blame

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Island Blog – Thinks and Inner Talk

Goodness but this humidity is something else! That, and the Cosmic Shenanigans, the Seven Sisters lining up a gazillion miles above our heads, the Moon playing Quidditch with them. Big Game in the sky. And, that’s enough capitals for now. Moving beyond……

I feel as if I am carrying said sky on my head, the biggest cloud-hat ever, but it doesn’t stop there, with just me. I see faces sweat lined, a stoop in shoulders, a trudge in steps, an Aah in voices. It thinks me. We on this westerly island are more used to slam and crash and wheelies taking off into another’s garden; or sun straight and clear, air fresh with clarity, helping our minds to scurry like mice, busy, productive, enterprising, aware. These few days of cosmic hoo-ha and all those sisters doing their aligning thing as if they plan to dance the merengue which will probably result in a load of noise we cannot hear, but can feel, has been daunting. Add mother moon and, well, I can’t go there. I just feel tired and here’s where inner talk makes an entrance.

If I say, out loud, that I am tired, it isn’t just the other person who hears my words, and, because I have spoken it out, he or she now needs to respond, hence commencing a conversation about the whys and whats and hows and whatnots of my particular type of tiredness. My computer brain has heard my voice and has recognised it as familiar. Good lord, I have started something, no, two somethings, neither one of which I want. Apart from a complete waste of precious time with a friend who now has the tired word blanching the storyline balance of his or her own life into a softness which is not quite edible, my own computer is going bajonkers on a ‘fix’ and coming up with endless plasters to stick over the ‘wound’, one I have just announced as a problem. All completely useless, what my friend says and the plaster. So, my question is, why do I speak it out, even to myself?

I know why I am tired. I work 4 days a week in the Best Cafe Ever (sorry, caps will come in) and I am not young anymore. I love it, you know that. but the number of days takes a toll. I remember Old Katy in Tapselteerie days telling me her bones were sore. I was decades her junior, made kindly adaptions to her work load, but didn’t understand it at all. I do now. Next thing on the tiredness thing. Over a few nights, all my smoke alarms have erupted into song. You knew about the first, I think. I binned that one, but the others shriek, and it is a shriek, picking the deathwatch (sailor’s term) hours to make a point, one which still confuses me. There is no fire, no gas escape, nothing. I ping out the batteries and try again to sleep. The batteries, just fyi, are new. I think this is all to do with cosmic hooha.

Back to inner talk. I believe that we are all hard on ourselves, no matter our history, and I say that because we blame too quickly, thus allowing ourselves a wee freedom. I have learned, am still learning, to take responsibility for the moment, for everything, actually, each step, every choice, regardless of bloodline or memories, or of what lies in our paths. Inner talk plays a huge role in this dance, this delusion, this rise or this descent. So, when I say to myself ‘I am tired,’ this brain of mine, devoid of emotive action, merely a mathematical robot, agrees. I stoop, I trudge, I tell someone, poor little me.

Well blow that right out of the water. I saw a young otter today on the Tapselteerie track; I went to church and found perspective; I watched a Peacock Butterfly on a flower, knelt down to see the sun through the backside of a Himalayan Poppy, lifted a Carder bee out of the sunroom, smiled with friends, drove past healthy black sheep, watched a toad pull itself through the green and saw the smallest moth perk atop my laptop.

Looking only at the beauty of whatever life anyone lives in, is not a plaster. It’s a re-jig of inner thinks. Every time.

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Island Blog – Into the Mirror

Last night I dreamed the strangest of dreams. Everything is acceptable, believable, in dreams. The craziest happenings are, well, just normal. I had driven miles to a place in the middle of nowhere, a place of one house at a time and hundreds of miles apart. In between, vast cornfields. Poppies and other wildflowers grew at the edge of one such field, although I never found the responding edge. Chances are it was a three day drive away, so huge was this crop of golden stems. Man food. I considered those who were here before, the wildflowers, the great trees, the wildlife, all working together in a synergy we have never successfully simulated.

I parked at the end of a track but could see the guest house nestled in a halo of man-planted, fast growing shrubbery and whiskery trees. I was extremely tired and considered, for a while, sleeping in my car. But the longing to lie down between crisp cotton sheets overtook such thought and propelled me towards the door and check-in.

My room had no walls. Not one. It seemed quite normal to me. Furniture, a desk, a cupboard with hangers, a chest of drawers and a chair created the illusion of a contained space. There was even a door in a frame, attached to nothing. I lay awake a while staring out at the cornfield, watching it vanish as the dark intensified. Then I slept and deeply.

I awoke to the sound of the door opening. A manservant (I knew him by his dress and his demeanour) came in with a silver coffee pot to fill my cup. I asked him the time and when he told me it was 9 am I was astonished. I never sleep beyond 6. I rose, dressed and headed out for a cornfield walk. A man walked by on stilts and I greeted him, watching him lope through the corn in long easy strides. Two children played with a stuffed giraffe. I heard their laughter before I saw them. This giraffe was a fully grown male, or had been, once and it was lying on its side. The children jumped over his neck, a skipping game of their own devise. The girl, breathless, sank down to wrap her arms around the long neck, her little fingers scratching over the glass eye. I watched them a while. All still perfectly normal.

On my return, I found a woman entirely dressed in pink in a warm motherly sort of way, sitting at a trestle table upon which sat pots and bowls of red jelly and a round mirror on a stand. She tipped jelly from one container to another, studied her work and noted her findings down in a little book. I stopped to greet her, thinking she was my hostess but she assured me she was not. I lingered awhile watching her work. She was lost in it until she suddenly came back to me and smiled, turning the mirror around until I saw me looking back.

It thinks me; not what it all meant because dream divination is not my skill, nor my interest, but more, why the mirror? I know that at the end of every road is a mirror. I read it once, heard it said often. The mirror shows me, me. It also shows what is behind me, the places I have been, my part in a created past, my past, my creation. How I felt, how I feel when catching sight of my reflected self is always a surprise. I look like that? Seriously? From behind these eyes of mine I see ahead. I see you but I don’t see me and when I do, it takes me a few seconds to acknowledge my own face. It brings me back to me and a lot of questions. Am I happy with myself, proud of my achievements? Am I kind and compassionate, strong and vulnerable, humble and yet ready to fight for my beliefs, for others, for justice? Only when I have made answer, settled my initial fright, can I turn back to looking out.

I remember one counsellor (been to hundreds) suggesting mirror work. Back then I could barely look myself in the eye, turning hurriedly from a snap reflection in a shop window. Now I get it. The mirror is vital as a reminder that life is not someone else’s problem, but my own. The walking out, of Me, matters. Not just to others but much more so to myself. All the great and good know this, taught it and still do. All religions hold loving self as a basic truth, a first step, the very heartbeat of life. Until we can look long and steady into that mirror, sorting out all those failings that make us turn away, we will live only half a life. We will snap back into our shame and blame as great pretenders. We will arrive at the final day and wonder what happened.

I want to meet that last mirror with a long hard look, no secrets, no shame. I want to see the miles and miles of my past just as it was and know I did more than okay. And then, to move on.

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Island Blog 113 Secrets and Mindfulness (plus donkey)

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Inside us lies a world of secrets.  Secrets we share with one or two trusted people, and secrets we never ever tell a soul.  There are secrets we won’t even share with ourselves.

I am learning the wonders of Mindfulness.  What it asks of me, this Mindfulness thingy is that I pause long enough to notice my responses to any stimulation, any event, any person, any words aimed at me, and so on.  For instance, if you say to me something like ‘ I wish you wouldn’t always kick my donkey when you walk through his field’ I might respond angrily, especially if it wisnae me in the first place, but just some woman who bought the same red jacket last Autumn. If I did kick the donkey, then I might respond defensively, maintaining that the donkey is bad tempered and sly, watching out for me crossing his field and making sure he whaps my shin when you’re not looking.

In both these cases I am holding a secret.  The first one will be that I think you are a stupid smug donkey-owner and I never liked, nor trusted you one tiny bit.  You are a gossip and probably spreading no end of rumours about me down at the shop.  I don’t tell you this, of course but hold this secret within my soft interior, a secret that rises like bile in my gut every time I have the misfortune to meet you in the road.

The second one could be that I do sneak about kicking donkeys, even if they do mind their own business and are astonished any time my boot makes contact.

I appreciate that the above example is a tad silly, and I would also like to state, for the record, that I have never kicked anyone’s donkey, even though anyone’s donkey most certainly has kicked me. But that’s another blog, another time.

My thoughts, my private thoughts are my secrets.  I like them, but there are times when I must allow them to fly away because holding onto them will harm me.

Anger and resentment for example will make me ill, or, at the very least, bring me lower back pain and plooks. Oh I know, absolutely know that people who say anger is a bad thing have never been angry enough.  Fear of anger, my own or just anger in general gives the powerful emotion very bad press, and quite wrongly so. Anger is an energy, creating adrenalin and heightened strength, and, mindfully employed, can achieve remarkable good things – lashing out with sharpened weaponry not being one of them. If I can accept and be thankful for this surge of anger and think about why I felt it so strongly when all you did was break my favourite coffee mug, I will eventually be able to understand the root of it all.  In the current climate, someone will probably tell me it’s all my mother’s fault, but I must look beyond her.  Although she is a convenient soft landing for the punch of blame, she won’t be the whole reason I can promise you that.

My over response to unkind words, or of being abandoned, rejected, accused or blamed will have its roots in childhood. Could be at home, at school, anywhere in the playround of youth.  Often, the lineage of those roots is untraceable back to source.  So what?  Mindfully I can accept this and move on, but not move on and hold onto them.  I must move on and let them go.  I don’t need them, they weigh me down and make me secretly kick donkeys and over-react to broken mugs.  I know I don’t like unkind words, but I also know that you may not have meant them they way I heard them.  I know I don’t like the accusing gossip in you, but you very probably don’t like much in me either and, as we don’t have to meet, let’s not. I don’t want to be rejected or dissed or ignored or abandoned, but life is going to throw all of them my way at some point.  If I am mindful of my response to any of these as they cross my path, I am going to hear my own secrets.  Instead of pretending that it is all ok and that I don’t hurt at all, I will be able to honestly allow anger to rise against the pain and deal with it all by myself.  I won’t need to snap at anyone, or kick a donkey.  Then, when you break my replacement, replacement, replacement coffee cup I will be able to say (and mean it) that it doesn’t matter one jot because it’s only a cup, and can be replaced (providing there are any left), whereas you are irreplaceable.