About FIX THE WORLD Seljord

Margaret Ann Waddicor (known as Ann) was born and educated in England, where she attended art college and completed degrees in teaching and design. In 1972, Ann moved “home” to Norway where she had lived for a year when she was 10 years old. A passionate artist, Ann has run ceramic workshops, is a prolific painter and has published (with a co-writer) photographic books on Norway and Andalusia, as well as two books of her poetry; at last count, she has over 2000 poems to her name! Ann has also published articles and given presentations on prehistoric art and the extensive travels she and her Danish partner of nearly 50 years, Erik Kjaer Andersen, took through Europe, north Africa and Central America. And last but not least, Ann also plays the violin and piano, and once fenced competitively for her English county!

Many of Ann’s poems — a selection of which appear below — are about the plight of humans and their alienation (from themselves, each other and the splendour of the natural world), and how to live with love and courage despite it. The absolute wonder of what Jeremy Griffith presents is that finally we can understand the heroic reason why we became so estranged from our all-sensitive original instinctive soul and its sacred natural world. We can at last make sense of the agonising but awesomely heroic journey that our species has undertaken from ignorance to enlightenment and know, from first principle biology, that we are fundamentally good as a species. As T.S. Eliot wrote, '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’ (‘Four Quartets’, from Part 5 of Little Gidding, 1942).

• Life’s Meaning

  We wonder at this world,

  we wonder what and if, and but,

  and never come to words

  that can describe the whole,

  only the tiny part that we ourselves impart,

  and then not even understanding our own art.

  We try with this and that,

  we see how all takes part,

  and realise that's all that we can do,

  to sense those others,

  just the few,

  that we can see and feel,

  their needs and ours entwined,

  in this a life

  as human kind.

• One Big City this World

  I would like to turn it

  into one big magic wood

  let nature win back some of her territory

  we stay to learn more from her

  allow things beautiful to speak

  those of naturalness

  make ourselves simpler

  not full of sophisticated blabber

  but with ears to hear the birds sing

  the butterfly flap its wings

  dance to the music of the universe

  understand it better

  seeking to live together

  being the most important aspect of life

  where money and oil

  are only peripheral necessities

  One big city being hopefully a metaphor

  for closer empathy with each other

  whatever creed or birthplace.

• Message to Earth

  Was it you who shook the lake

  as I stood silent by

  watching reflections of the wide blue sky

  the trees no longer straight began to dance

  they wrote a secret manuscript

  I tried to read

  perhaps we can

  we humans with imagination

  make out the pleas of nature

  be sensitive and understand

  the magic of all living things

  that came to clothe the land

  we are a part of all that is

  and not an alien race

  we ought as we grow up

  still learn to know our place.

• Mediocrity and Aesthetics in Life

  Through life like a whirlwind

  we see only what we wish

  passing by the riches at our fingertips

  the senses occupied with pleasure,

  learning stands aside,

  the subjects that we miss,

  all this just leads to ignorance

  of what it is to understand the beauty we despise

  in mathematics, arts and literature,

  through knowing how to speak, to dance,

  to grasp the visions of the qualities

  of those who've gone before, we have to study them,

  open the door to riches hidden there within,

  the diagram, the word, the sound of poetry,

  and feel deep down the ecstasy they bred

  in parallel with the body's ever craving of desire,

  a happy choir of circumstances for those who use their head.

• Thoughts on Things

  The whimsical wobes, and icycle globes

  and things that dance in the wind, fish that

  dance on their fins, wobbly children that rock

  on the swings, making noises like tigers and

  gruesome monsters such frightening things,

  dressing in costumes then making poses,

  birdsong and screams of delight, flung into

  visions of fantasy blown into shaped smoke

  trails by camp fires in woods, lakes decked

  with snowflakes, gently swaying, in breezes

  stirring the reeds, golden stems burning their

  arches, flashes bog myrtle, orange sun,

  turtle dove song, buds on the roses that flank

  the roadsides long after the ides of march,

  marching time, seasons flying by, changing

  the colours displayed in the sky, this is life on

  the knife edge of fate, so open the gate, I’ll not

  sit on the fence, I am young at heart, shall

  play my part, until I depart from where I begun.