Instructions for living a life: glimmer hunting

One of my favourite poems of all time is titled ‘sometimes’ by Mary Oliver. There are four short lines that I have stuck up on my wall, and return to most days:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

A cool thing about poetry is that while we might have come to think of it as a pretty serious, and maybe even formal thing, there are really no rules. This is my favourite thing to share with new writers, and I sometimes whisper it like I’m letting them into a great secret. It can be anything. It can be a bunch of rhyming lines, or something with structure like a haiku or an acrostic poem, or even a simple list of words. If we wanted to, we could imagine that the instructions for creating poetry could be the same as Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life.

Lately, I’ve been trying to work on moving away from doomscrolling.
This has been quite tricky because there is plenty of doom available, and it turns up direct to our pockets, with pinging alerts, scary headlines, and advertisements looking to sell us quick fixes. These are difficult times.
We doomscroll, often, because we think (consciously or not) that if we find out more about a situation, we can better understand it, and so have more control to change it or be kept safe. However, it can quickly become a space where we get stuck and feel worse.
When I pry myself from the screen, I remember that I’m at my best when I can balance being informed with taking action, and with taking care of myself.

A couple of years ago I learnt about the idea of ‘glimmers’. A neat article on RNZ describes glimmers as ‘tiny, micro-moments of joy; those fleeting, everyday moments that elicit a rush of happiness, gratitude, peace and calm.’ Glimmers are rooted in noticing beauty in the everyday. What it’s not is a toxic positivity, or an ignoring of the hard stuff, but a reminder of the ‘yes, and’. Like in improv, this ‘yes, and’ helps us to build connection and see the bigger story. Hunting glimmers can help us to teach our brains to slow and help us to lead with curiosity. It can stop every day from feeling like groundhog day.

At night, I write a glimmer from the day on an A3 piece of paper stuck to my wall–right under Mary Oliver’s instructions. I could string them together in a list to make a poem of good things. But even if I don’t, then I have practiced taking notice of beauty each day, and balancing out the negativity bias that comes built-in to our clever and complex human brains.

The root of the word ‘Poetry’ is from the Greek word ‘Poiesis’, which is to do with the process of creating.
Hunting daily poetic glimmers could look like lots of different things, from keeping a list of lush words and moments, to taking photos of clouds, or creating a mini dance routine while you brush your teeth. You could find poetic glimmers by looking at things upside down, going on a colour walk, or pretending to be a martian who is on their first trip to earth. (p.s There is a bunch of poetry that uses this martian idea).

The place where my creativity supports my wellbeing is the most enduring part of my creative life. It’s the practice of noticing, and creating in response to this noticing, that helps me every day, and that I return to time and time again. My creativity might flex and change, expand and contract in different seasons, but those principles of noticing, being curious, and making something, serve me in every season. If it appeals to you, I’ll leave you, again, with Mary’s instructions as a beginners guide for glimmer hunting:

Pay attention
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Written by: Dr. Aimee Anderson-O’Connor, Creative Waikato team member