METTLE FATIGUE

 

WOOF OF THE WEB

JUMPING THROUGH HOOPS

BRICKING IT

ON THE HORIZON

Photo is one I took of a long wind-flattened hedge near Wickersley Wood

ZEITGEIST GHOSTS

Photo credit and thanks: Skitterphoto from Pexels

LIVING ON AFTER

SEE YOU LATER, PROCRASTINATOR!

Grab the to-do list. Right time. Right date.

Now dawns the hour to procrastinate.

Line up the knick-knacks, fiddle and fudge,

Opportunity knocks but the brain cells won’t budge.

Clean out that cupboard. Check on the mail.

If you don’t start, how can you fail?

Biting the bullet? Not doing that!

Don’t show your hand and you’ll not look a prat.

Time for a cuppa. Who’s for a brew?

Descale the kettle. What can you do?

Check on the internet. Yes, it’s still there.

Just testing my balance by spinning the chair.

Need inspiration. Go for a walk.

Putting it off?  Who, me? You can talk!

What’s number one on this list? Let me see.

I’ll just dust my glasses and nip for a wee.

Right, full steam ahead. I’ve got to press on.

No time for that, now. Where has today gone?

WE BE CREATION'S CRYING

Bonded
To this body of birds
Wheeling in freeform flock

Rooted
Radical in earthball
Tendrils tucked
Through trackless undergrowth

Voice of the heartstop hare
From her barren form,
Whisper and whicker,
Melt and bloat

Ductile seductive
Plastic at the seabird's throat,
Barnacles losing purchase
On the toxic rock

We be creation's crying
Syrinx singing
Solidarity
With rhythmic sobs
Please cope

Struggling to shine afresh
The sun slinks up,
Wandering west
To wash the waste
Pale gold
Wanhope.

NEW YEAR SLOWS ITS STRIDE, BECKONS - AN INVITATION FOR 2018

The New Year slows its stride, beckons.
That wistful smile.
This is no blank canvas.
It comes pricked out with pictures under its skin,
Ink quivers a jet mirror, still in the nib.

Courage, winsome ones and wanderers!
Let's resolve to meet it all with mindful moments,
Future deliquescent into ripples of nowness.

Let's not miss this risk, this life, looking beyond.
Let's not cringe, not wince from the lyrical light.

Be there no regretted chance.
Midnight fires in spidered wheels of crystalline
Exploding through the spectrum,
Burn hello to tomorrow.

Dare to show up in your soul, crafting the possible
From the blissful imperfect.
Trust and go toddling!
Listen enthralled to compassion's soft whisper.
Learn your name afresh.
Let the critic fall silent.

May the crisp calendar call you
Out of fears into flying,
Out of dread into stepping
On stone, off springboard.

This be our moment for joy!
There is no other.

[You can see and hear me read this on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UasBACv8YIU&feature=youtu.be]

ATTIC

When I was little, I dreamed of writing in a magical attic.

I dreamed of just having an attic!

Back then, in Railway Cottages, painted Railway Green with Railway-regulation paint, we didn't have one. No attic to go writing and dreaming in. Only a dusty cockloft where my dad would store those once-a-year, just-in-case household items, reachable only by adults, only by ladder. Only an outside loo and a coal-shed of similar compact dimensions in our little yard, where the zinc bath hung from the brickwork, the bath we filled with kettle-and-panfuls of boiling water the night before school.

But I wrote all the time. On the dining table. On the three-legged tipsy stool my granddad made. On the dressing table surrounded by scary mirrors that made you look every which way into the shadows in the corners in the fading lemon light. On my lap. On the couch in the front room with the big light on before tea. In my bedroom. In the garden, where steam trains whooshed by and sometimes sizzled to a stop at our branch line station, spiriting my imagination away to wondrous unknown horizons beyond our valley.

I was writing my world a word at a time but still I would dream of my writing attic. Was it out there, lonely, waiting for me?

I dreamed the Moon would peep in through the little window set into the roof, peeking encouragingly at my scribblings. The sparrows would twitter in their cosy nests under the eaves, urging me on to tell them stories.

I've lived in many houses, many manses, flats, digs and dives since those dreams first melted into maybe.

Then one day, illness sneaked up, smacked my hands off the wheel of working, dismantled my strength, drained my batteries, clogged my muscles and bones with rubbery uneven pain, fogged my clarity, burgled me of my old whirlwind of energy, pickled my possibilities.

I moved here, forcibly retired with half my life still not written.

A little rented house in a village where woods, streams, fields and wandery ways have crept close enough for me to visit them on my better days. A garden full of flowers that imagine themselves into colourful calendars of the passing seasons. Eaves laden with sparrows and a clear southern view to track the Moon sashaying her catwalk arc towards the west.

And guess what else was waiting here for me?

My attic.

My writing space. My rooftop chamber of dreams.

I feel so blessed. I feel its joy, its sigh of relief surrounding me as I write.

I hope I was as worth its wait!

ONE INTROVERTED MIDDLE-AGED SINGLETON'S TAKE ON VALENTINE'S DAY

What does it mean to me to be an introvert, middle-aged and single on Valentine's Day? Much the same as it feels to be the above on any other day of the year to be honest! I'm not one for labels!

Maybe a few years ago when I still had a functional womb, I had a few wistful wonderings. What about my unborn children and grandchildren I will never meet?

 I would have liked my mum to know what it would have been like to have had grandchildren and great-grandchildren to gather round her as she grows older. I know how blessed they would all have been to know her. How her wisdom and good sense would have made them stop and think when they were making life's tough decisions. How her dependable faithfulness would have lightened their lives whenever they talked with her. I know they would have met love in her company, because I do. That mother/daughter relationship, my best and most trustworthy friend, to me is something of more enduring influence in my life than the intense but too often briefly burning flames of romance and passion. 

I know many who have lost children they adored, others who have never met the beloved little one they were waiting for, or who have endured the heartache of not bearing the children they lovingly planned. Compared to their acute pain, my musings are just what-ifs and maybes. I constantly remind myself just how fortunate I am.

Now, this side of menopausal, I am at peace with my inner singleton. Not just given the conclusion that this is a dark world into which to bring brave new lives. No – because I still love this quirky, unbelievably beautiful, precious and fragile world. I hope if I had met my Valentine, we would have been able to share wonder and hope with our children, gathered them close to watch the Sparrows in the hedge, the sunlight bouncing off frosty fields, to recognise the music of the chittering outrageous Dunnock, to love and value the comical antics of Magpie and Squirrel and become champions for those who can't stand up so easily for themselves. To help them know their indoor from their outdoor voices, to treat others with loving respect, courtesy, compassion and empathy as a given, whoever they meet.

I have met my Valentine in a way. 

He's been hidden in my heart all my life. 

I've had the privilege of introducing him to family, friends, readers, the world beyond my heart. 

He is Bram the kindly, tender wildlife-whispering marshman in my books. Bram embodies everything I would have loved in a partner, and to me he is as real as flesh and blood. Not without faults, not without weaknesses, but a beautiful soul, that is my Bram. Thirza in my books is the personification of my genes and ancestry, myself embracing the other. In some ways Bram is her temperamental opposite yet her soulmate on life's journey. They are both aspects of my own spirit. That is my Valentine coupling in the realm of imagination. It is my joy to be able to share them with the wider world through words that offer their reality robed in fiction and fantasy.

Sometimes it's lonely to be uncoupled. 

I am the shadow that walks unlinked. 

But I rarely if ever feel lonely unless I glimpse myself as others do. If we glimpsed ourselves constantly that way, I suspect it would often end in tears (or giggles!) even though Burns averred it would be a gift to see ourselves as others see us! I try to focus my love and caring where I can to wide circles of friends, family and strangers. My relationships as a singleton are the kind that don't really need one day a year to trumpet them. They are beautiful background noise that lullabies and strengthens. 

The worst mauling you will ever get from me is a nip from my inner pedant, my geeky nerdish knowledge of relatively useless facts and words. But I will always endeavour with my peaceful Enneagram Type 9 empathy to make sure you don't feel bested, belittled or patronised, even though I sometimes can't resist my Enneagram wing 1 impulse to challenge you subtly when I think you're factually wrong, or if you're ungenerous with somebody you perceive as different or lesser that you.

It's sometimes unnerving to have to think through things when my compass is instinctual rather than reasoning and the ability to ask for help is never the first option for me. I do learn a lot, though, that way. Not always as quickly and seamlessly as I'd like. Mistakes are powerful teachers, even if we squirm at the embarrassment of making them. I mask and move through that embarrassment by laughter, getting safely alongside those who, left to their own devices, might have turned those blunderings against me. Even at school, nobody could bully me for long. My smile and self-deprecating gentleness gave the bullies no way to get a satisfying grip or a rise out of my reactions. In the long years since the schoolyard, my learning curve has risen by fits and starts, as I strive to find ways of being bold enough, courageous enough to speak out and stand up for every underdog with whom I can readily identify.

Often I'm flooded with a momentary feeling of being alone in a confusing, frighteningly hard world of people. Some days I feel my creativity is simply "peopled" out of me. A profoundly introverted soul who has made a living of challenging my introversion, I often find myself "all peopled out." 

A woman once startled me by saying, after a presentation I had done:

“Where do you get all your self-confidence?”

The fact I remember her words shows how hilariously far that lady was from comprehending my true inclination to hermithood! 

No. It's a weak excuse to say my creativity is "peopled" out of me. It's an aspect of writer's block that has been much discussed in literature about creativity, including Julia Cameron in her excellent "The Artist's Way". I can and do regularly overcome it. What is true, for me, though, is that doing the people thing takes an enormous amount of energy out of me. My first thought in almost every situation where I am meeting other people, even if I know them well, is 'where is the endgame here? When can I escape and be by myself again?' Nobody ever guesses, so I tend to find myself even more "peopled"!

In my youth, I did most of my writing at the dead of night, when people were kept at bay by sleep. More recently, chronic autoimmune illness means I'm denied the luxury of burning the midnight candle without consequences. I am mystified by those who feel bereft when they can't be chattering with people. My own deep heart-joy is when I am alone, preferably with nature, or when I am writing, with books, music or learning some new thing that stimulates my thoughts and my ability to weave these new insights into my words.

So is my ideal Valentine really myself? 

The old song says: "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world." I do need people, very much so, but maybe not in indigestibly mammoth portions! 

It doesn't always come easily to love myself, essential as that is. I have struggled with this in the past as so many of us do, not least those walking through life as a faith journey. As I mature into middle age, I find myself less and less able to gulp down platitudes and alienating ways of seeing others, or to tick the box of unbending doctrines like some nodding dog. It makes me feel diminished to try to shrink this messy marvellous world and cram it into a straitjacket with sharp unyielding seams. The upside to that so-called disillusionment is that it leaves healthy room for new perspectives that may prove nearer to the truth. The truth of love is even more important to me, as vital as breathing. It leaves more sweet space for supporting and valuing other people without tumbling over the tripwires of bigotry.

So these are my introverted middle-aged singleton's reflections on the day dedicated by history and card shops to Valentine. On social media, people are either embracing the heart and flower memes that abound at this time of year, or angrily rejecting them as smacking of stereotypes and shallowness. Meanwhile this unique oddball's here trying to spread the ripples of a calm pool of love in which anyone and everyone can bathe without drowning. That's me and maybe one of my missions in life. To help people see they are all special, truly loved in ways they haven't even dreamed, but yearn to discover.

In the end, writing this, I see more clearly just how much I am loved too as the earth caresses me in its cloak of serendipity and shadowy sunshine. That reassurance will last so much longer than a bunch of wilted roses on this day that celebrates the ways of the heart.

2017 - COMING READY OR NOT!

Sunset, South Yorkshire (all words and images author's own)

We don't have to search very hard for reminders of why 2016 has more than its fair share of reasons to be lamented loudly and then forgotten. Nightmare politics and propaganda, media meltdowns, financial uncertainty, deaths of a golden host of celebrity friends we thought we knew like family, unfathomable tragedies, war and hatred we children of the sixties once dreamed the world would be too wise and too compassionate for by now.

Sometimes just checking in on social media, letting our eyes scan a newspaper or fix on current affairs on the screen, can trigger a tailspin into hopelessness, cynicism, bitterness, shrugged shoulders, hardened hearts.

Coral and apricot skies

Today I decided. Time to focus on things I might have missed if I hadn't lived through this rollercoaster year. Time to allow myself to be thankful. Thankfulness washes world-weary shredded nerves like a gentle spa of healing for the heart.

Thankfulness doesn't mean you're suddenly Pollyanna. Gratitude doesn't cocoon you from empathy with those suffering or excuse you from giving a damn. But it can help you find your footing on the slimiest slope. It can remind you of the motive that coaxes you to get up for another day.

Spot the pigeon

Here are my treasures gleaned and gathered from 2016:

-taking the plunge of going gluten-free, dairy-free, nightshade-free to try and give my body with its tortured neuroimmune system a chance to heal itself. Gradually glimpsing a life beyond the constant fog of exhaustion, pain and sickness. Doesn't mean I'm miraculously cured of a lifelong knot of autoimmune illnesses, but it seems to have allowed me the blessing, at long last, of better days. I've even had to reduce my blood pressure pills down to the very minimum and my insulin cartridge lasts me a week! A couple of dried dates can bring me back from a low blood sugars now instead of 30 years of severe hypos rescued by jelly babies and lucozade! Result!

-discovering water Kefir grains, brewing homemade probiotic ginger beer and soda and enjoying what a positive effect it seems to have on my digestion. Plus I'm so attached I think of my little jellified chums as pets now, giving back so much more than they get from a shot of sugar and mineral water! Still going strong after six months, they're currently having a little rest and recuperation in my fridge over the holidays! They so deserve it! 

Water kefir in spring water

-being well enough for my first longed-for holiday, five days in June in fabulous Flamborough to restore my soul and get inspired for my novel which is set along that stunning coast. 

North Landing, Flamborough, East Yorkshire 

-reconnecting with my bestie from schooldays after she resettled in the UK after decades living abroad. Our weekly Skype adventures, texting, laughter and far-ranging heart-to-hearts till the early hours are a joy to my spirit. The years fall away and we're in our teens again, but even closer with the richer perspective of the years apart.

My bestie and I conquering the Skype gremlins 

-teaching myself how to bake the most moist, rich, delicious chocolate cake I've ever tasted, using coconut oil, almond flour and ingredients that no longer make my blood sugars spike, with the joy of never needing to deprive myself of my ultimate salted caramel treat! That is, if I've ever got any left after sharing it with eager friends and family!

Gluten-free salted caramel chocolate cake

-dog-sitting a variety of furry friends of friends who fill up, temporarily, that dog-shaped hole in my heart since my own lad passed away.

Cocker Spaniel sisters discovering treat puzzle ball

-inching towards the publication of my second novel, “Cloudhover Solstice” with all the attendant pleasures of plotting, researching, dreaming, writing and editing, plus the privilege of knowing how much my characters have found their fond place in the imaginations of my readers. So thankful to the kind few who support me by leaving a review, sharing posts, tweets and spreading the word. You are worth more than gold to me, even if I never earn a penny from my passion!

Work-in-progress novel. Not the *actual* cover!

-adventuring on a fungus foray by day and a bat walk by night in local woodland and having the quiet thrill of being at one with the wonderful natural world that surrounds us in this lovely corner of Yorkshire.

Orange Birch Bolete on the Fungus Foray in October

-soap! After night after night of sciatic twinges and cramps, googling in sheer desperation for help with agonising, sleep-shrinking restless legs, I came across what sounds like some mad old wives' tale of putting soap in a sock in your bed. I bought a cheap tablet of soap from the Co-op the next day, stuck it in an old knee-high, shoved it sceptically between the sheets. I haven't had full-blown cramp since that first night! No more idea why this works than anybody else – maybe I'm a mad old girl, too, but who's counting? 

Soap in a sock

-acquainting myself with my new all-singing, all-beeping insulin pump, Humph Mk II and his handset, the rather feisty Rita the Second. Yes, I still scream at Rita when I'm hypo and she's nagging me to eat. I still roll my eyes at Humph when he decides he needs new batteries in the middle of something more interesting. But you've got to love technology and ingenuity. They're keeping me alive from one moment to the next. My great gran was dead at 42 for lack of such inventions being widely available in the 1920s.

Me and my portable pancreas

-the birds, the Moon, passing planes, the trees, the flora and fauna, the clouds, the sunsets, the faces, the patterns, the colours that have kept my camera clicking throughout this year and the privilege of reliving eternally these moments frozen in time and sharing them with friends the world over.

Full Grain Moon over the wood

-friends, old and new, online and with flesh on, who remind me how many truly wonderful and special people are on this planet, fighting to ensure that love will always win over prejudice, bigotry and hate.

2017, you're welcome! You might not be gentle. You might not be all we hope for. But I'm coming to make the best of you, ready or not!

I cannot fall through you

This valley runs between wrists

That weighed a world and found it worth the cradling

Cushioning fingertips that meet in mercy

Touching wet cheeks that turn the other way

The trinity of joints that lift my sinking

Balancing grace like rain that falls to quench

Pleading

Coaxing

Holding

Bolstering

Cherishing hands

Underpinning my downward spirals

Undergirding the flimsy in me

Stabilising with a parent's tender

Soothing the bruises

Handling hurts like gathering gossamer

Filbert nails point forward, onward, upward

No fluster or waggle

No matter how fragile

Patient palms

Nurturing, nestling

I cannot fall through you

My Lord, my All.

Mission Shaper

Fill up your heavenly home, Lord,
Incarnate love for those driven by world-weight purposes
Further towards the cliff's bone-grey edge;
Flesh out our mission to become your body;
Melt us into grace for broken citizens
No longer dithering between departure gates
But sitting in the lounge where you're tuned off the tannoy.

Right where he stands, defiant,
Where she despairs of meaning,
Aching without alignment,
Raging at betrayals
And hypocrisies,
Send us robed in the humility of all we share
With every neighbour dechurched,
To reveal the vulnerable whisper at the heart of hopeless,
Jesus, among his own.


We need to be your oil-stained, water-puckered fingers
Baptising into radiance the flaked exhaustion of consumer chaos.
Long we looked away, pious and uncomforted
Tongues locked against repent
Ritualled in our culture
Charity disembodied, compassionless,
Guarding our arches and blue carpets
Against His own,
Afraid we might leak out
And be found threadbare as scarecrows in the living field.
Harvesting with blunted blades,
Hearts on our personal rockets to rapture,
Pushing outsiders (for surely, wasn't that their name?)
To the front pew (or chair, if we'd lost that age-old fight)
If ever they braved a way in
To bewilder and keep them alien and safely peregrine.

Father, forgive; Merciful Lord, have mercy
On us, confessors and professors of your radical journey,
That we have mapped it static
With our dowager's hump of stubborn rooted pride.

Now teach us who count you creator, Saviour,
The obedient walk on your light-drenched, narrow path,
Not past our neighbours to holy huddledom,
But to kneel where we always knew they were,
When our eyes were averted from wandering loved ones
For whom their Lover Lord weeps and waits and longs.