Feldenkrais

I lay on my back, my front and both my sides
and breathed in - hold - out - hold for an hour.
I felt my body relax, my mind expand.
I felt the world changing.

Fly

A fly, heavy as a small stone
travels across the kitchen,
catches light on its fretted wings
as the clouds begin to spill warm rain
from their dull bellies
and all the shoes in the house are still
all the shoes are still.

Dreams Of Carol Ann

I have a strange cough, but no matter, we went to hear Carol Ann Duffy read last night for the second time in just over a year. This time in Haworth, though not at the Parsonage itself, as (I guess) they don't have a big enough space there for a poet laureate sized audience. They're having a Bronte festival of women's writing (sic) this weekend and this was the highlight. While Katrina Naomi read first, Carol Ann sat down next to L in the front row. L got a little red in the neck but handled it with aplomb - even making a moment of conversation before the introductions were made... CAD looked a little off colour, we all agreed having seen her very close to. A little grey. She sneezed once while reading, though no other evidence of a cold. And she said it was caused by 'little bits of Bible' in the air (we were assembled in a Baptist chapel...) The reading did not disappoint though, except for feeling about 10 minutes short to me. Maybe she was not feeling well, and wanted to get away early, I don't know, I felt a little bereft when she stopped and suddenly it was all over bar the signing. No refreshments, and no desire to stand in a queue (and L had got her to sign our copy of Rapture last time), so nothing to stay for. We came home with friend S and drank red wine.

Carol Ann is splendid, whatever might have ailed her last night. And her writing seems to get better and better. There's a kind of deep English vein now running through some of the work, a profound affection for history and tradition, and a fairly clear radical sentiment. Pub names, county names, Dutch elm disease, and the decimation of bee populations were all there. She did a few poems from The World's Wife again to start with, which are superb and funny and true, but I wonder if she's getting a bit tired of reading these, ten years on? She made some comment about not even knowing she wrote them any more... The ones about her mother and the newer ones just sang, lyrical, spare, strong. But I missed the passion of her love poems, which I'd heard her read some of last time. What stays with me most is the music of her work, the rhythm and cadence, and her terrific reading. I hope she has (will) made some recordings.

Last night I slept fitfully, with a multiplicity of short dreams, like poems, all of which seemed to feature Carol Ann. And when I was awake I was writing poems in my head, about her, and about the rain.

I am currently reading Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road, and am unable to shake off my sadness that these two are no longer together...

The Boot

Something rattling around my mind today about depressive thoughts, depressive tendencies. Mine I mostly mean, though also my mother's and my young client's. And L's absence of same. I saw my wonderful supervisor today and told her how I still struggle with the aftermath of the blogging-about-work fiasco, how I catastrophise and undermine myself, and have again and again to rebuild my confidence from the ground up. She spoke about the 'boot on your neck' and the need to find ways to get out from under that violent pressure. And yes, it does feel like someone has a boot on my neck at times, exactly, right down to a very physical corelate of that metaphor. She advocated using something of a CBT approach - writing down these thoughts, seeing the worst excesses of negative thinking on the page, so I know them, and then can identify them when they come for me again. And it isn't that I haven't used this kind of strategy before, but it's a timely suggestion as they have been getting some leverage with me lately, and are just so damn destructive, when I'm trying to rebuild my life, and they keep jeering in my ear that I'm possibly incompetent, too inexperienced to be taken seriously, or there won't be the work for me that I anticipate, or I'm just going to contract a terminal illness anyway and never be able to earn money again, and will soon die anyway. Reader, you will either recognise the territory so well you will require no explanations, or marvel that it could exist at all inside an ostensibly well-adjusted, intelligent and sensitive person such as I, particularly perhaps an experienced psychotherapist... But so it is.

Currently I'm back with 'morning pages', Julia Cameron's basic practice from The Artist's Way, and every day I end my pages with affirmations, and every day one of my affirmations is I am willing to be happy (x 4). I made that one up, or if I didn't I no longer remember that I didn't! Either way, it remains spot on for me. There resides inside me a sub-personality (a critic, if you will) who actually isn't, at all, willing to be happy or to let me be happy, depending on how you conceptualise the dynamics of this. I have so many unconscious or barely conscious ways to make myself unhappy, I don't even know a lot of the time that's what they are, that that is what I'm doing, or that I can not do them. These depressive habits of mind, when one is in them, are so compelling, it is very hard to get the perspective needed to see that these are only thoughts - inaccurate and destructive ones that make you feel bad (bring on the CBT...) I think will is an important part of dealing with this, and I am determined to start exercising it more firmly to say NO to the boot on the neck thug! The other thing, as ever, is to feel angry rather than like a victim. I was talking about my disappointment with the way my manager managed what happened back there, the way she failed to support me essentially, and my supervisor asked if I felt angry and I said 'yes!' beginning to feel that as I spoke and she said 'good, that's better...'

Pot

Before I go off to my Mum's, a photograph of L's foot in its pot, in its stylish shoe! As you can see, taken in the garden - we had more lovely weather while C was staying.

C also came to the allotment and she and I did some clearing and digging, while L presided from a white plastic garden chair. It helps to have an injection of energy into the project, plus plenty of know-how. C is a very experienced and dedicated allotmenter herself. In fact we used to look after her allotment when she was on her holidays about this time of the year, and enjoy a fantastic harvest of runner beans, tomatoes, squash, chard, raspberries, blackberries, and sometimes gorgeous sweetcorn.

I'm off to visit my Mum tomorrow for a couple of days, then it's back to business - blogging, work-related, poetry, allotment, and looking after L!

Toe

A wild night, rain rattling at the windows, wind roaring down the chimney. L has a pretty blue pot (that's cast to the non-Northerners/ non-English amongst you) on her left foot with an attractive plastic shoe so she can walk on it! We were misinformed by the internet (no!!) that they don't put casts on broken toes! It'll be on for 4-6 weeks, so probably won't be off in time for her 60th birthday :-( At least it doesn't hurt a lot. Ibuprofen consumption minimal...

It seems to be hard to get anything much done around here. I have apparently gone into vicarious R&R mode. Our friend C comes up to visit from London tomorrow, then I'm away down South to my Mum's at the weekend, so there won't be a lot of posting til next week.

Anything And Everything

It's all been rather dramatic here of late. Happily Indian summer has come to bless us with late glorious sunshine. It's actually hot!! So, L was out in her sandals doing a spot of weeding on Tuesday, and I was reading Winnicott's Playing and Reality. L went out the front, to weed the sort of earthy verge in front of our fence, where wallflowers and nasturtiums grow, and earlier in the year she planted some stocks and petunias. She had pulled out two enormous thistles and thrown them over the fence into the garden, one of them showering me with a light drizzle of earth, when suddenly she gave a loud shriek, and came hurrying round the corner and towards the kitchen door. 'What? what's happened' I asked, pursuing her. 'A huge rock just fell on my foot' she gasped, running cold water, desperate to plunge her foot into it. I ran her a bowl of water and added ice, got her a chair, and she sat in agony, foot in the iced water, rubbing her leg and rocking for a time. Then we transferred her to the sofa so she could put the foot up. Her big toe looked bruised and bumpy, and it seemed clear (especially when I'd been and viewed the rock in question, and unable to lift it, had just shunted it out of the way of anyone walking along the pavement) that there was a very real possibility it might be broken. She dipped it in and out of the iced water, as the first excruciating pain gradually receded, while I tried to find out where we ought to go. A&E or the new health centre in the next town, with a walk-in service? I phoned our local surgery and was most helpfully told that yes, the health centre did indeed have x-ray facilities. Great. 15 minutes' drive instead of half an hour. However, when we got there, we were told that they only have x-ray facilities of the kind you have to be referred to by your GP... So then it was 15 minutes back to our town, and then half an hour to A&E in Halifax. Where we were greeted by a sign informing us the waiting time was 'up to 4 hours to see a doctor'. There were also signs admonshing us to be certain that we really were an emergency - 'A&E doesn't mean Anything and Everything'. We were there 3 and a half hours, waiting for triage, waiting for x-ray, then waiting for the doctor... getting home around 9.30, hungry and exhausted. I will say though, that apart from the under-resourcedness leading to the up to 4-hour waiting time, everything was well-managed in A&E and staff were courteous and helpful and gave every impression of working hard to meet everyone's needs as quickly as they could.

So poor L's toe is fractured in two places. It is black and blue now, and blistered too. She's cut a section out of a pair of cheap sub-Croc plastic shoes she bought for the beach, and can hobble about in these, though she tries to keep the foot up most of the time. She has an appointment at the fracture clinic on Monday, though I don't think there's much more they'll do. Toe fractures seem to be mostly about 'letting nature take its course'. The A&E doctor strapped the toe to its neighbour, just to give it 'stability', and we bought more strapping, but it's not easy to strap the toe now it is so blistered. Happily it is not so painful now, and she slept better last night... I have cancelled a vist to my Mum this weekend, and she feels terribly disappointed. Torn between two people who need me, this time I've had to choose L. Not an easy decision though. But I feel better now I've made it.