A the start of each New Year there is a natural collective energy/consciousness of starting afresh with clarity and focus.
It is a time of renewal, regardless of the arbitrariness of the prevailing calendar system.
The solstice (longest/shortest day) was in any event a few days before on 22nd so there is a sufficient natural time connection point close by.
As we look to inspirational material as a means of helping to raise the Green Zeitgeist worldwide it is appropriate to feature micro poetry as our first Green Poetry posting of the year.
Ando Perez pursues a minimalist lifestyle, based on substantial life experience and she is the poet we would like to feature in this first post of 2012.
Most would perhaps know of micro poetry as the traditional Japanese haiku.
However even within the Japanese genre itself, haiku is but one of a number of forms.
In the Western tradition haiku is not necessarily 17 syllables and three lines, although mostly it does not exceed 17 syllables and typically it is three line structured.
A poet like Marie-Helene Visconti, for example, stays with the classical structure, a Nicole Rushin intuitively ‘feels’ the essence of haiku, sometimes having less syllables per line or a touch more.
Ando Perez moves in a broader range within the Western micro poetry genre, with a range of styles.
To date she has written more than 800 poems ... although as she says, not because she intended to!
At times it may be a rhythmic high impact five syllables per three lines, at others whatever it should be for the idea/thought.
The essence however of all these styles is the high impact brevity of message.
Deliberate words, each one carefully weighed up, with maximum delivery of an idea or concept or thought.
Micro poetry is not as simple as it seems, being the distilled/crystallised essence of a substantial thought process, be it conscious or sub conscious.
It may be rooted in periods of a life, or it may be the immediate response to a newly sighted phenomenon.
It is meant to provoke thought, to raise existential questions, both questions and answers being relative to the reader. Paradoxically the range of interpretation may be greater than that of longer verse.
In this sample of five of Ando Perez poems the focus is on the individual and his/her relationship to the inter-connected Universe in which all exists.
We have especially used images from Ando Perez photographic material, each one chosen by us in terms of how we thought of the poem.
For example, in her image “Little Jar Blue” the empty glass connotes the vulnerability of all our Souls.
Despite all the strength that we can muster we all have our own Achilles Tendons … it is purely a combination of the worst of circumstance and timing.
Wisdom would have us recognise our own vulnerabilities and not be so arrogant as to deem ourselves invincible.
Mike Shaw’s poignant black and white images of some of the people of the street should not be too easily dismissed as the ‘faces of the weak and poor of spirit’.
In her 'Untitled Meditation “5” ' the ‘opaque sky with birds’ image suggests the idea that we are mere specks in Something far Greater and far more Mysterious than we can imagine.
Even those of us who read scientific material as a hobby have to face up to the possibility that neutrinos are about to undermine the Absoluteness of the Speed of Light by arriving at Gran Sasso in Italy a few hundred miles from the Swiss CERN laboratory sooner than they should.
For us Green is Sustainability, and Sustainability is Green.
All is a synergistic (positive and negative) interplay of ‘everything’, within a holistic game.
A deadly game, because if we get it wrong, it can mostly be all over for the human species as well not just for the majority of other Life forms.
The raising of the Green Zeitgeist is a matter of survival.
