Vernacular Wandering

A Next Step

It has been a long time it seems since I posted here, seven months in fact. There have been many reasons but much has been expressed in those much abused words ‘circumstances beyond my control’. Much has been health related and much has been about my bloody mindedness, which goes to show this woman has still much to learn.

The last few months have been as interesting as the rest but may lay claim as turning point, only time will tell. Following on from cottage and garden being flooding at the beginning of December and me having a mightily spectacular fall rather heavily on to concrete, there came the ‘delights’ of Bronchitis slipping in to bronchial pneumonia and a cough that has only very recently stopped punctuating every hour of day and night.

In to this mix came the usual appointments with neurologist and lots of scanning machines plus the many chairs in waiting rooms. All got a bit wearing and I am still to get any sort of sleep pattern that gives me sense of rest.

A Reminder for My Self

I had thought to put this blog to sleep and create another but the reality is that I like this quiet place and there is no one else I am aiming to please or encourage  to link, like or ‘listen’ to the posts that will appear here.

I’ve only been away a few months, cough, so my vast following will soon be back waving and singing, hah! Never did I intend to use this as a marketing tool, a piss pot or a pity me purge. I started blogging for myself, to discover what I was thinking, realise what I had discovered I already knew and follow clues to find out where I was in my life that day.

None of that has changed I still need to discover what I’m thinking, be slightly amused and certainly confused discovering what I already know and as to finding out where I am in my life… well that’ll take more than a lifetime to get near I suspect but following the clues is always fun.

Why did I stop blogging for so long, no reason really save for the fact the life love and the universe just got on ahead of me and try as I might I couldn’t see the point of attempting to catch up as I would almost certainly fall over. There has be a lot of falling over one way and another during the silence here, much to do with a fairly marked down turn in all things health which has left little room for pretence and even less room to get out of my own careering self.

Today I put this wee note here to try and remind myself this is a place I like to visit as it is a place I can ramble through mind and life in my own chaotic way and realise the new wonders and old knowledge that teem in this brain and heart, which find pleasure and release in making marks with pen keyboard needle and brush.

A new beginning, no fanfares or drum rolls no plans or great scheme just one woman with blank screen and blank mind discovering, reacquainting, exploring this life and my living it.

So my Grail may be plastic, but...

The long absences here have neither been planned nor railed against they have just been, it is my life. Gaps never filled, activities not remembered, people missed but not as name only feeling, days engaged with but impossible to bring to mind without detailed notes and pictures etc, etc.

Sometimes I just get very tired of trying to keep track and let the daily routines and rhythm slip but often lose them completely.

This is sometimes a conscious decision though more often than not it is a case of me absent of mind ripping up and throwing away the notes, books, alarms and all the other nuts and bolts that hold this life together, then metaphorically heading down a jetty path just for a quick look at boats and water beyond.

Of course the quick look becomes weeks and sometimes months of floating midst a sea of chaos oblivious to the rotting planks of the row-boat I have cast off in, until feet become decidedly damp or better still I find myself sitting in my boat with oars floating rather than pulling as water level inside is equal to that outside so that swimming rather than rowing happens whether I want that or not.

But always there are new things to glimpse in the waters surrounding and entering my boat and though there are times when sense of drowning is more than ‘just’ a sense, the delight of the life flowing around and past me rarely leaves me.

I often daydream about a last boat ride I will make and am never dismayed by these thoughts rather they are the life-preserver for now. They always awaken in me great feelings of thanks and joy in knowing that I have this wonder-filled landscape to glide through, be held by and eventually almost certainly be embraced and captured by.

The boat ride may one day be one embarked upon in a solid plank built boat, across known waters that roll on to familiar shorelines, moving ever towards the dark horizon filled with falling stars and rising sun. The wheel house will be empty with its steering gear lashed to a point on the compass for I will need to be at the prow to watch the waters I will forever be part of at journeys end and beginning. Where that horizon and I will become one as the falling star and rising sun become the only trace I leave behind.

Or the waters I travel through may be those labelled by others as madness, dementia or senility, the boat will be hidden from all save my heart and mind but still the horizon will beckon and the falling stars and rising sun encourage and fill me up with the wonder and magic that have formed and reformed me for the now and always known and unknown.

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.

  

Report Support Encourage

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.

Solstice...a new day a new world

Seems that Winter Solstice this year is extra special given the doom and gloom from end of world propagators and the cyclical calendar of the Maya…

...for me the Winter Solstice always does seem to mark the end of a world and the beginning of another, as the spec of light is glimpsed on its rising it is always a thrilling moment full of expectation and intent, may be this year others will take the time to notice the gift, possibility and intent of light and embrace that rather than an assault rifle and a years worth of stored groceries. Ever the optimist:0)

The day here dawned dry after days of heavy rain and forecast for much more to come so it really did feel like a window opened and let the light in to a small life in Wales as I watched the night sky begin to fold in to morning I couldn't help but smile at the thought of a promise kept and a promise renewed.

The sky wasn't clear of cloud and some of those hung low over the hills but within that gloom it was obvious the sun had returned. The dogs and I after feeding wild birds and mistress Flo-cat climbed aboard the wagon and set off in to the mountains. I wasn't sure if I would actually get see any mountains but felt the light calling.

We climbed up in to the Brecon Beacons and stopped enveloped in cloud at one of  my favourite viewing points. Banon gave Rhys a look that said 'I thought we were going to the forestry plantation why has she stopped here it would be much more fun running in and out of the drees and sliding down mossy banks'. I actually burst out laughing to which they sighed in unison and settled down for a snooze.

We sat there for a little while and then it happened the clouds lifted and I could see for miles. Even a small piece of blue sky slotted in the midst of the white and grey whilst the light played on the fields, trees and mountains I could now enjoy, feeling my spirit rise with the sun as a huge sense of expectation and promise caused me to laugh again. A moment of joy, a moment of wonder, a moment of thanks and celebration all found on a cold damp mountain in Wales...rather fine for the end of the world and its begining.

Today is not yet over and I am about to shed the dirty clothes of forest track and moss slides, of course we went on to the forestry, and prepare food for later as I am going to join with others to mark this special day with meditation, prayer, song, celebration and stillness. I do not believe in the Divine but I do believe in the power of the Earth and the planets that surround it and am thankful to have had a moment to stop and take in a new morning, a new day and yes, even a new world begin.

I love Winter Solstice because for me it always speaks of new growth, bud and shoots and the light until once again nature begins to wake and spring calls ever mores insistently.

I wish you joy today and each day in the coming days. The darkness has not been banished completely but the light has returned and will slowl, imperceptively  fill up the days once more.  In the mean time the gift of the dark is the possibility to be still, take time for thought and reflection and most of all dream for dreams are powerful and I really believe I've got to keep dreaming as things never have the opportunity of coming true if I don't and I don't discover alternate ideas that meet the dreams in different ways. 

I came across something I had scribbled on a piece of paper and stuck on todays page in my diary, I'm not sure when I did this but I must have thought I needed the reminder. They are not my words but they could so easily be so I thank Mary Oliver for her gifts and for letting me find my words in hers.

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

 

Considering enough

Recently I was asked to fill in the blank space after given phrases. My responses were, I suspect, not quite what was expected as the impetus of the form came from a business forum where emphasis it seems is often very much on the use of hyperbole plus the use of repetition as in ‘I will become rich if I continually inform everyone I am fabulous, gifted and the answer to their searching’

Niche marketing as way of life and basis for something akin to a belief system that could easily be interpreted as a religion. There are acolytes who spread the word and disciples who endeavour to follow the true way of the enlightened one who offers promise of six figure income and glorious sun kissed beach lifestyle for any who closely follow their words.

I joined the forum as I have always had an interest in economics and want to understand how other women build life and business as a whole that not only puts food on the table for themselves and their families/community but also cultivates and creates an ethical approach to production both of service/product and income and its use. I also joined because I wished to hear other women’s voices that are in ethical business and those who are exploring and working towards setting up their own business.

Commitments and Promises

Someone recently told me they knew that I had enrolled on something only after a great deal of thought as it had involved a lot of money for my budget. I laughed and said so you think I’m some kind of cheapskate or miser then.

I thought they’d just laugh with me but they stopped the conversation from veering off in to the absurd by telling me that was the last thing they would ever think of when it came to my use of money and wanted me to know that my ability to live on very little income but to be so obviously thrilled by what I see as a rich and hugely prosperous life had given them much to think about over the time we have known each other.

I was told I was careful with money but that didn’t include the word mean rather it constantly seemed that I could always give money to someone or somebody’s when it was needed. But, that when I spent money on myself it was usually with more of a purpose than to just buy stuff. Don’t get me wrong we both knew we were talking about 10’s of pounds not 100’s though that has happened and I have not lived to regret either scenario.

I really did laugh at this and pointed out I was not some saint and bought stuff just like everyone, though I did admit that I have seriously been thinking about that in the last few months, but that is for another wander:0)