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. 

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

“You may call it ‘brown’ but I call it Burnt Umber.”

The things we come out with when we’re kids! Cute stuff. Cringeworthy stuff. Stuff we can’t remember saying, except from tales told about us by grown-ups years later.

I produced the piece of pedantry quoted above when I was about six. Our neighbour, a man in his forties, fresh home from his shift on the railway, had casually remarked,

“That’s a nice brown you’ve got there!”

when he saw me enthusiastically using my new watercolour paints to depict the bark of a tree. I loved daubing. I adored words even more, even then. Loved the shape and texture of the sounds. Loved the feel of saying stretchy vowels and delicious diphthongs that made special patterns and flavours in my imagination.

I was such a polite kid, too. I wouldn’t generally say ‘boo’ to the proverbial goose. But I knew when there was a fantastic magical proper name for something, especially when it rolled mysteriously off the tongue like this “Burnt Umber” then I sure as heck was going to say it.  And encourage others, including adults, to join in. Enter our neighbour.

I look back in horror to think how priggish and precocious I must have sounded. My mum assures me the neighbour laughed like a drain and wasn’t at all offended. He knew I wasn’t a cheeky kid as a rule. It was just that, being me, I’d learned by heart all the special exotic-sounding names on the labels in my new paintbox. Raw Sienna. Ultramarine. Cobalt Blue. Yellow Ochre. Vermilion. Burnt Umber.

If something didn’t already have a marvellous moniker, I wasn’t averse to making one up for it, either. I would go on errands to the local Post Office to purchase a “Post Lauder” as it was in my head when I asked for it at the counter, or “Postal Order” as the rest of the unenlightened populace called it. “Terrid” was my infant mangling of “terrible” and “horrid.” My cousin assures me that when I was little, I used to insist the small rectangular block of wood at either end of our piano keyboard was, and I quote, the “tisstop”. Don’t even ask. 

Somewhere not very deep below my placid exterior, even now, the voice of that pintsized pedagogue and would-be word-wrangler is still biting its tongue. Most of the time. Nearly sixty years later, the memory of the “Burnt Umber” controversy incident still has me blushing brighter than a brushful of Cadmium Red!

MY DAD: BORN THIS DAY 1924

Today would have been my dad's 93rd birthday.

He isn't here to celebrate it with us, but we remember him with love through the years.

Dad died at 65, 20 years after suffering a series of massive strokes at 45 (or as the doctor airily insisted to my mum, who knew only too well what had happened, "It's just a touch of bad bronchitis, Mrs Barrass!"). The doctor walked out of my parents' bedroom that day, leaving my mum bereft and alone with the obvious lie that my dad had merely a bit of a chest infection, even though his speech was slurred and he was weakly doing the opposite of every action, pushing away when he should be pulling towards, spilling when he should be holding steady.

Only a second opinion brought diagnosis, but soon the ambulances were on strike and he was forgotten for much of the time he should have been fetched to physiotherapy. Such were the times at the dawn of the 1970s. The strokes left him permanently disabled and unable to do anything without support. For many things he most loved, that meant not enjoying them at all, ever again.

At 8, I saw the happy, strong, capable, funny dad who used to stand on his head to make me laugh and gave me fireman's lifts till I was hysterical with giggles, turn overnight into a stranger who struggled to make himself understood by slowly spelling out words on my old toy chalkboard with magnetic letters, choked at almost every meal and lived in a huge hospital-issue iron bed in our tiny front room with calipers, pulleys, feeding cups, commodes, canes and humiliating helplessness.

No more running down the path, past the freight weighing shed, across the yard, along the platform to meet him at the little station at the bottom of our garden where he worked as head porter and shunter. No more that thrill of hearing the purring crescendo of the engine of his motorbike as he arrived at the school gates to whisk me off home or on some impromptu adventure in the Yorkshire countryside.

Dad overseeing my first steps on the lawn

But that happy, strong, capable, funny dad was still inside that often child-like, stubborn stranger as I learned to understand, growing up in the shadow of his loss of freedom and dignity. So many things remind me of him with thankfulness: maps, bikes, unplanned picnics, cherry genoa cake, corned beef sandwiches with brown sauce, trifle, playing patience, silly black-and-white movies, radio comedy, pit ponies, mystery outings in the motorbike-and-sidecar, steam trains, railways, picking the second favourite in horse races on TV, the spiral staircase up Hooton Pagnell church tower, watching the wrestling and scrambling and snooker, tinkering with things, laughter with crinkled-up eyes.

Me & Dad near Filey, c1965

My next book, Cloudhover Solstice, is dedicated to him, set in the places on the beautiful Yorkshire Coast my dad loved and which, without him, I might never have discovered or laid down such treasured memories that keep him alive in my heart. I could go on, but I'll just say:

"Happy Birthday, Dad! We love you and we'll never forget!"

Dad & his only child - yours truly, 1961

My dad, porter at Bolton-on-Dearne railway station in the last days of steam.
Quintessential Yorkshireman and a decent, lovely lad.

One percent inspiration: what makes your writing tick?

Whether you write for pleasure, for a living, for the hell of it, because you can't help it, we all know inspiration's an elusive butterfly that can be hard to harness.

It doesn't take a genius to know what Thomas Alva Edison said is true: "Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration."

But in between the sweat and buckling down to write in order to write, each of us snatches at precious personal muses that help to place us in the moment, with our words, our characters, our plotlines, our message, our soul-sharing.

When I felt a bit blocked with my second novel this week, I woke one morning from a dream encounter with my central characters. They reminded me not to be timid and self-editing while the first draft is humming along. Feel the fear and tap away regardless! Characters that are real flesh and blood to me, closer than family, will reassure or challenge me by living the next twist in the tale with me.

Yorkshire bard Ted Hughes's poem "The Thought Fox" explains the way inspiration came to him as a writer. You can hear the poet reading his poem here. 

Set on the Yorkshire Coast like my novel, below is my own latest poem trying to capture how one flash of inspiration for my work in progress came to me in the waking watches of the morning. 

Chatterthrow

They sailed through me in dream last night

My hero and my heroine,

His eyes reflect rainbows over marsh

Her scent of quay and salted sheets

Watched my hovering hand over blank page

Traced their fingers through knots of plot,

Unpicking and beachcombing unwritten words

Lips smiling at unmet characters

Over us, gulls of Chatterthrow

Wheeling and skimming the coffee cliffs,

Kittiwake held against her breast

As he whispers his breath under trembling wings

His palm facing the centred earth,

Her palm raised to the sky and spray,

My hand cradled between their warmth

Telling their story in woven waves

Guiding my grasp to the tiller of tales

Under the hush and howl of the fret

Cogs connect and the synapse sparks

Compass and craft over bar and block

(c) Joyce Barrass 2015

You can get my first novel, set on the peat moors and canals of South Yorkshire, "Goatsucker Harvest" here (some of the reviews may persuade you to dive in - it's FREE on Kindle Unlimited & crazy cheap on Kindle or in Paperback in UK & USA & some other parts of the planet.)