Journal

Window is a journal Maria Amidu started in January 2016, it is a repository for her random musings on significant and insignificant things

03/02/2020 03/02/2020

Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967 Roelof Louw

06/03/2018 06/03/2018

beginnings

07/09/2017 07/09/2017

Once Upon a Time (free writing)

I have zoned in on the o in Once and the o in Upon because Imogen mentioned it, and circles, and Tracie mentioned that momentousness is upon us, and now I can’t stop noticing the circles in all the words I have just written, which brings me to the my love of and the power of language, how I’m always collecting words and how they do not always suffice, how we need to embody life sometimes rather than just talk about it, or are we always embodying it anyways even if we are jabbering on and on? or maybe it’s just me doing the jabbering on and on! I need words either way, they sometimes formulate and organise themselves of their own accord and give me the essence of feelings I have been trying to articulate, I think I might prefer writing to speaking, the look of words are as important as the pronunciation, the hearing is less powerful sometimes than the scribing, I’m rereading Love in the Time of Cholera after a recent exchange brought it to my attention again and I’m astounded by Gabriela Garcia Marquez’s skill in joining words together to make the most beautiful, strange and heart breaking images, who would be without books, not just books, also the writers of the books; books raised me and raise me still, I’ve stopped writing and glanced out the window to the rooftops but I could just as easily be in the harbour that has just been described in the last paragraph of the book (see above) and I’m amazed, not for the first time this week, about the power of the present, disintegrating every other moment so that I am... (for the first time I ran out of time!)

07/09/2017 07/09/2017

my stuff (free writing)

Dustman, Michael Rosen, I love this poem, the noises of the morning, the emotional, social and moral dilemmas of a week day, the pragmatism of having a system to shed the stuff of human endeavour, the conversations that randomly happen in the street between two strangers, the way that a fleeting relationship builds, forms and then disintegrates. It’s comforting. We need this stuff to keep us present, solid ground to walk on when there is a sea of turmoil, waking up to the same scene day in day out matters because in all the confusion we know that what we see is true even if it isn’t what we want, without this truth we would stumble and fall, disappearing into an unstructured space, swirling with the cacophony of everything, bashing into us and sending us spinning, I like the certainty of these day to day things – sunrise, seagulls shouting, dust trucks beeping, my alarm of songbirds going off