Poetry – I am the master miller

Posted on by Opher

I am the master miller

In come the sacks of wheat,

Each grain a sealed globe

Of locked up mystery,

A richness of nutrition

Sealed within its protective case –

It’s cover.

The seed tumbles through my machine

In unseemly haste,

In hundreds of thousands,

As I slowly grind.

Harnessing the energy of nature

To turn my sails,

Working with nature

In the natural way,

For that is the art of the miller.

I break the case asunder

To release the wondrous essence.

It is now free

To dance with new joy

And give life.

There is deftness in my art

As I deploy my tools,

For I must keep up

With the flow of seeds

And never fall behind.

I separate the chaff

From the vital essence

And am happy,

Lost,

Within my work.

The sacks of seeds arrive

In great number

And I transform them

From potential into realisation –

A stream of purity.

For months I toil

Lost in the beauty of the slow art,

As the seeds arrive,

The sails turn,

The cogs engage,

And I am one with the process;

Losing myself in fulfilment

That stems

From the moment it connects –

A timeless balance

All of its own –

That I am of.

I am the master miller.

Waking from the thrall

I look behind

At the sacks of raw flour

I have gleaned,

With a glow of satisfaction.

The fineness of the flour

Is the evidence of my craft –

I run the fine white powder through my fingers.

This is what my hands have made

When I merge myself as one

With the process,

In harmony with the wind,

The wood, the stone and seed.

I transform the rough grain

Into this delicate stream of wonder

And it fills me with fire.

Back home I take the pure potential

And adulterate it with water, sugar, oil and yeast.

I knead and leave to stand.

I place it in the oven

But it is burnt or full of holes.

For I am no master baker.

My fayre is passable at best.

All the beauty of my skill is spoiled

And returns to mock me.

Ideas arrive into my mind

As ephemeral bubbles

That I must catch between the millstones

Of my imagination

So that their essence is released

To trickle out in words.

Those words

Endlessly streaming through my fingers

Across the page

Now need the master baker’s hand

To enable them to rise,

And the heat to do its work;

To release the full flavour they contain

Lest they read as run of the mill.

Every master miller is in search of the master baker

In order to perfect their craft together.

Neither one can produce excellence alone.

Opher 23.10.2016

I am the master miller

A writer works alone but cannot complete their task alone. It requires community in order to perfect the work. Without the feedback of the audience or the honing of the editor the raw product is poor. For the skill set necessary to create a work of art is too onerous and multiple for any one person to possess in full. Few have that range of ability. I surely do not.

A writer sits in solitude catching the globes of ideas that pass through their mind and capturing them in symbols. These words pour out in endless stream across a clean white sheet and build up into page after page. It is a relentless task, to keep up with the flow and translate those ideas into their essence – to liberate the abstract into concrete form that communicates their spirit. I use the word liberate deliberately – for I see those ideas freed from an internal abstraction into a wider world – a world where others might interpret them and taste the abstraction themselves. So while the symbols are reductionary and restrictive, the liberation comes in explosions of realisation in the minds of others as the essence, packaged in the constrained symbols, is released in the consciousness of others. The ideas are liberated from the mind of one into the minds of many.

That is the creative task of a writer.

Yet should the writing process be strewn with spelling, grammatical or structural faults that intrude and prevent that process of communication, like boulders on the highway, then the art is lost.

The writer can rarely see the boulders they have created to block the progress of the reader. It is the task of the editor to identify the faults and smooth the path. That is a skill as adept as any creator.

Alone we are less. Together we are greater. Every master miller requires a master baker in order to create the perfect loaf.

As a writer I am constantly haunted by Paul Simon’s words –

‘And all my words come back to me

In shades of mediocrity;

Like emptiness in harmony.

I need someone to comfort me.’

That is always how I feel – bereft.

Why the rich should pay more taxes.

Posted on by Opher

As  teachers I and my son spend our time developing skills, imparting knowledge, giving direction, encouragement and self-esteem to my students.

As a nurse my son saves lives regularly and makes people better.

There are millions of support staff in the social services, police, fire service, refuse workers, sewage workers, road sweepers, dentists, construction workers, road maintenance, telephone servicers, doctors, and thousands of other roles – whose function is not to create wealth but to support those who do. Without them the country does not function.

No creator of wealth can function on their own. They require the support of the rest of society – whether that be directly or indirectly.

Society provides the infrastructure that is required for wealth creators to operate.

I changed lives for the better. The millions like me who work in society are indirectly responsible for all the creation of wealth. It’s called teamwork.

To use an analogy from soccer – it is not just the striker who scores the goal, neither is it just his teammates on the field, nor just the manager, physio and coaches, nor the groundsmen, ticket sellers and security or the atmosphere generated by the fans – it is the sum total of all of them – every last one.

By suggesting that the wealth creators are more important and deserve to keep all their wealth you downgrade the value of the bulk of people in society who might not directly create wealth but provide the whole means for its creation.

The wealth creators need to pay, through taxes, for the support structure on which they depend – that is the society they are part of.

That is why tax evasion is despicable. It is an abuse of all the people that directly and indirectly supported them.

Writing is about teamwork

Posted on by Opher

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There are so many skills involved in writing a book. It is rare that any one person has the full skill set. Just think what is involved:

  • To have the ideas and enthusiasm
  • To organise them into a readable ‘story’
  • To create the structure for the book
  • To create characters, pace and ending
  • To have the punctuation right
  • To have the grammar right
  • To have the tenacity to plug away to the end and finish it when all the energy and enthusiasm has long gone
  • To edit the completed story
  • To design the cover
  • To write the blurb
  • To market and sell your completed book

That is why it takes teamwork. To receive encouragement when the going gets tough; to have people feeding you ideas on how to develop a section further and make it better, to have readers who point out what works and what doesn’t; to have editors who pick up the spellos and grammar; to have designers to make it look better; to have a blurb writer who creates a succinct enticing piece that makes people want to read more.

No writer can do all that themselves. They are too subjective with their own work. They depend on constructive help from others to provide the objectivity.

If the team is good what comes out at the end is worthwhile. It takes a team to write a book.