Flick's Poetry & Thoughtfield: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.” Rumi
If you knew me you would brush away my weeping with a thousand gentle touches as weightless as a cooling breeze, soft as purest light, silent as a dark night’s moonbeam. If you knew me, your heart would know that you are my healing, you are my sacred self, you are the Belovéd.
8th of July 2020
Written from the inspiration of the mysterious nature of life and love. When we think, say, or write something of tenderness, who are we truly writing this for or about? Perhaps it is about ourselves? Perhaps I am the ‘Belovéd here? 🙏
It’s 18:29 and Bank Holiday Monday in the U.K….. I’m sitting in the nook at my home – ‘Owl’s Hoot’…. it’s been warm and only now do I feel a coolish breeze flooding through the leaves around me. In the nook, I sit at the table in the presence of Tina May singing Maybe September · with possibly, Stan Sulzmann. Just gorgeous, my fellow travellers… worth checking Tina May out.. lovely Jazz singer.
I am just at the beginning of my 12th week in Lockdown. It’s such an interesting journey….. I have had moments of utter frustration, sustained times of uncontrollable sobbing, huge laughter with friends on ZOOM or Skype or any platform which is behaving itself….. I love this lockdown! I say this with apprehension as I know many people have been suffering with this virus, have lost people they love, have lost jobs and businesses…..homes, finances, food…. I have lost work, but not to the extent that many are going through…. NONE of this is funny. Not one iota of it is amusing in any way at all. I count my blessings for all that I have and the challenging things in my life, of which there have been many, I ultimately look for the good in them and explore what they might be teaching me…..(Ah…. hark!… I can hear you thinking )….. Okay, not all the time…. gimme a break…. I’m human… It’s my aim……. I shall leave it at that.
Wednesday 27th May
Speaking of being HUMAN, If I could give one piece of advice to my younger, twenty-year-old self, it would be this: ” Life is a journey of exploration – the correctness in everything, striving to be the best, to be perfect, nothing of these endeavours ever achieves what we set out to find. However, what we do discover, some of us anyway, as we crash into or out of this bewildering journey, is that we have gone the way of suffering. It’s humbling when we finally see that instead of this heartache, we could have been dwelling in the realm of loving-kindness, which accepts us, asks nothing of us ……… but to be LOVE ITSELF – just as we are.”
Just that…… nothing more, nothing less.
‘View from the Nook: ‘The Tree Goddess’ taken May 25th 2020
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……
I explained to my therapist on Thursday that, having been on and off diets since aged 9 years old (I am now 64), I had a major breakthrough on Wednesday evening. I was flicking through TV channels (as you do!) and came across that nauseating programme: ‘Embarrassing Fat Bodies’. Being the self-flagellating person that I *was*, I watched 10 minutes of it, enough to then turn it off. What I did hang around for was a segment where a
I was flicking through TV channels (as one does!) and came across that nauseating programme: ‘Embarrassing Fat Bodies’. Being the self-flagellating person that I *was*, I watched 10 minutes of it, enough to then turn it off. What I did hang around for, was a segment where a 56 year old woman had lost 14stones. She looked older than 56, but the real shock came when she was asked to remove her upper clothing. All the weight she had lost had left her with incredible amounts of loose skin which, had she been 95 years old it wouldn’t have been a shock, it would have been a natural progression of the physical body changing.
Suddenly, even though I have seen images like this before, I realised I shall stop this struggle to be an average weight because I have never been and now, I never will be because I refuse to put myself through this a minute longer. To have my body turn into a collection of shrivelled creases, where it cannot spring back to youthful smoothness, is not what I want and neither would I intend to have it surgically removed.
A lot (most) of my adult life has been spent *TRYING* to be acceptable, beautiful, lithe and slim…… That’s it…. no more. IT’S ME TIME NOW …… JUST AS I AM!
It’s so easy to think we are ugly… I have been there, have done it, still do it, am beginning to stop it….. I empathise…. but I also say, we see more of our own imperfections (what are those anyway!?) than anyone else does. I/we can easily say how beautiful I think you/we are, yet… that is a fleeting consolation to you/us unless you/we believe it ourselves…. I know you know this. There is something about living this life where one of our many lessons is to truly embrace our humanness, with our beauty, our ugliness, our suffering and our elation. At the end of the day, you/I/we are perfect in our imperfections and WE ALL make up the majestic mural of what it is to be gloriously human. You are stunning;
Cuckoo Pint growing wild in the British countryside.
‘Passion Fruit’ Acrylics on Canvas circa 2005
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