, yew and tall conifers. On its slopes, vineyards spread precariously; olive trees anchor deep with their roots. Streams cascade to thirsty plateaus. No wonder the ancient Gods lived there.
I stayed in refuges, drank from the streams and breathed the pine-scented air. Cicadas serenaded me; butterflies I did not know existed covered my arms. Wolves lusted after me.
Magical. Yet, I dared not return, fearing the strange sightings and the silence: ghostly shadows appearing through the trees, gathering near water, rushing through the meadows, with a heavy, voluminous silence falling all round. At first, I did not believe my senses. Gradually, I came to expect and even look for the shadows.
Whenever I tried to touch a diaphanous apparition – as if made of smoke – it pulled back, avoiding my hand. I thought I saw it sigh, more as a gesture rather than sound, and glide away.
It was recently that I understood – and felt freed to return. The shadows are the souls of trees haunting the Olympian home of their Gods. Felled unjustly, burned in war, famine, and in ruthless profiteering, or carelessness, they return to plead with them.
Next time you visit Olympus, look for the shadows; seek this silence: If it is not disrupted by a leaf falling, a stream’s gurgle or an animal’s light footstep, know you are listening to the silent weeping of the trees.
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You can find the story in 52/250, together with a number of other excellent stories on the theme of “Silence” here.
She missed many boats
Have you heard the expression “missed the boat?” It is pertinent to
where I live, because there are no cars, no buses to “miss” on my
island. Only boats. There is the boat to the nearest town, and the
ferry-boat to Athens, once a week. No one misses those, as they are
the only contact we have with the outside world. No one, that is,
except Meropi.
After her husband’s boat went down in heavy seas, she never made it on
time to a boat: she missed the boat to her daughter’s wedding, to her
giving birth; to the christening, and then the marriage of her only
grandchild. To the doctor’s office on Naxos, after several days of
suffering the big pressure on her chest.
She was afraid of the sea, you see. A woman born and bred on an
island! Terrified of the Aegean waves crushing on the huge rocks, she
avoided even looking at them. No wonder she missed many boats.
But, no one misses the boat to Hades. So, today Meropi is on time. She
is being carried in her coffin on board, as we speak. The local priest
performed the service already – while, curiously, numerous doves
collected on the belfry – and she is braving the meltemi to reach her
place of rest, on the mainland. I can hear her only goat’s bell
ringing, as if already missing her. God bless her soul; I am not one
for travelling either.
The End
This story appeared on 52/250 A Year of Flash
Aliens stuck in chimney
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My very short story published by CuentoMag on Christmas Eve 2010
@CuentoMag Cuento Magazine
Millions of aliens, stuck in chimney after copying Father Christmas, are accidentally swept away by chimney sweep. @stellapierides #vss
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@CuentoMag Cuento Magazine
A Special Christmas Eve posting tonight instead of our usual Saturday posting.
..
.
Merry Christmas!
a christmas tree always turns me into a child
.
(or a quick way to take years off your age!)
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icy winds
whistling their own tunes
icy winds invade the city
clear the streets
rattle my door
.
a lone raven
Ammersee
Mountain Stream
- Stream of Stones
While waiting …
Near the small town of Benediktbeuern, there is a stream called Lainbach, flowing down the Benediktenwand mountain. Through sheer force and persistence, it has carved a ravine for itself and made stones of the huge rocks that lined its path.
It is a nice walk, especially during hot summer days. I pick polished, flat stones from its banks and add to the stacked-stone sculptures that hikers create in its shallow parts. A reminder of the Tibetan stacked stone sculptures (Buddha’s stones) and the stones used in meditation.
See also here
Language/Place #2
The second edition of the Language/Place blog carnival, hosted by the writer and Journalist Nicolette Wong of Mediatations in an Emergency is online. Visit it here.
This is what Nicolette Wong says in her introduction to the second edition:
“It unfolds between directions, detours and codes to arrive at fictive domains that are made real by the yearning for souls adrift. The journey continues, looking into private places and eccentricities, to trace slipping boundaries and the sense of one’s ever shifting homes.”
Dorothee Lang, the originator of this project, who also hosted the first edition, wrote in her “virtualnotes,”
“The idea of “> Language > Place” is to create a collaborate virtual journey through different places, in different formats, and with different languages included.”
My short story “Postcards” is included in edition #2, together with writings of more than twenty writers from all over the world. I can’t wait to read what they have to say.
16 December 2010
Sources and Related Material
I have listed below some of my “Sources and Related Material” for Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree. I will be updating this list, so please, come back for more!
Online
Alice James, 2001, ‘Memories of Anatolia: generating Greek refugee identity,’ in http://balkanologie.revues.org/index720.html
Thalia Pandiri, 2007, ‘Narratives of Loss and Survival: Greek voices from the Asia Minor Catastrophe,’ in http://www.interlitq.org/issue1/thalia_pandiri/job.php
Raymond Bonner, 1996, ‘Tales of Stolen Babies and Lost Identities; A Greek Scandal Echoes in New York,’ in http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/13/nyregion/tales-of-stolen-babies-and-lost-identities-a-greek-scandal-echoes-in-new-york.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War
In Print
Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta Books, 2007)
Renee Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City (New York: Newmark Press, 1988)
Esther P Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans (New York: Macmillan, 1933)
Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven and London: 1993)
Mark Mazower, After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960 (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Leyla Neyzi, ‘Remembering Smyrna/Izmir: Shared History, Shared Trauma,’ in History and Memory, Bloomington: 2008, 20:2
Arnold J Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the contact of civilizations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922)
Fiction
Louis de Bernieres, Birds without Wings (New York: Random House, 2004)
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (London: Bloomsbury, 2002)
Ernest Hemingway, ‘On the Quai at Smyrna,’ in The Short Stories (New York: Scribner, 2003)
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Fratricides (London: Faber and Faber, 1974; 1967)
Nikos Kazantzakis, Christ Recrucified (London: Faber and Faber, 1962; 1954)
Dido Sotiriou, Farewell Anatolia (Athens, Greece: Kedros, 1991)
Films
Theo Angelopoulos, The Weeping Meadow
Costas Ferris, Rembetiko
Elia Kazan, America America
Pantelis Voulgaris, Psychi Vathia, With Heart and Soul
A Stream of Stones
What is NaSmaStoMo?
A new and exciting “international project to encourage people to engage with the world through writing a short observational piece every day during January.” The project was created by Fiona Robyn of Planting Words and A River of Stones.
This is what is called a ‘challenge,’ and it is one for both writers and ‘non-writers.’
Why?
“Because choosing something to write about every day will help you to connect with yourselves, with others, and with the world. It will help you to love everything you see – the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the beautiful and the ugly,” Fiona writes.
This idea reminds me of the concept of ‘mindfulness’ in Buddhist meditation and its attention to the present moment. It also brings to mind Haiku, capturing a moment of insightful openness to the world by an individual human being. A haiku moment from a mindful being. I have recently become fascinated by this aspect, as well as other possibilities, of haiku and have been trying my hand at it. (For Zen and the Haiku moment see here )
In this sense, writing down our observation of a moment of stillness in our daily lives, wherever we are, is an act of meditative awareness, of fully inhabiting our selves in the present and creating a mark, a polished stone.
I am going to be writing my daily stones, and collecting them in my ‘A Stream of Stones’ in this website and elsewhere.
For more information on the A River of Stones project, please see here
Why not join the fun and the mindfulness yourself?
Sharpen your pen, polish your keyboard, cream your hands, and then, stop, look and listen!
15 December 2010
Tania van Schalkwyk wins Ingrid Jonker Prize
Tania van Schalkwyk wen Ingrid Jonker-prys vir 2010
Congratulations to poet Tania van Schalkwyk on winning the Ingrid Jonker Prize for English poetry!
She is a favourite of mine and I am so pleased her work is gaining the recognition it deserves.
2010 INGRID JONKER PRIZE AWARDED TO UNEMBELLISHED INCANDESCENCE
“Tania van Schalkwyk’s debut collection, Hyphen, is the winner of this year’s Ingrid Jonker prize for English poetry. The judging panel consisted of the poets Prof. Leon de Kock, Prof. Sally-Ann Murray and Charl J.F. Cilliers.
Van Schalkwyk’s poetic voice was declared ‘a rich addition to English South African writing’ and her collection Hyphen ‘a very significant volume indeed’.
The panel admired the ‘quiet humour’, the delicate capturing of ‘human strangeness’, and the refusal to embellish, all of which characterise Hyphen.”
The Ingrid Jonker Prize for debut poetry collections is awarded every year, and it will be presented at the 2011 Franschhoek Literary Festival.
Well done Tania! I am looking forward to many more poems and prizes!
Tania’s book can be ordered here
See also here
Where home is
He scours streets, bus and tube stations for newspapers. Two years since he arrived in London and he is still amazed at how many newspapers lie discarded around. Although he cannot decipher the writing, they are ideal for keeping warm.
He stuffs them inside his pullover and feels like a king: he needs for nothing. He is warm and fed: the city overflows with leftovers. He beds down whenever he is tired, wherever he finds a warm doorway from where he can look at the sky.
He loves summer best. At night, sneaking into Finsbury Park, he heads for his favourite bench, near the lake. It is cool and the sky is full of stars. Not as spectacular as the sky in his village, in the floodplains of the Mesopotamian Iraqi marshes, where the stars shine like diamonds on black velvet, but it works.
It illuminates the memories that follow him like his shadow: the rice fields and the boat he made himself from reeds, the water buffalo; his father, punting through narrow channels. The Garden of Eden.
Then he counts the stars, looks for patterns, for directions; for a sign that it is safe to return home. His heart, filled with nostalgia, trembles like a bird. Often though, he counts his blessings: here, among the floods of people filling the channels of this city, he can blend in and feel safer than in the marshes of his homeland – till it is time to return.
The End
Hot from my computer keyboard, this new short story written for the 52/250 A Year of Flash project, was first posted on their website. A story about a war-savaged, homeless man sleeping rough in Finsbury Park, North London, and the cruel strands of present-day displacement and identity.
10 December 2010
Where is your home?
Marshes in Iraq, photo here and here
For photos of Finsbury Park I took myself, see here
http://52250flash.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/where-home-is-by-stella-pierides/
