See Yourself Series

Is your partner failing to meet your needs, not making you happy, are you drifting apart?

Are new relationships failing?

Maybe some of the cause of your problems is the amount of emotional baggage you are carrying that is impacting on your behaviour and your expectations.

How much emotional baggage are you carrying ?

Is emotional baggage impacting on a relationship, or stopping you making that new relationship successfully?

To make space in your life for a new relationship or to improve your current one, its time to start releasing anything you’ve been holding on to that is preventing you from experiencing true intimacy(baggage). Identifying those issues and working to eradicate them will bring you to a level of self-awareness that will give you insight, flexibility, and freedom, making you much more available for  satisfying relationships.  Heard the phrase  someone has “too much baggage” to be ready for a committed, connected relationship, its true. We have a set of beliefs about ourselves and others that we have gathered over the years many learned in childhood, these beliefs we use consciously and unconsciously to live our lives. The problem is that some of these truisms, beliefs …are negatives and some are actually untrue but we believe in them and they colour our actions and attitudes as we go about the daily grind.

Baggage isn’t always what we think it is. It isn’t necessarily our circumstances, our past, or even the issues we’re currently working with. Baggage is often just a lack of flexibility about accepting whatever is showing up in our life or someone else’s and therefore an inability to move forward.

We all have baggage. What’s important is recognizing our baggage and minimizing its effects on our relationships.

An underlying feeling of emptiness, loneliness, or longing is something many, if not most, of us have experienced at one time or another. No matter how rich our lives may be, with a satisfying career, material wealth, and plenty of friends, we may still be carrying around a low-level feeling that something important is missing. This can be made worse by negative thoughts about our lives.

The place many of us turn  to in order to address our feeling of incompleteness, is our  relationships.

Great you are saying, I find my other half ,my soul mate and everything will be hunky dorey. Maybe…but if all it takes is to find the significant other , why are so many relationships rocky? Is it that many of us have not  found the right fit, or is it the baggage that one or both of us is carrying that is impeding harmony.

Our  significant other can only offer us acknowledgment, encouragement, approval, acceptance, they cannot make us feel complete and whilst we have our baggage it will  never be enough to end our feelings of dissatisfaction of wanting.

Once we realize that a partner is not going to be the one to make us happy or give us everything we think we need to be complete, we’re likely to feel disappointed, discouraged, and maybe even resentful.

We often unknowingly drag a suitcase full of problems into a new relationship, drop them at our partner’s feet, and say, “Fix these for me!”The way out of this trap is to make a commitment to ‘being the one’ who will address your own issues,to be honest with yourself and look at the roots of your ideas, prejudices and behaviour. When you no longer need your partner’s validation, then any encouragement, love, or guidance your partner does offer you will be their very best, given freely and from a place of love. When validation is no longer the primary reason you’re in a relationship, you can explore, enjoy, and appreciate everything that relationship has to offer.

Samantha Beardon

Feeling the sound

how night changes
with the saxophone’s weep
as notes untangle themselves
floating in the air like dandelion seeds
then become charged with bellicose beauty 
as they meld with the chasing archipelagos
from the keyboard player’s nimble fingers
like twirling ribbons arching through the air
the atmosphere charged with emotion
as the saxaphone weeps.

Samantha Beardon

Tocsin


There is a persistant plip plop
scritch scratch scratch scritch
staccato beats like the tapping
of alien fingers on the window.

I pause and shiver shoulders tense
It must be the amplified sound of rain
and leaves yet there is a discordance
in the air like the distant call of the tocsin.

I shrug and turn on Rusalka and sit feet up,
as the liquid notes of the music envelop me
and I visualise the prince swimming in the lake

-the phone rings.

Samantha Beardon

Sounds in Poetry. 1

Use of Sound in Poetry Part 1.

Poets use words not only for connotation and meaning but also to utilise their sounds to make patterns.
Sound is the most basic element of language. We learn to speak long before we learn to read or write, and the emotional response we have to sound is programmed in to our psyche very early on, during our pre-verbal development.

Because sound is made by the movement of air in response to muscular activity, speech and poetry are not just intellectual acts, but physical ones. When you read a poem aloud you are not just hearing the words and interpreting the stories, your whole body is involved in producing the sounds required to deliver the poem.

When reading a poem, your brain accesses both your knowledge of language, your knowledge of the sounds made by that language, and your previous experiences of sensations and feelings. Whatever you write, therefore, has sound. People hear your words in their heads, and so the sounds you create can draw people’s attention to your message.

“I may write in silence but my words will always be heard” – Marie Summers

Poets use a range of musical and figurative devices to achieve their effects. Some of these effects relate to the rhythm and metre of the words.

We use the sound of individual letters as well as the way we pronounce, read and decode the hieroglyphics of writing and speech.

Alliteration the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words are utilised as sound effects by poets.

Sweet birds sang
Susie picked seahells on the seashore.

Why do we write and why do folks read
Why is poetry an endangered breed?

When In a world of buy one – get one free
When fast furious games accompany life’s grand prix.

If you look at the four lines above you will note that not only have I repeated sounds at the beginning of some words I have used vowel sounds that are the same.
I have the i sound sprinkled along the lines
y sounds like i

why(i) write
why (i )
line three has repetition of the w … also o
world one

So this little poem is constructed to sound good to the ear… your brain loves patterns, those repeat sounds helps add a sort of rhyme that adds musicality.

The repetition of vowel sounds is called Assonance.

Onomatopoeia

The formation of a word from a sound associated with an action, object or thing or naturally associated with it’s properties such as plop, click, buzz, splat, hiss are attempts at imitating a sound. The interesting question is do these imitations, influence the meaning of the other words that they are combined with when we write or talk. Do onomatopoeic words throw up pictures in our minds, send our minds on a chase for other word associations.
In addition to the sounds they represent, many onomatopoeic words have developed meanings of their own. The word whisper not only represents the breathiness of people talking quietly but also describes the action of people talking quietly.

Pauses in poetry

Rhythmic pauses in poetry

The caesura plural caesurae.
It can be used in poetry and prose.
This literary device involves creating a break of a breath within a line where the two separate parts are distinguishable from one another yet intrinsically linked together. The purpose of using a caesura is to create a dramatic pause, which has a strong impact. The pause helps to add an emotional, or theatrical touch to the line and conveys a depth of sentiment in a short phrase.

Everyone speaks, and everyone breathes while speaking. For instance, when you say, “Josh has done his assignment,” you take breath or make a pause before further saying, “But Gideon did not.” Then again you take a little breath and say, “He ran out of ink.” Such pauses come from the natural rhythm of your speech.

Poetry also uses pauses in its lines. It uses them to indicate how a piece should be read, to help rhythm and speed and sense.
A comma, semi colon, full stop, dash, double space ellipse or exclamation mark often in the middle of a line would indicate a caesura.
In metrical poetry the caesura can be used as unstressed syllable.
Even if a caesura is not marked by punctuation, poets use the natural breaths and intonations of speech to get the rhythm right. Word choice is extremely important to get the intonation right to speed and slow reading, to heighten, reduce emotion.

How we speak using caesura

Caesura on the whole are not big pauses you are not going to pause for 3 seconds just slightly longer than normal speech transmission.
Like everything in speech caesura come in various degrees longer or shorter. Sometimes a caesura happens as we lengthen the syllables in one word as we speak.

If we look at the lines
‘Death, only death, can break the lasting chains ‘

We say the first death sharply and crisply then the second as deathhh. Say it out loud try it.

Examples of caesura

In the children’s verse, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence,’ the caesura occurs in the middle of each line:
‘Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye.’
This caesura this pause would remain even without the coma its a natutal space to breathe.

In this piece there is no visable caesura but some occur naturally through word choice and speech patterns.

‘Do you wonder at the why of life

Heed the truth kick the doubt.’

Sometimes Caesura occur near the beginning of a line, for emphasis, not at a place we would normally pause for breath, unless our speech was dramatic or we wanted our listener to really tune in.

For example, in the first line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Mother and Poet’, the caesura occurs after the very first word of the poem:
‘Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east’

Sometimes poets use more than caesura in a line as in
Shakespeares Hamlet.
‘To be, or not to be — that is the question…’
Here there is a short pause with the coma but a longer more dramatic pause on the dash.

Sometimes near the end of a line.
‘Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!’

This stanza from John Ashbery’s poem “Our Youth” gives a more modern example of caesura using three different types of punctuation: ellipsis in the first two lines, a period in the third, and finally a comma in the fourth.
Blue hampers . . . Explosions,
Ice . . . The ridiculous
Vases of porphyry. All that our youth
Can’t use, that it was created for.

How we mark caesura in scansion
If we are analysing poetry we mark a caesura with ll called a double pipe.

Why use caesurae

Writers use caesurae to create variation in the rhythm of a poem, or to emphasize words in the middle of lines that might not otherwise receive attention. Since line breaks in poetry tend to serve as a natural pause regardless of whether the lines are end-stopped with punctuation, the rhythm of poems with lines of equal length can become somewhat monotonous and unvaried without the use of caesurae to create pauses in the middle of lines. The use of caesurae also allows writers to formulate their thoughts and images using more complex sentence structures with different clauses and a freer use of punctuation than is possible without the use of caesurae.
Check out caesurae in poetry and see how they work.
There are technical names for the different types of caesura you can look them up but to me it is important you understand the idea and ways to use pauses in lines. Technical terminology is not as important in the short term.

Samantha Beardon.