Time For Reflection

The Sea

We're home. The holiday was lovely. The sea was enough really, but the wild flowers, birds, reading and eating were also very much enjoyed. It wasn't hot mostly, but is now that we are home...

I am resolved to spend less time on the computer, since a week without it saw my neck and shoulders ease.

I have lots to say but a busy week ahead. My nephew is sad and so therefore am I, and I have a bit of new work, and a job application to send in, and a dear old friend visiting at the weekend. So posting may be scant for a while.

Handmade Parade

As promised pictures from the Handmade Parade on Saturday. The theme this year was YUM! The Fabulous Feast. Not sure what else I can say.


Where else are you going to see a grown man dressed as a portion of chips? It's R to be precise, who is coming to mend our fence and construct a couple of raised beds for us tomorrow! Pursued by a burger monster...

Greedy mouths...

The bees section, featuring L in perhaps her weirdest costume to date!

King prawn.

Four and twenty blackbirds...

The Parade ends in our local park, where things get steadily more surreal as the finale gets under way. Don't ask. The message is green...

The Beer Prize

I went to the Arts Festival box office on Saturday before the Handmade Parade to buy tickets for Moishe's Bagel. I was asked if I'd like to enter a prize draw. I said I would and filled in the required form, and thought no more about it. I didn't even ask what the prizes were, since I never win raffles, prize draws etc...

So, you could have knocked me down with a feather when we got back from the parade on Saturday evening to find a message saying I'd won the 'beer prize'! Well, how nice, I said to L, I expect it'll be a bottle or two of that local beer.

After her Pilates class this morning L went to collect the beer prize for me, and came staggering home under the weight of no less than six bottles of Little Valley Brewery beer, each one different. I especially like the way each one has a different coloured top. Click to enlarge to see them in their full glory.

At the age of 48 my first ever prize draw win! And it's something I really like. Thankyou.

Now back to the job application.

Handmade Parade photos coming soon.

Flaming June

Rain all day

soaking cold

windows covered in drops.

A cow in the field shakes herself

sends fine spray flying.

Dwell

I just broke a glass while washing up. It slipped from my wet rubber-gloved grasp as I reached to put it to drain on the folded tea towel that serves as draining rack overflow, fell hard enough from high enough to break, though it only fell onto the worktop not onto the floor. A big chunky IKEA tumbler used every day, it will be missed, but at least that sort of glass doesn't break into a million tiny shards like the wine glass full of white wine I knocked over and broke a few weeks ago. I don't want to have broken a glass! I exclaimed wearily, if one can exclaim wearily.

I am on an email service from my therapists' organisation, which alerts you to jobs in your area. They emailed me details of one this morning. It's 6 hours a week managing a counselling service for people with HIV/ AIDS. There are many things about it that are unclear, but one thing that is already clear is that 6 hours is not enough time to do what is in the Job Description, though it is probably all they can afford. I have worked for many charities and a kind of weariness creeps over me. However, it is more the sort of job I expected to be doing than teaching medical students, and it's nearer to home, and and and. I do and don't want to apply. Mostly I just feel a kind of mental chaos at the idea of having to start yet another new thing any time soon. Could I cope with that and two mornings of teaching starting in September, one morning at the school and two private clients?

L meanwhile is busy preparing for this year's Handmade Parade. It's on Saturday, and she has been painting bees onto cardboard since last night (she did go to bed in between) and has now gone off to today's community workshop to complete her costume and help children and parents with theirs. We hope the rain will stay away...

The glass, and the turmoil about jobs, and the fact that I can never seem to be comfortable on any chair, that my lower back and my neck and shoulders, and my upper back all seem to be taking turns feeling sore or stiff, make me cross and impatient. I have to keep coming back to my new resolve to check in regularly with myself and remind myself to be kind, to be gentle, not to bully and criticise.

In just over a week's time we go on holiday and will dwell by the sea for a week in Northumberland. This feels timely.

Breathing Space

It's funny, but I think I have a narrative going on in my psyche that says I should be doing better than this by now. Not actually funny at all, a major stressor being under that kind of pressure. The pressure to be alright by now. Of course, as soon as I see that in black and white I recognise it as one of the lessons of my childhood - you can be upset briefly, and receive comfort, but you will receive far more ongoing rewards for being happy, cheerful, able to offer solace to others. Early conditioning for being a therapist. Only of course a therapist needs also to be at home with her more difficult feelings. And relatively speaking, I am. Relative to many people, relative to my earlier self. But ever and again I see myself trying to wriggle out of engagement with discomfort, with disappointment, with loss and unhappiness.

Eighteen months ago, a dreadful thing happened to me, which shipwrecked my working life and left me entirely stranded, financially and professionally. The trauma sent shock waves through my whole being and rattled my never very steady confidence. There was damage which I am still repairing. I have three strands of work now, and all are well-paid and interesting. The school, the university, and private practice. But they are all very new still, and doing each for so little time makes it hard ever to settle in one place, get used to the people, the environment (except private practice where it's just me at home...) And the university job is now finished for a three-month summer, and my total work commitment is two half-days a week. In and out of modes I go, and at times straight back to 'unemployed' mode, feeling lost, adrift, structureless, demoralised. And here we go again, I have the feeling I should be feeling better by now. I read something yesterday in a therapy publication, in which someone mentioned that the worst thing that had ever happened to them was a nervous breakdown in their 40s, that had taken 'several months' to recover from... Comparing oneself with other people rarely helps, or not in a competitive way anyway. I very unconsciously understood this as a message that I am taking an unreasonably long time to recover from my -- what shall we even call it? -- disaster...

I'd like to get out from under this particular cosh. When I begin to bully and criticise myself, all that happens is that I compromise my recovery, feel worse, do less. Vicious circle beckons. I start to doubt that the work I am doing is ok, or that I'm able to do it, and off we go on another bareback ride on the wild horse of self-loathing. I hesitate to write that, but that is what it amounts to. And I don't, consciously at any rate, loathe myself, quite the reverse; but these are old and deeply worn ruts we unwittingly fall back into when the going gets rough. It's so hard to keep noticing, and intervene before the damage is done, to forgive myself when I realise I haven't noticed and damage has been done ('look what you've done again') and off we go again.

Today I am noticing. One thing that helped was Jean's comment about painful mental states and I thought 'yes, these are painful mental states, am I acknowledging this?' No, I had been just suffering them and somehow thinking I shouldn't be. The other thing that helped was a Feldenkrais lesson, which helped me become more aware of where I'm tightening, overworking parts of my body, and very gently, and without criticism, to explore these and to consider things that could help.

Edge

Two curlews circling wide looping

shrieking whooping, so close above my head

I can see their curved beaks,

the prehistoric arc

at the lower edge of their wings.

Sheep stare at me in the path

then turn abruptly

leading lambs

at a trot into the heather,

the muted drumming of their feet

on the hard earth.

Standing on the edge all the time

and teetering,

just pulling myself back

with pictures, with gentler thoughts,

from the plunge.

Pale Sky

I dream of a dead baby on a train and wake up thinking this cannot be good. The baby is in a pushchair and the parents bring it aboard the train at Rochdale. I cannot go near it.

Courgette plants in pots on the windowsill, growing reassuringly.

I try to sort out my 'intray' - actually a wicker basket that sits on the floor near the dresser and into which I dump things - reading material, bank statements, stuff related to my self-employment, stuff stuff stuff. Sorting it out was supposed to make me feel better... I end up not knowing what to do with half the stuff. I realise I need a big sort-out at the next level - the filing cabinet. Horror. But I know eventually somewhere in the process, I will feel better...

The sun is once again hidden from view by pale but dense cloud, and this dim light seems to seal me into my mood of dissatisfaction and unease. Actually, I want to weep. It is also windy. I wish it would be still.

Picture This

I want to show you a picture but I can't find the picture, the night black at the window, the cold-sounding wind in the chimney, I want to mention gooseberries and Ian Dury and to try to explain the endlessness of procrastination, and the calves chasing each other around the field, chasing and mounting, kicking up their heels in the yellow light, sickly and thundery around eight o'clock. Dusting the dresser and putting back each pebble, each cup and plate and shell, noticing the soothing. Parsley, mint and basil. I want to show you the smell of lovage as I weed round the beetroot, and the sound of two women talking but not the words as I earth up the potatoes. And memories of London in August four years ago, the toy people walking over the Millennium Bridge, and a man dressed as Salvador Dali outside Tate Modern.

Uneasy

The heat is returning after a month off, and with it some nameless anxiety in me. Maybe it isn't nameless, let's see if my final one-to-one meetings with the students tomorrow will set it to rest. I've been doing some Pilates exercises L has taught me and my shoulders are stiff, and I have a residual low-back/ hip discomfort from hard digging a few weeks ago on the allotment, which I now realise I have to avoid. All in all I don't feel quite right.

Yesterday a birthday walk and picnic in a beautiful spot in Wharfedale, for friend S on the occasion of her 61st. Most of the women there over 60, and again this aging thing gives me pause. Theirs, mine, everyone's. S boldly donned her swimming costume and swam in the icy waters - a fine way to celebrate! Some of us paddled, others just watched, there was much laughter and food and good conversation, and the sun came out, the warmer spell beginning in S's honour.

Tomorrow L's coming in to Leeds to meet me after I finish my morning's work and have lunch, and then a look around the city art gallery. Getting to know this other great city at the opposite end of the train line from Manchester, little by little.