Vernacular Wandering

Steps in to a day

Crooked Beauty

 

Sometimes I come across something that not only stops me in my tracks but stays with me for days and weeks later.

Recently I was pointed towards a video clip on YouTube and found myself sitting watching and listening to a reality, that I recognised on so many levels I found I had been holding my breath. This is always a good sign for me, it means I have connected and want to hold on to something not just my breath. This is an old habit from childhood, it went something like this - hold my breath because then I disappear, am not noticed and for a moment I can hold something special in my heart and mind before I am discovered and the special is ripped from my grasp but unbeknown to the ripper it has found a safe place in my heart and mind and no matter what happens it will not be taken from there. I led a heroic kind of childhood :0)

So the child in me said this is special and the woman I am agreed. Maybe it isn't something that you normally consider, please do, is all I would ask. I have ordered the DVD so if you want to see it and you are one of my local readers come round for cuppa some time and I'll put it in the lap top, no I still don't have a TV - given state of the kitchen sink at present and the speed of the mail services sometimes lets say sometime in June, cough.

 

If you want to stream the full film you can go to the website HERE

 

Days ahead

Low cloud finally lifted and the moon rose on a clear evening tonight. Chilly, but clear and bright - maybe spring is checking out the valley as place to stay for a few weeks rather than what has seemed short hours thus far.

Potting up stawberry runner plants given to me by a neighbour, who I am taking with me to WonderWool on Saturday, as her contribution to fuel cost:0) I was going anyway and there's a seat in the car spare as long as she didn't mind RnB in their boot space so I'd asked if she would like to come along she was very keen but wanted to contribute money for fuel but like me she lives on a small income so as we talked about what she might see - it'll be her first visit,  I saw runners getting away from some of her larger strawberry plants and wondered out loud if she could spare some.

I am happy because the strawberries these plants produce are real fruits not the watery specimens so often found in supermarkets and are more the treat they should be for that.

Hopefully come next year they will produce a good crop and may well give a few choice berries this year.

Beginning to harden off some herbs I have had in the kitchen and seeing how a sowing of salad leaves fare outside. A small beginning of the herb and leaf edibles I plan to have available for the next few months to add to meals and recipes.

Chives for the Soada Bread and parsley for pasta sauce tomorrow.

 

In The Mist

After a whole day with sun and blue sky on Saturday , though can’t really say that the temperature was hot it was pleasantly warm, Sunday brought the return of rain and heavy low cloud so temperature dropped and view of sky or even the bottom of the garden was gone.

 

Today the low cloud has thickened and the rain has been insistent. The garden has appeared and disappeared through the gloom and the valley itself has not made an appearance but inside the cottage is snug and dry so I feel fortunate indeed.

Dreams of further work that needs to be done on the cottage fabric are tempered by the need to save for quite a few months, at least, to pay for the work plus consider the logistics of emptying sitting room and kitchen to enable the work to go ahead. Then more immediately is the ongoing clean up after the last phase of building work.  

The other activity of clear out, bagging binning and giving to charity shop of ‘stuff’ also continues. I am achieving a little each day and the sense that this is good keeps me plodding on.

One of the things I have in my home that I am daily thankful for and definitely not getting rid of are taps. I cannot turn the tap on without being always grateful and fascinated by the clean clear flow of water that arrives in such volume and with such ease. I also have the added delight of instant hot water which is truly a gift when disinfectant and soap are such big parts of my life.

There have been times when for one reason or another, the water supply to the tap has been interrupted but almost immediately the water utility company arrives at my door with numerous containers of clean water.

 When the water has become a little cloudy due to some over exuberant oxygenation at the pumping station boiling the water just in case of infection risk is all that’s required, which doesn’t involve me in many miles walked to collect both cloudy water and firewood to make a fire to boil the water.

This is another reason why I am considering how many of anything I need; books, plates, gadgets, fabric, yarn, fibre, art materials, garden tools, clothes and all else I find in my care.

I look beyond my doorstep, beyond the country I live in and know that there are billions of people who still don’t have access to a well delivering fresh clean water let alone that water coming from a tap directly in to a basin in their own homes.

You can live without many things but you cannot live without access to safe clean water.

I cannot physically deliver a tap attached to a pipe bringing safe clean water to every home in the world but there is that possibility if the political will were more about water than oil.

Maybe if more people just stopped and looked around at their great good fortune at having such easy access to water, that we often so easily take for granted, and wonder what life would really be like without that easy access we might push our politicians for the right of safe clean water to be accessible to all becoming a reality rather than some pipe dream of idealists.

I have been informed by some people that dreams of this nature are for the naïve, the youthful zealot and that as one grows older you can leave such intensity and passions behind and enjoy the finer things in life without troubling too much about people thousands of miles away or for that matter nearer.

But every time I fill a glass with safe clean water, stand under my shower feel hot water on my skin I cannot help but smile and give thanks. In fact I have recently realised that each time I step in to the shower I actually say thank you out loud. This is partly to do with the fact that hot water on rebelling skeleton is always a relief but it is more about acknowledging how rich I am and taking a moment to remember there are a billion reasons to want others to be able to share in this.

I am not naïve or a youthful zealot but someone who has grown older who doesn’t feel I am able to leave the dreams I had in my teens and twenties behind. The life I live today may be much different from the one I led forty years ago but the sense of connection to other lives on the other side of the world still encourages me to seek ways to make that connection as fluid as I would wish:0)

I support WaterAid and as I approach 60 I still dream of safe clean water for all and give thanks each day for the taps in my home that bring me this so easily.

If you missed this campaign last year maybe the film will give you a reason to explore WaterAid further.

  

Morning Teeth Cleaning

Lost in Transit

Looking round a room, a building, an expanse of fields and mountains, peering out to sea there is always something I feel that is somehow lost in transit. I know I have all the different documents to cross borders, orders and officialdom writ large but still there is always something I feel lost in transit.

I could spend all my time trying to discover that missing element, scouring the horizon for that tell tale whiff of smoke or putting my ear to the earth to listen for the pounding of hooves but if I have done anything in the last almost four months of silence here it's to understand once more that the something I feel is lost in transit is not just beyond the horizon, round the next bend or at the bottom of an abandoned well. It is in any place I find myself, any moment I stand in and is there each morning when I look up in to the small mirror next to the basin where I brush my teeth and smile wryly at the well worn face that greets me. There, here, is that something I feel is lost in transit...me.

Somewhere between and betwixt I feel tentatively along a ledge that is the only path between oblivion and existence though leads to neither. My wandering is of mind and heart as well as footfall it involves both inner and outer state but most of all it needs to involve a deliberate organisation of my life. Not just the boxes bags and piles ordered sorted filed and flung but of my intent, my energy, my imagination, my creativity, my wholehearted undiluted commitment to living my life as fully as I may.

I know organisation needs planning, preparation and practice to positively happen, so, each day needs to have those three elements as the base colours for the picture I will have been part of at the end of the day.

For the last four months I have tentatively tried out some scenarios for daily life, have embarked on some learning – through internet and have begun to draw up a study/learning ‘programme’ for myself to explore philosophical and spiritual thought alongside gaining further skills in weaving, sewing, felt making, printing plus to re-engage with other practical skills in garden and home.

I have looked at my diet, eating pattern etc and tested ways and means; some have been real run for the bathroom moments others have made me smile and scratch a plus sign next to them. I have explored fasting as this has been knocking at my brain and heart for a long time and I have felt unable on oh so many levels to even begin to entertain it even though there was a time in my life I fasted regularly and remembered in these last four months just how much joy and peace that built in to my life and so I felt really pushed to explore this once more.

I have some limitations that I didn’t have when I fasted in my twenties and on in to my thirties; a somewhat compromised physical body needs to be negotiated with gently I understand even if my frustration and annoyance bubble and spurt from time to time. There is also the mental side of the equation. I know that I could all too easily take fasting beyond a joyous affirming element of my life and living, to a stick that grows larger by the day to beat myself with, pain after all is a reminder of being alive as much as pleasure.

So the fast is not to be a state of lack but a state where space time and me can touch in quiet understanding of connection, creativity, and constancy. Yes it will mean nothing to eat but will mean lots of water, ginger and lemon tea, even a milky (soy) coffee when needed to boost the speed that medication kicks in.

I’ve tried different scenarios and have discovered that eating three meals a day in this way - Breakfast 8.30am, Main Meal12.30pm, Light Meal 4.30pm and not eating anything between 4.30pm and 8.30am my body responds well to the rest. When I looked at this I realised I had created a ‘fast space’ every day of 16 hrs.

As of today I began the first longer fast 4.30pm to 4.30 pm to 8.30am. So Friday to Sunday it will be lots of fluid intake but no food as such, except the milky coffee if needed.

Saturday has been stay at home day for a long time as I find crowds difficult to contend with and Saturdays so many people it seems have a mission to push all before them be that in a shop, museum or garden and I find that very exhausting so now Saturdays will be a day to really reflect on life in this small cottage and the life internal I suspect. It won’t mean washing won’t get hung out on the line or soil be weeded or dug but will mark a moment of space and time shaped by a having rather than a lacking.

I have also looked at my need or not for connection and have been reminded just how much connection really is an essential not just a passing wave in a rush to the next ‘great thing’. Connection not only with other human hearts and minds but connection to the Earth, the life held in rock and soil, bird and beast, a leaf a raindrop a sigh through the trees. From the majestic to the microbial all have connection to me and in me and I suspect that I have felt this nudge to ‘fast’ because I needed space and time to repair and renew those connections as this life which I have always seen as a voyage of discovery became stranded, beached, pummelled by rocks and generally wrecked.

I have as long as I can remember often lived on the edge beyond reaching but have found joy wonder and love in the knowledge that accepting, forgiving and embracing all that and much more means that my core belief ‘All life is precious’ encompasses everything including me.

In the wasteland that I often visit this has been the pennant I have guarded to fly again one day, the message to my heart I have wrapped safely and the final echo my mind picks up when all else has disappeared in to the blackness.

Being lost in transit could I suppose be awful but I think being lost is never that if one remembers where one stands is where one is so how can you ever really be lost. Lost in transit speaks to me of intent open to detours and adventures not distress or disaster so I begin this blogging affair once more with sense of adventure for my self.

If you have read this far, welcome fearless traveller:0) As the blogs name says I am a wanderer but what it doesn’t say is that I most definitely ramble too though almost always I reach my destination even if I might take the scenic route to get there.