PHI lippa. Letters of Love

Who Am I? What am I about?                                       

A ‘Lover of Horses‘ is the meaning of my name. One thing my mother got right. The first love of my life was met in a film about a boy who chose to drown with his ‘Crin Blanc’ his White Stallion(Mane)’. Rather than let him be captured, the two rode into the sea to drown. The waves covered them in close embrace. Taking me to the film when I was seven was supposed to be a birthday treat. In a way, it was. I cried for a month and dreamt thereafter I would one day find just such a champion lover as a white stallion in the Camargue. Here it is as close as I can get. Understanding love in all its forms has driven my life.

Suitable ‘White Horse at sunset’

PHI

What began me has also ended with PHI, the golden section that binds love throughout the creation. Finding love in its manifest created forms is my search for meaning and one way or another I write about it. In poetry, in novellas, and in what has been damningly called my ‘Magnum opus’, the story of the Odyssey in which lovers found their connections with themselves, and brought memory to the surface. For a joyful book that appellation is quite a killer. Add ‘erudite’ ( somebody, who meant it kindly did) and it is almost dead in the water. Yet it is a light-hearted paeon to lovers, lovers of truth, lovers of the natural world, lovers of ideas, and creators, musicians, painters and poets. It is also quite irreverent because love is too important to be taken seriously…

Mavericks and Solitaries

The other thing I love are the mavericks, eccentrics, the unorthodox and shunned. I suppose because I know about that. The solitaries of life have always felt natural companions. It is why those lonely geniuses were my first choice, tracking them down, through desert sands and into mental hospitals. All heralded now, safely dead.That brings me to the writing of this new self-introduction. I have been ‘called out’ and admonished for  hiding behind books and stories rather than letting myself be known full frontal. Perhaps that’s because at the half mast of my seventies I don’t look great in a photograph, don’t make small talk easily, and, yes, I spend most of the time writing, books, blogs, and ‘those’ letters to my tribe of daughters. I had four once, but they are now (mostly) absent. I will probably offer reflections on all that too. Some of you are still going through the delusions that you can shape your children!

Virtual Friends

What might this newly polished portrait of what I am about have to offer? Ideas mostly, observations ( many) that are probably unwise, as many free stories as you feel like reading, and the hope of friends who have other ideas. My books are covered in other pages, and I have abandoned them to plan new ones. Just to keep the grey matter going a little longer. I will probably indulge in memories of the Africa I grew up in, the people who gave over to laughter and singing. Old people have a tendency to rose tint but it was another country then, and more vivid everyday. I’d like to share some of that.

I’ll stop talking and give you joy in the creation instead. Have a dose of PHI in its impeccable authority. Four minutes of sublime unity. Click the link that follows:

 The Golden Key by Jonathan Quintin.wmv

A genius film about everything bonded in the beauty of proportion

Albert Bierstadt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

By Adinbegic (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

By Jean-Louis Vandevivère (originally posted to Flickr as camargue-5) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons