Poetry has been a significant part of my life since my Mum sat on my bed when I was a small child and taught me Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ from memory. She also used to mutter lines from the Shakespeare sonnet which begins “Being your slave, what should I do but tend/upon the hours and times of your desire?” – making her own interpretation of those famous lines as a reflection on her life as a housewife looking after us all. Her influence on my writing life is huge – a glimpse of her creative powers can be see in the poems I’ve written about her – especially ‘Dora Wunbery’ and ‘Hang-gliding’. Jung’s observation that ‘nothing has so great an effect on the child as the unlived life of the parent’ rings very true in my experience. That she never wrote (apart from letters) seems to add fuel to my determination to write.
I was fortunate indeed to meet David Palmer, poet, teacher and technically a ‘bard’, through my best friend since age of six, his daughter Helen. David encouraged our poetry-writing from when we were quite young and went on to teach us for ‘O’ level English, which included a wonderful introduction to the work of Seamus Heaney, Norman McCaig and Robert Morgan. Along with his wife, Irene, he also taught us ‘A’ level – Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson. He wrote a lot of poetry himself, being published in the Anglo-Welsh review and once winning a poetry prize an Eisteddfod – which is what makes him a bard.
My third great influence has been through the Buddhist writing workshops ‘Wolf at the Door’ run by Ananda and the late Manjusvara, I began to take part in this extraordinary work in 1998 and it has been a life-changing experience. To use writing consciously as a part of spiritual practice, as a fascinating means to develop ones own awareness of and awakening to oneself, others and the world is a magical thing. As I write, we are still grieving Manjusvara’s unexpected death in June 2011 and I’m slowly turning my mind to picking up his ‘mantle’ to work alongside Ananda, as he has requested, to continue and further develop Wolf at the Door.