Category: writing

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Thresholds

After I’d finished writing yesterday, I looked up the dictionary definition of ‘liminal’ and found that it refers not just to borders, but specifically to thresholds, which pleases me, because of the ambiguity between the two – what I described yesterday as the ‘hazy, scary…’ nature of boundaries, their combination of both limiting aspects but also potential for discovery, change and new experiences.

It also made me think of a picture by William Blake, the frontispiece for his epic poem ‘Jerusalem’, which shows Los (his name for the embodiment of the poetic imagination) about to step through an archway, carrying a lantern into darkness.

About six this morning, as I was lying in bed and thinking, the word ‘edgy’ popped into my head, and I started to think about its implications – that combination of nervousness and excitement. When applied to people, it can imply a kind of fearfulness, a risk of tipping over into a chaotic and destructive state – most likely self-destructive, but not necessarily just that (does self-destruction ever not have repercussions for others beside the self?) But when ‘edgy’ is applied to actions, ideas, art, it implies courage, and is more likely to be complimentary, or at least ambivalent.

This whole idea of edges, boundaries, borders, liminality, the relationships between risk, fear, courage, change, uncertainty, danger, transformation , creativity, loss, immobility (in no particular order) has been haunting me recently as I try to deal with my ‘stuckness’ and lack of motivation and inspiration, not to mention my fear of not being able to find ways of dealing with the obstacles I keep coming up against.

Speaking of which, I think (only think) I may have got round the large ones with the website project, and that it shouldn’t (‘shouldn’t’) require too much more work. Having said that, I went out yesterday morning to walk on the beach and have breakfast out (instead of putting in the work) and realised how much that improved my mood. And then when I got home my broadband was down, so I abandoned websiting and spent the afternoon trying to sort out the design for the jumper, filling in the design on squared paper and then realising it would be far too big, so having to produce a smaller pattern which I think is going to work, but anyway it will all require a lot of time and effort (knitting doesn’t count as ‘work’) to put into practice.

Tai chi this morning, and I’ve just had a phone call from the GP’s surgery offering me a flu jab appointment at 2:15. I had to cancel the last one because I had a cold, so don’t want to miss it. And afterwards I might go and do some café-sitting and reading, or walking if the weather stays nice (which it looks as though it might).  Those things are important and I need to do more of them. But I’ll have a couple of hours between tai chi and lunch to do some website work.

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Failing Better?

I just inserted the date at the top of my Word document – as I aways do – and noticed that today is my Mum’s birthday – she would have been 108 now, but she died before the old century did, at the age of 86. I might call my sister later.

I can’t seem to get started today. Realised yesterday that it’s only a couple of weeks till NaNoWriMo. I did the 50k words challenge in 2018, and last November I tried reading it through just in case there was anything in it. Basically, it’s just as if I’d been writing three of these blog posts a day for a month, not even a sniff of a novel, just same old same old. So this year I’m not going to bother. Am I going to set myself any kind of writing challenge at all? After all I managed the poems for NaPoWriMo. Some days I think I should – maybe read through what I’ve got of ‘The Long Way Back’, I don’t know.

There are a few issues over ‘The Long Way Back’ (the follow-up to ‘Single to Sirkeci’). Partly it’s because I stopped in the middle of the journey, and didn’t include the return, in order to make it a more manageable size – but that part of the book is already written, so I could just combine that with the first part and maybe release the whole thing just to Kindle. Because the second part on its own would make quite a short book (about 40k words), I had the idea of writing about what happened after I came back and tagging that on the end – but when I started editing the blogs from that time it all seemed too downbeat, then there was the Prague bit, and I wondered if it would make two additional books, then there’s the question of: where do I stop, because life is still going on (even if it isn’t quite so interesting these days). But the longer I put off starting on it the more pointless it all seems, especially given that the original book hasn’t exactly sold very well.

It all becomes a long circular argument about – what and whom am I writing for? what other things could I be doing with my time? will I ever get back to my 30 year old lapsed novel, will I ever get an idea for another novel? will I ever have any ideas for short stories to contribute to the anthologies of my writers’ group? (who have stopped meeting again since the weather has turned and the Covid restrictions have tightened up).

Maybe these 500 word missives are as much as I can cope with these days. I said yesterday (I think it was) that I keep trying, keep trying to ‘fail better’. But how can I tell whether the voice in my head that stops me from setting off down that particular road is aiming to sabotage me or to save me from myself?

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Wherever That River Goes…

No post yesterday, because I got up and took a flask of coffee to the beach, arriving a few minutes  late for sunrise (but there was low cloud over the sea anyway) and writing in a notebook, which I might or might not copy onto here, but today I’ve got other stuff in my head so will go ahead with that.

One of the songs from my youth that listening to Amazon music has reintroduced me to is ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ by the Byrds, and now it’s stuck in my head. It starts like this:

‘The river flows, it flows to the sea,
wherever that river goes,
that’s where I want to be.
Flow, river flow,
let your waters wash down,
take me from this road
to some other town.

All (s)he wanted was to be free
and that’s the way it turned out to be…’

‘The Ballad of Easy Rider,’ Roger McGuinn & Bob Dylan

Notice how I subtly changed the gender in that second verse? It’s true, all I wanted was to be free, and that is ‘the way it turned out to be’, though not quite the way I might have expected (or even hoped for.) But I’m still very grateful for the way it is – despite the warning from another song of the same era:

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…’

‘Me and Bobby McGee’, Kriss Krisstofferson

…a warning that kept me stuck in a sad but ‘safe’ situation for many years, which has brought another song to mind…

‘How often does it happen that we live our lives in chains
and never even know we have the key?’

‘Already Gone’, The Eagles

But that’s enough soft West coast country-rock from the late 1960s and early 70s for today.

Going to the sea yesterday morning did its magic of lifting my mood. I sat on my usual bench behind the beach café, writing in my notebook, and two people passing by said: ‘you’ve got a good spot there!’, and later on my way home I sat in the Rose Garden and read for a while, and another stranger said the same thing. But when I got home and started trying to tackle a project I’ve started, I had a massive setback which threw me into despair about how useless I am and what a charlatan because people have expectations of me and really I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and am scrabbling all the time to keep going, and everything is ten times harder for me and takes ten times longer than any normal competent person but nobody sees it and I hate myself and I hate being me.

I talked to my therapist in the afternoon about it, this massive fear I have of cocking everything up. She talked about adjusting to not being ‘needed’ any more, but I don’t want to be needed, I don’t want anyone to depend on me, I can’t stand the stress. I want to be free of all that. I want to run away again.

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Detritus

I think: if I start writing, maybe the ideas will come? And in a way they do, but they’re not necessarily ideas I want to write. I think: if I do twenty minutes of movement, light candles and incense, sit quietly, maybe the thoughts will go away? And sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. I lie in bed and do backwards-counting exercises to try and stem the flow so I can get back to sleep, and sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t.

Why am I constantly engaged in battles inside my head? Is this just normal, does everybody have this never-ending struggle to manage their thoughts? I used to think that, and that it was just me doing such a lousy job of it. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think: maybe it’s my curse, maybe it’s just another part of my chaotic weirdness. Maybe it’s the cause of everything.

This morning, in bed and after, I was thinking about fear. What am I so afraid of? Failure and rejection, that’s what I thought. I deal with rejection by avoiding contact with other people, pre-emptive rejection. Failure is trickier (not that avoiding human contact is always easy). The best ways of avoiding failure are never to try to do anything and to give up – I am an expert on both of those.

But what did I say a couple of weeks ago? ‘The greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you don’t want to do and then knowing that you’ve done it’? True enough. Life is a bugger sometimes.

I remember getting into a conversation on Facebook a while ago about the ‘detritus’ that accumulates in your mind, that you have to wade your way through. I feel like I said something quite clever, but now I can’t remember what it was. There is certainly a lot of detritus in my mind.

I’ve just remembered a conversation with a counsellor over twenty years ago – I know it was in autumn 1999, because I saw that particular counsellor then after my parents had died in late winter and we’d moved house over the summer and I was getting about three hours sleep a night and was referred by my GP for six sessions of counselling, but she was offering bereavement counselling, and as I told her, after six months since their deaths I didn’t feel I’d even started to mourn them. But what I remember telling her was about this big well of shit in my head, which I can never empty and which keeps getting refilled all the time. I think the idea came from the title of ‘The Well of Loneliness’. But what was in my well? Loneliness, certainly, but not just that: shame and guilt and fear, and of course , failure and rejection.  

Within ten years I’d left my husband, in the hope that that would bring me new opportunities – which it has, it has, but why has so much stayed the same?

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Decisions

After I finished writing yesterday, I thought about how often I mention Monday in the titles of my Monday posts – I can’t be sure, but it feels like it happens that way more than any other day, or has done recently, at least. Years ago, in my major blogging days, I would sometimes use the day of the week as a title when I couldn’t think of anything else, and that was always a bad sign. Monday, specifically, has a bad reputation of course, as the first day of the conventional working week. But after I’d written yesterday, I worked out that it’s seventeen years since the last time I had that kind of Monday to Friday job, so why should it be an issue? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, I have no expectation of finding an answer).

Tuesday is significant in two ways, one because it’s bin preparation day (they’re supposed to be out by bedtime for early morning collection) and the other because of Tuesday morning tai chi lessons at the community centre, except they only restarted after lockdown at the beginning of September, I went to the first one and then was in Cyprus for the second, and the teacher then went to Spain  for two weeks and has been self-isolating since she got back. So it should be starting next week – assuming things don’t go back into lockdown, which who knows, given the way things are going.

There is something else on Tuesdays, which is Zoom meditation in the evenings, which I haven’t done for a while because I don’t much like the person who usually leads it. But there will be Zoom tai chi tomorrow – I missed it last week when I was at my daughter’s.

I made some progress on both my projects yesterday – some. I’m trying to do the website on WordPress, because I don’t want to host it myself. When I was trying to do the website thing as a business, I used to set all the sites up as sub-folders on my hosting, but earlier this year I let go of the last one on there (the owner having passed away). It’s quite expensive to pay for hosting, and getting more so – and I don’t get much traffic on my own site, in fact this blog is the only thing which is really still ‘live’, so I keep questioning whether it’s worth continuing. I paid last year for two years’ hosting, so am now into the final year, and I need to make some decisions, which is not my favourite activity. It is a lot of money, as I said, but on the other hand I can afford it – just it seems daft to keep paying for something which I don’t really make use of – and if I do stop it at some point in the future, my client will be left having to find hosting from somewhere else (or rather I’ll have to do that for her).  

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Gloomy Monday

I am here again – today, anyway, though it remains to be seen whether I will post this or just rant to myself. I went to stay at my daughter’s for the early part of last week, after my infusion at the hospital – quite a last minute decision, to do with me going to see their new house before she goes back to work full time, and not knowing when we might be able to meet again. I came back on Wednesday and came down with a cold Wednesday evening, which I’m now over except for an embarrassing cough, a nasal whine and a cloud of gloom that I’m struggling to get out from under.

Aha, autumn, increasing darkness, getting colder, and nothing to look forward to in the next six months but more of the same. Yes to all of that, but also commitments; an Xmas jumper promised to one person and a website to another, both of them started over the weekend, neither of them particularly well.  

One of the joys of combined singledom and retirement is not having regular commitments to do things for other people. Although it has been said to me that the best way to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, for me it just creates so much stress and worry beforehand, and the outcome is so uncertain – what if they don’t like what I’ve done when I’ve done it? What if it all turns out to be crap? For example, if I’m crocheting something for myself and I hate it when it’s finished, I can either unravel it or shove it into the back of the wardrobe and never have to look at it again (which is what mostly happens with the things I make). But if I’m doing something for someone else, I have a certain responsibility, and they have certain expectations which I have to meet. And what would happen if I fail to meet those expectations? Another failure to throw on the ever-growing pile, but with the added sense of shame and guilt of knowing that my failure is not just a private one but visible to others.  And even if they say they like it, how can I ever know that they’re being honest and not just trying to spare my feelings?

A crowd of starlings just flew past my window and over the roof – or the roof of the next house down the terrace perhaps. There’s a word for it – isn’t it ‘murmuration’? Or is that when they all get together and make a noise?

Yesterday was sunny but chilly. I stayed indoors, though I know there’s lots that needs doing in the garden to stop it descending further into an ugly green mess. Will the weeds die back in the winter? There’s no guarantee of that. Today it’s grey and gloomy, which is a good enough excuse to stay in. Already been to Sainsbury’s, and committed to going to yoga this evening. That’ll be enough.

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Leaf Upon the Water

Poem today. Not sure why. Sometimes it happens like that. Feels like this is the first one in a while

The photo was taken in the water lily house at Kew Gardens in 2015. The flowers and small leaves in front are lotuses, the large leaves behind are from giant water lilies. I was tempted to use a photo of a water lily from my old garden pond, but thought some smart Alec might point out that it wasn’t actually a lotus (that’s the sort of thing I’d do, anyway).

Also ‘The lotus flower grows from shit’ is only one of many interpretations of the mantra ‘Om mane padme hum‘ but it was the one explained to me by my first meditation teacher, and it makes for a great metaphor.

Leaf Upon the Water

The lotus flower grows from shit,
the silt of a thousand fishes, living
and dead, their shimmering scales,
dulled and darkened,
sinking through the cloudy waters
to the home of the scuttling things,
sliding into and becoming
the black, unspeakable ooze
that clings and clods
and welcomes into its bitter embrace
the scattered seed
that cracks and bleeds
in its agony of birth,
sending its silvery roots into the darkness
to trap the rotting death-food and to grow
new life that rises,
green and fecund
to break the surface,
unfurl its leaves
and open its lovely face towards the sun.

I am the leaf upon the water,
held in the magic of the meniscus,
I will not struggle
I will trust the power of the water,
I will lie back and let it hold me
until my season is done.

Om mane padme hum.
The lotus flower grows from shit.

Linda Rushby 30 September 2020

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Plus Ҫa Change

New day, new week. Almost a new month. Sunny but chilly.

Found out over the weekend that my local swimming pool won’t be reopening. When I moved to Southsea it was on my doorstep, and I started going in the mornings, then having a bacon butty and pot of tea afterwards at the local seafront café. When I first moved from the flat into this house, I stopped because it seemed too far to walk and I didn’t want to drive there. Then in spring 2018, after I’d finished my cancer treatment, I started going again, walking (it was only 20minutes away) first thing in the morning, only once or twice a week. The café had changed hands, but everything else stayed the same, and I would come out of the pool and stop for a few moments on the prom watching the sea and filling myself with love for this place. Then my writers’ group started meeting at the library on Monday mornings, so I would walk from the seafront into the town centre, and in the process found another café for breakfast. During that time, first John Lewis and then Debenham’s closed down, and our Sunday meetings moved from Debenham’s café to the library as well as the Monday ones.

I’ve lived in Southsea for well over five years now – in this house for four years next month. To me, it doesn’t feel very long, but in that time, so many of the things that I felt made the place special have gone or changed – of course, this year has accelerated that, but many went before that – in fact, of the things listed in the previous paragraph that have now changed or gone, only the pool and the second breakfast café (the one in the town centre) have closed as a direct result of the lockdown – and both were already in financial difficulty – this has just been the final blow.

Places change – that’s how it is. The sea is still there, and the park, I can walk there whenever I wish. Most of the people I’ve met over five years are probably still here, even if I’ve lost touch with them.

I came here intending to start a new life, and I’ve done that in many ways, and I guess I can do it again, even if so many things and places I treasured/took for granted have now slipped into memory (like riding my bike over the Common in that first summer and having coffee overlooking the harbour, watching the Isle of Wight ferries and other boats coming in and out – and when the weather got colder I started going swimming instead). I’d come out of a period when there was very little stability in my life, and the future had always seemed fluid and unknowable. Well, I guess that’s always true, but the human heart likes to kid itself that it isn’t.

I didn’t know when I sat down that this is what I would write today.

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Log Cabin

Very late this morning – although I’ve been awake for two and a half hours already. I decided to start doing my half hour yoga etc in the mornings again, and had a shower and washed my hair, and just generally time passed as it so often does.

Routines, as I’m sure I’ve said before, are both constraining and liberating. I half thought last week that I wouldn’t restart these two morning routines – exercise and blogging – but that’s because I was in a pretty shitty mood after returning from Cyprus. It’s so easy to slip down into chaos – especially for someone like me. Spontaneity can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying. Sometimes the chaos reaches a point where the only way I can deal with it is by ignoring it, and so it grows exponentially until it reaches a crisis and I fall apart emotionally. I was getting close to that point last week. But yesterday I wrote my blog; tidied the kitchen; loaded, ran and emptied the dishwasher; hoovered the stairs and landing – never really know what brings me back from the brink. I might say: ‘a decent night’s sleep’ but that wasn’t the case. Taking the van out on Friday? Doing that one, big(ish) stressful thing and then putting it to one side? Putting everything else into perspective? Maybe.

When I was learning to drive, the instructor told me that the greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you really don’t want to do, and then afterwards, knowing that you’ve done it. Over forty years later, I think that’s still one of the wisest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard.

I’ve started a new crochet project – while still finishing off the previous one (both cardigans). I started following a pattern for what’s called a ‘log cabin’ design, starting with a small square, then every few rows rotating the work and picking up stitches along the edge of the existing work so that you have a rectangle that keeps growing – like a spiral growing out from the centre, but with straight edges. I’m using a ‘cake’ type yarn with large blocks of colour, and it looks pretty good. But I don’t like the shape of the pattern in the book – which makes a sleeveless waistcoat, which I’m not that keen on. So I’m trying to think of a way of adapting it to make a cardi with sleeves. This is the sort of thing I like to do – trying out something new and seeing how it works out.

Every so often I think I’ll give up on crochet, because it’s too repetitive and I feel like I’ve exhausted the possibilities. Then I get an idea like this and get interested again. Admittedly, I have cupboards full of projects that I’ve never finished, and garments that I’ve never worn. But I keep going back to it. And today I’m looking forward to sitting in the sunshine and trying again.

Maybe there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

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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.