About
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!
“I appreciate Jeremy Griffith’s work so much as the human condition is a subject that has worried and been a sadness to think of in my life but something I have thought deeply about since being seven years old. I could never understand why people were so depressed and negative about life. That is why 'THE Interview' is so important. And the World Transformation Movement is, in fact, the most shattering of modern movements that can completely change the mental picture we have made of existence and the world of human beings. We can at last see how we can live together in harmony again just like nature, without destroying this beautiful blue ball of living things any more!”
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.