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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