You gotta search for the hero inside yourself ~ why I write what I do.

You gotta search for the hero inside yourself ~ why I write what I do.

A long time ago now, or so it seems, I wrote a paragraph in my walking notebook. I carry a notebook everywhere, even to hospital. I recommend the practice to every writer or thinker. You can lose so much by not recording those apparently passing or random thoughts. This is what I wrote, sitting on a winter beach under grey skies in a town that I felt would never welcome me:

“I look for you in every stranger’s face I see. Sometimes I think I see your eyes, your hair, your mouth. I wait to hear your voice when the phone rings, or see you across a crowded café. Hopeless. You’re not real. You don’t exist. I created you, your world.

“And yet. And yet I feel you out there, alive and real as the stones, the shingle that crunches beneath my feet, or the waves that roar and sigh as they hit the shore. I made you up, and yet you haunt me. Yours is not a tale told by an idiot. It’s real. Somewhere, somehow, both you and your world are real. I’m looking for the door so I can step in and join you. So far the only door is my computer screen.

“What are these insane longings for things that can never be?”

At the time I was in the process of incubating a third book in the series that began with The Bet. During this incubation time, I feel often as if I am on the very brink of dying. Melodramatic, I know, but that’s how it feels. It feels as if I need to commit some huge act of personal violence, some vast enactment of the turmoil inside that shows no sign of ever coalescing into anything more orderly. There’s a sequence of internal combustions inside that resemble more closely than anything a probable rapid descent into madness.

I don’t like myself very much; I think that much is clear from how I often wish to negate my own existence. I’m not who I think I am, not really. At some deep level I feel myself someone utterly other than who I appear to be. It’s this conflict of self that may drive a good deal of my depressive illness, this inability to square these images and blueprints of myself and be at peace with them all.

So I write.

Every character in every novel I’ve written faces the same dilemma, this same insoluble puzzle. All six of the main characters in Strangers and Pilgrims  tries to square who they think they are at core with who they manifest as in real life. Their distress at the apparent impossibility of this task is what drives the opening chapters of the novel. Isobel in Away With The Fairies  feels that her real identity is being swept away, subsumed and even wiped away by the life that has come to her; her distress when the two worlds she’s trying to live become impossible to maintain drives her inwards to seek her answers.

The most heartbreaking of them all (so far) is Antony Ashurst, the main character of The Bet, whose attempt to reconcile his distress ends in tragedy and a complete destruction of who he believed himself to be. Isolated by circumstances and by misunderstandings, he reaches breaking point and yet does not quite break.

You gotta search for the hero inside yourself

Search for the secrets you hide

Search for the hero inside yourself

Until you find the key to your life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGTe-zbj3Bo

I’ve written before about heroes  ,  the bond between heroes and the writer  and villains, / and I even used to teach a TEFL lesson on the subject. (though alas the students always leaped first to the idea of the superhero!) but I suspect that it may cause some controversy if I suggest that many writers (I cannot say all) do indeed put a lot of their selves into the heroes they write. My old blogging friend Barb used to ask in her author interviews whether the writer had put themselves into their stories. While I cannot speak for anyone except myself, I believe that I do put a considerable amount of myself into the characters of my novels.

It’s not escapism that makes me do so, though for the duration of the writing I do escape from some of the pain. Rather it’s a part of my own search for a key to my life, as the song suggests. Searching the hero inside myself may sound like a somewhat grandiloquent statement but I believe it’s true and it may be what gives me courage to carry on when I’m ready to give up and die inside.

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The Invisible Woman speaks…will you listen?

The Invisible Woman speaks…will you listen?

Hey, you there?

Yes, you.

I know you can hear me, but you know what? I’m standing right in front of you and you are barely aware of me. My voice might well be the sound of the wind in the trees, always there and yet never truly listened to.

I should really say, OUR voice, because I am not one but many. Many. Countless and timeless, we’ve been invisible for a very long time.

You protest perhaps, declaring that women are not really invisible. They’re everywhere. Half the planet’s population even. I would simply ask you why then do we have a tiny, tiny fraction of the world’s wealth? You might wave a newspaper in front of me, pointing to grainy photos of women, or direct me to the internet news. Women everywhere, you say.

Well, yes. But do you SEE them? Or do you merely look at them, taking in curves and synthetic smiles and enhanced features, polished and tanned and oiled for your pleasure? Young, slender women, barely even out of girlhood and constantly harking back to its simpler demands of beauty and silence.

You point out older women, who you say are very good examples of beautiful older women. Or to women who have climbed a corporate ladder or that of government or leadership. But do read also the comments, about their clothes or their figure or their skin or sex appeal. You rarely get comments about anything else. Many of these are the women whose childhood was punctuated by the cries of relatives male and female declaring, “She should have been a boy!”

Feminism? I do not know what feminism is. I only know that at a certain age, we all begin to fade from view. That is what fuels the industry of anti-ageing creams, you know. It’s not fear of death that worries women most, I think; it’s the fear of becoming invisible, and ultimately inaudible too. You can still hear me because I am shouting now. I was brought up to be quiet and polite and not to put myself forward, so it takes a lot for me to be shouting now. I’d grab your arms and shake you, but that would be simply so rude it would throw me into that other darkness of age and madness. Another mad old woman, babbling insanities, to be shut away and ignored. Kinder to kill such folks, that’s the next thought. God forbid that they be heard and listened to.

When do we become invisible? I do not know. I think it varies. Some of us were never terribly visible in the first place. If you are not blessed with something outwardly apparent to catch the interest of the world, you remain a mouse in the wainscotting, there but easy enough to ignore. It takes a lot of mice to wake up a whole house. For those who were blessed with outward beauty, the fading of it is bitter because we cease to be seen, slowly, like a long death. That’s why Snow White’s stepmother went down the route of bitterness, you know. She sensed she was being eclipsed, and soon her image in the mirror would become grey and dim and then gone. Every young mum has a moment where the admiration expressed towards her infants hits a harsh note, like a wisp of sun over the clouds. We dress our daughters up and parade them, repeating what we knew in the unconscious hope that her loveliness will not fade and we will not see her becoming slowly invisible.

So we do other things to try and be a part of the world. We seek roles of kindness and service, often, because we are thwarted at the Front from real combat because the only way of being seen for long enough is by relinquishing our femininity. Or at least the outward trappings of it. We wear business suits, cut for our curves, but in essence the same uniform as the men. Without such armour how can we even enter the Lists?

Those whose academic gifts carried them far into their path bear also a harsh burden. It’s not enough to succeed through your brains alone; enter the public consciousness via the media and you will be judged not for your work or your soul but through your outward appearance.

It’s enough to make a woman weep, but even tears are seen as weakness and not the healing balm they truly are. Cry, and you get labelled with one of the cruellest, most impossible of labels: the hysterical woman. The source of our femininity, the womb, is cursed as the thing that makes us weak. And yet, when that womb starts its journey towards the quiescence of menopause, we are not welcomed either but dismissed as worthless now we can no longer bear children. We become useless and repulsive, as if all our worth was invested in being breeders of another generation, and once we are retired, we become invisible sexually.

I do not offer answers; I only offer questions, and yet more questions. I do not ask to be answered, except with the courtesy of being listened to. I am a warrior but the first lesson of any war is to only choose the battles you have a chance of winning. My battles are by necessity are the small ones, as I learn what my skills are.

You walk away, shaking your head. That’s all right. You listened, even if you did not truly understand yet. One battle at a time, that is what I promised myself. I fight not with a sword or with other weapons that bear an edge but with words that can be sharpened or softened and can shape the listener’s perception so that maybe, for one moment of blinding clarity, they too may see things from the other side.

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Four Years on…Celebrating Blogging.

Four Years on…celebrating blogging.

 

Today is a special day for this blog. Four years ago today I made my début into the world of blogging. I’d been feeling a sense of stagnation in my online life, which at the time consisted entirely of the internet forum for Sacred Hoop magazine, to which I’d belonged since ’99. So in the autumn of 2008, I made a decision to step back from it and see what came to fill the void. By the Christmas of that year, I’d realised that blogs were a medium I’d hitherto known nothing about, and in the January I became part of a co-authored blog Café Crem. By the end of the month, I knew I wanted a blog of my own, and Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking was born.

Blogging is a way of connecting, for me anyway, and of sharing the thoughts and observations that come to me. It’s been a way of meeting extraordinary people, too, and while one or two have proved to be men or women of straw, the vast majority of the folks I’ve connected with have been people I am proud to call friends, even if most of them will never be sitting in the same room, enjoying a coffee with me.

The general focus of this blog has always been about trying to find a sense of balance in life, especially when challenged by mental and emotional distress, and I am always deeply moved when I receive feedback to remind me that while I often feel I am typing into a vast empty void, there are people reading and who find my words and experiences resonate with theirs. If I do nothing more in my life, knowing that I have offered comfort, reassurance and inspiration to others with my words is something I can hold onto in my darker days.

I’ve long wanted to do a collection of blog posts, rounded up and licked into shape as an e-book(or even a paperback) but the scale of the task defeats me. There’s over 700 posts here now. Some are like this one, words for a moment that will pass. There’s poetry (yes, and I keep promising to do an entire book of poems, but am discouraged by the knowledge that so few people read poetry, as well as the fact that I have no clue about creating a table of contents for an e-book of any sort) and there’s fiction. There’s dozens of essays about grief, depression, and spirituality, and even a few humorous ones too. I’ve announced the release of my novels here, and also of life changes too. I try to answer all comments but sometimes I just can’t. I sit and stare at the comments sometimes and I cry, because they’re often so kind I don’t know what to say. Sometimes I can’t answer because I have nothing to say. But I appreciate each and every comment, even the occasional critical one.

The last year, I have posted less often, aiming to post weekly rather than more often. This is simply because I have limited energy these days. I’m trying to conserve it, and use it as wisely as I can. I’ve covered vast areas of subjects and some posts receive daily traffic even years after they were first posted. Some posts seem to slip by without anyone noticing. It’s baffling. I’d love to write one of those posts that goes viral and gets read by tens of thousands but in honesty, it’s probably not going to happen. That’s often down to luck but also to appeal. I write about things that are not really terribly fashionable or appealing, and I know that it’s not a popular cup of tea kind of blog. That’s OK, really. Like with my novels, I write primarily to please myself, to let the being who dwells inside me have her voice (and Monday’s post is about her, the Invisible Woman) and though sometimes I moan about the relatively low number of people who read my stuff, I am content that I do not change who I am and how I write to chase a market that is as nebulous and changeable as the British weather. Writing for a market is a dangerous choice. If I write for myself, then there is one person in the world guaranteed to be pleased with it.

Anyway, I am glad to have all my readers along for the ride, so thank you all for taking the time to read, whether once in a while or as regular thing. Without readers, we would all be just talking to ourselves in the darkness, and without connection we would all be dreadfully alone. Some days I feel so alone, and then I remember that perhaps I am not.

 

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Embodiment ~ muscle memory, belief and the complexities of the human soul

Embodiment ~ muscle memory, belief and the complexities of the human soul

Ever heard of embodied cognition?

No, me neither till the other day when an article in Church Times caught my eye. Don’t underestimate this paper because of the title. While some of it is inevitably the dull warblings you might expect, they have some very intelligent columnists who turn out some excellent articles. Here’s some snippets from the one I read by Mark Vernon:

“But what if faith is not primarily about facts and theories? They may come, but only after time spent exploring a way of life, committing to practise. …[redacted] But surely most people are likely to find faith because one day, perhaps by mistake they walked into a holy place or were helped by a Good Samaritan or were caught by a visceral experience of love or loss. Thinking about what it means is vital, but belief rests on, and stays alive because of the embodied experience.

“A new area in science suggests these intuitions are right. It is known as ‘embodied cognition’ which roughly translates as: what we think, feel and do depends not only on the brain but also the body. We are not brains in vats. ‘It is not the brain alone that gives rise to consciousness. Consciousness is grounded or contextualised in the body,’ says psychologist Canon Fraser Watts.”

I’d love to reproduce the article in full but there are copyright issues at stake. However, the ideas had chimed with things I’ve been pondering.

As many of my readers may know I have very long hair. It’s long enough to sit on, and I started growing it when I was in my mid teens. For the first year or two while it grew long enough to play with and try out myriad different styles, I used to use a dressing table with winged mirrors that meant I could see the back of my head. Not to style my hair (because that’s incredibly confusing in mirrors) but to view the results. It’s probably thirty years since I did this now. I get asked by folks whether it’s hard to style your own hair and the answer is no, not really, once you have done it a number of times you can see with your fingers. Recently I watched a video http://earthsky.org/human-world/video-re-creating-the-hairstyles-of-the-early-roman-vestal-virgins of how a very ancient hairstyle was probably done. A comment thread developed on Facebook and most people were dubious that the style could be done by the woman herself. It looks incredibly complicated (and it is, fairly) but actually, I feel sure that those Vestal Virgins may well have done it themselves, with perhaps a friend to hold an end from time to time. I know this because when I was about twenty, I recreated a style very similar, to try and imitate the style Roman brides wore (which is pretty much that of the Vestals). I’d intended to perhaps have it for my wedding. But the results were not pleasing and I didn’t go ahead. After many years of French plaiting and other apparently fiddly styles, my hands and my fingers and my senses could perform tasks without being able to see visually what they were doing.

We do not have the five senses we are accustomed to thinking; there are over twenty senses accepted by science, and others less well accepted such as the sense of being stared at (also a book by Rupert Sheldrake, http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html whom I met last year http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sense-Being-Stared-At-Extended/dp/0099441535/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359889760&sr=1-1 )

It would appear that belief is not merely an intellectual thing, but something that becomes viscerally real. Like memory, which it is becoming increasingly clear is not stored exclusively in the spongy matter of the physical brain but also within the muscles and even the guts, belief is lodged deep within the physical matter and the experiential layers of the human being.

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

This excerpt from T.S Eliot’s Little Gidding (from The Four Quartets) illustrates this well. The act of kneeling in a sacred space creates or recalls embodied experience, links to things deeper and more ancient often than we realise.

Even words, those things were throw around so carelessly, carry this embodied cognition in a way. Check out this article. Brains viewed under MRI scanners have been shown to light up in the same areas when certain words are spoken as light up when the actions those words represent are performed. Thinking the word SMILE, for example creates the same effects in the brain as actually smiling.

I’ve been pondering about the concept of therapeutic literature. That’s to say books or poetry that have a measurably beneficial effect on the reader. I’m not talking about books that are all sweetness and light and which steer clear of dark topics, but rather ones with an indefinable something that triggers a change in the reader. It might be infinitesimally small but cumulative. I’ve always found poetry(not all poetry but some) to do that for me, where the sound of the words is like a balm on sore skin, and some novels have been an authentically beneficial experience. Do you have any books that do this for you? I’d love to find more. I want to explore the experience of letting words take me places but without the imposition of heavy handed directive narrative because embodied cognition is something that takes place in the body, not in the bright, shallow, brittle thought processes. I can talk myself out of benefits of ideas but not out of the feeling of them, and it’s the feeling that speaks longest and loudest when the darkness draws in and intellect falters. 

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The Stationmaster’s Garden

The Stationmaster’s Garden

The summer storm seemed the last insult to an already injured spirit, and I ran, tears cascading down my face. Not for home, as that was a good mile away and I didn’t expect either sympathy or understanding there, but rather to one of the hidden places we’d played in some weeks previously.

The stationmaster’s cottage had long been demolished; I’m not sure now it even existed except as a part of the fantasy landscape that the kids I played with constructed around the railway line that ran past the edge of the small town where I grew up. Tales of Victorian train crashes, culled probably from films and books rather than any real events in local history were the basis for various games of ghostly goings on and gory play-acting. Something had been there for sure, for the narrow strip of ground hidden by high hedges and overgrown fencing that collapsed at the slightest kick, contained cultivated plants and feral flowers that we all knew did not grow wild. The belief was that this hideaway had once been the garden belonging to the stationmaster, and screened from the road and the railway by vegetation it was the perfect place to play out of sight of adults. We weren’t sure if we were trespassing or not, but since we were not actually on the railway embankment proper, it felt like this was a safe place.

That day, my friend Tina had decided, out of the blue or so it seemed to me at the time, that she preferred another girl to play with. After a couple of awkward days of three of us playing, I found myself surplus to requirements and was driven away by the other two. Children can be cruel without a thought, and that thoughtless cruelty that sent me running away cut me deeply. I was not wanted, I had been rejected as being… well, there were no reasons given and as an adult I can think now more kindly of the whole thing. Tina simply needed a very different friend for a while. We were growing up fast then and people change.

So I said OK, I’ll go, and I went. I believe I left with dignity and without reproach but my memory may be playing tricks on me. Once gone from sight I began running, and that’s when the rain started. A hot day had brewed a sudden storm, with pelting rain that drenched in seconds. I was soaked to the skin in a few minutes, and with nowhere to go but home, I ran for the stationmaster’s garden. You had to crawl in through a gap in the hedge and then you found yourself in a partial green cave.

It’s long gone now but that long thin strip of lost garden was filled with old fashioned cottage garden plants, fighting valiantly against more robust weeds like bindweed and cleavers. Honeysuckle twined amid the hawthorn and elder and sloe that made up the bulk of the hedging. Bright blue flowers (Canterbury bells I later discovered) straggled here and there. A few aromatics like a leggy lavender and rosemary fought against choking grasses.

I lay doubled over, sobbing, emotions too powerful to contain or articulate spilling over. I had no words to explain how I felt, so there would be little point going home when I could not tell my mum what was wrong. The bare facts did not seem to justify this explosion of pain. I rolled over onto my back and the rain that made it into that dense green shelter pounded on my face. I cried, silently, but wanting to howl and knowing I couldn’t. This was a secret place. I lay there, knowing I’d be in bother for the grass stains on my clothes but not caring. I wept until quite suddenly I could weep no more. Sun touched my face, making me open my eyes. The rain had stopped as abruptly as it had begun and the clouds were gone. Brilliant sunshine was drying out the grass and the flowers and a robin was singing somewhere close by.

Something had changed but not merely the weather. I’d gone in there, feeling as if I might die from the internal pain that I couldn’t even describe, and yet, within twenty minutes it was over. Oh, I felt sad, for sure, and angry too, but the white heat of rejection was gone. I was dimly aware that it didn’t really matter much, not really. The sun and the rain and the robin and the flowers, they were what mattered, because they were there when no one else could be. Being in that hidden place, away from people and with only nature as my companion, had brought that storm in me to its close.

To an adult the stationmaster’s garden might have seemed a poor scrubby remnant deserving of no second glance but to a child that secret garden contained real magic that I can feel to this day.

(This narrative came to me following a meditation called Dreams Come True from http://www.flowerspirit.info/gifts/ by the wonderful Jackie Stewart. It’s a real event from my life that I began to understand after going deeply into my own past)

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One click and you’re history ~ how social media makes us more isolated and intolerant.

One click and you’re history ~ how social media makes us more isolated and intolerant.

You know the drill.

Someone has hurt you. These days it’s just as likely to be someone on a social media network as it is to be someone in real life whom you see face to face. There’s a reason for this.

I love social media. There’s a better chance of finding your tribe than simple geography allows. There’s quite simply MILLIONS of people out there. You can refine your basic parameters and hey presto, instant social circle.

Except for one thing. Most of them will be hundreds if not thousands of miles away. You see them only by the words they write. Or by the statuses they post on Facebook. Or by their blogs. A few you progress to chatting with on messaging facilities. Even fewer, on Skype. Some you talk to on the phone. A very small number you end up meeting face to face. My goodness, but this is a wonderful feeling. I have had coffee with some chums, stayed with a few others, chinked glasses in cocktail bars with one or two, given city tours to others. It’s a good feeling.

But there is a downside. People are not cardboard cut-outs, acting out my fantasies (steady, the Buffs!) but real people with lives, thoughts, feelings of their own. They think, live and believe things that are quite different to the way I do. Sometimes I see what friends post on Facebook and Twitter and I recoil in shock. Truly. In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting atrocity, I saw things that made me shake. People I believe to be decent, good folks airing their views on gun ownership that were quite at odds with my own beliefs about guns. I saw fights break out over it.

Every time something powerful happens, I see the same thing. People fighting over their right to believe what they do, whether it’s in a political stance, a religious one or over music. It rapidly gets nasty, and what usually follows is a blazing row followed by a silence. The silence is usually because one or other of the parties involved has deleted or blocked the other.

In an instant, years of internet friendship is gone. Every Christmas present posted, every jovial exchange, every key moment shared in their mutual lives, all lost.

Don’t agree with my political stance? Deleted!

Dislike my religious faith? Unfollowed!

Hate my liking for cats and of posting pictures of kittens? Unfriended!

Object to sharing of youtube links? Blocked!

It’s too easy.

Imagine the person you have taken umbrage at is standing in front of you, helpless. You have a gun. You can put it to their head and without fear of consequence, you can pull the trigger, and that will be it. Would you do it? No, of course you wouldn’t. But in many cases, that’s what’s really in the minds of people when they remove another from their virtual life. Getting rid of a problem permanently and without mess or apparent consequence.

It diminishes all of us. It dismisses the very real value of learning to get on with people we don’t agree with all the time. It stops us learning to live and let live.

Each time a person cuts out someone they find they’re come to loggerheads with, something happens they don’t see. They lose the mirror others hold up to us and to our own behaviour and attitudes. We need others to disagree with us sometimes, because it helps us reassess our core values and beliefs. It stops us feeling as if we are paragons. Believe me, I hate anyone criticising me, having a pop at me for something. But like anyone else I need it. I need to see the other side of a story, the side I don’t want to see because it makes me uncomfortable and angry.

Someone had me hovering over the unfriend button because they were posting some pretty disturbing things about abortion, but I stopped. I spent time thinking about something that upsets me and it was good for me to do that. It reminded me of why I feel what I do about that subject but it also taught me that people always have reasons for their feelings. I’d dug a little deeper, just by reading their posts and comments, to see that there had been severe suffering that had brought them to this viewpoint. I felt compassion and I was able to step back and disagree, but allow him to hold his view as a valid one. That’s the key, you see:

You are not me and I am not you. You have been places I have not been and never will. I have done and seen things you have not. You have reasons for your beliefs and so do I. I may not agree with them but I would defend your right to hold them.

But the more a person hacks away at those who don’t quite fit their world view, the smaller their world becomes. Each time a layer of others is pruned away, the remainder become more and more closely scutinised for any signs of heresy.

I’d like to end by sharing some words by Anthony de Mello, from his book, The Song of the Bird:

The Old Woman’s Religion

A very religious-minded old woman was dissatisfied with all existing religions, so she founded one of her own.

One day a reporter who genuinely wanted to understand her point of view, said to her, “Do you really believe, as people say you do, that no one will go to heaven except you and your housemaid Mary?”

The old woman pondered the question and then replied, “Well, I’m not so sure of Mary.”

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The hot mess ~ or why damaged goods garner more interest

The hot mess ~ or why damaged goods garner more interest

When Jane Austen wrote that she was going to create a heroine for a novel whom nobody would much like but her, she showed a surprising lack of insight into human nature. That said, she never lived to see how wildly popular her novel Emma would become or how beloved its eponymous heroine was later to be. Within the confines of the story, Emma herself is a disaster area, meddling in the affairs of others and nearly costing them (and herself) lasting happiness. In strict contrast to her imperfections, her peer Jane Fairfax is held up by all and sundry as being the pinnacle of young womanhood, but Emma herself finds Jane distinctly boring and has never sought her out as a friend, despite being the same age. It’s only later, when circumstances show that Jane has a secret that Emma feels any sort of real interest in her.

I came across the term hot mess on Twitter, I think in relation to a photograph of actor Gabriel Byrne. The term basically means someone whose appearance is far from smart and well turned out but who somehow contrives to convey heavy duty sexiness. Think bed-hair and smudged eye make up, think Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow. But a hot mess goes far beyond mere animal sexuality and appeal; it links in with some very complex psychology.

I believe we have an inbuilt sense of proportion and beauty. The golden mean, that measure of perfection in proportions is quite deeply ingrained, though often unconscious. One house I lived in years ago had a very large living room. It seated twenty people quite comfortably. But sitting in there for any length of time made me uneasy. It took me a long time to figure out why; it was the proportions of the room. Despite it being a huge room, it had a disproportionately low ceiling that created a feeling of oppression. I ended up feeling squashed.

It’s the same with people. In physical terms we are drawn to symmetry and research has shown that the closer a face is to symmetrical the higher it rates in the beauty stakes. Yet perfection often repels. There is something god-like and untouchable about perfection. We end up confusing beauty with goodness.

Both beauty and goodness are hard to be around because they show up our imperfections. Drawn and repelled, we circulate, dipping in and out of orbit. There is no place for us to anchor ourselves alongside perfection; we cannot connect.

But the hot mess has something special. There IS beauty, and lots of it, but it’s a damaged kind of beauty. There may be room for us to stand alongside, without looking so conspicuously imperfect. There is perhaps room for us in their life, their mess. Just as we are drawn to admire perfection, we may also be drawn to try and create it. The hot mess just begs to be fixed.

I’m not merely talking about external physical appearance but also about the interior. People with problems, damaged souls, sometimes can be more compelling, singing that siren song of need. Many of us need to be needed and the more damaged a person seems to be, the more scope for us to be useful. It’s a heady mix, though, and you’re probably thinking already of relationships you’ve witnessed where this strange co-dependency has developed.

In literary terms, the hot mess is vital to a good story. Reading about someone whose life is perfect but which then unravels in spectacular fashion is enthralling; we live vicariously through their troubles. On the other end, a story where the main character starts out a mess and travels towards recovery, we find ourselves rooting for them to succeed. And yet, if they do succeed, do we lose interest? Some of the best novels I’ve read that address this are those by Susan Howatch; they take the reader on a rip-roaring journey where the main characters implode, explode, fall to pieces, and recover. But they never recover completely. There’s always a sense of there being a hiatus in the experience, of reaching a safe haven but only for the moment.

I wrote once “If life is a journey, then any short-cut is a death trap” (I was very amused and slightly humbled to find this quoted on Facebook by a stranger) and I have to stand by that. Recovery from the damage life does to us is only ever partial, and we become walking wounded. I think we become fascinated by the hot mess of literature because there is a sense of fellowship, of kinship with the characters whose lives are in ruins, internally or externally. They help us feel less alone when we are unable to show our damage to those around us for fear they will reject us as weak, imperfect and ugly.

Who is your favourite literary hot mess?

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Janus, the two faced god ~ looking backwards and forwards at the same time

Janus, the two faced god ~ looking backwards and forwards at the same time

Anyone who knows me even a little knows how interested I’ve always been in Roman culture; indeed, that love of all things Roman led to me doing a joint honours degree, one half English, one half Latin.

Janus is of course the Roman god who gives his name to our first month of the year, January, and while I don’t want to dwell too much on the past it’d be a good thing to have a quick look at what 2012 brought me. I’m also not one for resolutions but in the spirit of Janus, I would like to take a peep ahead too.

In many ways, the year was a maelstrom of changes and of seeming chaos. March-time my mental health broke finally and for some weeks I was incapacitated and unable to face leaving the house alone. The trigger for this was a trampled bunch of daffodils but the reasons, the causes so much deeper. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the darkness those poor flowers revealed. What I told my GP a day or two after the meltdown meant he made me an emergency appointment with the mental health support team. I’m not going in to much detail but I feel disappointed in the process. In theory moving house ought not to have made any difference, but in fact, relocating meant that I lost my place on a waiting list for some help, and had I chosen to go to my new GP to restart the process I would have been obliged to go back to the very beginning and restart the whole thing from scratch. I’ve chosen not to do so (yet) simply because at present none of the options I may be offered would actually be of any benefit to me.

I was resistant to the idea of returning to a parish, hostile even, yet there were clear signs along the way that it was the right thing. We moved here in September, and I’m still finding my feet. I’ve left my teaching job behind, as it’s too far to travel back when work comes in for the money offered. A new job has yet to materialise, though I’ve been looking. I even had a careers interview which was very helpful in identifying my key skills, and suggesting looking for work in mentoring. I can only hope that something comes along.

Writing-wise, this has been a year of surprises. I’ve put out two new books this year. The Wild Hunt came out in February on Kindle, and The Bet came out in late September. My two previous books, Strangers and Pilgrims and Away With The Fairies had been ticking over, selling both on Kindle and in paperback, but from May onwards, sales saw a steady then meteoric rise, and from May both started to appear on several of the best-sellers lists for Kindle. Strangers has been consistently in the top 100 for personal transformation and often also the top 100 for self-help/ spirituality. The highest it rose to was 8. Away With The Fairies nudged its head onto the top 100 for women’s literary fiction a few times since its release but from May it landed there and has stayed there ever since, getting as high as 14 a few times. The Wild Hunt has in the last 3 months begun to climb steadily, getting into the top 100 for fairy tales and myths, consistently, then slipping off again. The weekend I launched The Bet, it shot into the top 100 for psychological fiction, but it didn’t stay there. I believe it will start to rise soon, judging from the pattern of the other books. I don’t write this to boast but rather to encourage other writers who may read this blog that if a book seems to be dead in the water, things can and do change. Word of mouth from readers seems to be vital, and also patience. Money is tight for everyone, and any sensible reader will download a sample, take time to read it before deciding to buy. Sometimes the gap between sample and buying is many months. I know it is for me. I have been told by some who downloaded the sample of The Bet that by the time they’d finished that, they hit the buy button. Modesty aside, it really is that good. I’m intending to do a paperback copy of that and The Wild Hunt quite soon, but as I want to try Createspace instead of Lulu, it may take a little while.

Next year, I am hoping to start a few more projects. I said last year I wanted to put out a book of poetry and one of the most useful essays here, and some short story collections. Poetry is not a big seller but enough people have asked and I’d like to have paperbacks too. My biggest worry for this is getting the Table of Contents for the Kindle version right. I go blank even trying to figure out the process. Likewise for a book of essays. But I’d like to try. I’ve got a squad of themed shorts lined up for another short story collection.

But real writing, the way I’ve been unable to do, to tackle a long project of a new novel, that’s been on hold for over 18 months is something I really want to do. I had a plot arrive in my head a few weeks back and I’ve been making notes and letting it brew every since. I have 3 other works at various stages of completeness too, that need digging out and kick-starting. I think subconsciously I have been hesitating, for those 18 months (or even 2 years, now I think about it) because I knew at a deep level our life would be changing dramatically within a certain space of time. The friendship I lost last year was a factor too as I can see now it was inhibiting me, as was both my location, my job and various other things. I feel more like myself in this house; I have a lovely room at the back of the house and a view I find pleasant. I also have more time and mental space.

So next year, I will spend more time on writing than I have for many years, unless a full-time job comes along. I still have my travel job, but that is sporadic and I have long spells without work. I’ve beaten myself up continually for my inability to use my down time for writing, but I’m going to try and quell that tendency. Writing takes a great deal more time away from the page; there’s a good deal of thinking, pondering and dreaming involved, not to mention the less easy to describe process of fermentation that alchemically transforms dross into gold, without the conscious mind being able to follow the deep and very hidden journeys the pain of experience can take. I’ve long wondered how I could work through and heal through the ordeals and betrayals of the last few years, and it’s a slow process. Yet I think the time is approaching when I will be able to do this through writing, to cauterise wounds that still hurt and break open.

Wishes for next year? Many. The Bet on not just the Kindle best-sellers lists but once it’s up in paperback, to see it sell well there too. This is a book that I love deeply. It’s got two sequels, written already but just needing the same process of getting a cover etc. But the themes of the novel are deep, powerful ones; you can’t read it without being moved and also, inspired. The reviews in so far have confirmed my own feelings about the book; I’ve been touched and delighted by all the book reviews that have come this year. I’d like to see the others continue to grow and reach a wider audience, especially the USA. I sell few books there but I do not know why. I guess I’m a very English writer. I’d also like to get back into my stride of exploration of my imagination and actually feel creative again. There is so much bubbling away inside me; to learn how to channel it effectively again is a real challenge. I think a lot of my creativity got siphoned off by the teaching job. Now I need to focus on words, both poetry and stories again, not on finding ways of teaching English that is fun and effective.

Health-wise, there’s other things. I’ve realised that neither medication nor the ubiquitous CBT would be at all helpful for me, and potentially both are harmful. I’d like to find a soul-friend locally who has the experience and training to help me work through things, a kind of free-range psychotherapy that cuts both ways, so that neither participant is client. It’s something I talked about in abstract with the friend who I lost, but never found a context to explore it further. I have no idea how to go about this but it seems like an important idea I can’t let go of. My involvement in the Dandelions and Bad Hair Days project, a book about mental health, has taught me that there are many, many ways of living with mental distress and each person needs to find their own.

Anyway, I have rambled a great deal. Time to stop and just say:

May 2013 be for you a wonderful year that brings more joy than sorrow.

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The Journey Home Begins With ‘Sorry’ ~ on reconciliation and relationships

The journey home begins with “Sorry” ~ on reconciliation & relationships

I’m a great procrastinator when it comes to Christmas things. I object to anything remotely Christmas themed until at least advent and I’m seldom in the mood for festive frolics till mid month at the very soonest. This means that the majority of my preparations are crammed into seven to ten days. I count myself ahead if I have managed to get the tree up by the 20^th. The thing I procrastinate the most about is the cards and until this year I wasn’t sure why. Usually I finish them and think, why did I put it off so long?

This year, as we moved in the autumn I needed to do a round robin letter (never done one before) to give our new address and a brief resume of the year. I don’t mind other people’s round robins, even though there’s a general loathing of them that gets expressed through the media (and social media) and apart from one that began, brace yourselves I’ve got leukaemia and went downhill from there, they’re usually nice to read. So equipped with a sheaf of printed letters I opened my address book and found my reason for hesitation.

As I leafed slowly through, I realised it was full of people, not merely names and addresses and some of them were no longer in my life.

Some had passed away. Those made me sad, but I had good memories of them.

Some have drifted away. That’s normal. Not all friendships are forever; they have their moments, a shared experience, and they decline. You have good memories, a smile when you think of them and usually a card at Christmas. Sometimes those are rekindled, and it’s as if nothing has ever happened.

And some are sundered from me.

Not many. I’ve been lucky generally that I don’t make enemies. But in most of our lives there are people who hurt us. Those who can hurt us are generally those we let in, and trust, and care about. And in turn, we too hurt others. Either inadvertently, or deliberately.

I’ve seen a good deal of discussion lately via social media about cutting people out of lives, both from those at the hard end of the cut and those wielding the knife. There’s a school of thought that has it that we should remove from our lives anyone who is seen as being negative or not what we need/want. I’ve heard of people recently who have been told they are being ‘let go’ by friends. It’s horrible, frankly, doubly so at the Christmas season of goodwill. We do not really know what another person has been going through, and to judge someone else as negative and needing weeding out of your life is bad enough, but to tell them so in such terms… To me, that is needlessly cruel and desperately selfish. This year I had two people do it to me.

But when it comes to broken relationships, ones where the hurt still smarts, the last words echo in your memory, even years later, what of those? You may think, their loss. Imagine then you find one day they have died. If you find yourself thinking, I wish I’d…., then perhaps there’s unfinished business left.

Some there is no way back with. You have no idea where they are, or how to find them. These are ones you have to leave in the lap of the gods. I have a few of those,and for those I may have hurt or who have hurt me, I can say simply, “I am sorry. I wish you well in your journey. I am here if you want to talk,” and hope that somehow those words may carry on the wings of quiet hope. There is great, unseen power in such prayerful words. Someone hears them, even if we speak them silently.

But others, we look at their names and we think, they must hate us, they’d never let me back in. It doesn’t matter which side of the hurting you were on, there is fear in an approach, a fear that our overtures will be rejected, opening the wounds again. Perhaps this time of year is the safest. One may send a card, knowing that if they tear it up you will never know. But it may pave the way towards a little dialogue later, the proverbial olive branch.

I do not wish to live in conflict with anyone. I would make my peace with all, and offer my ‘Sorry’ as a hand towards any soul with whom I am not in harmony with. Sorry for my part, for every relationship breakdown has two sides(or more) and no party is completely innocent.

May your Christmas be filled with peace and harmony.

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Sunrise on the Solstice ~ the view from the Cave

Sunrise on the Solstice ~ the view from the Cave

The embers of the fire are barely visible as I crawl from my bed, eyes still gummed from sleep. Heat emanates from the fire-pit, but it’s lost its strength, and I’m aware I’m only just in time. The long night has chilled the cave to almost freezing, and the ashes in the fire-pit have scarcely any life left in them. I take a handful of finely split kindling, and I place a tiny piece on with great care, blowing softly to try and coax the dying fire back to flaming life. The cave is almost completely in darkness, only the reddish centre of the fire-pit gives any light. I banked up the fire before I settled to sleep, and before I lay down, I deliberately blew out the flame in the rough clay oil lamp that is usually left to burn all night. Only the fire was left, hidden under slabs of peat, an act of faith that it would stay alight through the longest night.

I blow, my face close to the warm ashes, but I can feel the heat dying away, and my heart sinks. If I cannot rekindle the fire, I may freeze to death. The fire is what keeps me alive, warms my body, cooks my food and scares away predators for whom a lone woman high in the mountains is a convenient meal otherwise.

I scoop the final whitened sticks that have some heat yet left in them, and scrape them together and lay more of the kindling onto the heap and blow. My breath raises ash, and I want to cough but I must keep blowing, steadily.

Just as I realise I cannot blow any more, the wood begins to glow read, then silently and softly explodes into flame. I cough, finally, and find I can breathe more easily now that the new wood is catching. I watch intently as the fire leaps from twig to twig, and at the right moment I begin to pile more on, bigger pieces steadily until the blaze is crackling away and I can sit back on my heels.

In the new light of the restored fire, I can see my own breath curling in the air in thick clouds. I am just in time, for the cave was becoming desperately cold. Beyond the cave entrance I can see the stars still, but they are fading and I know it is time. Dragging my warmest clothes around me, I pick up the cold lamp, and using a taper, I light it. The oil is animal fat, rendered until it is almost clear, and I have tried to mask the smell by adding pine resins.

Outside it is colder still. There’s a wide area beyond the cave mouth that is a half-moon of soft pale sand, but it’s lost under a layer of snow that crunches as I walk to the outside fire-pit. I have kept it mostly free of snow, digging it out, and a few days ago I dug out both snow and old ashes, and covered the area with pine branches lopped from trees near the path. There is a layer of snow on top of the deep green pine needles but I take care it does not fall into the circle of stones as I lift the branches away. Last night, before the final rays of sunlight were lost in the forest below, I laid a fire here, ready to light, and covered it again. I watched the light die in the sky, and felt my eyes become dark too.

The stars are going out as I watch. One by one they vanish until only the North Star is visible, her light fainter by the moment. At the point when the last star’s light is gone, I can see that the sky has become empty. The wind blows, edged with ice, and I glance at my oil lamp, set on one of the stones that surround the fire pit. The flame wavers but the wind does not extinguish it. The forest below is silent, except for the wind in the branches, and it is as if the whole cosmos is waiting. I can see an owl, waiting, perched on a branch high up, watching me but she is silent and still. Nothing moves.

My feet are becoming numb, encased in thick boots that keep the snow out but not all the cold, but I do not stamp them. Like the owl who keeps sentinel, I remain still and silent.

At the far eastern edge of the forest that spreads out below me seemingly without end, the sky has become paler. Pearlescent, with an icy pink glow, the horizon seems to warm, and the rose gives way seamlessly to deep red then orange, and as I take a deep breath, the very first rays of light beam across the frozen dark of the forest, and I kneel in the snow, touching the flame from the lamp to the kindling in the fire pit.

As the fire catches with a scent of pine and snow, the light reaches the semi-circle in front of my cave, and for a single moment, the flame of my fire and the flame of the newborn sun are one.

The sun stands still this day, and all else pivots upon it but I have lit my fire, against the long dark that is still to come. This day will endure and pass but all that come after it will be daily that tiny bit longer as the light grows and summer begins her journey back to the land. I go inside to tend my fire and to wait.

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