I had been thinking for some time that I would like to change the nature of my blogs. This wonderful short video written by the creatively erudite Eve Ensler, has come up for me this morning on social media and has given me the hefty nudge I’ve been needing!

All my life my body has needed, no…. y-e-a-r-n-e-d for a revolution, I tell you a damned great big, rooted in the fertile ground of Mother Earth, Revolution! Well, here I am at long last, ‘facing’ my body, standing in that revolutionary soil, feet first, head-on.

It’s a tragic and terrible thing to ‘awaken’ and find yourself emerging from sleepwalking through life. She, I was a ”fat little girl” who ached from the disrespect coming at me… the energetic violations of a world hell-bent on making me wrong, or at least, squashing my voice, squashing me, suffocating the screams. They weren’t actual screams you see, they were on a parr with Edvard Munch’s ‘Silent Scream’ … a scream that rips apart the fascia in the body, MY body.

Climbing trees to escape was my way. Hiding in that oak tree where no one could see me, hear me, smell me …. touch me; I didn’t want them to touch my soul. I hid in fields of tall grasses, hollow trees, dry ditches where Cuckoo Pint grew with such voracious sexual beauty that they embedded themselves in my six year old mind, to be replicated, unwittingly, in my fifties on canvas.

 Cuckoo Pint growing wild in the British countryside.

 ‘Passion Fruit’ Acrylics on Canvas circa 2005

I hadn’t realised as a child (who would?), that  I wanted to break free with the insanity of a woman who could be stoned at any given moment, the psychological pain in me was so great. The wild young thing who had rising passions … in the body in the Soul …. in my heart… passions for sounds, colours, shapes. The desperation to be dramatically daubing colour everywhere…. in my hair, you know what I mean, like people do now…. oh-bring-it-on…… I feel it brewing… damned convention, wretched polite society, that girl is still there waiting to be met…. Of course she found the Cuckoo Pint voluptuously divine in its shape and colour. Of course she recognised its significance in her own physicality…… but not in words…. it was a kinesthetic sensing and knowing. Only looking back do I see the fog, smog sticky old bog in which she tried to breathe. N.B. not being able to breathe can cause brain fog….

You could ask me, “but what happened to you in your childhood then?” and my answer could be and is….. “You will have to listen deeply. You will need ears that can permeate the impenetrable. You will only understand if you can come to the rawness of the psyche with me, where there are the bones of the bare and broken; the molten lava of Gravitas and Expansiveness of Life.”

This is where I now invite you to come on my journey with me. My amazing life of a woodman’s daughter where suddenly, smashed and grabbed at the age of fifty-eight, it all changed. In 2011 the diagnosis of colon cancer was upon my body and my heart and then ALL that follows on from that is not even circuitous, but more a direct shaken by my bones sort of story….. the story of little c. Please note, dear traveler, there is no Big C in MY life and never will be… I am bigger than it will ever be, regardless of how this all spins and weaves its way through to my transition into the next bit of my journey ……

This is the first of, who knows how many posts, exploring my body’s need to be all ‘present and correct’ just as it is!  If you’re interested or know of anyone who might relate, please share……