Animatedstardust

Eagle Eyed?

If you noticed I am impressed, if not...there have been changes in the sidebar which will lead you to another place where from today any posting I do will happen, Thanks for walking along with me this far hope you'll carry on popping an, walking past and waving and maybe sometimes evn stopping and chatting:0)

New address http://animatedstardust.typepad.com/astwo/ ,known as Heading Home See you there.

Bounding to realisation

Midst storms within and without, floods and torrents of the weather and personal kind there are always moments that make me smile and remember the gifts found in letting go, in finding life cut off and changed beyond repair but offering possibility of new life and living way past the obvious death.

Autumn time to face up to endings, time to stand square before whatever axe may be about to befall a life and understand the pain and confusion of the felling may in fact be a beginning not an ending and other lives will replenish and renew within the sphere seen so clearly as death.

Death, deacay, departing, disease, depression, distress....interesting they are all D words but then so too are delight, delicious, delerious, dream, define, destiny.

The week has past in a flurry of activity and stasis of the u-bend kind. The activity has once again taken me away from the cottage rather more than expected or possible if I actually took note of reality but creating my own reality is so much more sensible - well that's what I think others do not always agree but rebounding fat ladies are a law unto themseves.

Oh yes the rebounding...part of the acknowlegement of needing to look at ways to excercise and tend a body well abused over the last months has been the decision to spend a little time on a sprung circle:0) It sits on its side propped up through the doorway between sitting room and kitchen and fits nicely in the doorway when down with door frame ready at hand for me to grab or steady myself on and kitchen chair and table to act as other leaning post - my rooms are small. The concept is that the bounce takes you into a weighless zone for milli-second which leaves stress and strain off skeelton and encourages the lymph system to begin to operate a little more decidedly.

I have started off very slow as they recommend and am gradually building up the time spent 'bounding'. So far I have felt a little freeing up of my neck and it has not made back pain any worse which is great. The vertigo and bounce don't always agree but the door frame works well as support and I have a bounding buddy!

At first it was a tentative pair of feet placed on the rebounder as I bounced and a grin of delight on the face but now body and all feet join me and Rhys stands alongside me and rebounds gracefully along too:0) Missy Banon is interested but the diva that she is wants the rebounder to her self and looks crestfallen when she stands there and no bounce happens.

Sunday Smile 38

Looking around at the utter chaos of my home at present I know that the weeks before the New Year is marked in this household need for my own sake to be ones of clean and scrub and most of all stepping back and taking a long hard probably somewhat jaundiced view of life here in this small world.

The stresses and strains of the past year are being felt not only personally as in mind and body but looking around the cottage and garden the cracks and fissures are evident where jobs have been left and others not even begun and the gap between living and surviving has closed to a space so small it is difficult for me to notice the difference some of the time.

This year has thrown so much into the spotlight which I would have preferred stayed in the shadows and the shadows in their perverse way have enlarged and engulfed to leave me creeping forward in more trepidation than is good for the knickers:0) I am left considering this walk into the 50’s as something I might well pass on but know the journey continues and the numerals have nothing to do with it. In three weeks time I will have entered and begun to walk through my 52nd year so the year before and the year after celebration and commemoration of my 50th birth day will have transformed into daily ‘ordinary’ life once more. What a relief!

Still waiting

It’s the time of year, it’s because you are tired, it’s hormonal/menopausal, it’s usual.

My life is a messy affair, nothing clean, clear or constant save for the drip, drip, drip of tortuous thought. Nothing wondrous or divine about this living save for the fact that it has somehow continued.

That the continuation is questionable and questioned often and with searing heated distaste as much as joy forgiveness and acceptance is reflection of human heart battered, human spirit stretched into contorted shape and human being twisted and pushed into places and spaces beyond others imaginations let alone experience.

My life is a messy affair much of which has not and will not ever appear as anything more solid than a flitting idea of substance in a drowning woman’s mind.

Moving forward

Autumn is in evidence but so too other seasons in the buds, flowers and new growth aplenty. So far we have had a few chilly days and a deal of rain but as to the usual autumn storms and constant grey cloud days, no. In fact the night time temperatures have often been higher than the day time norm which is very strange.

The garden is bursting forth with the kind of gusto that seems to ignore the fact of the probablility of frost and worse and I wonder what life will be damaged beyond repair in what must come but for the time being I am thankful for the interludes of dry moments and even though the garden is still very much a mud bath at best and a quagmire in many instances I have been enjoying beginning the work on the new design of the garden or should I say I am pleased to have at last made a start but will admit that the ability to actually move after I stop working is somewhat of a puzzle to a skeleton that is so focused on shouting very loudly its distatse of the activity that it kind of refuses to move from any position taken for more than a few minutes but all hail the combination of coffe ad medication, the effect doesn't last very long but gives me a small opportunity to manage to get work clothes off and wash muddy body before finding myself stuck in the armchair again:0)

The round bed is now based more on an eliptical shape with dissections which I hope will eventually give it a sense of something organic like flower petals but a long way to go yet. However, come spring I am committed to have walls built, pathways made and planting schedule worked out....note I have not actually said which spring:0) The design is evolving as I work, slide and land unceremoniously on my bottom in the mud, much to the delight of RnB, and that seems a good process as each step and slip feed into the reality and the possibility that I am designing the 'new' garden for.

One year on for Pakistan

BELOW IS A REPORT I RECEIVED FROM THE INTEGRATED REGIONAL 
INFORMATION NETWORK (IRIN) A SERVICE I SUBSRCRIBE TO AND WOULD 
RECOMMEND TO ANYONE ELSE WISHING TO HEAR OTHER VOICES THAN 
THOSE LOUDLY  TRUMPETED BY OTHER NEWS OUTLETS. 
(I also posted this at Stepping Stones so appologise to the few who read both places)

One year after the worst natural disaster in Pakistan’s 59-year history, which 
left 75,000 people dead and another 3.5 million homeless, progress on earthquake 
recovery has remained slow and many reconstruction programmes are facing a 
funding deficit. 

People in the affected areas have begun the slow process of rebuilding their lives but 
reconstruction efforts are being held backby a host of administrative difficulties and 
a continuing information gap between the authorities and the survivors, aid workers say. 

“Survivors have begun rebuilding their homes, communities and livelihoods. But, 
the rebuilding process has, so far, been very patchy, slow and complex,” Farhana 
Faruqi Stocker, head of international aid agency Oxfam, said in the Pakistani 
capital, Islamabad. 

“People need to be clearly informed about thefinancial and technical support 
they are entitled to and the guidance on building earthquake-resistant homes 
must be easily available and understandable,” Stocker explained.

Private housing suffered the most extensive damage from the 8 October earthquake 
last year, which ripped through parts of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province 
(NWFP) and Pakistani-administered Kashmir. 

Some 600,000 rural and 30,000 urban housing units were affected across a 
30,000 sq km mountainous terrain, covering nine districts and 4,000 villages, 
according to the revised damage assessment of the Earthquake Reconstruction 
and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA). Initial estimates put the number of homes to 
be rebuilt at 400,000.

Under ERRA’s housing reconstruction grant, some 422,777 owners have already 
eceived  money –  a quarter of whom have started rebuilding, according to ERRA. 

Breathing

 

In this past week I have written letters, sent cards and made phone calls but as to blogging there has seemed a barrier, which could not be crossed so I have sat and pondered instead. If only it has been just a week of sitting and pondering but that as they say is another story.

Pen and paper have certainly been utilised to enable thoughts to be straightened confronted and begun to be understood and as always the very act of taking letters and forming them into words or colours into shapes has given me space I did not think I had and time I was not aware was available.

Sharing

Sometimes it is good to just lay and think.

Rhys has certainly come of age in the last month or so, the lanky gangling teenager has without fanfare become the long legged, muscled young male with the glee of a toddler and the energy of a volcano kept to 'delight' me:0)

Tomorrow will be the anniversary of Mr Bryn's death and today I found myself watching Rhys and his sister Banon - co conspirator and all round egger on, race around up down in and out through autumn tinged trees and I remembered another dog who loved life just as much and wished the three of them could have played together.

Rhys and Banon have not and will never replace the companion I found in Mr Bryn but they are certainly held in my heart with thanks if sometimes in mind with hysterics. They grow and become as I do also and we continue to learn and come to understanding of each other as the days roll into weeks into months and will be a first yea together in a matter of weeks.

There are still many moments when I question them both being here but  get the feeling they don't question it at all and I am learning how to do this through their example and maybe come another year or two I may not question the choice I made to bring two loudly needy puppies in to my home and life.

I cannot pretend that I went to see the litter of puppies after seeing their pictures, I went to meet the pup I now call Rhys, I knew immediately I saw his picture that he and I had some travelling to do together. Banon was and is immediately cute to look at but she did not register with me until I watched and listened to the communication between the two and discovered it was Love-Rhys-Love Banon so home they came. They are very different individuals and run rings round me basically but even though they have tested every  ounce of patience and  persistence on my part they are part of my life now and even though I may consider finding one or both another home far far away from me or me a home far far away from them on the days of hysterical need, lack of comprehension, loss of control and exhausted winging, which describes my state not theirs, I know to lose one or both from my life would be deeply unsettling in ways even their intelligent chaos cannot begin to touch.

On a day when leaves begin to carpet the ground, temperatures are definitely turning towards the cool and the days grow shorter in light minutes I found watching a young dog enjoying a moment of rest, and, it seemed to me thought, was moment to be thankful for a shared morning midst trees and leaves and racing knowing that the Earth offers support and continuity to all life and all I may endeavour to do is echo that intent towards the lives my life touches especially within my home.

Small thought

So a new month arrives, another week has passed and I find myself considering where am I?

It would be easy to say, at home watching the heavy rain pelt the window and two rambunctious dogs wrestle around on the sitting room rug and leave it at that but my wondering has been about geography both internal and external and I find when they are both combined as they always are, no matter how hard this mind often tries to  separate them, the landscape of the personal and of the world takes on a very different topography and I find maps, charts and plans need appraisal, updating, re-configuring and often just plain ripping up and starting again.

This goes for day to day, hour by hour as well as month or years and is the place I find I need position energy, intent and acceptance of the highest magnitude to make sense and semblance of a life I call mine.

Someone said to me recently that the ‘one day at a time’ mode of living was all very well and good but they needed goals and plans way beyond that if meaning and any sort of purpose, sense, living seemed worth bothering about. I knew what they meant and on some levels agreed with what they were saying but it has niggled at me since on a deeper level for my self and midst watching rain fall and dodging the joyful games of Rhys and Banon as I cleaned up a somewhat dishevelled kitchen I found myself smiling at the thought of the goals and plans in my life and how often they have been at the very least modified and more often wrecked or obliterated by the one day at a time and how fortunate I am that this has happened and will no doubt continue to happen.

Looking out, looking up, stepping towards, reaching forwards, building, creating, designing are all words and actions in my life many of which could be part of a plan, means to reach a goal, the way to express the aim to find completion but to my mind, heart and body not to mention my spirit:0), they are just the small part of the proverbial iceberg which is noticeable to the casual eye or careless lookout for beneath the obvious there is a vast panoply of other.

The kind of other that has little to do with words or lines on paper drawn in the earth lost in the sand spelt out with leaves or pebbles trailed with dripping bucket or sprinkled crumbs. Nothing identifiable that marks the way to go or the way travelled rather there is nothing and everything held on a breath expressed in a moment understood in a second and lost to eternity.

Time is nothing but a pause to gain momentum to nowhere so I would rather be nowhere and finding myself stood in the moment becoming.

(just to say that Stepping Stones stretched and shook itself into life today too, Sunday Tuesday and Thursday posts have begun again,tentatively as I say there but with sense I need that small space to be awake too)