GOODBYE, CAR!

PRIVACY FILM

CANDLE

LONG GRASSES

BRAIN TURNED TRAITOR

Why won’t this key turn the old way in the lock?

Everything’s back to front, these days.

You count your change with somebody’s liver spot fingers –

Surely they can’t be yours? -

Never seems to tot up right, somehow.

The unlit gas looked safe, hissing silent below

The threshold of your hearing

When you left the cooker to answer the phone.

Alien voices calling your Sunday name

Boom through the room 

From that box with its winks and wires.

You caught that silly button round your throat

Again by accident. You can’t remember last time. Or the last.

It’s not a necklace you would ever have chosen

When you walked upright, sprightly, doing three jobs,

Busy and coping and confident.

The numbers on the calendar are all higgledy thump.

Days are dead-eyed with strangers

Someone even stranger says are carers.

Please never forget:

No-one should ever feel foolish for forgetting.

In the jumble stall muddle of a brain turned traitor,

Know you are loved for who you really are,

Though absent memory may go rogue

Your soul shines bright, though mind's eyes may be closed.

ONE THING

There's only one thing.

One thing important to say.

One thing important today.

You are beautiful.

Whatever your fears or failures.

You are loved.

Whatever your need to curl up

Licking those wounds unseen.

You are safe. 

Cherish yourself

In the warm wise core of your heart.

There is peace here.

Peace you bring to the eye of your storm.

Don't let the wilderness of this wild world

Pull the wool over your lovely eyes.

You are good enough, beloved.

This is the simple truth.

This is all you need.

It is enough.

Enough,

And so are you.

I'LL BE RIGHT

That knot in your stomach. You know it. You feel it, too, don't you?

You feed it with worry and fretting about the future. Its favourite diet is 'might happens' and 'what ifs'. It ties itself tighter. It dyes itself deeper into darkness, knitting itself into a jacket with bristly threads.  You try to unpick it with distractions. You try to cast off its stitches but the needles of denial keep clicking.

Suddenly your mind is spinning. You feel shipwrecked on a distant horizon. Life feels remote and you picture yourself all alone, isolated, nervous, jumpy. Your hear an echo of your own helpless voice crying out, sobbing like you did as a child when you once felt abandoned and anxious decades ago.

You come to the end of your rope. You creep, broken, into silence. You let your babbling mind relax. You shush it firmly as it warns and scaremongers. You're Mary Poppins closing the beak of her parrot-headed umbrella.  When it starts to get the message, your mental chatter quietens its chuntering for a space. Just a space, so the silence can break through. Then the frantic little knot, the node of grief and anxiety, smiles at itself being gently acknowledged, and as your soul reminds itself of being one with all creation, you suddenly find the knot itself has unravelled and lost its kinks and snarls. Under all the surface shimmer of dire imaginings, you get a peek at the solid ground underneath.

Then there is a wideness, humming with light. You know for certain the truth that you are not floating in abandonment at all, but tenderly held, perfectly still, in love and security of another kind – the peace that's beyond words, or images or concepts. It waits for you so humbly, while you clumsily juggle with your mind’s plunge into the past, as it tries to recall better times while stopping off to rerun all the worst moments etched unhelpfully, obsessively, in memory; while your thoughts pick nervously at the imagined emptiness of the future, with that sense of undefined, vague and untouchable dread.

I hear from my heart: “I can't help with what you dread in the future. I can only be here with you in this moment. Here we can deal with everything that is, together as one.”

So I choose to be here. Not to ‘stay’ here, because change and impermanence is a given. We dread change too, don't we, when we make it into a choice, or link it to the uncertainty of the future? No. I choose to be here. Only here and now is rock solid liquid reality. Here I am beloved, with a love that is everywhere and everything, that is refreshed to perfection every moment, before that perfection can fall away even for an instant. Only sometimes, when the knot makes itself felt inside, I lose sight of this still centre and I escape into the captivity of mind-buzzing absence.

I've spent so many years of my life caught up in my mind's fantasies. The world of misery was always waiting when I came back to earth.  Like so many others, I've walked through a featureless wilderness of illness during these past few decades. After an initial ‘my life is over!’ moment, when I became so ill,  knees chopped from under me, unable to function from the illnesses that stalked me and ate me alive, I've reached a clearing. 

Clearings give us a new perspective on the surrounding forest with its thickets of thorns and hidden pits. Now I am finding my heart somehow drawn deeper and stiller than ever before. Nearer to silence's lucid clarity than I was, even in those active, fervent years when I was free to serve, travel, and minister wherever I was called to be. 

Nothing can quench that love at the very kernel of life itself. It never goes out and far from abandoning us to grief and cynicism for ever, it waits inside us till we can stop running and shouting and weeping for long enough to realise it has always completely been with us, and within us.

True joy comes welling up. Never pushy, never strident. It's always waiting in the background while the mind is doing its dread and loathing thing, fighting to get away from the truth of eternity that never diminishes or fades away for a moment.

This morning’s headlines in the UK include medicine shortages even before full Brexit at the end of the month after next. I could worry. I could whine. Perhaps I will, again! I've had enough practice! I could stress and resist and identify as poor little me, the hard done-by. But whenever I can summon up the insight not to, I refuse to. I'm unfriending that knot inside. I’ll let my imagination go on a hike, with its worst case scenarios and its personal 'Project Fear'. I’ll be softly in my spirit in the silence, in the midst of it. 

I'll be right here. 

I'll be right. 

BLUE MONDAY

You for whom Monday dawns bluely

Not blue of gentian, of cirrus-combed skies,

Not cornflower, powder, periwinkle,

But bottomless blue bruise of ice,

Of frozen feather in a fox’s footprint:

I will stitch you a cloak of comfort in Arnolfini greens,

Swaddle your sadness in robes of amethyst,

Wrap your sorrow in sun-warmed apricots and ambers,

Dry your tears with tissues of cadmium and canary,

Warm your heart with carnelian and coquelicot reds.

I would not see you blue

But if that is where you must be for now,

I will walk out across

This fragile crust of slippy-sided blueness

To hold your hand

Under the frozen brow

To wait with you

For rainbows.

ANXIETY: PALE ROBBER

(This one's for all my friends struggling bravely in so many upsetting situations at the moment. Thinking you're alone. Please know you're not.)


A mirror distorting joy into a gargoyle.
A telescope bringing terror close as skin.
A magnifying glass of grief's despairing.

Anxiety.

A doubling of fears, a blank forgetting
A tripling of turmoil numbing drives and dreams
A well of weeping drags tomorrow under

Anxiety.

A deafening to birdsong and love's murmur
A toiling twice up every harrowing hill
A thief of calm, a churning, an abyss

Anxiety.

Hope? Oiled perfume drizzled on dry dead feelings
Hope? Soft palms cupping the frayed and fraught
Hope? The return, rebirth, the restoration
Of all that pale robber plunders from the heart.


(The photos here hint at the truth that I find my personal hope and comfort in the natural world and wonder of creation and creativity. May you bless yourself as you deserve to, by allowing yourself to drink from the fountain of your own deepest joys, to heal your heart when it feels lost in that fog of anxiety and helplessness. Thank you so much for stopping by!)

This Melancholy Act: Suicide and Secrecy in Victorian Yorkshire Part 2

G. F. Watts - Found Drowned - Oil on Canvas ca 1848-50

I wrote last September here about the ripple effects through our family history of the suicide of my great great great great grandmother Nancy Turner in January 1856.

Friends who read this will know how much I want to understand more of what happened. My hope is to track down the actual inquest one day.

Blogging and social networking can bring such helpful blessings! One person who came across my blogpost was my fourth cousin once removed, David. David is also descended from Nancy and Thomas, through their youngest child, Charlotte, sister of my 3x great grandmother Hannah. We "met" through our mutual interest in our shared ancestry but had lost touch since I changed laptops!

He got in touch again, much to my delight, when he guessed I was the author of the post about the tragedy. He was kind enough to point me in the direction of the British Newspaper Archive. This resource is searchable for free online, and if you find a newspaper cutting you want to see in detail or to download, there are various levels of subscription, starting at a 2-Day Package of 500 credits valid for 2 days currently costing £6.95.

From the BNA, two issues of the Yorkshire Gazette reveal a little more of our ancestors' story. The first mention of the tragedy appeared on page 10 of the Gazette published on Saturday 26th January 1856. This was a shock in itself. I knew Nancy had died the following day, Sunday 27th, according to her death certificate, issued on March 20th after what we have to conclude was a lengthy inquest. So why was the incident being mentioned before it took place?

The truth is even worse than imagined. Nancy did not die quickly, but attempted to cut her throat with a penknife the previous Monday and was still alive, apparently recovering when the Gazette went to press at the weekend. More upsetting still, the paper reveals she was in bed with Thomas at the time of her attempted suicide. What he and the rest of our family living in the Barlby farmhouse at the time must have gone through, is hard to contemplate:

-BARLBY, NEAR SELBY.--ATTEMPTED SUICIDE.

--On Monday last, the wife of Mr Thos. Turner, of

Barlby, farmer, attempted to destroy herself by cutting

her throat with a pen-knife. She was in bed at the time

with her husband, and he shortly afterwards, from the

noise he heard, found out what had been done. Medical

aid was shortly procured, and she is now in a fair way of

recovery. The unfortunate woman has been in a

desponding state for some time, which was no doubt the

cause of this melancholy act.

Without the full inquest, or some further insight into Nancy's state of mind, we can still only speculate what triggered the act of despair. We can't know if she was suffering from some form of depression we might recognise as a mental health condition today, or whether her final heartbreaking decision was triggered by events that she couldn't bear any longer, such as the emigration and death of several of her close relations including children and grandchildren. But we can glimpse the devastation and grief, even stigma the family had to face then and in the years ahead.

Sadly the Yorkshire Gazette's prognosis for Nancy's recovery was premature and flawed. She died the next day, after living on for almost a week in that state of utter agony and internal torture. The next issue of the Gazette on Saturday 2nd February carried her obituary on page 3:

On Sunday, the 27th ult.,...aged 66, Nancy, wife of Mr Thomas Turner,

of Barlby, farmer. In our last week's paper we stated that

she cut her throat with a penknife on the 21st ult.

R.I.P Nancy. Your blood runs through my veins, and I feel privileged to trace your story and share your sadness. I hope you have now found the peace you could not enjoy in this world. You will never be forgotten.

A Victorian chart analysing the causes of suicide: Nancy was deemed "Insane in mind" instead of the verdict "felo-de-se", deliberate, "intentional" self murder, which was still considered a crime in 1856. You were a criminal, by law, if you failed and insane if you succeeded (source: Victorian Web)

Thankfully, unlike many who were not permitted to be buried in "consecrated ground," I finally found Nancy's grave in the churchyard at Barlby, where, in the sad years that followed the "melancholy act," she was joined by her daughter Charlotte Vollans who died just after her 38th birthday in 1858 and Nancy's widower Thomas, who died in September 1861 and whose body was transported from his farm in Hatfield Woodhouse to lie beside Nancy near the home they once shared.

Sacred

To the memory of

Nancy the beloved wife of

Thomas Turner of Barlby farmer

Who died January the 27th 1856

Aged 66 years

Also Charlotte Vol(l)ans daughter

Of the above named Nancy and 

Thomas Turner who departed this

Life June the 15th 1858

Aged 38 years

Also the above named

Thomas Turner

Who departed this life

September 6th 1861

Aged 77 years