Month: November 2020

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Starlings

I looked at the clock and it was 6:21. I looked at the Accuweather app and saw that no precipitation was expected for 120 minutes, it was currently 11° and sunrise would be at 7:27. So I immediately decided I would get up and go to the beach with a flask of coffee, and then thirteen minutes later I got out of bed and dressed, let Miko out for her morning constitutional, filled her food bowl, made coffee, put on my shoes and winter coat and walked to the beach, arriving on the dot of 7:27.

I hadn’t thought about the clouds. There was a grey curtain hanging over the sea, and white overlapping ones over the land. And a surprising number of people out and about – not so surprising really, because it’s always like that, but somehow it always surprises me. Even more surprisingly, I wasn’t the only person just walking on the beach for the sake of walking, on their own, without a dog, or a metal detector, or a litter grabber and plastic sack. When my parents were ill, and after they passed away, I would go out for walks by myself, just generally through the fields around the village where we lived then, and along the old railway track, and the people I met invariably had dogs, and I always felt self conscious, as though walking by myself was vaguely suspicious, and I must be up to no good somehow. Until this year, it’s always been like that on the beach too, but now it seems people do go out on their own walking without ulterior motive – even walking normally, in normal clothes, like me, rather than ‘power’ walking (or whatever it’s called) with their elbows flailing.

I sat behind the café, where I always sit, and gradually the white clouds became tinged with pink, which was strange because they were over the land and hence further north, but evidently the light was seeping out from behind the darker clouds as the sun crept up surreptitiously, with none of the usual showy light across the sea. I watched the gulls and listened to the waves and drank my coffee, wondering why there were no starlings on the street lamp this morning, then a few minutes later I heard them chattering and looked again. I counted five on the lamp, none on the wire, but gradually more turned up, and I’d just got my phone out to take a photo when they all flew up at once and formed a small cloud which passed out of my eyeline then reappeared over the park. Two women with a beagle on a lead came from behind me, past the café. The one holding the dog’s lead was trying to jog and her friend was trying to take a photo of her, but the dog wasn’t co-operating, and stopped for a pee against a bunch of seakale. When they’d passed by, the starlings came back, so maybe the dog disturbed them.

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Calling

Sunshine outside the window, and Miko has just come to join me at the computer. I thought last night that maybe I would get up and walk to the seafront for sunrise this morning, but although I was awake in plenty of time, I didn’t do it. Maybe I’ll go later, but probably I won’t.

The word ‘hibernation’ comes from the same root as the French hiver, winter, so it literally translates as ‘wintering’, but is mainly used to describe the ways in which some animals adapt to winter conditions by slowing down, conserving energy, and in some species entering an extreme state which can last several months (I’m not a zoologist, this is just my layperson’s understanding of the term). I don’t know why I just wandered into saying that, all of which I’m sure you already know, it’s just the link with hiver that I find interesting. I thought that was going to take me somewhere, but I’m not sure where – or to put it another way, I don’t have a bloody clue.

Sitting here staring past my computer and out of the window and thinking about the Purpose of Life, and wondering how to say that I don’t believe there is one – I’m pretty sure mine doesn’t have one, anyway. Last night I was listening to the Paul Simon song ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’ and thinking I’d never noticed before quite how nihilistic it is – especially the verse about the woman who ‘…became a wife…’

Like Descartes, the only thing I can say for sure is that I must exist, because I am always thinking, and something must generate those thoughts – plus I receive sensory messages which tell me I have a physical body which interacts with an external world; accumulated memories of past events; and the ability to anticipate and prepare for future ones. I have experienced joy and despair, but never anything which convinced me of the existence of any higher power or God outside of those created by human cultures or explicable by science – although I don’t think this has affected my appreciation of the beauty of the world. So I’ve never felt ‘called’ by any such higher power, and insofar as I’ve ever felt ‘called’ to anything, I suppose I could say it was to writing. It may seem a little harsh not to mention my children at this point, but although since they appeared, my commitment to them has  been total and overwhelming, they came as the result of choices made by myself and their father, and I can see alternative lives in which I didn’t have them (though of course I am eternally grateful that I did).

Back to writing then – the one thing which has always been there, the closest I’ve ever been to having a ‘calling’ or to ‘following my bliss’. And here I am, still following it, doing it every day, in however limited a fashion.

And wondering what it was that I meant to say about hibernation.  

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Not Writing, but Blogging

Where does this stuff come from? I sit down with a vague idea and the words come out in a completely different direction – like starting from a conversation about the role of fate and chance in an individual life and going off on one about Isaac Asimov and the fates of galaxies (not to mention Planet Earth).

Lately much of my time is being taken up with obsessing over getting this jumper finished – so much so that I haven’t even touched the weather blanket for a week. And a fair amount of that time, of course, is taken up with untangling wool, although yesterday I felt as though there was a better balance, and that I made reasonable progress (admittedly it was a less complicated part of the design). In fact it even feels as though I may be approaching the end – although I still have to do the sleeves, which always take longer than expected. I’ve made a start on one of them (when the body got too stressful) and I’ve decided to incorporate small candy canes into the pattern to relieve the boredom.

I still have moments (or even hours) of panic that she’s not going to like it. But then I think – too late to go back now, I might as well just keep on the way I’m going, knowing that whatever my daughter’s opinion, I’ll be embarrassed by it when it’s done. She asked for it, I tell myself, and she knows well enough it will probably turn out to be a mess.

But I’ve decided to stop worrying about the quality of the things I make (which goes for my writing too, which is why I’m still writing this blog). Also I heard on the radio the other day that only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, but almost 1800 were discovered by her sister after her death. What does it matter?

This takes me back again to ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the idea of the poetic imagination, or Wild Spirit, (or whatever you want to call it) being stolen or given away or strangled at birth. Looking back over my life – which I still haven’t delved into in depth – has shown me how much I’ve repressed, denied, pushed away, belittled that side of myself, while simultaneously longing for it. So I’ve decided just to do what I can without thinking too much about it or expecting anything from it. Lockdown helps, of course – as it did in the spring: I feel a lot less stressed and more content when I don’t have to go out and interact with other people. That’s something else Dickinson is famous for – it’s said she rarely left her bedroom –at least I have a whole house to myself.

Despite longing for the life of a wild bohemian, I never had the nerve or the opportunities. I’ve always been more Emily Dickinson than Bloomsbury – and at least it requires a lot less energy.  

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Foundation and Pandemic

No dreams to report today.

I have to go out today and tomorrow: this morning, to take Miko to the vet’s for a checkup and blood test to monitor how she’s getting on; and tomorrow I’m going for a mammogram at the hospital. I don’t mind too much – we are both getting older and creaky, and it’s good to know someone is looking out for our health. Miko is less than thrilled, as she can’t have breakfast because of the blood test – I wish I’d got an earlier appointment than 10:30, I didn’t think about it till it was too late to change – must remember next time. The vet is checking her quarterly at the moment, though it seems to have gone fast since the last time.

Yesterday I started talking about fate. My yoga teacher once said that Destiny is what is supposed to happen and Fate is what happens due to our actions, which sounds as though it makes sense, but doesn’t really when you start to think about it. Is Destiny what’s going to happen, or isn’t it? If it can be changed, by individual actions or collective, then in what sense was it ‘predestined’? I’ve been described by people as a ‘gloom and doomer’, particularly with regard to climate change, but I’ve never claimed that it was inevitable, just that trends in the scientific understanding and a knowledge of human behaviour have made it increasingly so over the three (nearly four) decades I’ve been observing it.

When I was an undergraduate, almost half a century ago, I read the ‘Foundation’ trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which an interplanetary federation developed computer systems powerful enough to model all physical, social and economic trends and predict the future of the galaxy. In the story, the ability to plan for and control the threads of destiny was disrupted, initially by a mutant human who developed psychic abilities and took over supreme power, and although he eventually got his comeuppance (I forget how), events were never returned to their original trajectories. Since then, a lifetime of experience and observation has convinced me that it doesn’t take a mutant dictator to throw Destiny into confusion, just the usual work-in-progress of individuals and groups interacting and living and doing what people do without understanding, or caring about, the outcomes of their collective actions – all conspiracies collapse under the weight of sheer unadulterated human cock-up.

For years, scientists have been warning that we were overdue for a global pandemic – it could have been ebola, it could have been SARS, or bird flu, or swine flu – it wasn’t any of those, but the stories popped up every couple of years in the news, and were forgotten by most members of the public, (apart from geeky doomer-types still harbouring the soul of an over-excitable 18 year old statistics student). Medical and population trends continued to predict it was bound to happen – sooner or later.

Welcome to sooner – and funnily enough, no-one was prepared for it.

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Trains of Thought

This morning I have quite a vivid memory of dreaming, which is awkward because I already had an idea of what I wanted to write about, which I’ll have to try and retain for another time.

I was at Bedford station, waiting for a train to London, only it wasn’t exactly the Bedford station I know, because it was much bigger, and a lot of renovation and construction was going on, in particular there was a large restaurant/lounge, as opposed to the ATM kiosk where I used to grab a Café Maya or chai latte in passing, or the Starbucks which is now in the place of the old newsagent. I had a special ticket which entitled me to a free drink and cake in the restaurant, but I realised I hadn’t got my rail card, and wondered if I should go ‘home’ (my old flat was only 15 minutes walk away) to get it. I got talking to an old friend, then I realised it was getting late, and I didn’t know what I was going to do in London, or whether I’d have time to do whatever it was, and if there was even any point in going anyway.

Running out of time requires no deep explanation, and train journeys are also very familiar. I always associate them with running away, and when the Eurostar terminal moved to St Pancras, I was very excited about the fact that I could go from Bedford to Brussels or Paris with only one change of train – and from there, of course, all the way to Istanbul or anywhere in Europe or Asia. At the station in Sofia, waiting on a very wet day (kind of like today) I saw on the timetable, and heard on the announcements, that there was a direct train to St Petersburg, and checking the ferry timetables in Istanbul, I discovered I could get one to Odessa (but not to Constanta in Romania, which is what I was hoping for).

But the thoughts I had yesterday, after I’d finished writing, were about fate, and destiny, and Taoism, and can I remember what that was, am I fated never to get to the end of that thought, or even to the point? I believed in fate when I was young, I remember a conversation in which I said this, and someone said: ‘I don’t because I could never have predicted that I’d end up doing this’. But that was the exact point that made me believe, because of the small chances that can have such a strong impact on life. However, I didn’t know how to explain myself, and since then I have come to believe the opposite, that fate and destiny are illusions, things aren’t set in stone, because we can never know what the alternative choices would have led to. Even if we can untangle all the chances, choices, causes and effects that led to a specific event, we still can’t say ‘this had to happen’.

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Fail Better

Dropping the bucket down in to the well and seeing what comes up, as I do most days, a bit of this, some of that, maybe the odd scrap of inspiration, quite a lot of repetition. My online avatar, theoretically accessible to thousands, in practice viewed by very few – is it, as online personas supposedly are, pure fabrication, or is it truer to who I am than the perceptions of those who think they know me in Real Life? I show and tell so much on here that I would struggle to explain face to face, but realised many years ago that this is a safe space where few venture to look.

In trying to look at myself and my life with attention but without judgement, in trying to discover and welcome my Wild Thing, I look back over all the times I have run away, and the people, situations and commitments I have run away from. According to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, there is not one single descent into the underworld, the wild forests of the psyche, one lesson to be uncovered, learnt and brought to light, but layers beneath layers.

From all my runnings away, I have never returned voluntarily. Although once or twice it might seem that I chose to turn back (thinking specifically of returning from the USA to the house my husband and I had left four years earlier), the situation I returned to was always different from the one I left (or at least, I was different – in that case, I was now a mother with two small children, and no longer a professional career woman) and in each case it was only a matter of time before I ran away again (except arguably the most recent, but of course it could still happen – only time will tell).

What am I trying to say? That reading Pinkola Estés’ book is leading me to reflect on all those times I have leapt into the unknown, the choices I made (which were largely my own, though some also involved my husband), and see them as… well, maybe answering the call of the Wild Woman?

Last week, I read a piece where she suggested drawing up a time-line of life-events and at the time I dismissed the idea, but then I wrote about my first running-away – in fact the first two – going away to university and then accepting the first (actually, the only) man who asked me to marry him.

I have a tendency to look back on my life as a string of failures: failed marriages, failed (or abandoned) careers, dreams that were fulfilled but then turned to dust and ashes. But perhaps there were lessons learnt, things gained which weren’t recognised because they weren’t what I thought I was looking for? Most of those runnings-away were thrilling, at least in the early days, even though I eventually came to the conclusion that wherever I went, I could never ‘run away from myself’.

Fail again. Fail better.

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Dreams and Explorations

I mentioned a few days ago that I haven’t been remembering my dreams. Yesterday I tried to remember as soon as I woke up, and retained a few things, which I didn’t write down and now they’ve gone, but today I did the same and am going to write what I can remember.

The main theme was that I was visiting an old, strange house, near the sea – not here, but somewhere with cliffs and a rough grey sea, a dangerous sea. The house appeared to belong to my ex husband (although part of it was rented out to some other people), slightly ironic because I was always the one who wanted to live near the sea, and he was never interested. Rough seas and old, strange houses have cropped up in my dreams from way, way back, though I can’t remember them ever occurring together before. Exploring an old house signifies exploring your own psyche, and I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I don’t know about rough seas, but I wasn’t on the sea or threatened by it, just watching it from the beach, and also from the house.

One specific incident in the dream that I remember was that I got stuck in an automatic door leaving a supermarket, and couldn’t move to go either in or out. I could see my ex, who was loading shopping into the back of a car in the car park, and I kept calling his name to get him to come and help me, but he couldn’t hear me because he was busy with the shopping. I don’t think you have to dig too deeply to find a message in that. Another man came up behind me from inside the shop and I suppose he freed me. Also, later I was in the house and washing up at the sink, when a strange man came up behind me, put his arms round me and kissed the back of my neck (or was it the side of my face?)

Thinking again about the stuck-in-the-door incident, I don’t actually remember the second man freeing me, just talking to me. So it could be that I managed to free myself – which would be a better reflection of what happened in my life.

Yesterday in my therapy session I read what I wrote on Wednesday about my childhood – though she’s heard the story before, of course. I’m still reading my way through ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’. She recommended it – two years ago, when I didn’t read it – because of the part about transitioning into the third stage of life, as the Crone or Wise Woman. But it’s leading me to re-evaluate the whole course of my life – which is why I wrote about my childhood expectations of what life as a woman would be like. Often I read things in it which bring me up short – about being lost, wandering, not knowing what you’re looking for – and finding a new self.

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The Way It Was Then

When I was very young, all I wanted to do when I grew up was to be a writer. However, if anyone asked me, I would say I wanted to work with animals (mainly because I’d rather spend my time with them than with other people). I never told anyone about the writing idea, because I knew that writers were very special and talented, and I was far too dull and not at all special, and besides, there was another girl in my class who wanted to be a writer, and she wasn’t the sort of girl I could ever compete with. Also I knew that the main goal of a girl’s life was supposed to be to find a man, get married and have children (although I never really liked children, didn’t even play with dolls), or, if she couldn’t find a man who was interested in her (which seemed the most likely scenario for me), she had to stay at home and look after her elderly parents, and most likely become a teacher (a horrifying prospect). At least marriage and children (if achievable) offered some likelihood of financial security and time to write (when the children started school).

Before you ask, no, this wasn’t the Victorian era, it was the 1960s, but when I looked at my mother, and my aunts, and the neighbours, and my teachers, there didn’t seem much evidence of women breaking free of those stereotypes. The pattern was: you worked until you were married (or, if hubby was particularly enlightened, till the babies came along), then you gave it up, and maybe when the children were older you got a part-time job in a shop, or the Birds Eye factory, or the biscuit factory, or cleaning offices, for ‘pin money’.

As I grew older, I discovered there was a route out of this: university. If I did well enough in my exams (which I would), I could leave home and go away to a place where there would be lots of young people, in a new, exciting town, probably in the sophisticated, even decadent, South, where no one knew me as the pathetic little nobody I truly was, and even I might stand a chance of finding a boyfriend (boys outnumbered girls three to one in universities at that time), and best of all, I could go with my parents’ blessing, and as long as I kept my nose clean in the holidays, they wouldn’t have a clue what I got up to, they might even be proud of me, and at the end of three years I could get married, and maybe a job, and never have to go back again.

Funnily enough, that is more or less how the plan worked out. I met someone in the second summer vacation, when I’d managed to wangle a job in Reading so that I didn’t have to go home, he asked me to marry him, I said yes, and that was that. Sort of.

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Tangled Again

I wrote yesterday, but when I tried to upload it, I found that there was no wifi. I restarted the router, tried to get on from the laptop, switched the telly on and even the Tivo wasn’t connected. Went looking for the contact details for Virgin Media, funny how they never give you a phone number, or if there’s a letter or document somewhere that has that information, I couldn’t find it. It was down all morning, came back up just before one o’clock. I’d texted a friend who lives a few streets away who also uses Virgin, he replied mid-afternoon, when mine was back, to say that it had been up and down all day.

So I never posted what I’d written, but might do later.

Horrible weather yesterday. That does sometimes seem to correspond with the wifi being crap, I don’t know if it’s related, or if so how, it’s just an anecdotal correlation.

When I wasn’t fretting about the wifi not working, I was fretting about my knitting. I have one knitting project (jumper) and one crochet project (weather blanket) and they both have multiple colours of yarn which are permanently tangled, so that it feels some days I spend more time untangling yarn than I do crafting. Sometimes it can be quite a soothing thing to do, but mostly it’s a frustrating chore. I don’t know what I do to make it happen and I don’t know what I can do to stop it happening, except not use so many different colours – and I don’t want to do that, which would be very boring.

For the Christmas jumper, I’ve currently got two additional balls of white on the back (for snowflakes), two on the one sleeve that I’ve started (for candy canes) and seven on the front. You may ask why I make it so complicated, but the point is that it’s a pictorial design, and unlike cross stitch or tapestry, where you can work on one area at a time, everything that appears on one row has to be done at the same time.

I’m also having doubts about what the recipient (my daughter) will think of it. Is what I’m doing completely bonkers? On the current bit of the front, there’s a gingerbread man flanked by two candy canes and two cup cakes – okay, I admit, that IS a bonkers idea. I’ve adapted it from a cross stitch pattern and a jumper a friend of mine had last year, with the slogan: ‘Calories don’t count at Christmas’. Over the last three years I’ve made jumpers for the grandkids, and my daughter kept saying: ‘when are you going to do one for me?’ but I do wonder how she’ll react.

I always have this when I make things for other people. Will they like it, will they wear it? Personally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in half the things I make. I’m following my creative instinct, but I do wonder about what it produces.  

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Brain Freeze

Back in front of my PC after my weekly trip to the shop. Oddly calm in the morning the last couple of days. I think it’s because I’m slipping back into the lockdown peace, no stress, nowhere to go, nobody to see, just my own peaceful life. Won’t last, of course it won’t, it can’t, at some point the world will wake up and I’ll be forced to deal with it again, but not now. Can’t believe it’s only a week since I took the van out, it feels like ages ago.

The sun is shining at present. I didn’t mow the grass when I said I would – maybe I will today, if it stays sunny, though it must still be wet underfoot.

I’ve not been remembering my dreams recently. When I wake up, I know that I’ve been dreaming and now I’m awake, but the content of the dream is completely gone from my awareness. It’s like watching something on the telly, and you know you haven’t been asleep, but you haven’t got a clue what just happened, or what was said, and you have to rewind the last few minutes to find out. Of course, that also happens when I’m listening to the radio, or reading, or even in the middle of a conversation (though in that case there’s no rewind button), and as I now know, that’s all part and parcel of dyspraxia. But I’m sure I used to remember my dreams.

Incidentally, although for me the lack of short term memory had always seemed to be the key aspect of dyspraxia, from which all else follows, it’s only recently that I’ve started to think it might be the other way round. Starting from the premise that it’s due to faulty message processing in the brain, and that that makes it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘absent-mindedness’, whereby I have no recollection of where I put my glasses, because when I put them down no part of my brain was processing the information : ‘I am putting my glasses on the bookshelf/back of the toilet/behind the fruit basket/they just fell on the floor’ and so doesn’t leave an imprint on my memory.  

Sounds like a good theory – it definitely reflects my personal experience, anyway. I expect somebody somewhere has thought of that before, but as I mentioned yesterday (I think), my PhD supervisor pointed out years ago that I struggle to accept things unless I can understand them from first principles. What I don’t think he understood at the time was that it wasn’t due to bloody-mindedness so much as that my brain couldn’t hold and process that information if I didn’t have the right pegs to hang it onto. Which sounds quite paradoxical, because although I can have enough flashes of insight to have achieved a PhD, there are times when my brain freezes and I’m incapable of absorbing what I’m being told.