I celebrate New Year in November - Celtic, Beltane, 1st November so January 1st is a new calendar but not new ‘spiritual’ year for me really. However, I enjoy the sense of the new so the approach of a new calendar year is time for sorting out my desk, putting up wall calendars and filling in the new A5 daily diary with appointments already set up etc plus writing in the 365 daily words, 12 monthly words plus celebratory/marking days that are the basis of the rhythm and practice of my life and its living.
I will also have ready four A4 diary-logs each for recording the “practical’s” as I call them whose titles are Production, Creative Possibilities, Stone and soil, Belly and Bend. I also have a receipt/invoice/ cash flow book but that gets filed under impractical:0)-
I know all this could be done on computer but pen and paper still resonate with me for many reasons. I have tried to kid myself that I could manage without the writing down in book ‘thing’ but if 2012 has brought me anything it is a greater acceptance that limits are only enclosed boundaries when I don’t actually know where they are. The daily diary is great for letting me know what waiting room I will be sitting in and who I might be meeting and reminds that a library book needs returning etc but gives me little sense of what I may have accomplished or not for that matter.
For a number of years I kept a day log and that book went everywhere with me and it became a reflex action to pick up a pen or pencil and scribble down not only to do’s and the done but people met, places seen etc. I’d flick through the pages for memory or reminder, however, ask me what was in there a few hours or few days later and my answer would be vague and woolly at best.
The day book was precious as it really did support encourage and enable me in ways that anyone with non impaired brain function may find hard to understand and me, who is in that interesting situation, didn’t quite grasp just how much it helped me recognise me.
I stopped keeping a day book because I couldn’t really face trying to create it from scratch when I actually lost my last day book in to the river Thames somewhere on the Embankment in London July 2005. It ‘jumped’ off a wall and plopped unceremoniously in to the muddy fast flowing waters. I lost more than a few hand written notes, I lost a friend who I didn’t realise was as important to me as they were but felt a huge sense of loss nonetheless. I know this, as well as still feel it, because I wrote a note at the time on a paper bag, from Tate Modern the reason I was in London, which says ‘can’t stop the screaming inside my head every time I look at the Thames, found myself sobbing in deep anguish as I don’t know why I am here’
Yes, there were addresses and telephone numbers that I have never managed to obtain again I am sure but couldn’t and carnt actually remember the who or where just have the sense that people and places were swept away in the tidal flow too.
That continues to happen of course, it is the momentum of life people come in to my life for a reason or season and then I find my journey and theirs takes us on to other places and people even if we don’t physically up sticks and move. However, this kind of momentum has context usually framed by memory of times and places inhabited, messed up, transformed by those people.
For someone whose brain is much more a sieve than easily accessed treasure trove the thing that really lingers for me is a feeling, which is a very slippery marker. Is the laughter and warmth I remember, about the person, the place or just how I am at this moment I am never really sure.
I’d like to think I have tended to err on the side of the good, the glad, the if you are talking to me you must be friend response but my knowledge of the who what and why of me informs me clearly that there is always more than a smidgen of wariness and stepping away from any kind of involvement in anything other than the moment I stand in there and then because it seems to me thinking of tomorrow or yesterday needs context of self beyond the moment and I am never really sure if I’m clinging on to stop me falling or trusting the earth will miss me as it hurtles past.
Someone who has known me for many years told me I rarely ever ask questions. I was perplexed by this as I know that my favoured words are why, how, what if and told them so. When they had stopped laughing they hugged me and said, ‘exactly, it always is about the now, the problem or delight that needs understanding, solving or expressing but I don’t think you have ever asked me or anyone else we know those questions with regard to ten minutes, ten hours or ten years ago or for that matter ahead’.
I laughed then as I recognised myself so clearly in her words it made me smile with a joy that surprised but also ache with a longing that brought tears to my eyes as I wondered how it must be to ask those other kinds of questions and understand what you were asking because of a life more than fleetingly remembered.
As I waved this friend goodbye I could hear myself saying, when being questioned by some well meaning professional or other about what I wanted to be doing in five years time, ‘nothing as I feel I need to concentrate on the moment so I suppose I could say in five years time I want to be doing being in the moment’…BUT it’s not about wanting it’s far more powerful than that.
It is a need as basic as drawing breath because I know beyond doubt that trying to look five years ahead, demanding from myself a picture of somewhere I’ve never been is jumping off a precipice in the dark never knowing if the air rushing past me is because I’m really falling or the ground is rushing up towards me.
Instead I continue to stretch out my arms, having felt finger tips graze something and dug my fingernails in clinging on to that solid certainty, neither identified nor guessed at, for it is real enough to believe in as this moment.
As a new diary gets opened and calendars are hung a new calendar year will be acknowledged but for me it will mark the rising of the sun. The same moment, new bright and beckoning, I stand in each moment.
That I will write things in my diary-logbooks, note things down on paper bags and till receipts will give me sense of what’s been happening in my life but that is only a sort of context and somehow for me I understand it isn’t the context that is important it’s those stretched out arms clinging on by their fingernails because that’s the significance for and of my life; knowing I’m neither falling nor waiting for annihilation but finding footholds to heave and support myself in the moment.
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