About habits. And beginnings.

There is something about habits.

I have just resurrected an old habit of stepping into my blue walking shoes first thing in the morning. No slumber (well....), no shower, no breakfast. Out you go, girl! This is March, the mornings have opened their eyes again. When I stopped my healthy morning habit last autumn, the sun was far more lazy than me. It was just too dark.

There is something about habits. They make you do it, whatever the “it” is. This morning rain tapped on the roof, the air was gray and misty. I still tied my shoe laces. The habit told me to.

Inside my coat pockets, together with tissues and old cinema tickets are little scraps of paper, crinkled and creased from wear and tear. They are my walking poems, my dialogue partners and company, and speak with me through layers of cloth, skin and bone. Some whisper with intensity, others shout with gentle sounds.

I am reading Mary Oliver’s The Journey these days. When I say days, I mean the plural. The words speak wonder, but they need time to penetrate my skull and that brain bark that surrounds my mind.

There is something about habits. I have bad habits as well, and one in particular called anxiety. It runs as a darkened river through the landscape of my existence. In times yonder the reason for acquiring it was real enough. But as habits go, I internalized the experience and turned it into automatic thinking. It sounds simple. It is not. I could write libraries about it.

This blog is about poetry and how to let words speak their power by introducing new voices into my life. Voices, I might add, that I also recognize as my own. We all come from the same waters.

“One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,...”, writes Mary Oliver. I have repeated the line over and over. One day. I finally knew. What I had to do. And began.

This blog is also a beginning.