“If you’re going through Hell, keep going!” or Why Winston Churchill was Right.

 

“If you’re going through Hell, keep going” ~ or why Winston Churchill
was right

 

 

 

If life is a journey that begins with our birth, then the ultimate
destination is death. This is simple logic talking, picking apart a
somewhat overused metaphor and deconstructing it. I often wonder at the way the world is, and how blinkered we often are, how focussed on the outcome and not on the process, how determined to get where we’re going as fast as possible.

 

I’m guilty of it myself, on a regular basis, of wishing to get somewhere and skip the boring parts. And yet, as someone who travels for part of her living, I cover thousands of kilometres a year and very seldom get bored by the countless hours aboard a coach surrounded by other people getting bored and frustrated by the miles. For me, I have a rich inner life that stops me getting bored when all there is for hours is the side of the autoroute or motorway.

 

 

 

When it comes to the simple passage of life, it’s too easy to wish away the quiet hours, and rush along to better, more exciting things, and in doing so we can miss so many beautiful things because we don’t take the time to look. The sheer wonder of nature infiltrates every niche, like these swallows nesting undisturbed barely above eye-line at the Slipper Chapel in Walsingham.

 

They flew in and out and no one seemed to see them; I could have put my hand into the nests and scooped out eggs or hatchlings. Yet the birds seemed unconcerned, having learned that people generally didn’t even see what was in plain sight.

 

 

 

But it is in the dark times that we most need to keep going without
rushing through the process. Winston Churchill’s famous words seem
obvious, but there are a number of ways that people react to the dark
times. There are those who when plunged into darkness will stay
there, lost in a state of psychosis and shock. This might be for the
rest of their lives, and for these souls, medical care is still in
its infancy. Thankfully, relatively few people end up lost in this
state.  

 

 

 

Giving up and settling for the cold comfort of believing that this is all
there is to life may be another reaction. When people react like
this, it’s often at the stage where they were very close to emerging
on the other side, and are occupying those grey hinterlands of hell,
that one might term limbo. They’ve been trudging along for such a
long while that the relief at things suddenly not being quite so bad
convinces them that they are through and free. From being in total
darkness, they’re in a monochrome world that seems sparkling with
light by comparison to what they have emerged from. I think that
Churchill’s words are at their most powerful for people like these,
who do not realise that they are still in their own hell.

 

 

 

If you are taking one of these enforced subterranean journeys, then I
have a little advice. Do not rush headlong, in your desire to emerge
into a lighter place, because in your ascent you will find places
that appear to be beyond the darkness. Like great caverns lit by
eerie phosphorescence, these are places where you can take rest and
refreshment and give you time to think. They are way-stations on the
way home, but they are not home itself. These are places where you
may re-equip yourself with torches to light your way and other things
that may ease your journey. You may meet people here who have wisdom to share with you, who may wish to hear your story. But these are not places to stay and live. They are places between the worlds and the nourishment they provide is both limited and limiting. Use these times to reorientate yourself, but do not fool yourself into thinking you are home safe. You are not. There’s a long way to go. You may come to these places and stages many times before you come out into the true daylight again.

 

 

 

If life is a journey, then any short-cut is a death-trap. It might be
literal death, or it might be that drawn-out metaphorical death of
the spirit I have spoken of before, but bypassing and cheating your
own journey will only ever ensure you spend far longer in the dark
places than you might otherwise have done. If you’re going through
hell, you might wish to go back, to a better time or place, but this
will ultimately just take you deeper into that hell.

 

On this one, I am with Winston: “If you’re going through hell, keep
going.” 

 

Beachcomber ~ a poem about inspiration

Beachcomber

The
shores of sleep last night

Were not of soft white sand,

Strewn with intriguing driftwood,

Magical wave-smoothed rocks

And shining wine-coloured weed

Cast up from the deep.

No. The shores of sleep last night

Were strewn for miles

With the wrecks of dreams,

The hulks of hope

And fragments of fantasies,

Lying like beached and decaying whales.

Some looked whole and entire

Till I peered through portholes

And found them empty, no more than shells.

I would be a beachcomber,

Gathering material for my work

As I patrol this shoreline,

But I cannot work with this.

I will wait till the next storm

Washes the strand clean

Of cast-up wreckage

And leaves me with the flotsam

I can fashion and transform.

 

A Tale of a Midsummer Bee ~ Balancing the Needs of the One with the Needs of the Many

A
Tale of a Midsummer Bee ~ Balancing the Needs of the One with the
Needs of the Many

As regular readers will know, I am the proud keeper of four hives of
honey bees. I studied bee-keeping at school;  because I refused to do
needlework or cookery and wanted to do woodwork or metalwork, the school compromised and allowed me to do rural science instead. That afternoon lesson was the saviour of my third year at high school,
because I could enjoy doing something practical, and I loved working
with the bees. My husband does a lot more with the bees, being more
confident than I, but usually our weekly bee inspection is split
between the two of us. One smokes while the other inspects frames and then we swap over.

This week we did our usual routine, and this morning, on the stairs I
spotted a stowaway. One of the bees had come home with us. Now, our hives are over three miles away and clearly this was one tired and
disorientated bee. I put her in a jar with a blob of honey and left
her to feed. When I came back, she’d nearly drowned in the honey so I had to rescue her with a pen she clung to. Some hours later, she’d
cleaned all the honey off herself and was ready to go home. I put her
in my water bottle with the cap on loosely so air could get in and
she’s gone off with my husband to be dropped off at the farm on his
way somewhere else.

Now I can hear what some of you are saying. All that fuss for one bloody bee? I know. Every time we open a hive for inspection we kill a few bees no matter how careful we are; a hive at full strength has over fifty thousand bees in various stages of their bee careers, and there are casualties all the time. We even managed to kill one queen, so some of yesterday’s work was reducing the thirty or so queen cells
the bees had produced down to one good one so we didn’t end up with lots of new queens each flying off with a retinue, taking our hive
down to nothing. It hurt me to destroy those half made queens but for the sake of keeping a healthy colony thriving, it had to be done.

Bees are the ultimate social creature; theirs is an almost perfect
society. Each worker is born knowing what to do; the first thing they
do when they hatch is clean out their cell so it is ready for the
queen to lay another egg in. They go through various stages as they
live, starting out working in the nurseries first, tending to eggs
and grubs, then making wax and building cells, then finally going out
to forage for nectar and pollen. A worker bee in her days as a
forager might make a scant teaspoonful of honey. One bee makes little or no difference; it’s the sheer numbers that make them successful. A solitary honey bee is a lonely thing; she is lost without her sisters and her function. The chances are they will not even notice her missing. And yet, I grieve for every bee I accidentally kill, for
those that have stung me and will therefore die (fact: human skin is
the only skin that bees cannot withdraw their sting from. Bears and
badgers can be stung repeatedly without ill effect to the bees;
humans cause the stinger to die, ripped more or less in half)

There are approximately seven billion human beings on this planet. Seven billion individuals. It’s an astonishing figure. Imagine: that many people all with needs and wants and thoughts and feelings and dreams. Some are starving to death, others dying of diseases caused by excess. Each and every one has the same value as another, and yet, when tens of thousands die half way across the world, we cannot
comprehend it. It takes a single human interest story to engage us;
we cannot relate to thousands, or even hundreds. We can barely relate one-to-one.

The gift of that single bee I found on my stairs is to remind me that
each is precious and worth saving, and that if I make no effort at
all with one, I cannot hope to care for thousands. It might make me a
slow bee-keeper, unfocussed on harvesting the golden glory of the
bee-people’s hard labour, but I think it might make me a better human being.  

 

Monday Meditation ~ Linden Blossom for Lightness of Heart and Ease of the Soul

Linden Blossom Meditation ~ for Lightness of Heart and Ease of The Soul

Background

Linden trees (also known confusingly as lime trees despite not being a
citrus) are among some of the longer lived native trees, some
rivalling yews in reaching vast ages. There are two main species to
be encountered in the UK, one of which has been extensively planted
as an avenue tree as it grows relatively fast and is tall and very
straight. They’re also one of my personal favourite trees.

Linden blossom is one of the most lovely scents of early summer, blooming from mid June to early July; the flowers produce vast amounts of nectar and the honey made by bees foraging in an area where linden grows is exquisite.

The wood itself is a favourite of woodcarvers, being close grained and
light in colour and the bark has also been used to produce cloth. The
fresh leaves have been used in baths to calm feverish children.

But it is the flowers that have the most pleasing uses. A tea made with linden blossom is light and delicate and can help with insomnia, and with nervous tension. An essential oil is also produced so that the
heavenly scent is available all year round and though this is
expensive, it is also available at a reasonable price diluted in
coconut oil or similar

For this meditation I suggest you use either some fresh flowers if they
are available, a drop of the essential oil, or a cup of freshly
brewed linden blossom tea.  

Go through your usual grounding and centring techniques and when you are ready, take a breath of the scent and hold it in your mind. Let the scent fill your thoughts and feelings and when you are sure you have the scent, you may begin.

 

Meditation

You are standing at the end of a long avenue of lime trees that stand
like columns of emerald green, shimmering as the soft summer breeze shakes the leaves. With the breeze comes the fragrance of the
flowers, light and very sweet without being heavy or sickly. It’s a
warm day but as you look around you can see that clouds have come
over and you feel the first drops of rain falling on your arm. The
ground beneath your feet is somewhat cracked as if this is the first
rain in a long while and the grass under the trees is going yellow
from dryness.

Start to walk along the avenue, but take it slowly. The rain is soft and
refreshing and seems to bring out the heavenly scent even more
beautifully. There are birds singing, and the whole place seems to be
quiet and deserted. The avenue is long and you are enclosed by the
towering trees so that you are walking in a lovely filtered green
light, a little like being under the sea. The sensation of being
bathed in green is relaxing and you feel tensions slip away as you
walk and breathe in the delightful aroma of linden flowers.

When you get to the end of the avenue the trees open out and form a circle; the clearing in the middle of this circle contains a small
building. It’s a little summer house, painted white and it has open
sides so that you can sit inside it and be sheltered from the rain.
All around the summer house are planted shrubs and plants which have large leaves, some like great hands of greenery. You notice as you cross the space between the avenue and the summer house that the rain has become heavy and almost torrential so you run a little so that you get to the wide shallow steps of the building and under the
protection of the roof.

Inside there are refreshments laid out for you to enjoy and a wickerwork sofa covered with soft cushions is very inviting. It feels like a very special sort of sanctuary, and someone has spent time choosing things that will appeal to you and you alone. The refreshments are covered with a crisp white linen cloth and if you wish to you can go and see what is there for you.

When you have made your selection and eaten and drunk what you have chosen come and sit down on the sofa. It feels perfectly comfortable, soft but supportive and as you lean back or curl up, the warm wind brings with it  moist air laden with the scent of the linden flowers. The rain is drumming a steady rhythm on the roof, and the music it makes as it falls onto the leaves of the plants is so soothing that you let yourself fall into a reverie or a daydream. You are in a loving place, a space where everything is meant for you and is therefore the safest place in the world. Allow your mind to wander and follow dreams and visions, while you sit in this little sanctuary and enjoy the sound of the summer rain and the scents from the trees outside.

*

It’s time to leave now. The rain has stopped and there is brilliant
sunshine warming the flowers and coaxing more scent out; bees are
starting to return and begin their foraging among the linden
blossoms. The avenue as you walk down it seems to hum with life and with renewed energy and inner strength. You feel renewed and blessed yourself and as you return to the start of the avenue, let yourself remember any of those daydreams and visions. Some of them may be things you may want to do in real life.

You’ve come back to where you started now. Allow the sense of peace and renewal remain with you as you return. The lightness of heart and soul will stay with you but you can always return another time if you need to.

Make sure that you ground yourself fully before resuming normal activitiy.

Written as a part of the Meditating with Aromatics interactive project.

Anomaly ~ a novel of resilience and self acceptance by Thea Atkinson

Anomaly – a novel of resilience and self acceptance by Thea Atkinson

My first port of call on my voyage of discovery in the world of
Independent authors was Anomaly, and I was intrigued enough to
download the sample. That’s the beauty of the Kindle system; you can get a fair chunk to read for free and then decide if you want to buy the whole book.

I read through the sample at a fair pace and was hooked enough to make my very first Kindle purchase. The next afternoon I had free, I
curled up in bed and read the whole lot, a guilty pleasure like a
massive tub of ice cream.

Essentially it’s a simple enough story if you boiled it down to mere plot, but that could also be said for a lot of world renowned literature. The power of this book is the characters and especially J, the narrator
and in my opinion, the hero of the story. J might take issue at this
but this rather depends on what gender J is at the time.  You see the
central character isn’t really sure of his own gender, and that’s
what makes this book so breathtaking. We’re not talking about gender reassignment or anything quite so…well, crude.

  Anomaly examines in a very thought provoking way what gender actually is. Is it what genitalia we are assigned, our chromosomes or how we think. Or is it how society depicts what makes someone male or female? It brought home to me quite how loosely many people are fixed into their gender. It’s something I’d thought about quite often and how society demands that somehow we make up our minds and stick with our decision(or that which birth landed us with)

  J can’t make up his mind. In fact, I think it’s not about making a
decision at all, but about something that shifts on a regular basis
and has done since childhood. He has suffered for it, dreadfully and
the events of the novel force him to revisit his own demons and fight
them again, but this time while trying to help both his friend and a
neighbour fight the same family of problems.

  At the end of the novel I was left with a sense of increased compassion and understanding for J and also for myself. The narration flows smoothly, the voice of J is discursive and sometimes evasive as though he’s aware that people want to know more and is making them wait. I spent quite a lot of time wanting to know what gender he actually is, but that is intentional, and I found it nicely unsettling. His inner voice, the one we are listening to changes, veering from masculine to feminine and back again but often settling somewhere in the middle in a way that I found familiar of my own thought patterns at times.

  This is such an original novel, I cannot imagine how a traditional
publisher would have taken a risk on it. If they had, I feel sure
that the heavy hand of an editor would have slashed away much that
was raw and real in a bid to make it more palatable for the mythical
reader they are catering for. It also defies genre stereotyping. I
have no idea where you’d place such a book in a bookshop.
Psychological thriller? Nope. Chick-lit? Nope. I don’t think a comfy
slot exists for a book like this, which, given the book that it is,
is oddly comforting in itself.

  I’ve begged Thea to write more about J’s journey and she assures me it will happen. Sometimes a character really gets under your skin and J did that to me. Give it a go, and see if he grabs you the way he did me.    

The Dark Side of the Moon ~ the Pull of Darkness

Tonight in the UK is a total eclipse of the moon, starting around half past six in the evening.

I find this sort of event challenging because it makes me think that for every good bright thing there is not only a shadow but a dark side.

The dark side of love is hate; the shadow side of either is indifference. Dark is not automatically to be equated with evil but fairly often it is not only portrayed as such but does actually represent what someone like me would see as evil.

But even as the world turns, so too does the balance between light and dark, and kept in equal measures, we can live as complete beings. However, when the tug towards the dark becomes overwhelming that balance becomes uneven and we make poor decisions that hurt others and ourselves. When someone harms us, our first instinct is to strike back and take revenge; it is seldom to forgive and to try to understand.

I’ve been finding the pull to the dark overwhelming lately, and tonight I hope to sit through the eclipse and watch as the moon passes through blood red shadows and back into the light and as she does so, I want to trace my own journey through the dark and back into the light.

Dark is not always evil, but dark is always…..dark.

Pray for me.

Disneyland, Cowboys and Let’s Pretend ~ Is Suspension of Disbelief the Secret to a Happy Life?

Disneyland, Cowboys and Let’s pretend ~ Is suspension of disbelief the secret to a happy life?

 

My first experience of a depressive episode came when I was about six years old. By that point I’d been in full time school for about six
months and was already finding it a baffling experience. There was
way too much messing around and not enough learning for my liking.
Back in the seventies, before any of this National Curriculum
rubbish, teachers got to decide what they were going to teach their
classes and how. I went to school eager to learn to read and write
and all that and within a week was hopelessly disappointed at the
grinding slowness of it all. I even realised that I could actually
already read a bit.

 

The crisis came with P.E. In those dim and distant days infant schools
usually made you do P.E in your vest and pants and that was trial
enough for a shy kid like me. Balance beams and hula hoops were
endurable but one day the teacher told us she wanted us all to
pretend to be cowboys twirling our lassos. I stood for a second, not
quite able to believe it and watched as my class erupted into action.
They galloped hither and yon, waving arms with invisible ropes and
whooping with delight. I continued to stand there, baffled. I
couldn’t do it. I looked on in utter bewilderment. It defied any sort
of logic or narrative; cowboys do not go round wearing vests and
pants from the Co-op, nor do they try and twirl like that, and
if you tried that on a real horse, you’d be on the ground in
seconds…..You’d surely never have twenty eight trainee cowboys
running round together unless this was a special training session.
And we were too close, the ropes would have had someone’s eye out by now….

 

“Come along Vivienne, you must join in!” said the teacher brightly, not realising that this set the precedent for my lifelong opposition to
“joining in”.

Something in my juvenile psyche fizzed and banged in a wholly ominous way and being five and a half, the inevitable happened. The tears started and wouldn’t stop. I think I cried most of the day after that.

 

Fast forward to 2008 and a shamanic dreaming workshop I foolishly attended and standing in the middle of a field with 12 other women and the leader(who will remain nameless) I watched as they all “took on the attributes of their power animal” and after watching for a minute, walked off without a word to pack my bags and catch the train home.

Fast forward to 2010 and Disneyland, Paris, and seeing hundreds of people, adults even, getting excited because people dressed in costumes were coming past them on a float, waving and wearing fixed and weary smiles. “I met Mickey Mouse!” breathed one woman with ecstatic joy in her eyes. I smiled and didn’t say, “No, you met some underpaid French student dressed in a Mickey Mouse suit.” That day was only made bearable by the company of the two teachers and some of the students I spent time with. It was actually painful. Everything was fake and almost everyone was happy to accept it for that day as real. Like an atheist among believers, I felt isolated and ill at ease.

 

During my childhood I played lots of let’s pretend games but within those games there had to be a certain structure of reality. Yes, a felled tree could be our spaceship but you couldn’t just jump out of it; you had to exit via the airlock. Yes, my paper boat could be a ship going down the Amazon, but the dolls piloting it couldn’t carry it over
waterfalls because it would be too heavy. The internal world of let’s
pretend had to follow certain patterns of logic and reason; if I was
being a boy in the game, I had to wear boyish clothes and so on.

 

I find it almost impossible to believe even for a minute in things I
know are fake, like Disneyland. It ruins any enjoyment I might get
because it grates on raw nerves, and makes me suspicious of what else they might be trying to fool me with. I’m the same with a lot of New Age matters, even though I know enough to realise not all of it is quackery and snake oil and that some is utterly genuine and helpful.
The shamanic dreaming workshop upset me badly because not only did it throw me back to that episode at five years old, but because I was unable to get past it. All I could see were grown women behaving like pre-schoolers and a leader who seemed to take more delight it it than I felt was healthy. I felt threatened by it, as if by giving in and suspending my disbelief I was somehow in serious danger. It may sound an exaggeration but at the time all I could feel was a whirlpool pulling, drawing me into a different dimension. Nobody stopped me leaving, or seemed to care much that I was upset; the leader did try to persuade me to stay and when I explained my reasons he refused to accept my point of view. I’ve never dared go on anything like that since then.

 

But observation of people who can seem to get “into the spirit of the
thing” whether for Disney or whatever has shown me something that
disturbs me more. They tend to be people who are happy. They tend to not agonise over things the way people like me do.

 

I asked one friend why she liked Disneyland so much and her response was, “I love it because I can be a child again.”

 

It’s made me wonder if I ever was a child at all. 

Setting Sail For New Seas ~ Exploring The Uncharted Territories

Setting sails for new seas ~ exploring the uncharted territories

In my Twitter bio I set out to sum myself up in as few words as possible and managed to get it down to only four: Writer, Poet, Explorer, Mystic. To some degree all of these are slightly tongue in cheek but the one that needs most explanation is Explorer.

The word conjures up an image of a man in a pith helmet, wielding a machete and followed by native(of where ever) guides bearing parcels on their heads or on poles. Or possibly Ray Mears. It certainly
doesn’t conjure up a slightly overweight, forty-something English
teacher with slight tendencies to agoraphobia and a big problem with
depression and anxiety. To be an explorer requires courage, curiosity
and a fair measure of recklessness. People in real life would say the
only one of the three I have in abundance is curiosity. I’m one of
life’s natural wimps. I don’t even like travelling. But as fate(ha!)
would have it, I’ve ended up in not one but two jobs that require me
to travel. For the non teaching job I often travel to places I’ve
never been before, and show other people around. I discovered (to my surprise) I have a good sense of direction, and if you drop me in a foreign town I can usually find my way round quite quickly.

That’s not to say that going somewhere totally new doesn’t fill me with sudden and almost paralysing dread; it does. But I get through that. Preparation is the key, not to mention dear old Google.

But that’s just one aspect of exploration. These days, exploration of the physical world is a tame thing, filled with Rough Guides and blogs.
There aren’t many people who hack through unknown jungles to get to lost tribes; the lost tribes are usually wearing Reboks by the time
you get there. The physical world has shrunk; exploration is not the
same. Good job I was never aiming to be a real explorer; I’d be
weeping for more worlds to conquer by now.

Research has shown that our tastes in music, food, experiences have fossilised before the age of around thirty. It explains why parents seldom like their children’s music. We stick to what we know, what we’ve already tried, in so many things. But me, I’d got bored of books. Really, really bored.

Anyone who has ever visited my home will be shocked at that because apart from dust and cat fluff, books is what I have the very most of. Every available wall is covered with bookshelves, often double parked. The only rooms without permanent books are the bathroom and kitchen and then only for obvious practical reasons. I love books. I love everything about them (but the need to dust occasionally). So people were a bit surprised when I asked for a Kindle for my birthday. I was a bit surprised by it myself, to be honest. After three months, I am convinced it was an excellent move.

Let me tell you why.

I’d stopped buying books.

Yes, this book lover had been walking into bookshops that ten years ago I’d have come out of laden with books. For the last few years, it had become a rare event that I bought books. Or even borrowed them. Don’t get me wrong, I bought a few. And was almost universally disappointed.

Books had stopped thrilling me, surprising and delighting me. They gave me a sense of ennui beyond mere boredom. I was actually sick of them.The Kindle has changed all that.

One of the things I noticed quickly was that the books by my previously favourite authors were still often almost as expensive as the hard copies. There is no reason why this should be so. An e-book costs virtually nothing to distribute. As an independent author myself I have opinions about the whole sea-change in the publishing world, but basically the e-book means that authors can now reach readers without the intervening publisher getting in the way. They’re not subject to anyone saying “You can’t do that,” or “That doesn’t sell” or
“That’s not what readers want.” I had a novel rejected almost at
the last stage because the editor felt that there needed to be
payback for the baddies(I simplify) for what they did to the heroine.
I disagreed. Real life  rarely provides neat solutions and
resolutions; closure is seldom forthcoming.  Mark Twain once said
that truth is stranger than fiction and he was so right. Real life is
so strange and unpredictable and the fiction I’d been reading was
just that: predictable. It had become formulaic, to the point that
even if I didn’t guess the ending, I knew all the stages. It followed
the fads and fashions of the literary world to such an extent that
even reading the blurb was making me nauseous.

Where oh where was originality and daring? Where was risk-taking and being controversial? I’m not talking about the now-endless books about child abuse and rape. I’m talking about simply letting a story take you where it wants to go, not where the dictates of literary mores would have it go. I’m talking about Story as a living, breathing
symbiont of the writer, where templates, character outlines plot
conventions and other cookie cutters are instruments of vivisection
and torture.

Welcome to the world of the independents. Welcome to a whole new universe of possibilities. Sure, some will be rubbish. But so is James Patterson.

I’m going to be reviewing books I discover, and sharing my favourites. By and large they won’t be about already famous authors (except in a few cases) even though in terms of blog hits, those would bring me many. My post about Susan Howatch is my highest hitting post of all time. No, that’s not what this blog is about. I want to showcase those brilliant and brave authors who don’t have a Juggernaut of a publishing house behind them, or a phalanx of marketing experts whispering advice at every turn.

So coming soon(in no particular order of merit) will be:

“Anomaly” by Thea Atkinson (the very first book on Kindle I actually paid for, having got hooked by the sample.)

“The Butchered Man” by Harriet Smart

“The Company of Fellows” by Dan Holloway

Those are just my starters. If you have an suggestions for must-read
indies, please let me know. Being semi-fossilised already, I really
REALLY dislike romance, not keen on fantasy(though I have
enjoyed some) and classic chick-lit (of the shopping, shoes and sex
variety) generally has me reaching for the razor blades.

Anyway, I hope you will set sail for new seas and start exploring a strange new world of literature that didn’t exist even a few years ago. This kind of exploring doesn’t involve insect repellent, native guides or
Montezuma’s revenge (or Delhi belly even) but it has a risk all of
its own that you might not like:

It may open your mind.        

Like a Tree in November ~ stripping the soul bare

Like a Tree in November

 

One by one I will let my leaves fall

All those things that hide my true being:

The words, the smiles, the clothes

Those outward things even I think are me.

Each one detached and falling

Slowly like petals from the cherry tree,

Surrounding my feet, shifting in the breeze

Before settling to begin the slow transition

To mulch and worm food and raw earth.

Then I shall stand naked, stripped bare

Like a tree after November gales.

You will see my true shape unmasked

By pretty colours and shifting shapes

And the confusion of shimmering sunshine.

Then we will see who I might be,

Beneath this coat of many colours

These tales of a thousand nights

And my Scheherazade soul

Who would spin out yet another story

To keep you entertained and distracted

From the true business of staying alive,

Will be faced with the final question:

Who am I?

Monday Meditation ~ Jasmine, for sensuality and relaxation

Jasmine Meditation

You are standing in front of an archway set in a long high wall of mellow old bricks. The archway frames a gate of heavy but plain wood, standing a little ajar, inviting you to investigate. It is twilight and the sky is starting to darken and as the sun slowly sets the sky changes  colour steadily. Shades of rose pink, apricot and gold at the horizon deepen and then turn seamlessly to indigo. Birds are singing their evening songs and the air is full of the remnants of the day’s heat.

Push the gate open and step through.

You find yourself in a courtyard surrounded by high walls and filled with an atmosphere of peace and privacy. This is not overlooked by
anything and you feel safe and secure here. The courtyard is laid out
as a formal garden, in a somewhat Arabic style. At the centre is a
rectangular pool, lined with tiles of cobalt and midnight blue
decorated with geometric patterns in vivid colours that resemble
flowers. A simple fountain plays in the middle of the pool and the
falling water shimmers in the fading light, glowing brightly as the
last rays of the setting sun catch the droplets and make them light
up like molten gold.

The air is still warm from a day of sunshine but standing near the
fountain brings a pleasing coolness and freshness. The sound of the
water is gentle and musical and is a perfect counterpoint to the
birdsong.

The courtyard is filled with ornamental tubs planted densely with shrubs of varying sorts- bays rub shoulders with olive trees, and the
glossy leaves of citruses contrast with the silver-grey furry leaves
of lavenders. The walls are painted white and close to each wall is a
neat flowerbed each with a climbing plant trained up a trellis.
Tendrils of greenery reach down and brush your head as you walk
slowly round the little garden. Here and there a small candle burns
in a jar, flickering and dancing in the still air.

As you move you notice that the sky has passed through its sequence of colours and is now changing to deep midnight blue. A few stars are
now appearing and you see that the flowers on the climbers are tiny
white stars too, opening as the night begins and surrounding you with
their scent. The flowers are mostly pure clean white, slightly waxy
in appearance, their unopened buds pinkish, but some are a deep
crimson colour too. Whatever the colour the perfume that emerges is
sweet and heady and intoxicating. It comes in waves of intensity,
almost too powerful to enjoy, but fades away just at the point where
it might be unpleasant. The scent fills you with a sense of joy and a
longing you find hard to quantify.

At the far end of the garden directly opposite the gate where you came in is a white painted table and matching chairs, the ironwork complex and oriental in design. They are positioned so you can experience the full glory of this garden with its sights and sounds but most especially the scents.

Go and sit down.

In the middle of the table is a white porcelain teapot and two small
cups. A wisp of steam emerges from the teapot and if you lift the lid
you will see that it contains jasmine tea. If you wish, pour out two
cupfuls. Inhale the mingled fragrance of the tea and the jasmine.
Take a sip. Enjoy the taste as well as the fragrance.

If you wish, you may summon anyone you would like to share this moment with, sitting in this tranquil evening garden, the air filled with
the aroma of jasmine and the music of birds and falling water from
the fountain. Think who you would like to be here with you and as the idea forms in your mind, see the gate swinging open and watch them coming to join you. I will leave you in peace now to enjoy your time here.

The moon is rising, a sliver of silver in the starry sky and the air is
feeling cooler. Your visitor has left and the teapot is empty and so
are your cups. You feel peaceful and happy after your time here, and
a sense of joy still tingles in your blood. As you get to your feet
to leave, look round the courtyard one last time. It will be here
again exactly as you wish it to be next time you come. When you step
through the gate into your room again, notice that the scent of
jasmine, faint but resilient, clings to your hair and clothes.
Whenever you smell this fragrance again, you will recall the feelings
of peace and joy you felt in the garden.

Breathe deeply and fully several times before opening your eyes again. You are back.  

         Written as part of the Meditating with Aromatics project