Thinking about birds and bees
I've just updated my MA tumblr blog- only been 16 months! - and in it I used a metaphor about writing ideas and birds.
It's only natural really. Your idea is an egg, it needs to be fertilised, incubated and then when it's hatched, it needs to be fed, nurtured and then finally allowed to take to the wing and fly through the literary skies. With any luck it hits a warm critical thermal and soars higher and higher; of course the opposite can occur and it plummets to an untimely end. This could well be due to a lack of preening, or taking flight before the wings are fully formed.
Some ideas are just plain silly and you look back and wonder where the hell they came from. I couldn't possibly have come up with something that daft, who placed that idea in my head? Those ideas are cuckoos. Your own brilliant ideas have been uncermoniously pitched from the nest and one, that on the outside looks like one of yours, is sneakily placed there. You nurture it, keep it warm, feed it little tidbits when it has hatched, then before your very eyes it grows into something monstrous, so different from anything else that was naturally yours. The cuckoo.
I once wrote a poem about cuckoos. I was about 8, I think. It is no longer in existence, but I performed it in school assembly. As always at that age, I got into the performance. The first lines were:
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
The first days of spring.
and I really tried to sound like a cuckoo. I remember some of my peers laughing at me. Little children can be so hurtful, but I carried on regardless.
It's like spring here, at the moment. This is not going to be good for the bee population. The garden is full of bees who have come out thinking the spring has sprung, not that winter is imminent. They have flowers to visit as they too are confused by the warm weather. The nights, however, are chilly and every day there is a bee, or two, lying dead in the garden and that is not counting the ones that my young dog has decided are the enemy and must be destroyed. I really hope that the bee population does not suffer from this - we need bees.
It's only natural really. Your idea is an egg, it needs to be fertilised, incubated and then when it's hatched, it needs to be fed, nurtured and then finally allowed to take to the wing and fly through the literary skies. With any luck it hits a warm critical thermal and soars higher and higher; of course the opposite can occur and it plummets to an untimely end. This could well be due to a lack of preening, or taking flight before the wings are fully formed.
Some ideas are just plain silly and you look back and wonder where the hell they came from. I couldn't possibly have come up with something that daft, who placed that idea in my head? Those ideas are cuckoos. Your own brilliant ideas have been uncermoniously pitched from the nest and one, that on the outside looks like one of yours, is sneakily placed there. You nurture it, keep it warm, feed it little tidbits when it has hatched, then before your very eyes it grows into something monstrous, so different from anything else that was naturally yours. The cuckoo.
I once wrote a poem about cuckoos. I was about 8, I think. It is no longer in existence, but I performed it in school assembly. As always at that age, I got into the performance. The first lines were:
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
The first days of spring.
and I really tried to sound like a cuckoo. I remember some of my peers laughing at me. Little children can be so hurtful, but I carried on regardless.
 |
| Not a cuckoo! |
It's like spring here, at the moment. This is not going to be good for the bee population. The garden is full of bees who have come out thinking the spring has sprung, not that winter is imminent. They have flowers to visit as they too are confused by the warm weather. The nights, however, are chilly and every day there is a bee, or two, lying dead in the garden and that is not counting the ones that my young dog has decided are the enemy and must be destroyed. I really hope that the bee population does not suffer from this - we need bees.
Comments
Post a Comment