Coincidence?

I recently attended a wonderful writing workshop with Anne O'Leary (Blue Horse Musings - link to details about workshops here:)

 http://www.bluehorsemusings.com/Workshops-and-Offerings.html

After lunch, we were each invited to select a card from a pile with at least a hundred poems/extracts of poems. I could only smile when I saw the piece that arrived in my hand.

Here are the words that were on the card I picked that Saturday:

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be  to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" 

(Little Gidding, from The Four Seasons)

I first wrote these words into my journal when I was 17 and studying English for A Level. TS Elliot was on the curriculum, and I had fallen into his words quite deeply.

The Four Seasons is a wonderful, if often challenging piece of work. I was very fortunate in that the english teacher who took our A-level class and took us through the work in a way that encouraged developing our own understanding, rather than just "a way to help us pass the exam".

Here's another, less often quoted snippet from the same piece, Little Gidding:

"And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all" 

Aching Space
(Acrylic on paper 2010)