Category: books

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Sunrise

Add to the list of things done this week: sunrise walk. I was awake from 4:30 anyway, so got up around six, got dressed and made coffee to take out in my flask. First day of lockdown, but there were quite a few people on the streets and at the beach – joggers, dog walkers, and the regular wild swimmers. I sat in my usual place to drink my coffee, then walked down to the waves’ edge to watch the sun come up behind the bank of cloud low over the sea. Walked along the beach and through the Rose Garden, then through the gardens behind the natural history museum (surprised to find the gates open so early). Nowhere to stop for breakfast, so I was home before eight – which meant that I thought maybe I should still write.

I did take a notebook and pen out with me, by the way, but didn’t feel inclined to write anything on the beach. Didn’t do much of anything really, just sat and walked and watched for the first appearance of the spot on the horizon where the light came through a crack in the clouds.

Being there is important. Getting there doesn’t always feel that easy. The urge has to be followed when it arises.

I wrote something at bedtime last night – onto my phone, so I wouldn’t forget. This is it: ‘I have to keep reminding myself that, although fundamentally nothing ever really changes, some days, hours, moments are better than others, so I have to believe that those are worth hanging on for’.

It’s a privilege to be able to get up in the morning and walk to the beach in time to see the sun rise over the sea. It never gets boring – god knows how many photos I’ve taken of it over the last five years since I moved here. But the motivation isn’t always there. Today, for some reason I can’t explain, it just felt like the obvious thing to do. But most mornings are not like that.

Being on the south coast, it’s possible to see both the sunrise and the sunset over the sea, but I’m not usually out for the latter.  

Granny Weatherwax has something to say about sunrises, but I can’t remember exactly what. I think it’s in reply to being asked what she believes in, and she says: ‘sunrises mostly’ or words to that effect. Which just reminded me of some good advice given to me years ago by one of my first meditation teachers: ‘if you’re still breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong’. If the sun rises, there’s more right with the world than wrong. Another breath, another day, another spring and summer to come (eventually).

I still haven’t quite got back to cause and effect, destiny and fate, Taoism and whatever else I’m always on the brink of mentioning. Today might have been a good opportunity for that. But there’ll always be another sunrise to walk towards.

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Here We Go Round Again

So far this week: last yoga class before lockdown; last tai chi class before lockdown; last trip out in the van before lockdown. I mentioned last week about my yoga teacher being homeless and having to cancel classes – the next day she sent a text to say that someone had offered her a lift, then came the lockdown announcement, so there was a class on Monday evening, and ditto the tai chi yesterday morning, after which I picked up my camper van from the garage and drove to Queen Elizabeth Country Park on the A3 near Petersfield, and had a walk among the trees and a picnic. I love taking the van there, because there are car parks spread among the trees, often empty (on weekdays when I usually go), so although you can’t actually camp, you can get some of the feeling for a few hours.

The weather has turned dry and sunny but noticeably colder than it was, and today looks to be about the same, with a clear blue sky. I really should get out and do some tidying up in the garden, I tried cutting the hedge on Monday but the trimmer kept cutting out. Because it stopped and later started again, it had to be a loose wire. I took apart the connector that joins it where I cut through the cable in the spring, unscrewed the little screwy things inside, couldn’t see anything obviously loose, then got into a horrible dyspraxic muddle trying to put it back together and gave up for the day.

I read some more of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, this time about creative blocks. The author suggests the usual things: keep trying, don’t self-edit, do a little every day, expect to fail, but keep going anyway. This is what I’ve been doing forever. Back to the old question of whether it matters that it never gets me anywhere? Apparently, it doesn’t. Either one day a miracle will happen and I’ll suddenly start writing something worthwhile, or I’ll be gone and someone will come along and wipe my hard drive and that will be that.

Last week I read the poem about the ‘Wild Thing’ to my therapist, and she said I should try to get it published. I haven’t done anything about it. Strictly speaking, I think posting it on here counts as publication, which disqualifies it from most competitions anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’. I think this definitely counts as a ‘plague year’, but I don’t think this journal of mine is in the same class.

My current yoga teacher once said that destiny is what has to happen, but fate is what you make happen (or words to that effect). She is not having a great year, even worse than most of us. But she has faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, and I envy her for that. Today, I fear for the fate of us all.

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Running With Wolves

The deeper I get into the book I’ve been reading, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the more I relate it to my life, the more I can see how broken and bent my life has been. I know how melodramatic this sounds, I can hear the voices telling me all that stuff: how lucky I am to have had such a (materially) comfortable life; that I should stop whining and practise gratitude; that I should stop reading books that make me unhappy; that I should stop thinking so much and simply be.

I was never cut out to be a nice, good, well behaved girl, but I tried, I really did. Some of my struggles in that regard were clearly related to my dyspraxia, interpreted as clumsiness, untidiness, laziness, carelessness, not listening, not paying attention, all those traits of the ‘difficult’ child. I wasn’t deliberately ‘naughty’, in fact I tried very hard to avoid it, which still holds to this day – needing to know the ‘rules’ so I can stay on the right side of them always, never causing trouble, never making waves – except that doesn’t always work, isn’t always possible, there were/are/will always be times when through carelessness etc I overstep the mark, or get trapped in a situation where to please someone upsets someone else and so I keep falling over my own feet (metaphorically as well as literally) and bringing down judgement on myself, which is why, as you must know by now, it’s easier for everyone if I just keep away from other people as much as I can.

The book, written about thirty years ago, is a Jungian analysis, illustrated by myths and fairy tales from all cultures, about how girls and women are socialised into conforming to culturally required feminine norms and roles. The author’s main thesis is that by trying to live up to those norms and roles, many women suppress their creative spirit, or ‘wild nature’. I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it, two years ago, because her writing style irritated me and it seemed related to New Age ‘Goddess’ cults, which feel a bit whacky to me. Now I’ve persevered I’m more impressed by the psychology behind it, and anyway, it was recommended by my therapist, and I have great respect for her academic credentials.

And, as you can probably guess from that description, the idea of the ‘wild nature’, the alternative female archetype and alter ego of the creative spirit, whose suppression can cause great harm and distress in women’s lives, struck a mighty chord for me. Hence the posts over the last few days about the Wild Thing who lives caged inside of me: self-destructive, resentful and raging as any caged beast has the right to be, but only ‘evil’ if seen from a specific, limited perspective.

I sat down to write almost in tears because I didn’t think I could find the words to express this. But it happened anyway.

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Back Home, Reading and (Not) Writing

I was wrong about the equinox being yesterday, it’s today. I didn’t check. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel any more equable.

Yesterday I was tired all day – not surprising as I always feel that way the day after a long journey. So I didn’t push myself to do much, not even unpacking. Today I still feel tired, and I have a headache. That may be down to dehydration – on holiday I was careful to keep drinking plenty of water, but yesterday I didn’t bother. I feel slightly queasy as well, which may be because I didn’t eat much on Sunday. Yesterday I ate more like my normal amount of food – not as much as on holiday, more than when travelling. Actually, come to think of it, feeling queasy first thing is not that unusual.

Guess I’ll be tired again today though – largely due to reading from about half past three, when I first woke, to nearly six, finishing off the last book I’d been reading on holiday. Because that’s what I do on holiday: in the airport; on the plane; on the hotel balcony; on the sunbed; drying out in the sun after swimming; in the shade; flat on my belly with the sun on my back; in bed at night. There’s nothing really to stop me reading all the time when I’m at home – but for some reason I don’t.

Now I’ve finished my holiday reading, I’ve gone back to ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ which I mentioned a while back. It’s a very dippable book; quotable too. I picked it up again on the flight out. It’s as much fun as a novel, but not quite so obsessive in the sense of having to get to the end to find out what happens. Because nothing much does happen, there’s no plot as such, it’s just about trying and failing to write a serious book and in the process writing this rambly, chaotic, engrossing book – which may be why I like it so much. This morning, on the loo (forgot to mention that in my list of holiday reading places, though it’s my main one when at home), I read two things which really struck home, one about coming home after living abroad (which I highlighted and must try and share), and another about not being able to write when you have seven days a week to do nothing but, and thinking that maybe having a part time job would make one value one’s free time more and hence improve productivity.

Anyway, I was going to write more about reading and writing, and reading and not writing, but I’m running out of words. That sense you get when on holiday that you could really sit down and do it and write something worthwhile when you get home, and that that’s what you’re going to do, really put your back into it at last. Which is great, until you actually get home and realise there’s not a hope in hell.

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Splurging

Do I want to write today? Some of the stress I was under earlier in the week has been alleviated, I slept a bit better last night – 71% according to the sleep cycle app, but then it was 79% two nights ago, so doesn’t necessarily correlate with a good mood in the morning. I don’t know what those percentages are based on – is it percentage of a ‘normal’ night’s sleep – eight hours, maybe? When I first installed the app, it spent the first few days saying it was calibrating, so maybe it relates to how much sleep I had in those first few nights? Or is it a kind of index which also takes into account factors like frequency of waking in the night or proportion of deep to light sleep? Whatever, it’s never 100%, and very rarely over 90, so 79% is pretty good.

In checking my sleep, I got distracted onto Twitter and came across this quote:

“You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.”

Dorothy C. Fontana.

Hmmm – that’ll be me, then. No surprises there. I retweeted it anyway.

Is there any other activity/artform where you create so much ‘stuff’ just to throw it all away again? Another tweet from the same person’s feed:

‘To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over….”

John Hersey.

That’s not quite what I meant – I was thinking not of the early drafts that become something in the end, but what I do: writing for its own sake that never does and never will go on to become ‘something’ – not about perfection, but just ‘splurging’.

Incidentally, after I’d written the word ‘stuff’, I tried to think of a better word for the products of ‘creative’ effort, and I thought of ‘material’ – which reminded me that my Mum – who was trained as a seamstress– used to sometimes call fabric/material ‘stuff’ – oh the wonders of language!

Where have I got to? Not very far is the answer, but then I very rarely do.

I wrote about Tara Brach a couple of days ago. One thing I struggle with in her teachings is the idea that to manage your emotions you need to identify where they manifest physically in your body and focus on that. But emotions occur in the brain, surely? I’ve had this problem with other meditation teachers – I once raised it with the leader of a meditation group and he was really dismissive: ‘oh, so you think it’s all in your head, do you?’ in a tone that implied I was being deliberately obtuse. But although there are conventional physical reactions to some emotions – mostly concerned with changing the heartbeat or breath – isn’t saying that love comes ‘from the heart’ metaphorical? To be continued (maybe).

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Blame Game

By chance this morning, looking for something to read on my Kindle, I found a book I’d forgotten I had, by Tara Brach. In fact, I was apparently 25% of the way through reading it. She’s an American meditation/self help guru who was recommended to me by someone I met at a mindfulness retreat a few years ago. I watched/listened to a few of her videos on Youtube, and downloaded this book.

I needed something to read on the loo, so I read on from the point where it ‘opened’. It was an anecdote about Christmas dinner with her family, where every individual was being annoying for one reason or another. In a huff (she didn’t put it like that), she went out for a walk on her own in the snow, reflecting on this, and realised that while she was blaming them she was really angry with herself.

I finished on the loo and went to the kitchen, where the radio was playing Thought for the Day. The speaker was also talking about deflecting our own blame onto other people, and how we should face up to it and take responsibility (maybe not in those exact words). And I thought, well, that’s what I do all the time, isn’t it? I always take the blame onto myself, and like apologising, somehow it can make people even more irritated with me, and I with myself. What am I doing wrong?

My late mother-in-law used to say: ‘Everybody makes mistakes, but I try not to make the same mistake twice’, the implication being that you can’t be blamed for the first time, but you should learn not to repeat whatever it was that you did. Because if you do repeat it, you become culpable for failing to learn the lesson the first time.

I’ve taken a lifetime of blame, but I just keep on and on making the same mistakes. I’ve tried to learn the lessons, take responsibility, be a ‘better’ person – but there are aspects of myself which will never change no matter what I try to do – and I am trying to explore and accept them, because I’m tired of fighting against myself. It’s easy to get frustrated and irritated with the chaos of my life, but as long as it’s just me on my own dealing with the consequences, it’s not so bad as when it affects someone else, or there are witnesses, and I have to deal with their reactions, and my own reactions to them.

Yet at the same time I have this compulsion to ‘come out’, to explain myself, to be understood and accepted for who I am. Judge me if you must, but please try to judge me on my own terms, not by comparing me to the person you believe or want me to be (or think I ‘should’ be).

Perhaps all our perceptions are illusory, but my self-knowledge is based on a lifetime’s study, and – I think – deserves to be heard.

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Another Morning

Been thinking that maybe I should reorganise my morning routine. If I did the writing before the exercise, that would be more in keeping with Dorothea Brande’s original instructions. I could get up an hour earlier and write, instead of lying in bed trying/hoping to get back to sleep. I resolve to do it, and then, when the time comes… I could move the ‘gentle alarm’ on the Sleep Cycle app forward from 7-7.30 to 6.30-7.00 – the half hour is because it’s supposed to detect whereabouts your sleep is, and go off when you’re in the most appropriate sleep phase for waking (until it comes to the end of the period, when it goes off anyway). It’s fairly immaterial, given that I almost never hear it because I’ve already stopped the app before then – except for the extremely rare occasions when I HAVE managed to get back to sleep.

Whatever, it’s only going to get harder as we move inexorably from the light half of the year into the dark.

Had a day out yesterday, with my camper van, which only got back on the road after lockdown last week. Another new battery, another stern warning from the garage that I need to use it regularly. The new (refurbished) battery they fitted last year was so tightly connected that I couldn’t disconnect it over winter, so when I tried it in March they said they would come and recharge it, but it wasn’t a priority either for them or for me in the following months, so although they’ve had the keys all that time, I hadn’t been chasing them about it.

Well, it’s going now, and last week I took it out for a picnic in the Queen Elizabeth Country Park, off the A3 heading for London, and my favourite go-to place for a significant non-overnight jaunt. Yesterday I went in the other direction, to the New Forest, which I’ve never done as a day out before, always camped, even though it’s only an hour’s drive. I had a vision of a memory from the last time I was there, this time last year, of the empty moors covered with purple flowering heather, seen from the open-top tour bus. I had another memory too, from a few years earlier, when I drove my old Micra back from Dorset to Bedford over two days with an overnight stop in Salisbury, of walking on the same moors in early summer.

I should write more about this. Why am I reluctant to write about happy things? Perhaps because I’m afraid I can’t do them justice? Or because, when you try to describe something like that, you – I – never feel I can capture the essence of what made it special? Like trying to take photographs and then being disappointed with all of them. Writing words and being disappointed with all of them. I got lost, I found somewhere to stop, sat on a tree stump and looked at the view.

Maybe I’ll try tomorrow.

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Spontaneity vs Inspiration

I was talking yesterday about why I write in the morning, following the advice from Dorothea Brande’s book ‘Becoming a Writer’, but how that’s also usually my unhappiest time, as I try to sort out in my head what I need to do for the day.

When I first tried to follow the advice, in the late 1970s early 80s, I was trying to write a fantasy novel, of the then conventional swords-and-sorcery genre, which was hopeless, because it inevitably had to involve a certain amount of fighting and war craft, which I couldn’t get my head round at all. In fact, I didn’t even like reading about that stuff, even though I loved the Tolkien books, I would skip all the fighting parts and just read the adventuring. This was in the days before the genre had opened up with more female characters and writers, such as Ursula le Guin, Julian May, Anne McCaffrey and Marian Zimmer Bradley. I didn’t see how it was possible to have fantasy books outside that patriarchal paradigm, or how I could write within it, so I really was on a hiding to nothing.

Be that as it may, I tried, and I tried in the mornings, and then I discovered that if I sat down to write for a specific purpose – such as to continue my novel – I was paralysed. All I could write was what was in my head – such as what I’m writing now, and write most mornings, about my life, my thoughts and feelings. I was going to say ‘write spontaneously’ but that seems odd, in that the daily writing is quite regimented – but there again, it is spontaneous in the sense that I don’t always know what I’m going to say until I start saying it.

Now I’m confusing myself. Because the other kind of writing – the way I write most of my poems – is the stuff that comes into my head at any time of day, and I need to capture it – so that by the time I sit down at the computer, it’s already there, and I’m just ‘taking dictation’ – so is that spontaneous or is it the other? Because that is what I think of as being ‘inspired’ writing, and I have no idea where that comes from or how to make it happen – it’s outside my control except… for the times when it isn’t. What about all those poems I wrote in April, for NaPoWriMo? They were ‘inspired’ somehow, so how did I make that happen?

There was also a period in 2005-6, immediately before and around the time when I started both a creative writing course and blogging, when I WAS extending my novel (not the original one from twenty years earlier, but a more feminist one) by writing 500 words daily, developing the plot in classic ‘seat of the pants’ fashion. Why did that come to an end? Because my writing energy was diverted into assignments for the course and blogging, perhaps?

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Mornings

As you probably know, I wake most days around five o’clock, and very rarely go back to sleep again after that, although I usually lie in bed for a couple of hours brooding (or reading, listening to podcasts, looking at stuff on my phone – you know how it goes) before getting up – usually around seven – and doing a half hour routine of yoga/tai chi/meditation. So over the last few months I’ve been able to notice the changes in the timing of sunrise. It always comes as a bit of a shock how much the length of daylight has reduced by the end of August, but it’s hardly surprising when you remember we’re only three weeks away from the Autumn Equinox.

Every morning I have this sense of wishing the day would go away and just leave me alone, even though I haven’t had a regular get-up-and-out-of-the-house job (even a part-time one) for over eight years. Life is still there to be dealt with, whether you have somewhere to be by a certain time or not.

I used to have this idea that one day I would find my ‘place’ in the world and when that happened I would wake every morning looking forward to the day ahead. Although I now feel that I am in the best ‘place’ I’ve ever been (or am likely to be), I’ve had to accept that (along with many other things) starting each day full of enthusiasm and positivity is just not in my power.

Why have I started writing like this today? I don’t know, except that maybe I’m not quite so deep in the usual existential despair (or ‘gloom and doom’ as some would colloquially call it) that I can’t step back a little and consider it analytically for once. Is it down to lack of sleep? Probably to some extent, but that begs the more fundamental question of how I can get my body (or rather brain) to sleep any more than it always has, a question for which I’ve never found an answer. A more interesting thought is that this probably explains why so many of these posts tend to be so dark, and the question begged by that is: why try and write at this time of day, when I’m nearly always in a bad mood?

That goes back to advice I read – probably 40 years ago now – in ‘Becoming a Writer’, by Dorothea Brande, a classic from the days before the world became swamped by books of writing advice. The one thing I still remember from this book was to write first thing in the morning, before your conscious brain has a chance to elbow out the subconscious completely. Over the years, I’ve striven to follow that rule, although it’s sometimes led me down some strange alleyways.

And I think it might lead me somewhere now… but I’m nearly at the end of my quota. So I’m going to leave that for now and let it stew till tomorrow.    

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Bother

Why do I bother? God knows. I haven’t got a clue.

I did another of the five items on the list yesterday – and a bit of another (sorting out my accounts, which is going to be a long job), and had a stab at another (renewing the insurance on my van) but got stymied by the technology, because I thought I could renew it online, but couldn’t see how, so now I don’t know if it will renew automatically or if I have to call them – which reminds me that the van itself is a can of worms, because I need to call the garage – but I don’t want to use it at present anyway.

You’ll notice there are still five items – I haven’t added any more, although I keep thinking of them, but I never remember to write them on the list. However, I did do last night’s washing up when I got up, and tidied and wiped the kitchen counters and sink (again). We’ll see how long that lasts.

I made a plan yesterday evening that if I was awake early enough this morning I would walk to the beach and watch the sunrise, but I slept in till 5.20, so there wasn’t time to get myself sorted and to the beach before the actual sunrise at 5.37.  And although I don’t really like lying in bed when I know I won’t get back to sleep, I still don’t want to get up either, even now, when it’s warm.

This is why I’ve decided that routine is so important, because if I know what I ‘should’ be doing, maybe that will push me (‘motivate’ is too strong a word) into doing things even when I really don’t feel like it (which is about 23 hours and 55 minutes of every day). Given that I’ve got quite good about doing my half hour of exercise and meditation, and writing my 500 words of drivel, over the last few months, I’m hoping that maybe I can squeeze some more useful and positive habits into my days.

I’ve given some thought in the past to how to get over the problem I was talking about yesterday, of never knowing where I’ve left things. One solution would be to constantly scan every room for anything which isn’t in its ‘specific place’ and return it so I can find it when I need it again – the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I guess that’s what most non-cahotic (I like that typo, I think I’ll leave it) people do automatically – but the idea fills me with horror and deadens my soul. There wouldn’t be time for anything else, would there? But then if it actually worked, wouldn’t it save the time and stress of constantly searching for things? I think of my spirit animal, Mole from The Wind in the Willows, throwing down his paintbrush and running out into the springtime to cries of ‘Bother!’ and ‘Oh blow!’ and ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’