empathy

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Island Blog – Lemons, Zest and Loving

I was angry, and anger, in my life has played two roles. One confounds and limits, sinks me. T’other fires me up like a rocket. I have heard so so many people tell me, intelligent people, I thought, who told me any anger is a BAD thing. Much research and even more inner work has taught me this is not the truth. Anything in ‘overdose’ is damaging, yes. Any emotion without reflection, introspection and direction is damaging, yes. But with inner work, intelligent work, and with a heart that does not want to entertain any controller, and certainly not the control of any emotion beyond the timing of its natural flow, anger can turn into a flower garden, a new path snaking through old undergrowth, old limitations, old beliefs, old stuff. Anger is random, sudden, a boom to the gut, the heart. It traverses a whole body and not just then, but perhaps for days, weeks, months, but if what a goodly loving and trusting human being wants are peace, dance, chances and a new path, the latter will reveal itself. It always, always does.

Yesterday, and, if I’m honest, the day before, too, I just wanted to sleep. And so I did. Although Sleep and I will never be easy bedfellows, separating many times during the hours of darkness, whilst the oystercatchers make a right bloody fuss of pretty much everything down on the shore, I could sleep these past two days. Not all the day, but in bits and bobs for it was necessary that anger calmed his boots within me. He is calmed. I went to work today feeling quite the thing, as they say on this lovely island, and I know, now, what I know. I let go, or try to, of self-hatred, of the sting of rejection, the confirmation that I am not the vibrant, exciting and fun-loving woman I believed myself to be for a few short weeks. Well, I try to let them go, tell myself to let them go, insist in fact that they bloody go, and they do for a short while until they curve back to me with renewed energy. It is hard work living alone when that is not what I want. Others have confirmed this belief. In order to be cheerful, I have to start the process. In order to see a friend, it is I who must make the call. In order to laugh, I must pop one into my mouth prior to a visit to the shop or into the harbour town. It is, oftentimes, exhausting, all this DIY living. If I want to build a new life, I must find the tools and get to work, I know this, and, before he came to mess things up, I was actually finding my stride. Now, back at the start, I have to summon up enough get-go to get going all over again, erasing, as best I can, the memories of happily shared days, of conversations, of plans and of companionship.

But, (again) I have fire, yet, in my belly, fire for life, for a good life, for the one I want, and no-one can extinguish that fire, unless I hand over the water bucket. Which I will not do. There is too much zest in my thoughts, my heart, my imagination, my brilliant brain and strong body. I think of others who have been rejected, of children, teens, older women like me, men, boys, those whose sexuality brings in black storm clouds, the marginalised, the unwanted, the extras in this game of life. I am fortunate, indeed, to have so much loving support from family and friends. And, one day, I will laugh at this, at myself, my reaction, my sinking into negativity. I will say, Oh, this happened to me, once, trusting me, loving me, and, believe me, time will heal the cuts. There will be scars, but scars are beautiful things. Scars hold compassion, empathy and understanding. Love your scars because, one day, you too will laugh at this pain, and you too will be quick to hold another who has been rejected.

This is how we love the world.

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Island Blog – We Can Too

There’s another hoolie blowing here, strafing the daffodils, splitting the petals into suncolours on a lewid grass. It isn’t really lewid, the grass, I just found the word and it would out. The grass is, in fact, growing strong and upwards, but only the latter bit when the hoodie pauses for breath. I swear we are all bent over these past months, the taller ones, like Jim and Archie are almost paperclipped. We work with the gales, that’s what we say, as we cheerfully take fifteen minutes to unfold from the driver seat and take another ten to straighten, pre entering the local shop. This bit is very important, because the paperclipped could well be in danger of leaving with all the wrong products, thus being unable to stick to their diet plan. A terrifying thought.

It thinks me, this wind, Kathleen or Jinx or Indigo or whatever is the sequential naming nonsense applied to ‘just another bloody gale’, which is what we called the whole damn lot of them when I was younger and when we believed in a world that talked straight, unencumbered by the ridonculous need to put everything into prettily labelled boxes. I sincerely believe we understood wildness, back then. I digress. My thinks, spiralling away from the whole gale-ness of things, make me consider disruption. As, indeed, a gale disrupts. But when something disrupts us, as humans, we respond in so many different ways. Some hide away, some rise in latent anger, some observe and consider, some run for higher ground. I’ve done them all. Trouble dropped into a community, a family, a couple, a crowd, dissents, if that’s a verb. It is now. If we can allow any respondents to respond in their own way, without judgement or, (or is it nor, Dad?) and we are not saints, not at all, but simple humans, then we have cracked it. I don’t say it is easy when challenges to said trouble comes thwack attack and feels personal. It hurts, until, if we have engaged in a lot of personal (and personally uncomfortable) inner work, such that teaches us about empathy and acceptance and humility, we just let go and listen. No, not just that, we actually hear, and grow.

Gales flail daffodils, tulips, anemones and narcissi. And, next Spring, they rise again. We can too.

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Island Blog – If This Life

I love audio books. While I sew or cook or fanny about, I listen to those who know a deal more than I. If I run water for washing dishes or flip the electric kettle on to boil I must needs whack up the volume or hold my phone to my ear, but you could never say I am not committed. Is that a double negative…….?

My books could be scientific, factual or fictional fairyness. I love love both. This began during covid and isolation even before himself left the planet. I love to read an actual book and do so at night, pre sleep, but the thing about an audio book, if I like the reader voice, is that my brain absorbs it in a different way. I couldn’t tell you in what way different, but I am aware that the information I can take in from a very factual book is something I could never cope with as an eye reader.

So and thus, I can listen to some tricky stuff on audible. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Mate. Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt. Eish I could never read than stuff in a book, stuff I want to hear because even at my age, I am curious and keen to understand and to learn. The former book is on addictions stemming from childhood abuse or neglect. The latter on the effect of parenting on children and its subsequent manifestations. Yes, I know, tough, and most of us won’t go there because we can’t face the guilt, but what I am discovering is not what I feared. We do the best we can, clueless like every new parents are, as they always have been and always will be. I have felt sharp heart bites and warm yesses. I have remembered being present yet absent (aka distracted with guests, husband etc) and that hurts, but I hope I gave the warmth and love and attention to my children at the times they most needed that from me. We mothers are so quick to take the blame, the blood red tsunami of it, upon ourselves. I know this.

With my own mother and many of her generation, there was no desire to look back over the child rearing years. What happened happened. What was done or said was done or said, belonging only in the past and the past is dead as a dodo. My own generation initiated a change in that thinking, deciding to do things differently because we knew we were damaged by a Victorian-ish upbringing to some degree or another, and wanted our own children to feel more obviously loved. Although that old nonsense of ‘this will hurt but it’s for your own good’ still came into my head when some sort of retribution for a crime committed was required, I remember thinking long and hard about a kinder way of getting the same message across. I wasn’t always so clever. Kids drive you bonkers and always at times when your own chips are down. I lashed out in anger at times and the regret and shame consumed me. I learned to say I Am Sorry, something my parents never said. Keeping that regret and shame quiet is very damaging to the self, to both selves in fact.

Listening to these audio books and more besides is not doing me any harm at all. When I relate to something the writer says, something either painful in recollection or uplifting and empathetic, I have the choice to take any action required. The intelligence, backed up by scientific research on children (and I was one once) helps me to smile at myself as a faulty mother. It also kinds me towards my own self as a little girl who believed in fairies and happiness and who was astonished and hurt to discover that her own mother was also faulty and broken. I now know why but I didn’t back then. She, who never got from her own mother the love she needed, did not have the benefit of information available to me and to future mothers and fathers. Knowing this as I do now, affords me the chance to empathise with her, to understand why she was who she was and to love and appreciate her backwards.

It does take courage and the willingness to be vulnerable to read or listen to such information, but if this life is the only one I get, then I want to get to the end of it knowing I have understood myself to a high degree, to have made amends wherever I could and to have learned that we are all broken humans with a huge capacity for loving and understanding others and ourselves. And it is never too late to learn something new.

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Island Blog – You First My Friend

Lockdown, schmockdown. Time gentlemen, please! It is almost a year since this whole stay home thing began and it feels like it may never end, even as I know it will. Of course winter hasn’t helped in our slow trudge back to what we took for granted so easily before. This time has made us think, stretched our inner resources and taught us new skills. Some of us have become bakers, some painters, some just good with the management of Time which, to be honest, has turned into something we all notice and some of us, minute by minute. To say ‘I am Too Busy’ are words for caseworkers and frontliners but not for most of us. Most of us can spend ages staring out at the rainy dark wondering what on earth we can do to turn this day into something other than a trudge.

I know we must wait. I know not one of us wants yet another lockdown as the restrictions lessen their grip on our days. I know this, but knowing something and living it are two very different things. So how do we continue when we feel fed up with the prison we are all in? One day at a time, that’s how. There is no other way to face this. Many of us, if not most, have hit rock bottom a few times over the past year and for good reason. Not being able to hold and hug, meet and talk, visit and touch are all alien concepts for a human race. No travel, no lift share, no hand holding, no gathering of friends around a table. And, for some, the death of a loved one. It abnormals us, all of us. And yet we must abide and we all know it. However, the damage done by such restraints will show once we re-emerge into the light of ordinary life, it has to for we are not all strong like bull. Some of us, isolated with our fears and doubts, our imaginings and anxieties, will need a hand to walk again. Some of us will have lost confidence around more than two people, two we know well. Strangers may appear even stranger. We may be asking ourselves, Where have they been, what have they touched, who have they met with? The natural reach out for a handshake may be compromised, a hesitation freezing our limbs and stumbling our words. We are going to need help.

Let us who are strong like bull consider all of this. In any mix of people there will be ‘outsiders’, folk who hesitate, who are shy, afraid, unsure and compromised by this long incarceration. Emotionally we may be damaged and damage takes time to heal and then only with help. Let us remind ourselves that odd behaviour may well emerge alongside the damaged ones and let us keep our hearts open. Let us wear our coat of empathy in our rush to the shops or the cinema, theatre, concert. To consider all other human beings is to be truly human. We are, after all, a team. Together is the word for the future, not alone, not any more. It didn’t work after all, now did it, this alone thing? I beat you to the front of the queue might have felt good at first, been reflected in a higher salary or the best parking space, but the elevation of such ‘success’ will never sustain its position, not for long, and it brings no lasting peace, not to the winner, not to the ones left behind. How much more benefit might be felt if I was to turn in grace to another and to say ‘You first my friend.’?

You first my friend.

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Island Blog 92 On Writing

On writing

As you may know, it is essential to read, especially if you are a writer.  I read avidly, even during the day sometimes, which would have had me thoroughly tutted at by Granny-at-the-gate.  Reading is for pleasure and wifeys don’t do pleasure inside of working hours which numbered, in my recollection about 22 per day.  But now I have less demands on my time by little or big people, although sometimes, just before collecting my book and settling into a chair, I do check the clock and feel a frisson of minor guilt.  It is so much easier to busy up with faffing jobs that lift the dirt or fill the larder with goodly smells, leaving the me part of me just a bit skinnier.

When I am writing, I become lost in the story, as I am now.  Nights are broken as I weave my web, and ideas come at the most inconvenient of times, when the night is dark as a cave and I know I should fight on to achieve my 6 hours of rest, but once the next idea comes, the something that might happen to someone, the how of it and its consequences gets a hold of me, then Lady Sleep leaves the room.  Over the years I have worked with various top tips.

Get up and start writing.  No thanks, its too cold downstairs.

Keep a pad beside the bed and write down your idea.  Yes I do that sometimes, if the story is just a foetus without a name, but if I am well on with the tale and the tellers of it, I can just lie there and follow the thread.  Often, almost always, a character takes me in a direction I never mapped out for them, and that aspect of story-telling has always surprised and delighted me.  It is, as if, once named on a page, each character accepts an initial structure, quite quietly it seems, until he or she decides I’ve got it all wrong and should listen to what they have to say about themselves.

Yesterday, a woman took an action I would never have expected of her, with a confidence that never came from me.  That action changed the whole course of the story and I sat back in my chair, fingers hovering over keys that had just become a jumble of confused letters.  A moment or so earlier, I knew just how to write a sentence.  I knew where he was going, what she would say, what they would do as a result.  Now I stare down at a keyboard that is singing me, not the other way around.  I have become a player in the greater game.

Some writers don’t like this state of affairs.  Some painters, musicians, song-writers too.  But for me, it is the time when I can, to a degree, let go of control, and enjoy learning about each character by listening to their guidance.  I move wholly and completely into their world.  I work to understand their feelings, often not my own, about what has happened to them.  I endeavour to find empathy with choices I would never make, have never made, although I do wonder if that bit is quite true.  If I have considered, even for one minute a choice of action not in sync with how I see myself, might that mean that I could do that thing in different circumstances?

When I am writing a story, I move into it.  I have to, or nobody would believe in it and the book would be closed and sent to a charity shop, un-read.  Good drama draws us in, involves us and we can emerge from a book feeling angry, upset or filled with a happiness that never came from the outside.  We can love a character, or hate them, wish them joys or want to punch them in the tonsils, but we can never find them dull, for if we do, we won’t bother to read on because we just don’t care.

Once I have found my characters, and, believe me, I do find them, or they find me, more truthfully.  These characters came to me in an ordinary moment when I wasn’t looking for them at all.  Two people sharing lunch in a café, and the dynamic between them.  It captivated me and the story began to tell me how it wanted to be written.  I made notes, kept looking at it as I walked, worked, cooked, cleaned and gradually the protagonists revealed themselves.  How they dress, laugh, eat.  How they love, how they live, and how they wrote their past.

Then, one day, I know it is time to begin and not long after I do, there is a knock at the door and in they all come.