focus

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Island Blog – Trailblazing

Anything that risks showing up whilst other things hold back for more clement weather have my deepest respect. They are showing courage and bravery, risk takers, future makers, trailblazers. ‘Anyone’ who does the same thinks me samely. I thrill to witness the braves. At times, I may have been such a brave, perhaps. As I ‘ink’ my thoughts, I long to cut the ribbon of correctness, and I do, but with caution, because the world is a heavy old judge and everyone listens to him, or her, or so it seems/seemed. I think of song lyrics, of poets, of writers who, in their time, were dismissed and banished, and, yet now we elevate them into an almost saintly status. What they took was a risk. What they said confronted the acceptable, particularly in the UK where class division appeared solid and impermeable and for generations over generations. I smile when I hear the echo of my past generation, sniggering at people from America, as it was called in my day, a country which had no class system and thought it laughable. Actually, most of us here did too, but we never had the brave to challenge the nonsense of it, and, perhaps, for it’s time, it had a place.

Today I met three bumble bees, always the first, these glorious and singular bumblers. They dip into the early blooms, thrumming with hopeful nectar, longing for pollination, and they will get it from these trailblazers. Barrel-bodied, humming like a C-130 Hercules, without a belly full of bombs, they swing crazy , bumping into me, into the window, but when they land on a primrose, a perfect gentle landing. I marvel.

I consider bumbling. With focus, without focus? It thinks me. The bees know nothing but focus. They rise from a dawn of frost and minus, and the minute Father Sun lifts his lazy butt out of bed, they fly. I think about focus. I am bumbling these after radiotherapy days, and may well do so for some weeks, but do I have focus? It’s an ugly word in my personal opinion, for such an important thing, and that thinks me more, because it seems that the speak of a word and the look of a word often don’t match at all.

I am bumbling. The radiotherapy is tireding and the zap map area, stings. I know that this will pass. I do what I need to do, want to do in the light of this new thing in my life. I rest, a lot. Sometimes i am in and out of bed for bits and pieces of the day so much that the concept of a day makes little sense, if any at all. I hoover, a bit, sort things, a bit, clean things, a bit and there’s another thing……what does ‘a bit’ tell me? Much.

It tells me that a bit is often more than enough. That rising through the frost of something is more than enough. That being one of those herculean bumble bees is exactly what I am. I buzz at that.

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Island Blog – Huge Grey Knickers and Moving On

Today I had frock trouble. Admittedly it was 3 am when the ditherment began, dark as jet outside and moonless. It was also 3 am, an hour when all the doubts and wrinkles come blasting in. I think it’s the noise of them that wakes me, the chaos of voices all saying something different but all in the same unsettling tone. Critical. All that I didn’t do, should have done, did do and shouldn’t have done rise like goblins from the dark ground of the night woods. It was the wrong time to have a frock issue, I know that, but it seemed like a good focus at the time. My wardrobe is dark inside, frocks hanging like a line of empty women, all colours, styles, shapes and drops. choosing aright is important on any day because my frock combo creates me a story for the day ahead. Do I feel like a Spanish dancer today or a bag lady? Am I needing colour or is there colour already in me? Do I want midi or something just below the knee, reds or blues or do I want frock chaos? The latter wins today. I might as well continue the theme after all. I swat away the bluebottle buzz internal and focus on the external response. I select a pink straight down dress with a sauncy little frill I wheeched off an extraordinary summer top from China, the rest I used to stuff a soft toy. I add a bright lemon yellow slightly shorter dress for layering and complete the whole hysterical combo with a butter yellow cardigan. I check the mirror. Triple ghastly. I’ll do.

Coffee and music and no cake-baking today. I’m enjoying the quiet of the nothing of these nobody hours, waiting for dawn to yawn awake. No sun this morning, not visible anyway through the flat grey that reminds me of my school knickers, thick, huge and woven tight enough to blank out all light. I smile at a dorm dressing memory when one of my friends, tiny and slimpicked, demonstrated how she could get a pillow down hers without any stretch of the elastic. My mother says I’ll grow into them, she laughed. I met her decades later and just know she never did. In those school days when frocks, loathsome frocks, measured, controlled, no waistband, long sleeved, high collared, no buttons, were our only escape from the sternly tailored skirts, I confess we did feel an almost kittenish sense of freedom between prep and prayers. We could actually move without creaking, lift our arms without the snap of angry starch, breathe without the throttle of a tie, wiggle toes freed from the brace of stout lace-ups. I can feel that freedom now.

I think, no I really believe, that the more experiences we have in situations of constraint as youngsters give us a real opportunity to learn compassion. To know what it is like to feel in any way imprisoned, whether inside light blocking huge grey knickers or in a relationship, or a job, or even in a whole life, teaches us something that gifts great power, if we can rise from blame. I find an instant compassion when anyone shows me, no matter their age, old or young, that they feel starched shut. It matters not that I have experience their circumstance. I know the feeling and, if we are honest, feelings are everything to an individual. Everything. If someone comes with angst and anger, we can just sit and shut up. Just listen. Just be there. I remember the ones who were there for me just like that. They, without realising it, gave me the courage to move on. And I thank them.

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Island Blog – Thoughts, Red Speeders and Me

Thoughts are always busy I find. My head is a freeway for them. Sometimes I fly above the chaos and stare down, mystified. How can one small head allow such mayhem? I mean, I am watching speeding, overtaking on the inside, collisions and fatal hesitations. It seems to me that all of these rushing thoughts want to get my attention, regardless of how much damage each one does in order to achieve it. If I focus on one, that red speeding one, the one that tells me about yet another failure or shortfall for which I am solely responsible while the rest blur into a rainbow mist. The red one won. I no longer notice the well behaved thoughts, the kindly ones, those driving carefully and with no intention of upsetting anyone else, especially me. Why are they so well behaved, enough that I don’t notice them much, if at all? They are the ones who are not out to pull me down but instead to build me up. Is it that I think them boring? Is it that I have not heard enough uplifting encouragement from the older humans in my life that I think it is ok to ignore these guys? Well, maybe but that is no authentic reason to be stuck in that belief, be it true or imagined. Hell no. I am a radiant, powerful human being who chooses to live life with joy and pleasure and I have met Joy. She’s a keeper.

I flick the red speeder away and decide to notice the good thoughts, the ones down there running on kindness and consideration, joy and pleasure, love and happiness. I watch them change gear a lot, slowing to allow another to overtake, pulling over for a big truck to pass, stopping often to allow a break for anyone else involved. There are many of them now that I look closely, as many as the speeders, the takers and the critics. It seems that what I choose to pay attention to is up to me and my vigilant looking, the picture below me, around me, within my head. Hush! I hiss, suddenly overwhelmed, and there is a slowing down, a hold up, a line of thoughts stuck bumper to bumper with no chance of moving ahead until I clear the blockage. The kindly thoughts just wait patiently, turning to make sure others are not scared or stressed. The red ones shout and yell, hit the wheel, swear and stomp about like fools achieving nothing and yet, and yet, these are the ones I believed in just a few moments ago; the pretenders, the nothings, the past voices that have been dead and therefore no threat for a long time now. Was I giving them the kiss of life? Eeuch! I am so stopping that and right now.

So how do I do that? Well, sadly it is not a one stop decision, although it is at the one stop part, but thereonafter it is a daily watchdog thingy. Whenever I notice a red speeding thought, one that tells me about my failings and my mistakes as if they define me and confine me and align me with hopelessness and haplessness, I will not give them focus, no matter how pretty they are, how alluring. It amazeballs me that I am so ready to tell myself how much I have failed and fail still, but I read that it is a common human condition, as common as the cold. Our brains are the most powerful thing known to man, more so than any amount of technology we know about now and any of it we will discover and develop in the future. We are so incredibly powerful. My doctor once said to me that physical disease is not our killer. Our brains are, or, rather, the way we let them control us instead of us controlling them. I think her wise even if the whole thingumajig of daily noticing of red speeders makes me yawn because, like everyone else, I want lovely things to happen to me just because I am a magnet for good and because I care about others and la la la. Nonetheless, we all have a job to do and never more than now as we tire of isolation and fear, of what the hell and where do we go now even if we are brave enough to do the ‘go’ thing?

I piddle about with upbeat courses, affirmations, mirilations and striations. I swither and dither on the edge of wastelands, of brokenness and lack looking out at the pretty lights in the distance, ones I haven’t walked towards for years. I swale and fail, I rise and fail, I falter and halter but by heck if by noticing my thoughts and taking over my lunatic brain until it gets my message, until it sees me standing on the dust path with my stop hand up, my focus on the kindly thoughts, the uplifting ones, the beige ones, then, I am going to stand. If I do it every day, every time I feel myself louded out by the naysayers then just maybe, the red speeders, the bully thoughts will see a radiant, powerful human being who chooses to live life with joy and pleasure, and will eventually feel lonely enough to book in for a respray.

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Island Blog 157 Light on Dark

 

 

Blue eye, close-up

 

We rarely draw the curtains against the night.  Even in the winter, when the dark creeps out from the woods so much earlier to dim our eyes and send us running for the long life light bulb switch – even then I hesitate to make that final call, so entrancing is the ‘out there’.

Out there a massive power shift is already playing out.  The creatures of the night are waking, alert and ready.  Their eyes are not ‘accustomed’ to the dark, they are made for it right from the very beginning; it is their light.  The rest of us whose vision is, at best, impaired in darkness, must draw in, draw our curtains, hide from danger, sleep.  There is a strong pull of the wild in me as dark descends, a longing to be a part of it, and without a torch.  Turning back from the window, having reluctantly closed off the night, I face warmth and safety, some polite crime on television, or a read beside the fire, supper, and I wonder what I’m missing.

Rabbits know fine what they’re missing, ditto hens and rodents.  Although the latter do pop out at night, they must needs scurry beneath the dense shelter of undergrowth for the screech owl is about.  Even scurryings won’t save them from the neighbouring cats.  So, it isn’t darkness we, or they are afraid of, but the creatures who inhabit it.  In our case, imagined ones too, demons and lurkers and no-gooders with an eye for weakness. And we are weak in darkness, compromised and slow to focus.

And so, we turn in, pushing the darkness back into the woods and back across the sea, flooding our night with light, and more light, neon and flashing, computer screens, television, digital clocks, standby lights on printers, sound systems, streetlights lighting our hurried steps until we find our own doorway, unlock it and step into our nests, leaving the stars behind.  We cook, argue about homework, phone mother, answer emails, bathe and sleep until the light begins to rise again, a slow green at first, then lifting white or blue or pinkly clouded into the full light of day.  But maybe we miss something.  Maybe that’s what I feel so strongly.  The way we divide our days and nights into themselves, stored neatly, controllable, separate, and, yet, they are one.

To stand out inside the darkness, to feel it’s soft mantle about our shoulders, and to stand long enough to see is a wonder.  Even without visible stars, even on the blackest of nights, there is still light.  We make it.  It emanates from our ancient human spirit, this light, and all I have to do is wait until I am fully present.  Dashing out with the recycling is not the same.  I need to stand, to let the inside worries slip away, to move, without moving, into the wholeness of the dark, to let it become one with me.  I become aware of movement, of sounds, of the depth and texture of the dark.  My ears hear, my eyes see, my mind empties of everything that lies behind the front door.  It is, as if it is another world, one of bustle and of chaos and the quack of televised nonsense, of clatter and youtube, of the ping of an arriving email, of the whirr of a fridge, the hum of a computer, the ticking of a clock.  There is no time out here, no hum, no white noise, only the immediate and raw darkness, broken by the rustle of mouse deep in the dry stone wall, a triumphant hoot, a warning cry, the rush of spring water over rocks, the wind through the pines.

No currency exchanges hands out here; no bartering or negotiating required.  No clothing, fashion, menus or public transport.  No strife over friendships or loyalties, no business sense, no degrees, no difficult mother in laws.

I stand for a while, a part of the darkness.  I feel vulnerable and alone and I thrill to those feelings, for this is real life, real dark, real and raw and sharp and edgy.  This is Order.

Then I turn back to what the world calls order, with a twinkle in my eye.