Drift was unexpected. Uncalled for. Unsought-after. But it arrived anyway. Words that dance and bend and wrestle with meanings they were never intended to have, to help tell of a dramatic, gentle, world-altering opening. A poem that stretched me beyond any previous shape I had known when we birthed it into the world. The poem and I. We co-created each other at that moment. But the making, I now realise, began a long time ago.
In 2002, I was a community pharmacist, practising with sincerity in a small pharmacy next to the covered market in Preston, Lancashire. The days passed and were almost always uneventful and almost always very, very similar. I couldn’t appreciate the value of this at the time and often felt unmoored. Which was odd because I was very strongly tied to the dispensing bench. My attention, rightly, fully absorbed by the work in front of me. But a part of me longed for freedom and the unknown. Alongside notes of which pharmacy I was to work in each day, I wrote poetry in my diary. It was lamentable but I was young. I had forgotten this. I had forgotten that I was once a poet. But the writings, collected in an old box file and my wife’s memory are a record of this time. A spilling of which you can see above. Then a career lifted off and I forgot about writing and mostly, feeling very much at all.
Some two decades later, with a creeping sense of unease about that same career, after the alien feel of lockdown and gradually connecting with people from around the world via Zoom, I went on a trip to Spain. I had no idea what the trip was to be about other than we were going to talk and walk in the Spanish mountains while we did so. That happened. Lovely. Then on the last day of the short trip another ascent to the summits seemed altogether too much to the group, so we had a little time to ourselves before a riverside walk. I found myself literally without preference about what happened. It was a new and odd feeling. I borrowed a meditation cushion and went to sit on the top of a cliff nearby. Drift is about the sudden moments that followed.
Returning home was many things. One of those was the presence of words. They came and wanted out. So I wrote them down. Not knowing how. Not remembering how. Without great skill or knowledge but following what felt truest to tell of what I had experienced. It took a while. Too much to fit into words. Words were and are not the relevant medium. However I persisted. Eventually I sat with a set of words that told something of what I had come to understand existence to be. The best I could at that time. Yet, I wanted it to have more substance, more presence, more life. So I set about illustrating the poem. With my beloved cat for close company. Tabitha was a wonderful companion. Very silly, loving and wise. That’s her in the image above. Helping with the illustrations.
After much effort, 18 illustrated pages came into being and it was a joy that they did. We talked about framing them and hanging them on the wall next to the stairs. I shared them with family who picked out the lines here and there that pulled on them. I shared them with the people I’d spent time with in Spain. ‘That seems like a real thing’ one said. I shared them with a friend in the US. ‘Please publish this’ he said. They were behind me, taped to the wall, while I trained to be an Integral Development Coach. One fell off at a seemingly poignant moment. I read the verse to the group.
Then they remained, stored in a cardboard envelope. For an age. Almost three years. I always had in my mind that, one day, they would be bound together so that others could read them. But it felt so hard. For some reason it felt so hard. It turns out that it wasn’t hard. I already knew how to produce a book and have it printed. Something else had gotten in my way. Some intuition that it wasn’t yet time or that I wasn’t ready. But now it is, and I am. So here is Drift. Printed and bound and a little magical.
You can buy a copy if you like. You’ll read it in minutes but perhaps you’ll find something in its pages that lasts.
