Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey

Strange to return from the stone-gathering mission, feeling a little raw and shy here. The daily stone-writing practice was a joy and a revelation. An exercise in mindfulness, a retuning of my poet's eye, I found it made January slow down, or made me more present to January. There were usually many stones on any given day, which, like a beachcomber, I sat down and sorted through at the end of the day. Poetic licence there, but sometimes there was more than one, and it was fun choosing. Other days I was stuck for even one. Usually on especially busy days, when I had rushed past them, or forgotten them in the clutter of content. L sometimes suggested something, but only once did that work. They had to be my own. So, great gratitude for this lovely practice. It's also nice to stop, and have the opportunity to explore other forms here again. But I shall always know that a stone is a possibility. What seems so small and unimportant becomes, when singled out, resonant, poignant, a marker along the way as the days and weeks go by.

I have my third cold since December. This is most unlike me. I have taken a sicky from my teaching job today, and postponed a visit to my mother's this weekend. Snow forecast tomorrow was also worrying her, and certainly the sub zero conditions don't make travel an appealing prospect, even train travel. I am, predictably, sitting at home with the wood burner. Less predictably perhaps, listening to Nick Drake. L is out for drinks with friends, which I've cried off. I rather like this feeling I get when I opt out of planned activity through illness (minor), and can just be cosy and quiet, a little outside of my life. And my life has suddenly become much busier, so I need some respite. Work has begun to develop and grow, and I am finding more confidence, resilience and enjoyment in it, especially the work with young people. Troubled though they are, and sometimes challenging, they have a freshness of vision, and a lack of defensiveness (compared with adults) which is refreshing, disarming, deeply moving sometimes.

I am solvent and feeling good about myself. Amazing to place those eight words in the box. Two years ago we moved up here just beneath the moors, in the snow, and for a long time after that I felt as if neither of those things would be possible ever again. Hard to take the long view when you're in crisis or its aftermath, trauma and its devastating after-effects.

(There goes the gritter!) 

I have stopped, and I mean stopped a constant inner narrative of self-criticism, self-doubt, self-blame. Replaced it, by and large (yes, there's slippage, of course), with a kind and gentle one of encouragement and reassurance. How I've done it is a kind of mystery, a kind of grace, but let's just say I've been stalking this particular prey for a long long time.