The Secret Garden

Taking responsibility

"We seem to be taking the arduous route over the mountain carrying two suitcases and a watermelon rather than flying on the wings of eagles. As another ancient sage once said, "The pathway is smooth. Why throw rocks before you?" ~ Susan Jeffers

My subconscious does not understand metaphor. In order to get this message through my inch-thick skull I had to live it. Up and down the mountain I went with a rucksack on my back, and gallon containers of water in each hand. Up and down, up and down in the blazing sun until my knees screamed and I broke down in tears.

Now, three weeks later the penny drops when I read this quote in Feel The Fear... And Do It Anyway. How did she know I was on a mountain? Not with two suitcases and a watermelon, rather two containers of water and a backpack?

My pathway in life is smooth. It is me who throws rocks before myself. I need to take responsibility for the problems in my life which are mine, and give back responsibility for the ones that are not. Throwing the rocks back one by one until I can see my way forward.

Live everything (even if it hurts)

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

That's a brave intention. To live everything. To embrace each waking moment with open arms and take it to the chest regardless of the daggers hidden within. To bleed joyfully for the thrill of living.

Can I do that? Can I go to that uncomfortable place and make it my home? I am living so many questions. Even now, after five months of uncertainty I am still in limbo.

I have been looking back through this blog. It holds many surprises for me. Some joys, mostly painful growth. My life has been laid bare before me these last three years and I have been blind to see it. It has taken a Vision Quest to see what was right before my nose all this time. Even as I stepped out into the void I was blind to the hurt I feel.

I feel it now.

I feel my mother's words as they cut through me. I feel the rawness of my grief for my grandmother, and I cry when I finally allow myself to read my words about her death: "I can be true to myself, and fearless, even in the face of crushing defeat."

The only thing I cannot feel is the pain of a lost love. That wound cuts too deep.

Never give up

I dared to hope. And I hope yet. For life, for love. For joy. Brigid walks with me through these dark times. Her small yet constant light a beacon to help me find my way.


In that dark lonesome place
between a dream dreamed
and a dream realized,

I have left a little light for you
so you will know that someone cares
and believes in your dream.

Just where it becomes the most dark
and difficult to find your way,
there is the light I left for you.

It will light your way,
through the doubt, the confusion,
and the fears,

It will stay with you
all the way to the realization
of your dream.

And when your dream has come true,
please go back to that darkest place
where you have been,

And set the little light there to give heart
to the next sweet soul that braves the path
to his or her dreams.

Dreamers are the architects of greatness.
There wisdom lies within their souls.
Dream long enough and hard enough
and your dream can be attained.

Anon.

How does my garden grow?

I've been holding off writing this post. I wanted to avoid sliding into my navel, and the urge to type now is just too great. I have 4 1/2 hours of tense waiting time to fill and no energy for work, nor inclination to go outside in the rain to walk off my nervous energy.

Lovely Venus goes direct today, in the sign of her exaltation. This by all rights should be a day of celebration. Fading fast are the last 6 weeks of love strife. My emotional garden as well as my actual garden should be blooming, and yet there are storm clouds gathering on both horizons.

I am April showers. My mood swings from upbeat and optimistic one minute, to gloomy and overcast the next. I know the best way to nurture the seedlings trying to push their way up out of the soil in my soul is to tenderly shine down on them, to sprinkle them with soft water. And my hands are all thumbs.

I have read all the books, done all the inner work. My heart is as light as a feather. Now I look on with concern as my hours and days of hard work could all be ruined in a moment. I'm scouring the skies for an omen. I dare to hope.

Change the energy

Life is pretty shit right now. No, make that VERY shit right now.

I'm on such a downward tip that even the slightest upward motion feels immense. I was overjoyed last night when Bex gave me some alpaca fibre and silks, and a set of amethyst runes. Really. Overjoyed. There's so little that is good in my life at the moment that I felt real joy that someone out there cares.

It all started at Yule, and I won't go into details, but so far 2009 has had nothing to offer me except those silks. There's been learning and "life experiences" sure, but none of them comfortable and none of them asked for. There's been no yin to balance the yang, when silk as light as a feather can outweigh lead.

That's the great pity of it. A kind word, spoken from the heart and as light as a feather is enough to make the balance creak and the leaden weight of my soul take flight, but all I get is recriminations. Life shows me a cold, hard mirror.

Why give an inch, it says, when I can take a mile. Come on, I know you have one mile left in you and I want it.

But what is waiting for me at the end of that mile? An inch? A wan smile? It's not enough. So what can I do? I can change. I can change my energy. I can transform myself and take that leaden soul and make it a butterfly.

I hope the crysalis allows space for my heart.

Fire in the belly

Welcome to 2009, come in and sit down. The briars have grown up and the path is weedy, but there is still a seat for you by the hearth. You don't mind if I spin while we talk, do you?

It has been almost half a year since my last meaningful post here. I think I had forgotten that I had this space. Oh not the actual space, since I've tweaked and twiddled here and there, but the intellectual space. I'll probably be criticised for using the term "intellectual" - far too cerebral, far too "right-brain" - but I defend it. It is who I am, and if I can't be who I am then I am nothing.

I see the world as a child sees it, and like a child I categorise every new thing I come across. I see things with the same awe and wonder as a child sees them, and I struggle to maintain that childlike quality in my daily life. Without childish wonder there can be no liminality, no enchantment in the world.

I think the malaise that has crept in over the last six months hasn't been due to any particular change in my overall outlook; more in my interaction with the day to day. Life had become arid and dry. My creative juices had dried up. I was suffocating.

I never did come to terms with being in Air - those lofty heights never appealed. Like a fish out of water I gasped and flopped about and became dizzy with the lack of oxygen to the brain. The lack of oxygen to feed the fires that burn deep within me. They almost went out.

Almost.

To say that I have felt the shift into Fire as palpable is to understate it. I have felt consumed by it. Burned up in it and set aflame! I have passion and vigour - I want to go out and see the world and be part of it. I have a spiritual life again! I have always considered myself to be a fiery person - Saggitarius rising, Fire Snake, wearer of my "Trademark" red. Full of piss and vinegar and too opinionated to make an easy wife. But where did that spark go?

A telemarketer in India suggested I take ginger. I'm taking ginger, lemon, basil, I've washed every red item of clothing I possess and I've lit a dozen candles round my bed. I'm feverish, choleric, hot blooded.

I am Fire.

Grow that mo!

The price of happiness?

A friend of mine has recently gone on sabbatical. She’s taken five months off to reflect on her life and to decide whether high-powered career woman, single at 40 is really the way she wants to go. She’s done this by booking five months off work, flying to the other side of the globe and… enrolling in ski instructor school. At a cost of *cough* thousand pounds, she has managed to book up every waking moment from the day she lands to the day she leaves and she doesn’t even intend to teach skiing when she graduates! It’s the best bit of procrastination I have ever seen. 

She wrote to me today to tell me that she is enjoying the “chilled” feeling she is experiencing out there, and hopes to bring it back home. But bring it back home to what exactly? To the same lifestyle she had before she left? Same job, different company? The “chilled” feeling she is experiencing now, a few days into the trip, is just denial. All she has done is put off making any decisions about her life for another five months. It’s like a 0% finance deal on a credit card. The debts are still there at the end of the promotion.

This may sound harsh, and I am only writing this secure in the knowledge that she will never, ever read this blog (since she is so self-absorbed that she still gets my partner’s name wrong and doesn’t seem to care). But I think it illustrates an important point.

You see, I have always envied her her job. She earns a lot of money, and she lives a very comfortable lifestyle. At the age of 30 she has bought a house in central London and goes skiing for almost the whole of January and February each year. I used to think that is what I wanted. That with the extra cash in my pocket I would be happy. I even thought that it was a huge self-indulgence for her to be complaining about her lifestyle, and to be considering taking a career break for no other reason than inertia.

But is it really?

While it is abundantly clear that I disagree with how she is going about “finding herself”, I think it is important to be looking for oneself in the first place. So many people seem to be aware that there is something missing from their lives – that there is a depth that is lacking – but so few people seem to be willing to look for it.

I would like to think that I am willing to look, but where on earth do I start? Does the answer lie in voluntary simplicity? Can giving up on the idea of money, of possessions, of purchasing power really make one happy?

There is an idea in NLP that money is energy, and you only ever have as much as you can deal with. If that is the case, then having less money means you need less energy expenditure to maintain it; you have excess energy to devote to creativity, to spirituality, to actually living.

But is that actually true? Less money means fewer holidays abroad, limiting entertainment opportunities (from missed Hen Parties at one end of the spectrum to living without a TV at the other), limiting the amount of stuff you can have (including clothes, haircuts, time and labour-saving devices and crafting bits). Less money means using more brain power in creatively dealing with life, and doing things the hard way.

So is that really desirable? I think what is becoming clear as I write is that it is not simplicity for simplicty’s sake that appeals. Rather, it is a process of working out exactly what you need to live, adding a safety margin, and then having only that. On the face of it that’s quite a frightening concept – of limiting life to the bare minimum. But what if you were really honest about what you need to live a happy life? Then the picture changes.

If you were truly honest with yourself about what you needed to be happy, then rather than limiting yourself to a life of austerity, you choose to provide yourself with only what you need. It becomes an ecological as well as a philosophical concept. It means taking only what you need to be happy (whatever that may reasonably be) and nothing more.

I quite like that concept. The hard part is deciding what I really need to be happy, and what I only think I need. There is going to be some honesty and personal soul-searching involved in that.

Hmmm… is that the washing machine for a life laundry I can hear, filling up?

Clawing back some dignity

So I have spent the evening clawing back some dignity after the lemonade debacle. I added citric acid in the end, which gave the stuff some bite, but it hasn't dissolved properly and so one bottle is going to be far more tangy than the other! Oh well. It was a lesson. It was my choice to continue with the post, even though it showed me in a bad light, because I think it is important not to take yourself too seriously. I'm no domestic goddess. I'm a human being in training. As someone very dear to me once said: "in this life we all die beginners".

It has been a trying evening (no, not the lemonade! I mean personal stuff, like being hounded out of every room by a manic flatmate) so I got the spinning wheel out. The wheel (should it have a name?) has been languishing in disuse for the last nine months, and I really don't know why. As soon as I got my foot on the treadle and some fleece in my hands, I relaxed. It's as if I were transported somewhere else, and my focus on the task was complete.

I've started spinning some lovely fleece. It's 17.9 micron Merino, which is as fine as Cashmere, and a monkey to get it to stay on the bobbin. It needs a lot of twist, and if I don't have my next rolag lined up and ready to go, I end up pulling off the entire length I have just spun as it comes apart in my hands as I thread it back through the orifice to attach the next bit. It's highly absorbing. I'm ending up with about a third of the fleece on the bobbin, a third as waste (claggy, twiggy, matted mess) and a third as noil. It's tempting to combine this last third of fluff with the carded fleece and roll it all up into a rolag, but when I do it comes back to bite me on the bum. The rolag disintegrates and I have to unreel the whole of the previous section piece by piece trying to get a strong join.

I hope this means I am learning a lot!

I'm learning that carding fleece isn't just about combing out the tangles, it is about separating the vegetable matter and the nubbly matted bits from the loose strands, and then further separating the short strands from the longer ones. I'm learning that a scrap of suede wrapped round my thigh saves wrecking yet another pair of jeans with the metal teeth of the carders!

I'm learning that the darker patches of fleece are the softest and the shortest staple, that the oatmeal bits are the nubbliest, and the white patches are the coarsest and the longest staple and spin beautifully into long, smooth singles. All of this is fun, and absorbing (it is worth saying that again and again) but what I am also learning - which is the most invaluable lesson to me - is how to relax. How to clear my mind, and to make the crap that is flying my way not stick.

It is going to take me a month of Sundays to fill the bobbin with this stuff, and with the tiny dog-comb carders I am using it takes an age to prepare enough fibre to spin for more than five minutes at a time, but I am oddly attracted to the task. I don't even have a project in mind for the yarn, but that doesn't matter. What matters to me right now is the process. Just like the lemonade, when life hands you a tangled, knotted mass of a problem the best thing to do is to grasp a handful and, little by little, straighten it out into something of value.

When life hands you lemons...

Make lemonade.

A little trite I know, but literal in my case. Here's the recipe:

Lemonade
2 1/2 small lemons
350g cane sugar
1/2 pint boiling water
12g tartaric acid

Oh bugger. I used Cream of Tartar. There goes my nice little blog post about how when life is difficult you can overcome the difficulty by transcending it (accepting it will be so). Arse. Don't I look a fool! Ha ha - I wonder what it will taste like now...?

Ho hum.

There's a life lesson in that too I guess!