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? 🙏
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;
they come in handfuls,
haaaandfuuuulsssssssss
floating through, to ground.
pink floaters like
boaters sailing on winds….. whispering:
shhiiiiiiiiiifffffvvvvvvvvviiiiiii….
she winds her hands and arms
into snaking eights
snsnsnaking sleaking shifting
as if to drag up the wind and make it sing….
apple blossoms never find their way…..
never, ever, find their way back home………
not when the insistent breath of life
has carried them off and
folded up their wings……….
I’be just been to the most wonderful Qigong session. I was brought back to my heart and to at least one rather profound revelation.
We did a ‘standing posture’. We don’t usually do these, but I remember them well from my Energy Therapy Training at Snowlion schule. As if I needed to be made even more aware of pain! Argh…. I heard a voice in my head say “I am in so much pain when I stand still.” Yes, it’s true. Physically I am in a lot of pain if I just have to stand. As it is, that Nirvana state which is possible is nowhere in sight for me. But it meant more than that . It was telling me that when I don’t keep working at/on/with moving on, getting things done, being busy, I AM IN PAIN.
I recall how my maternal grandfather and my mum used to do potato picking up to earn money. I would go with her sometimes, yet I hated getting mud and dirt on my hands. Not when it was wet, but when it dried on me. It was as if I couldn’t breathe.
On one particular day, my grandfather really shouted at my mum because I wasn’t helping pick up spuds. I think I was about 8 or 9 years old. “Lazy little bugger” are the words I remember my Grandfather saying. That upset my mum, pushing her into anxiety and shame – about me and about herself….. The bad mother syndrome, foisted on to women by angry men. She felt that at my age, I was too young to be forced to do it, however…. that was not her response to me. In turn she laid into me and was really ratty with me for what feels like, the rest of her life 33 years to be precise.
And so that label stuck. I then went on to spend the rest of my life until 2011, forcing myself to keep going, to jump up quickly from the chair, to run upstairs, to cycle everywhere, to work hours on end. My belief was that I had to do anything I could to not appear – ‘fat and lazy’. I had to jump through hoops of fire and not get burned.
After gradual decline, post mum’s passing, I became seriously ill with FMS (fibro) filled rapidly by cancer; the rest is history.
Now, those ego driven, scared, hurt behaviours of the child – ME, are impossible. Too much has happened. Too many hurts have fermented and exploded into dis-ease, in me.
So – facing the stillness is now imperative. Perhaps I shall find myself hidden in those layers of pain. Perhaps – could it even be that it’s all okay? Maybe it is.
I move my legs, the duvet tugs at them, not wanting to let go. Even my back feels the strain, resisting the pushing through to get out of bed.
I thought it was raining,
but through the slats of the blinds, there is sun and blue above the roof. Here, I notice my wonderful life is slipping past creating smoke trails in this gentle sky….Yet, as it goes, I make lace in my mind from the overwhelm of personal pain and tribulations of the world.
The thing about lace is that it’s delicate yet strong…. Before modern life took over, when it was allowed to be of natural materials, it was made by quiet hands.
Today I am making
~ ‘Mind Lace’ ~ new ways of dealing with the natural frailties of the Human condition – and for my own.
I am grateful and glad that Life is Beautiful every second of the day and night, at least somewhere in the world 💜
We see through mists
to where we think Love bides.
Never pausing,
or sometimes even breathing.
The fear this red and luscious longing
will go out there on the wing
and not be one with us,
or attempt the Soul to Soul
deep contact thing…
Nothing comes from forcing
as forcing creates fixing
and from fixing,
not one tear can flow,
not one heart is healed,
not a single life is saved…..
and no one,
not one person
receives our abundant beautiful Heart.
Coming in
we gasp our first.
Going out
we release our last
and in between,
we live our lives
round, robust
Impassioned –
and there,
guided by a
single, inner light,
we do our soulful,
sweetest best.
In respect of Jo Cox,
Labour MP shot and killed
In her constituency Wednesday 16th June 2016
💗
Cuckoo Pint growing wild in the British countryside.
‘Passion Fruit’ Acrylics on Canvas circa 2005
BubblingWordClouds 