Hello World!

“Take hold of the shaft of the pen…
…Subscribe to the first step taken from a justified line into the margin."
"The First Gloass” - Seamus Heaney

I start my first post with words from Seamus Heaney’s poem “The First Gloss”, part of his Station Island collection. Not because I understood them immediately the first time that I read them. Nor indeed did I understand them the second, third, fourth or fifth time I tried.

I include them because it took me so long to understand them. That’s the point; learning something is hard.

It takes time. It requires persistence. It is not easy.

There will be times when you think you’re going backwards. There will be days when nothing works. In the worst case, days can follow days when still nothing seems to work.

But, over time, we learn. We find ourselves understanding more and more. We find that we no longer have to look things up because we know them!

And it all comes from picking up the pen and writing the first words.

My Mum wrote her Masters’ thesis on Seamus Heaney and she had a framed picture in which these words from “The First Gloss” sit. The picture has been an ever present for the last 30 years of my life whenever I went home to visit my parents.

I have read the words over and over many times; mainly because, just as we have hung the picture now, my Mum and Dad left the picture in the downstairs loo. Until, one day (when the internet was useful) I looked them up and came to understand their full meaning.

And for me that meaning is…there is power in the written word. Power that rises irrespective of how or where the words are written; they could be written in computer code, inscribed on parchment or chiselled in stone. There is also a process, sometimes even a ceremony, which we follow each and every time we choose a word to write.

Perhaps some of the words I will write in this blog will have power. I hope to find the process that works best for me and hopefully well for you too given you are one reader of these Sane Musings.