Beauty

August 7, 2021

Haiku in the Northern Territory

I’ve played around writing Haiku and other short poems for a few years now but not consistently or seriously learning how to write them well. Recently I thought I’d like to try and write Haiku better and match them with photos I take. There’s no Haiku society in the Northern Territory but I’ve found lots of info on-line from all over the world and many helpful books.

Im reading “Haiku in English: the first hundred years” and in the introduction by Billy Collins he explains the following: “…a Haiku must be very simple and free of poetic trickery and yet be airy and graceful…Haiku is both easy and impossible to define. One can merely use dictionary language to say that Haiku is a short poem, usually three lines that uses natural imagery to evoke a feeling or mood. But such flat definitions fall well short of accounting for Haiku’s mysterious power to cause in the readers consciousness a sudden shift, literally a new way of seeing. Part of this ability lies in the form’s brevity, which leaves no time to explain an experience; instead, the Haiku conveys an experience directly without commentary and with an immediacy not possible in longer poems”.

Below are three I’ve written this week with photos I’ve taken locally…enjoy!

Sunset over Gove Harbour
Wild ducks at Kakadu National Park
Tigerwing dragonfly Daliwuy Bay was flying too quickly to photograph. It was beautiful.

May 15, 2014

Singing Days

The French author Marcel Proust once wrote “There are hilly, difficult days that one takes an infinite amount of time to climb, and there are downward-sloping days that one can race down singing.”

I knew I was going to have many singing days when I stared out of the window of the small plane flying low over the Torres Straits, just off the top of north Queensland. The water below was a collage of blue greens and tiny uninhabited islands. I was on my way to work my first nursing agency contract on Badu island. I had grown used to island life in Samoa, where my partner came from. The long, lazy fishing days, the close knit family and community life that comforted me with the feeling of never being alone, and the endless beauty of the surrounding sea.

From the moment the plane touched down on the Badu airstrip and I saw coconut palms fringing the fence line, I couldn’t stop smiling. The two years I’d been in Aurukun on the western side of Cape York, had been mostly “hilly difficult days”, coping with being a long way from family and friends in a harsh environment. I was looking forward to living and working in a quieter environment. There is nothing as restful as being able to look at the sea and what I enjoyed as I walked in through the door of the Badu clinic, was being able to see straight down the corridor to sparkling water.

Singing days can be created or caused by any number of reasons. My Badu six weeks were filled with songs from the sea.

February 21, 2014

Beauty as Therapy?

I’ve just read an article entitled “Beauty Myths” by Dr Mary Grogan in a magazine called “Mindfood. She writes about how people are attracted to others with symmetrical facial features and how often beautiful looking people have a smoother path in life. But to balance that she mentions a book called “The How of Happiness” (Prof Sonja Lyubomirsky, Penguin 2007) which states that attractive people are no happier than plain-featured folk. Her ideas were interesting but what stopped and made me think was the following: “Interestingly, appreciation of beauty is one of two character strengths that have been shown to be associated with life satisfaction following recovery from a psychological disorder (the other is love of learning).

She continues “In a web-based study of 2087 adults published in The Journal of Positive Psychology 2007 Christopher Peterson and colleagues found that people who had a high appreciation of beauty were more likely to recover from depression and anxiety disorders with greater levels of life satisfaction. Thus, interventions that include how to develop appreciation of beauty may be useful not just as a general life skill, but in enhancing life when experiencing psychological distress and afterwards. So how do we find beauty in our world and appreciate it?”

When I worked in Aurukun, a remote Indigenous community in far north Queensland, for two years my sanity saver was to walk down to what was locally known as the landing on the Archer river after work and watch birds, sunset, sparkling water or misty mangroves depending on the weather and to photograph what was memorable. I’ve found in the years since I left and worked in various remote locations, finding beauty spots in nature and just sitting and watching and maybe photographing (which makes me notice more) has calmed my mind repeatedly. I can’t recommend appreciation of beauty, highly enough as a therapy for stress and a life enhancer. Remote area nurses are lucky to have access to some of the most amazing places in Australia if we take the time to find and notice them.

This photo was taken recently in the Northern Territory across the Gulf of Carpentaria from Aurukun.