Twelfth House

In [the 12th House] the progressing Moon gives a person the opportunity to examine his life from a perspective broader than that of self-gain and self-interest. If a person will not take this opportunity then he will be forced to acknowledge that there are other ways of looking at the situations in which he has been involved, even if this takes imprisonment, hospitalisation or the loss of loved ones. During this period of his life a person frequently feels lost and lonely but nonetheless, it exists as an opportunity for him to rethink his life and use his future more wisely than he has used his time up to that point. That opportunity will be at its most obvious and most pressing as the Moon reaches the closing degrees of the 12th House - just before a new twenty-eight year cycle begins.

The DK Foundation
 http://www.dkfoundation.co.uk/dkfoundation/BookTransitsBook12.htm

Yup, that's me right now.  Looking back over the past months and the state of my life and relationships is sobering, as indeed it has been all the time I've been ill.   Horribly tempting to see myself as a victim.  I have to ask am I really, and if so why.  Why does the behaviour of others trigger the old childhood feelings - not good enough, not worth making the effort for, feelings that have been a leitmotif throughout my life.  You are so strong and independent people say to me.  And I am.  But I'm also lonely much of the time and that's very hard to admit.

What this period of ill health and consequent isolation has done is give me the space and time to deal with some of this.   I've not only let go of junk food and clutter; some  family relationships and friendships have faded away as well. Illness has changed the dynamics.  All but two I accept as having ended naturally, but the remaining two I grieve and ache for.  Disappointment and disillusion are hard.

The isolation has been needed.  Awful but needed.  I've needed to understand how strong I am as well as how weak. Sometimes - not so often now thankfully - the physical pain and discomfort have been so excruciatingly bad I wouldn't have been able to cope with anyone around  me,  also the loneliness has provided the framework, the space and time to think and dream and hope, to take care of my diet and health without pressure from others.  There is solid satisfaction in cleaning up my act. (Mustn't forget either to thank the two therapists, the cranial osteopath and the naturopath, who in different ways continue to haul me out of the pit).

As I said, sobering.  But given where I was in early 2009, almost certainly necessary.   And going into 2014 I'm not unhopeful that with honesty and vulnerability, as well as strength and independence, things may change. Even though I'm sixty-four.  My dreams are more mundane and realistic now but that's just fine. 

Refocussing

So much rain. Through the window of the bus the summer foliage moves in and out of focus, the tracks of the raindrops on glass creating a hall of mirrors effect. A routine pause at a crossroads is transformed.

I'm not around here much at the moment. The absence is necessary but I miss my online world - especially reading other blogs. I'll catch up when I can.

....

What would you like to do long term, somone asks. Pieces of the answer are easy. Grow the massage work. Grow food and flowers. Develop a thicker skin and a peaceful heart. For the rest, I sit with with the question and strive for zen-like calm and insight. The snag is that I need to earn money.

I update the CV. When the answers don't come, do the footwork. And footwork can be surprisingly therapeutic.

Risk

I've been mulling over Tarakuanyin's recent post
which eloquently puts into words much of my own thoughts and feelings about blogs and blogging.

My favourite bloggers have a common thread: a degree of self-revelation. They are personal bloggers. They communicate in prose and poetry and pictures. They write about places they have visited. They write about their passions, their loves, their children and their childhood, their interests, their joys, and a connection is forged. They sometimes post pictures of the intricate and beautiful things they have made. Perhaps they write about their politics. It doesn't matter to me whether they are "good" writers. What is a good writer anyway? From heart and mind to heart and mind and my online world becomes a larger yet more intimate place. They may write about more general topics as well, and I'm glad to read these posts, but I'm not sure I'd be visiting the blogs regularly without the personal.

Having said that, although I would class myself as a personal blogger I'm finding it difficult currently to blog about myself in any great depth. At one time I was far more open in cyberspace but now there are draft posts galore where I've opened my heart and where I hold back from pressing the Publish button. Some of it is a desire to remain anonymous. I can't resist posting about the area I live in - so much is new (to me) and fills me with joy and pleasure to the point that I want to share it in words and pictures - but I shy away from self-revealing in case an acquaintance hereabouts homes in on a give-away detail. I think about boundaries and this gives me more reason to pause.

So. I don't tell you about the therapy that is helping unclog the metaphorical passages nor the man I am attracted to (but I'm not sure how much he's attracted to me. Watch this space.) I don't write about loneliness or fear. I don't write about about my concern over what we are doing to the planet to the point where I blank out a lot of the news that I read. I don't tell you about the bad habits and compulsions. I don't tell you how badly I missed my father, even when he was alive and present. I pride myself on seeking harmony and beauty so I won't write about my dark side nor about my laziness. I don't tell you about my spiritual life and the unreasonable conviction that in spite of everything the future holds love, the daily new beginnings that I make, how my life is a series of moment by moment new beginings. I don't write about the mystery of the early mornings, and today's early morning in particular, and how privileged I can feel at times to be alive in the here and now.

Except I just have. This is the best I can do.

Thoughts

Click to enlarge.

A photograph taken this week on the regular morning walk/commute. It's amazing I make it to work at all these days.

****

Two male blackbirds perched a hundred yards apart, sing out piercingly beautiful warnings to each other. Stay away. Stay away.

****

The electrician in the office takes his time, working steadily and methodically. He pauses for a moment to chat and asks about plans for the weekend. I stop what I am doing to reply. There's no hurry.

****

V, wearing a green jacket to go with her Irish lilt, brings me an armful of flowers from the farmers' market as a birthday surprise. I'd mentioned to her in passing a few days ago how much I liked that particular flower stall. Unkempt and wonderfully imperfect blossoms, redolent of another era, so different from the tidy bouquets in the florists. The tansies and cornflowers - and many others whose names I don't know - in my bunch are plucked in local gardens and tied together with thick, rough string. As best I can, I thank her.

****

J's eyes are exactly the same shade of dark brown as mine. It's unsettlingly like looking at a male twin. Previously I've been attracted by opposites: men with blue, or grey, or green eyes, the colours of the sea.

I doubt anything will come of it.

Photography, photography

A thought-provoking visit to the local photography festival, examining rural change and disruption in a globalising world and featuring the work of both South African and local photographers. I was particularly moved by the photographs of young people on the fringes of South African society, Between Dogs and Wolves by Jodi Bieber, and - closer to home - by the exhibition by college photography students.

It's inspired me to post some of my own recent shots taken around town. Nothing to do with globalisation. Just for the pleasure of it

Behind the counter ...

Overhead ...


Message ..

Crossing the river.

Ageing

His coat is the sandy brown of a lion's pelt and the sculpted profile resembles those of the cats in Ancient Egyptian paintings. He's beautiful, but of course I'm prejudiced.

He's getting old. Over the past eighteen months he's turned into a lap cat, rarely venturing outside even in good weather. He sleeps more and more, though he's perky enough when awake. The vet guesstimates he's around fourteen, but since he's a rescue cat we don't really know. Could be more, could be less, but it's clear that the days of playing the wild rover are gone for good.

I could never get him to stay on my lap when he was younger. Twenty seconds maybe if I held him down with both hands, then a struggle, a wriggle, and he was gone. If he was feeling particularly benevolent he would place himself next to me on the sofa, his flank against my thigh. Thus far but no further. I felt honoured, in the way we humans can by the occasional attention of a normally aloof cat.

Since we left London it's all changed. Whether I'm sitting on the sofa or lying in bed he jumps up. It's become difficult to read, impossible to knit - his furry bulk imposes itself between me and the object of my attention. He stakes his claim to my lap, kneads, turns round in a circle and settles. I feel the movement and warmth of his small body and the soft beating of his heart. As I scratch beneath his chin the purring redoubles. Quite quickly he falls asleep. What is seeking, I wonder. Body warmth? Comfort? Life force? Certainly his health is failing. There are chronic kidney problems and in addition he's losing weight and nobody knows why. He's also lost most of his teeth. Between the special diet and the vet's bills his care is expensive for someone on a limited budget, but I pay up more than willingly.

You see, he's a companion in the literal sense of the word. Since he arrived at my door over ten years ago I've had more meals in his company than in the presence of any one human. He's been there through the arrival and subsequent departure of two lovers, the death of both parents, through excitement, contentment, grief, anxiety, boredom. Through a mugging. Through a house move. Through the flu. He sleeps on the bed through my morning quiet time. He makes me laugh.

Ach. There'll be time enough for knitting later on, and in the meantime I go to a coffee shop or the library whenever I want to read in peace. He can have my lap, my body's warmth, whenever he needs them.

Blossom and Bicycles

Early blossom. Yellow celandine and the bruised blue of grape hyacinth. Greenfinches dart and flutter in the branches of the rowan tree in the garden. Exhausted relationships morph into shapes I'd never imagined because truth will always, always out. Yet it doesn't do to give up on love and joy. On warmth and tenderness and touch. How could I? Something close to elation is tracking the footsteps of loss.

It still feels strange to be alone in my mid-fifties, without partner or children. I am an anomaly, in spite of all those futile efforts when I was young to blend in. (There's nothing wrong with blending in per se providing you don't do as I once did and make it your life's purpose). I ponder the seeming inevitabilities and conditioning that have led to this point, what - if any - gifts of mine are needed by the planet and whether it's time to stop dying my hair to cover (or blend in as the blurb on the packet says) the grey. I enjoy the town and the job - its ethos and people - and fret over balancing my budget in this low-wage county.

The days slip by smoothly one by one. Impossible to decipher the bigger picture, how the pieces of a life fit together. Uncertainty is what makes living such a whacky business, and it's all ridiculously transitory. Fossils have been found in the fields where we walked a few weeks ago - those hills once formed part of an ocean floor. And there's a place locally where you can book an environmentally friendly burial plot with a tree as a gravemarker. I'm a little surprised at my own pleasure at this discovery. Silver birch perhaps, with sweeping branches that are never totally still? Or a lime tree, for the heady scent of the blossom on a summer's evening?

***

A friend tells me on the telephone that the real high point of her life to date was not meeting her lover. Nor giving birth to her daughter.

It was, she says, learning to ride a bicycle as a little girl one morning on a dirt track in East Africa, the day her father finally took his steadying hand off the saddle. Short chubby legs pushing down on the pedals, picking up speed in the hot, dry air, the shock of the realisation - one that she could never have articulated that day - that it was possible to break through limitations, to fly out free into the wide world.

I've rarely heard her voice so certain and joyful. As she talks she's back on the bicycle again.

Welcome

Welcome to the new blog. It's a work in the progess as far as the decor goes but watch this space. I've chosen A Suivre for the name, partly as a nod to my love of most things French but mainly because the phrase neatly sums up life and blogging.

A suivre. To be continued.