qualia and other wildlife

springing the trap

2012-03-07T09:42:00.000Z

I'm back. I'm doing some work with poetry for the Prince's Trust with rural primary schools at the moment; we're gearing up for the first performance in Exeter Phoenix on Thursday. This has all been pretty back-to-back and interspersed with workshops for adults, and has involved hundreds of miles of travel and early starts and late nights.

Yesterday, I spent 10 hours straight trying to work out why my email outgoing server, after years of working fine, has been refusing to send my emails – although they appear in my 'sent' box. I didn't know they weren't going, so the ramifications re deadlines for copy, articles and approving the cover for my new book, not to mention a great many people not receiving responses to their emails, are wide-ranging and I'm feeling pretty sore about it all, as so much of my work is email-based. (I haven't solved the problem, but those of you who have my internet-today email address please use the one on my Fire in the Head website instead.)

The joys of e-communication. And I need to add to the list of People I Appreciate my mac-guru, Jim, in Tavy Typesetting, who has spent hours and hours without charging me over many years now sorting technical/electronic problems. And those of you who have emailed to ask if I'm OK – thank you to you too.

On a brighter note: I've just had the proofs for the cover of my next poetry collection: All the Missing Names of Love will appear from IDP in early April.

~

One of the rigours and joys both of my life facilitating workshops is that I have to think up new ones all the time. I've been doing this now for 21 years, and I try my best never to repeat exactly what I've delivered before. Of course there are many overlaps, and some exercises come back in different clothes. Workshops such as my outdoor 'Ground of Being' ones on Dartmoor (advance notice of this as a weeklong residential in France, 1–8 September), held on the equinoxes (next one 18 March) and solstices, take loosely the same shape with addenda and changes according to the season.

The common core in my practice though is a trust in the subconscious. Poetry depends at least in part on freshness, surprise and originality of the images and metaphors used, and this happens best when we get out of our own light. A great deal of my time is dedicated to helping people unlearn the tyranny of the conscious rational mind; or at least to be able to sidestep its grip at times (the more highly educated the mind, the harder this often appears to be). The most inspired and inspiring writing, creatively speaking, springs from somewhere other than the 'thinking' aspect of mind which, to me, is employed as a secondary shaping process.

So there is 'thinking logically', and there is 'thinking associatively', which is not really thinking so much as a kind of linked-particle slipslide connectivity. Poetry employs and needs both, but in my view the more alive and vital a poem is the more likely its genesis in the associative – an undervalued mode in the West, at least since the Enlightenment, I believe.

So I try and offer 'bait', as it were, to the feeling- and image-based associative aspects of the unconscious mind; the 'right brain', as it has been described (Roger Sperry and others).

One of the ways I do this is to offer exercises that prompt free association; usually I offer my prompts at speed, so there is no time for participants to think and dither, but instead go with 'first thought right thought'. I work with triggers for images. I also like to suggest that people use others' words as starting points, erasing them later; this injection of a different vocab/style can often catalyse new expression.

On Monday evening for the Poetry School I wanted to concentrate on metaphors. Our working text is the wonderful Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive. I offered a series of exercises: we picked and read out ten metaphors each at random from the book; then we wrote some of our own; then we used the last line of a couple of the poems from which we'd lifted our metaphors as a starting-line for, first, ten disconnected lines of our own, one beneath the other; then for ten connected lines. I asked people then to remove the borrowed lines but to use the rest to quarry something new, without too much thought (aka rational intervention).

Because we'd been working with images 'foreign' to our own personal subconscious, but some of them at least recognisable as 'felt' images from, let's say, the collective unconscious, much of our own work in response to the trigger was different from our usual. For myself, I ended up with some bizarre and quite dark imagery (I have also been thinking about the myth of Persephone, relevant to this time of year), which, while not necessarily comfortable, offered me new details.

Again, in relation to the idea of loosening the grip of the conscious mind, I reminded people that poetry, unlike prose, does not have to unfold in the shape of a linear syntactically-senseful narrative. In poetry it is not just the rational mind of the reader or audience that's being engaged but also their imagination, which can make leaps and somersaults and bridge gaps. Don't spell it all out, I say. And don't feel you have to write in complete sentences. And especially 'show, don't tell'. In the interests of this I also suggested they try reading their poem, with a few tweaks as necessary, from the bottom up – often so much more dynamic and surprising.

Here's the first draft of my own weird little piece from the workshop, turned the other way up, so to speak:

Springing the Trap

in the news from a distant star
back where you started
finding home –
and, contraflow,
in cold clear air
breaching gold
where, moonlight lying
on grass like frosted tresses,
you, being salmon,
leap, and leap until –

or, leaning on wind,
comes at last
a kind of solution
one that cannot arise
from words from semen
from haemoglobin

but only
in dialogue with silence
speaking in tongues
like the dead

~ Roselle Angwin

dydd gwyl dewi sant*

2012-03-01T18:25:00.000Z

Ahhh mmm the land is definitely waking up. Green scents of cracking-open earth. Feathery tendrils of ash. Soft sun through mist. Skirmishes of chaffinches in the lane – testosterone-fueled scraps, heedless of cars, cats, passers-by (me and Dog). All day mating calls of young owls. Congregations of snowdrops, rashes of daffs. This everywhere-renewal, cracking open again the heart, over and over...

*(St David's day) (actually I'm guessing at the Welsh)

spirit, soul and the pairs of opposites

2012-02-29T09:05:00.000Z

'The heart asks for both clarity and paradox, aches equally for freedom and for joining, being part of and apart.' Roselle Angwin, in Bardo (Shearsman 2011)

One of the great insights in Jungian psychology is the idea that each constellation of energy, or archetype/figure in the human psyche, is accompanied by its opposite. To the extent that we identify with the one and repress the other, the latter will gain a kind of dark power which, one way or another, will eventually ooze, or explode, out.

According to Jungian thought, we live in a state of creative tension between the two. To evolve, we have to make, at least to some extent, both poles conscious – and therefore less polarised. These pairs of opposites need to be integrated in us for optimum health; by which I mean recognised and acknowledged – which is not the same thing as 'acted out'. (The more usual way is to project on others – whether an individual, a race, a culture or a species – and see 'out there' what we are not aware of, or can't accept, 'in here', as I've spoken of before in relation to the Shadow and projection.)

This integration is one way of looking at Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.

When this doesn't happen, a whole era can be hijacked, let alone the individual psyche. The more closely the individual or organisation is identified with needing to be seen as virtuous, the more likely that the unacknowledged corrupt aspect will be visited on another or others: so we get the witch hunts and inquisitions of the Middle Ages, so we get Hitler's persecution of the Jews, we get the dark shadow of paedophilia in the Catholic Church, we get the idea, during the Cold War, that the Russians are the 'baddies', or currently Islam, etc etc. (And given that there were no WMDs in Iraq, what were we seeing in Hussein, for instance? There are many world leaders who are guilty of human rights' abuses; why – other than for oil – choose him? Why portray him as the baddie, convince ourselves that we are pure, motivated by the Higher Good, completely innocent of ulterior motives? - You will realise I am using the word 'we' advisedly – that war was 'not in my name', as the peace campaigners' slogan had it.)

So in the psyche the pairs of opposites are eternally conjoined. In myth and fairytale we have the puer, the innocent or foolish young man, accompanied by the senex, the wise elder. We have the Loathly Lady, whose counterpart is the beautiful young damsel. We have the warty frog, who has within the prince. At some time in the journey, the puer needs to visit and listen to the senex, the prince needs to kiss the Loathly Lady, the princess the frog. Accepting and making conscious this darker or less apparently attractive part of ourselves is actually what liberates the inner truer and enduring beauty.

We subscribe all the time to the viewpoint of polarised opposites. Look at eg our 'madonna/whore' axis – more prominent than we'd like to think in our apparently liberated culture. Or the way we seem to need to believe ourselves to be either 'unworthy' or else completely virtuous, above reproach; whereas of course we are all both. Or we could say that someone focusing strongly, even exclusively, on the importance of the 'scientific' objective rational mind may well have sorely neglected the less ordered needs for creative,imaginal, relational feeling-based living; and of course there is an opposite to that too. And collectively in the Western world look at the dichotomy that has become institutionalised in the polarisation of eg Dawkins' atheistic scientific worldview and that of the faith-based Christian community. (I could say, too, a great deal about the schisms created with the Cartesian worldview and its dualistic dominance in the Enlightenment, but that's a whole other year of blogs...)

I've found it very useful to explore the hidden shadow of the archetypes with which I identify. For instance, in focusing on that aspect of me, fairly well developed, that is to do with self-determination, freedom, wildness, not being 'tamed', I tend to neglect the part of me that also needs outer 'marriage', with its containments (and this has nothing to do with whether one is in relationship or not, and everything to do with how one is in relationship). In acting as an extravert, 'out there' and doing, I have (until the last few years) neglected the very strong introvert in me that needs a great deal of silence, solitude, seclusion; and now I can neglect it no longer (sometimes an illness draws attention to the imbalances).

I have been having a conversation with a friend about the twin pulls of the human heart: towards detachment and flight as well as towards attachment and intimacy. It seems that we need to allow both to fertilise our lives and our relationships. We need both the ascension of spirit and the descension of soul. (And I think too about how our formalised world religions tend towards either the detached impersonal 'spirit-based' approach, or the deeply-engaged feeling-based 'soul' approach, each slightly sneery of the other – which it also badly needs.)

In my first book, Riding the Dragon, I speak of all this, and of how the transformational journey, mapped out in myth by Joseph Campbell as the 'Hero's Journey' and on which, in the book, I build my own picture of an integrated life, requires that any individual man or woman needs to make both parts of the journey: the journey of individuation and transcendence away from the collective that we might describe as the 'spirit' aspect, and then the return to the needs of the 'soul', the unifying, relational, personally-involved realm, from a less driven, less egocentric and more conscious place. This individual offers the greatest gift, then, to the collective: a perspective motivated by wisdom and compassion that is both engaged and non-attached. In myth, this is the return as King, or Queen. How different would our world look if governed by such people?

(And – because the workshop facilitator in me will always out – on this extra day today, 29th February, how would it be to take an hour out and look at our own journey towards king- or queenship in our lives?)

'...and the night came down...'

2012-02-27T12:43:00.001Z

A week ago or a bit more I picked up a paintbrush for just about the first time in three years. Was very disappointed with the results; but looking at it today, unless it's flu speaking, I see it's not that bad! It's a start, anyway...

fishing boat

2012-02-27T11:42:00.004Z

In the tidespill boats rock, masts tuned to the gale,playing it like blind Ossian’s harp. This is the art I would like to perfect:to be a vessel for light and cloudplay, being only oneself without knowledge ofoneself, in flux, at the nexus of ocean and sky and riding that dance instillness, yielding, fluid, tethered only to each moment and every passing wavebeneath the keel. To know nothing of fear, or striving.

~ Roselle Angwin, in Bardo (Shearsman 2011)

living within our limits, and the forest garden

2012-02-26T15:06:00.001Z

This morning: sun sun sun. A handful of buzzards in the thermal over the valley. Clusters of blue- and coaltits on the feeders. A tree sparrow – they're endangered now, astonishingly, this most common of British birds only a decade or two ago. The daffodils on our north slopes are out now, and the bright-blue-eyed borage family alkanet, too. Pussy willow, catkins. Lambs. And I'm crashed out on the bench in the courtyard, exhausted after walking the dog, and helping The Man carry a number of 16-foot lengths of larch – unbelievably heavy! – up the very steep field to the flat horseshoe where our veg garden is sited, to make our fourth raised bed, this one for the potatoes currently chitting indoors in their boxes. This year, half our crop will be Sarpo Mira – very resistant to blight and slug damage, tasty cooked in all ways, and good for storing. The late-planted garlic has come through now, too – along with the dwarf irises.

February in England is so often a sunny soft month, contrary to our expectations and beliefs. I remember many occasions when my daughter and myself would eat outside our cottage high up on the Bere peninsula, overlooking the river, on a sunny February day. As I think this I remember, to my shock, how so often I was ill and wrapped up in the weak sunshine. February seems to be an annual lowpoint, at least for me; the year's equivalent of the nadir of diurnal biorhythms; and once again I'm at a very low ebb physically. Stress and continual exhaustion take their toll, and flu has wiped me out.

I recognise that I have a problem with living within my own personal limits, energetically speaking. I'm not good at being sensible with my own internal resources – I'm too enthusiastic for too many things – which is another way of saying I'm greedy with life and don't recognise when I've hit the end of my rope. I put out a lot of energy, but don't take the time to let my well refill itself.

I have been thinking a great deal, as I have for many years now, of what living within our limits means. I'm speaking ecologically, not personally, now. We have exhausted this planet, and we're at a tipping point. It's as if we believe we have divine right to take what we want, from where we want, simply by virtue of being human, 'top of the tree', as we mistakenly, in my view, see it. The planet may or may not survive; ecosystems simply won't, humans included, if we don't change things. I know this is a view that many people find hard to swallow; some of the changes are unpalatable. But I believe we urgently need to address this – the issue is too desperate to be dressed-down (or do I mean dressed up?). If we don't reduce our consumption, it will be drastically reduced for us. We worry about the economy: without an ecology there is no economy.

We need – and I am saying nothing new – urgently to revision our relationship to the planet and the needs of her other inhabitants. We need to understand, really understand, what it means to live genuinely ecocentrically rather than anthropocentrically – to live as if every other species which shares this planet with us has the same inherent rights as us within their own different sphere. We need to perceive and relate horizontally, for a change, instead of heirarchically. We need to stop seeing other beings and other parts of the planet as 'resources', and instead as integral and crucial parts of a healthy functioning ecosystem. Think it doesn't matter that we are losing species at the rate of – what, three a day? It does. Everything has a place in the web of being, even if we can't see it.

Globally, I have a reasonably low impact – it matters hugely to me to walk lightly, and I'm continually looking to shave my footprint. The way of living to which I'm drawn is extremely simply, in tune with natural rhythms, in a wild place, with very few 'conveniences': I'd be genuinely happy in a small wooden cabin in a clearing in woodland or perched on a wild coast, with a solar panel, candles and a woodburner, big enough simply to house my books (OK it's true I'd need a small study/studio), with no or few gadgets or 'white goods' (a solar powered computer would be essential, though), no debts (I don't have any money but I also don't use a credit card or have loans or mortgages), and minimal overheads, so that one is not hooked in to working forever simply to pay for 'stuff'. It'd be good if there were others living out an eco-vision nearish – communities, sharing vision, work, ideas and bartering skills, sharing harvests, co-operating with each other as well as the natural world. 'You can call me a dreamer...'

Last night I watched again Martin Crawford's DVD 'A Forest Garden Year'. Building on the work of Robert Hart, Crawford, who lives close by, promotes a permaculture lifestyle based on agroforestry, where the natural conditions of a woodland garden are followed to provide a genuinely sustainable method of food production based on perennial crops that work in synergy with each other. (Crawford is also developing any number of fruit and nut species that yield well in the British climate; the increase in which is one advantage of global warming.)

There are many benefits, to both us and the planet, of this system: for a start, the input for upkeep on the part of the human is much less demanding than a high-production veg bed, once the system is up and running; although the yield is less. For the planet, there are many positives: by using a diversity of plants one can accommodate and mimic a natural and healthy ecosystem where shade-loving and sun-loving plants can work together, where heights are 'matched', where bees and hoverflies and butterflies and other wildlife are an integral part of the scheme, and where trees can contribute moisture and act as a carbon-soaks.

What's more one can use a very small space effectively for us, wildlife and the planet: Hart's pioneering approach worked in just one eighth of an acre – a very small garden. This seems to me to be a wise way to go; and if the deep green views are correct, it may be that our survival as a species might depend on small groups of people buying up land for the forest garden method of local production, with its returns to the eco-sphere as well as to the human.

the four agreements

2012-02-23T14:55:00.002Z

For me, there is only the travelling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart... ( Yaqui Medicine Man Don Juan)

Some of you might remember, if you were of the right age and of that inclination in the 70s, several books written by Carlos Casteneda of his time with the Yaqui shaman Don Juan. The first, The Teachings of Don Juan, and the succeeding books shaped my own vision.

Built on similar foundations but much simpler and with an altogether shorter scope, but nonetheless insightful, is the book by Toltec medicine man Don Miguel Ruiz: The Four Agreements (Amber-Allen Publishing).

There was a time in my life when, living alone, one of my biggest joys was sitting by the kitchen window early in the day with a first cup of tea, watching dawn come back to light up the river, and the garden slowly fill with birds. Gradually, as my cup emptied and I filled myself with riverlight and birdsong, I'd turn to my journal and also some book of sacred texts or spiritual writings, or poetry – so much more warming a way to wake up than with, say, the news.

This morning, with TM off to work early, instead of rushing to meditate, shower, then walk the dog straightaway, I sat with a cup of tea watching the birds in the courtyard, and then picked up Ruiz's book.

Ruiz has four proposals; he says they're Toltec, but in content and range I'd say they are also in effect a distillation of psychospiritual perennial wisdom teachings from all times and cultures. If we live according to these four, he says, we can transform our lives. Need a shot of transformation? See what you can do with these.

Be impeccable with your word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Don't take anything personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

Don't make assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

Always do your best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you're healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse, and regret.*

*I'd qualify this one by saying that our problem in the West, (or maybe it's a British problem), is not that we don't do our best, but that we believe that our best isn't enough, or good enough. We may need to challenge that deeply-ingrained belief.

notes from the valley, the Bodhisattva Vow & a biscuit recipe

2012-02-22T11:11:00.002Z

My headache has resolved into flu, so I am busy cancelling stuff and also learning about this nap business. So far, I like it a lot! My heart seems to appreciate it, too – a quality of spaciousness. At the end of a month there's always a lot of work on with course assignments to respond to, and in this case also schools workshops at all the nether ends of Devon; I still have a backlog of work from before my mum's death, but in those 45 minutes or so I draw on meditation practice and allow my over-busy mind to meander to the flames flickering in the woodburner (still in the house with my laptop rather than in my garden lair).

In the valley the pair of egret seems to be a fixture, often comically mirroring each other in a pose on the bare oak tree. Daily, duos or trios of geese fly over, and a heron will lift off from the little pool as I pass. The last few mornings and evenings the air has a scent of spring, and freshness, about it, and the first dog violets are out here.

Yesterday I was distressed to see an hour-old lamb being rejected by one after another of the ewes in its cold and wet field. It's undoubtedly my concern about the wellbeing of everything that puts a strain on my heart, physically and emotionally; old habits die hard, and for various family reasons I learned how to be an over-responsible eldest sister very young.

Also there's the Bodhisattva vow, to do with caring for all sentient beings/saving all sentient beings from harm or suffering. I do take this seriously and with great commitment; but how much is enough, or even too much? And there is also the Buddhist view on non-attachment to everything, including outcomes, so somewhere there's a balance here: to do what one can (ah yes, but where are the reasonable limits??), and then let go.

There's a lesson in all this for me. I find it very hard to know the range, extent and commitment that's appropriate in each situation, and how to separate that from a pathological fear-driven need to fix stuff, and a sense of indispensability. It's about trust, really, in the end; but it's also about going the extra mile. Because my health has suffered badly as a result of the stress of the last few years I now have to challenge this pattern, and work out what's healthy connected concern and what is a step too far. Was it John of the Cross who said, reputedly, 'Hooray! Another obstacle!'? I smile in recognition at that. Anyway, I rang the farmer, who said he'd come up.

Last week there was a small dunnock – hedge sparrow – hopping around alone, mostly in hiding, clearly not well. I came back from somewhere one day and the whole sturdy upright birdtable had been slammed into, hard, to the extent that the house-structure on top had been demolished. Where pole and ex-house lay in the broad bean bed was a burst of little brown and grey breast feathers. I can only imagine that the local sparrowhawk visited, and maybe took that dunnock – but the impact of that smash! They travel at such speed (a peregrine can top 100mph) – I wrote here last year about a sparrowhawk cutting the air from the ridge of the roof above me, where I sat invisible to it below, at such speed it sounded like a sheet tearing an inch from my ear, or a fast motorbike on the track. My sister says that there are a huge number of hawk (or do I mean falcon, counter-intuitively?) fatalities from impacts of various kinds.

On an altogether lighter note, the wild garlic here is now through. Jubilation! I used some, with a little wild sorrel (I love foraging), in buckwheat pancakes using my daughter's ex-batt hens' eggs, stuffed with our leeks, home grown garlic bulb and mushrooms in a creamy (vegan) sauce. Delicious! And here's another recipe for you: take a can of, or some cooked, kidney beans and mix with equal quantities of nuts (any of hazel, cashew, brazil). Add lemon juice, soy sauce, tomato puree or sundried tomato paste, pepper and a handful of wild garlic if available (or regular garlic, spring onions/chives). Blend. Makes a great paté/dip for carrots, celery etc.

And while I'm at it: nothing like deciding to lose some weight to prompt my Inner (and usually very well hidden) Biscuit Maker. The rationale, of course, was to send some to work with TM. But although I'm an inventive savoury cook, I'm a bit rubbish at sweet things – mostly because I hate following recipes, and I think you need to for cakes and biscuits (that's my excuse for the rock-hard biscuits and floppy cakes...), and because we don't each much sweet stuff. But you know how you come across those biscuits from time to time that are soft and chewy, but with a little crunch, too? Ha! Smugness here. I made this one up:

Pre-heat oven to 160 degrees (can't find the symbol); just under for a fan oven
Melt together 100gms of either unrefined dark brown sugar or honey with 150gms of butter/or margarine/or sunflower oil
Stir in a heaped teaspoon of powered ginger (or chunked crystallised ginger, buit maybe reduce sugar content above) and the grated peel of a lemon (I'd use organic, to avoid wax/pesticides). You could instead add chunks of chocolate, berries, or orange and cardamom, or lavender flowers, or...???
Add 250gms total (or more if mix is too 'loose') of polenta grain, coconut, oats and flour (I used spelt) in roughly equal proportions. Stir well and throw in
a small handful of chopped nuts. Make sure it more or less holds together.
Plop spoonsful on greased baking tray, mould gently with fingers and flatten.
Bake until just going golden and still soft!

Light the sofa and find the fire. No I mean light the fire and find the sofa. Oh no – that's me. For you, I mean enjoy the biscuits.

For me, back to the assignments (by the fire, on the sofa...). Have eaten all the biscuits – with a little help from TM.

the artist as spider's web: journaling

2012-02-20T19:33:00.001Z

OK, OK, I will stop banging on – for a little while – about the right-on-ness of mindfulness. Am sure I'm repeating myself, anyway.

Today (and yesterday) I've been pole-axed by a strange headache. I should be teaching a class for the Poetry School, but instead have been languishing on the sofa by the fire. I have discovered, for almost the first time in my life, the benefits of that thing other people mention – what's it called? Is it a 'nap'? (Actually, if I think of it as a 'siesta' it seems cool.) Anyway, I liked my brief taste of it, and might try it again.

Just to prove to you I can think of other things besides Zen teachings, I thought I'd post here another of my pieces from MsLexia magazine, published in early 2009. (Help! Hope this one isn't a repeat.) This piece, like some of the succeeding articles, is on the benefits of journaling – core practice, in my opinion, not just for a writer but for a human being.

Now it's back to the sofa for me.

The Artist as a Spider’s Web

‘The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web...’ Picasso

… and so is the artist’s (writer’s) journal. The journal has been at times not just an anchor but also a lifeboat for me. Interesting, isn’t it, that the things that might help us the most but which require a little time and attention are the things that so easily go out the window at a time of crisis. So for the last two-plus years when my family has experienced serious illness and a tragic loss my journal has remained almost empty. When I came to pick it up the other day with renewed commitment I couldn’t believe that I could have let such a crucial practice – and personal support – slide.

For me my journal is part of my meditation practice; but it’s more, besides, including my creative treasure-box. I encourage you now, if you don’t possess one, to go out immediately and buy the most sumptuous blank-page hardback notebook you can find, and a pen with which you’ll really enjoy writing in it.

‘Journal’ is a bit of a misnomer, conjuring up as it does simply a diary – the ‘daily record of events’, says the Concise OED. My journal is a great deal more than this. Journal-writing can be a profound tool for entering a more conscious relationship with the way we live out our lives on all levels. It does not matter whether the writing is lists, single words, phrases, snatches of incoherent ideas, quotes, poems, jottings, philosophical speculation or tumbling stream-of-consciousness writing. The process will be aided by images: from dreams, as symbols, as photos, drawings, clippings, colour. Mine includes postcards, scraps, feathers. It’s friend and confidant, repository of thoughts and feelings, and it’s where I work the greater picture of my life out.

And there is a whole well-established movement that uses the journal specifically as a therapeutic tool, in the service of enhancing one’s sense of personal and transpersonal meaning. In 1966 Ira Progoff, in the States, started the Intensive Journal Process. ‘The journal is an open-ended means of gaining a perspective on where you are in the movement of your life…[it can also help to] achieve on the practical level the goal of fulfilling one’s seed potential,’ he says. It happens that the process itself deepens one’s perspective, so that it becomes a very effective way of living a more fulfilling and creative life.

In addition to storing creative ideas, journaling can be used:

• to create a deeper relationship with one’s inner life

• to draw inner and outer lives together

• for a better understanding of life themes and patterns and how they play themselves out in one’s life

• to explore significant periods, people, places and events in one’s life

• to explore the dilemmas we encounter, decisions we make or need to make, and paths taken or not.

More another time.

At a Journal Workshop,Ira Progoff (Tarcher Putnam 1975/1992)

waking up

2012-02-19T19:53:00.000Z

Buddhism is a path of profound simplicity. It doesn't require religious belief; it's a psychological practice that can be tested via our own experience.

I guess one could summarise it as being about waking up. The heart of Buddhist practice is to do with weeding out whatever it is that gets in the way of the flow of love, understanding and wisdom, of our alignment with essential nature.

The Buddha spoke of our suffering as being largely to do with the 'three poisons', or obstacles that get in the way of our living in an enlightened way: greed, or attachment/craving (whether to people, situations or, for instance, our own opinions, likes, preferences, or getting our own way); hate, or aversion (to people, situations, aspects of life that don't suit us); and delusion – an unwillingness or inability to see true nature, essential reality, exactly as it is, to truly see into the heart of things.

This makes good psychological sense; startlingly insightful and revolutionary in many ways, especially given that it is as relevant now as it was when the Buddha, Siddhartha, was alive nearly two and a half millennia ago.

In a culture that cannot, on the whole, see beyond the individual ego and its needs, the practice of this examining of what sits between us and waking up usually means heading in the opposite direction from societal norms and materialistic values; like the salmon, swimming upstream.

In the past, a monastic cloistered environment was seen as strongly preferable for doing the work of enlightenment. However, out in the world, engaged with the world, every minute can bring us a prompt to challenge the lazy, fearful, greedy, delusional self-protective ways of the ego.

And the Buddha emphasised that this waking up should not be simply for our own benefit, but for every being's.

I liked this summary of the Buddha's teachings, adapted from againstthestream.org:

The Buddha said his path to awakening was one of rebellion – a subversivepath that challenges greed, challenges hatred, and challenges delusion. It is a pathof radical, engaged transformation, a path of finding freedom and spending therest of our lives giving it away.

ragbag blog: Bere Ferrers, lapwings, toads, Hinkley Point and pain vs suffering

2012-02-17T22:58:00.000Z

It's Thursday dusk. I'm standing beneath a little elm tree – here in the UK it's unlikely to mature, due to Dutch Elm Disease – back of the water, which is silvered and still. The tide's low, and I'm at the lovely Bere Ferrers, my local village for ten years (up until 2009). Bere Ferrers sits at the confluence of the Tavy and the Tamar, and I love dusk here.

This is the first time I've smelled spring in the air. I'm quiet, dog at my feet, just watching night steal the land, listening. In the distance, a curlew. There's gooseyip from the channel in the middle of the tidal creek, owlcall from a tree to my left, and now a flock of lapwing circling, circling, with their plangent peewitsongs. If you listen long enough to birds you start to be able to identify them from their wingbeat, with your eyes closed. Lapwing, winter visitors here, with their wide blunt wings, have a kind of two-time ragged beat, like the heart's pulse and echo: a fast DEEduh DEEduh DEEduh. Like rooks and jackdaws, they like to do a small flypast before roosting at night.

I've seen two lots of frogspawn now. Let's hope they survive the freeze due.

*

Speaking of things amphibian: Ecological Ethics, Patrick Curry's book that I'm currently reading, is prefaced by this beautiful poem by Joseph Bruchac:

Birdfoot’s Grandpa

The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out
and gather into his hands
the small toads blinded
by our light and leaping,
live drops of rain.

The rain was falling,
a mist about his white hair
and I kept saying
you can’t save them all,
accept it, get back in
we’ve got places to go.

But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life,
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said
they have places to go, too.

(http://www.josephbruchac.com/index.html)

*

Eco-issues: the last time I lay in the road over a nuclear issue was at Hinkley Point in the 1980s (though I've been in protests since). My daughter was young, and was getting used to being dragged around to places like the Peace Camp at Greenham Common, and Hinkley Point, instead of going on holiday, like other kids (we did go to festivals, though). Looks like I might need to do it again, as this Government is about to refurbish and boot up the nuclear activity there. That time, Paddy Ashdown, MP, sailed in in style from South Wales to join us. Maybe I should invite him again. There again, maybe he'll join us anyway...

*

Our work, psychospirituality suggests, is in integration of our fragmented parts, and of inner and outer. I think a lot about these words by Anais Nin (thank you Karen). How simply they sum up the whole of Jungian psychology, and the obstacles to enlightenment spoken of in Buddhist thought: 'We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.'

*

And on a similar theme, I have caught myself caught up, as it were, in the second arrow of the 'two arrows' teaching, a theme favoured by my Zen teacher, Ken Jones. The first arrow is what happens to us. 'Shit happens'. The second arrow, as I've mentioned before, is entirely down to us – it's not an inevitability. This is how we react to the first arrow, and therefore multiply the pain – or not. Someone said: You can expend energy on working out who launched the arrow, what tribe they came from, what their motivation was, what wood the arrow was made from, what tree grew the wood, what tool shaped it. Meantime the wound festers. Or you can pull it out.

Mhmmm. I've practically got growth rings around that particular wound from a month's hard begrudging.

Today I came across these words from the wonderful Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness teacher, and I suddenly saw what I was doing: 'If you distinguish between pain and suffering, change is possible.'

Again and again these teachings! Can't do much about the pain. The suffering though is in my own hands...

Her Spine

2012-02-16T12:57:00.001Z

How
might
we
step
on
the
earth’s
thin
skin
if
not
by
treading
lightly?

Poem written for the 'spine road' at Cotswold Water Park as part of the Genius Loci project 2001. This was later carved into charred oak, as others of my poems have been, by Michael Fairfax: http://www.michaelfairfax.co.uk/treadinggently.html

Monbiot on social justice and environmentalism

2012-02-15T09:44:00.001Z

Social and environmental commentator George Monbiot is that rare thing: an informed visionary and iconoclast who is able to muster every argument imaginable to shed light on the unethical practices of eg Big Business. He has no fears at all about speaking the truth as he sees it, which often brings him into conflict with, for instance, climate change deniers, multinationals, and those who are determined to support the gap between rich and poor.

He himself walks his talk, living in rural Wales and catching his own fish from a kayak; I believe he's also a smallholder. I consider his weekly blog posts my most valuable and focused dose of political commentary (www.monbiot.com).

This one, on the Guardian of 13th February is, as usual, well worth reading:

THE BIG GREEN QUESTION: Is environmentalism compatible with social justice?

'It is the stick with which the greens are beaten daily: if we spend money on protecting the environment, the poor will starve, or freeze to death, or will go without shoes and education. Most of those making this argument do so disingenuously: they support the conservative or libertarian politics that keep the poor in their place and ensure that the 1% harvest the lion’s share of the world’s resources...'

I never quite understand why he has not become a bigger and more significant figure in global politics; but that, of course, might well be incompatible with his function as a revolutionary.

I hope this link works:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/feb/13/protecting-environment-social-justice?

no language at all

2012-02-14T17:37:00.002Z

The Next Revolution

How we long to overthrow

ourselves, transgressboundaries,

borders, races, states

how we long for alanguage

that is no language atall

but cadences in thetongue

of sparrow, sea, shell,silence –

here, now, trying to makewords

sing like birds orviolins

like without speaking;and

all the time beyond thewindow

the snowdrops and catkins doing their thing

from All the Missing Names of Love; Roselle Angwin, IDP April 2012

'the empty spaces between stars'

2012-02-11T18:25:00.000Z

Cold cold cold. Either the Test matches are still on or the rugby commentators do what cricket ones do and take various raconteuring digressions when, I assume, nothing much is happening on the field, or pitch, or is it crease...? because The Man keeps telling me the lowest sub-zero temperatures in different countries. Cold enough here, though at least so far this year we haven't lost any of the courtyard bluetits, unlike the last two winters. (In France the flamingos haven't fared so well.) A pheasant and two squirrels visit the birdfeeders; I smell fox in the courtyard sometimes in the morning, scavenging for a nut or two, poor things. Earlier today lapwings and fieldfares were flocking together, and I watched a fox quarter the field at Larcombe.

Dog and I go up to the field now to dig a couple of leeks in the deep dusk; our approach sets a clatter of woodpigeons from the trees. Above me Jupiter and Venus are blazing; and is that Mercury over in the east? In the little orchard, the silhouettes of apple trees show swelling nodes; secret buddings going on. I've forgotten so many things this winter: to wake the apple trees with a Wassail on the 17th January; to plant garlic before that, on the winter solstice; to order onion sets; to continue with my druidic studies. I haven't forgotten the sound of my mum's voice, nor the softness of her hands, nor the way her face would light up at my arrival.

In the dimpsy the trees rustle. Above, high high up, a plane's contrail stitches the stars together.

performance poetry: why humour is like a spark plug

2012-02-10T15:21:00.002Z

No way to describe it except paradoxically: the light on the high tide in the Teign early yesterday morning was both luminously clear and frosty-hazy opaque gold.

I love train journeys, especially starting early in the morning; and I love that I can get on a train in dozy alternative Totnes and arrive in gritty-city Glasgow, say, or Edinburgh by teatime; or Cardiff for lunch. I love too that meditative rhythm, and the gazing/dreaming/reading as one is in a kind of time-suspension bubble, and work is on hold (for me, usually) in this cocoon of the travelling present moment.

Yesterday I was only going to Exeter. Just as driving the moor's high upland between here and my dad, or my daughter, means that I journey on one of the most beautiful roads on Britain, so catching the train from Totnes to Exeter is one of the UK's most amazing journeys, as from Newton Abbot onwards the rails run by the estuary of the Teign, then the open sea at Teignmouth and Dawlish, then back inland alongside the Exe estuary. (Not infrequently the trains are brought to an abrupt halt by a particularly high tide with, presumably, water getting into the engine's secret places, like the points.)

Yesterday morning was high tide, and amongst little cocktail-stick clusters of silver-tipped ochre reeds huddled wild duck floated. (Later, coming back, low tide: the patterns of channels and mudflats and clumps of ochre/silver-green/peatbrown wetlands topped with swaying rushes so made me want to reach for my paintbrushes – idle for two or three years, due to family stuff and overwork in the admin department.) The Teign was silver in that haunting atmospheric way that some marshy pools in the French countryside can be at dawn – do you know what I mean? (Anyone seen the film of that wonderful coming-of-age book by Alain Fournier: Le Grand Meaulnes? I think in English the film was called The Lost Domain – can't track it down on DVD anywhere; would love to know if anyone has info.) And then suddenly you're out by the blue and gold high water lapping the red sandstone cliffs of Teignmouth and Dawlish with their dramatic stacks and your senses are so full you can't think.

As the sea morphs into the Exe there are any number of swans on the flooded meadows, and Canada geese, duck, egrets, divers and some little birds I can't identify – dunlin? sanderling? – at the saltwater's edge. On the inland side of the track Powderham Castle grounds host a few hundred fallow deer lazing on frosty grass in shafts of light beneath sessile, pedunculate and the evergreen holm oaks. The willows near the water are starting to blaze red at the tips, and the silver birch (oddly punctuated by pampas grass escapees) are turning magenta – signs of approaching spring.

This is such a treat. So I'm smiling when I arrive in Exeter; and am thinking again that, erratic and low-level income notwithstanding, there's little I'd rather be doing right now than what I am. Having made such a journey to come to Exeter, I'm to be paid for doing something I love: being audience and co-facilitator for an intro and q&a session either side of a really great gig. I'm doing some work for the Prince's Trust and its PoetryQuest project which in the southwest, is currently, via myself and fellow poet Anthony Wilson, taking poetry workshops into small rural primary schools. Partway through the workshops Anthony and I are providing is this performance put on by Apples & Snakes as part of their SPIN project for the pupils as inspiration for their own forthcoming performance.

The line-up is three extremely funny performance poets: Jon Hegley, whose dry humour I've enjoyed for many years; the eccentric and wonderful Ashley Harrold, whom I met when he attended an Arvon course I was tutoring (and who then booked me for a reading in Reading); and the engaging Joe Coelho.

The children loved it all. My cheeks ached. How is it that Jon could make us laugh so much with a poem that consisted entirely of the word 'me' repeated maybe 30 times in different voices and with accompanying facial contortions? And then, on the heels of that, again with a different poem, consisting of the word 'tea', nearly ditto? And then again, in his poem about a sick octopus on the heels of the last two, when we all expected a particular rhyme to be 'tea' (having been well-primed), wrongfooting us by saying in a deadpan voice: 'No, seawater. You've just had some tea. Haven't you? You've just had some tea.' OK, you'd have to have been there.

I'm not a performance poet. I work better on the page, so to speak. And I can barely write a funny poem to save my – whatever; or, at least, maybe once a year I manage. If I have to.

But I learnt a lot about the art yesterday: that humour depends

on setting up expectations and then thwarting or subverting them;
on juxtaposing two apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive ideas;
on the presence, maybe, of other ingredients below the humour (quite a lot of these had a slightly sad or poignant undercurrent that hooked our emotions even as we were laughing);
on timing;
on delivery (voice, body, face);
like a pantomime, on some degree of audience participation;
and on that most essential ingredient, a childlike simplicity and appreciation of the absurd.

I also realised that, as in so many other things, just how much depends, like the spark needed to ignite the process in a combustion engine, on the gaps....

the heart's dark lonely nebula (poem)

2012-02-08T08:19:00.002Z

The little egret who in previous winters has roosted at night in the big oak down by the brook has been absent this winter – until Saturday, when he/she appeared solo; and then on Monday s/he brought a friend. Egrets have been colonising Devon's estuaries for maybe 15 or 20 years now, but they still look exotic and foreign, and inland even more so, their snowy-white standing out against our rather drab winter shades.

For ten years I lived on the little Bere peninsula, the confluence of the Tavy and the Tamar near where Devon and England both give way across the water to the ancient Duchy of Cornwall – Kernow, to those of us who come from there. I loved that world: its micro-ecosystem, its proximity to the moor, but the ever-changing water (it's tidal there) offering a flux I like. There's a small causeway running alongside the river, with a reedy hinterland graced with an occasional lightning flash of kingfisher. Once or twice a grass snake would emerge under the road-bridge to have a little swim in the salty water. Always there are egrets, strutting and peering, and heron too.

The northwest coasts of Devon and Cornwall are utterly different from the southeast coasts. North is wild, dramatic, uplifting. The southeast coasts are a landscape of tidal creeks, saltmudflats and little backwaters, wooded and mysterious. I'm a northwest person, but I've come to love these tidal creeks (and they are too reminiscent for me of holidays spent on my cousins' farm as a child, riding out alongside creeky water, down on the east Cornish coast).

Yesterday I took my bereaved dad down to the peninsula in the bright clear cold of a February afternoon. It's full moon (in Leo), and at its height the spring tide at the full and new moons washes over the causeway: a little subversive reminder to us all that there are things we still can't control, like the moon's tug. I like this, too. My dad and I took the tiny path between trees perched over the rising tide; the last light of the day echoing off the chrome-yellow lichen of the rocks to gild the water lapping at the rushes (where yes a little egret was stooping for water creatures). It occurs to me that the lichen on rocks near the sea is often unusually brightly coloured – a deep yolk-yellow. I wonder if this is specific to salt water air? There's a permanent colony of Canada geese here (to my fury one or two of the locals used to shoot them, but badly, so that occasionally they would be left maimed rather than killed); a flotilla of 60-odd was floating out in the channel. The daffodils are out (this used to be known as the 'fruit and flower basket of the West' – the climate is mild, so early cropping is normal, and the little branch railway would take flowers up to Covent Garden, and the woods are full of a variety of types of escapee daffodils). Already bluebells are spiking well here, and the snowdrops flush all the corners white.

One of the treats about visiting my dad and my old haunts is the drive back across the moor in the dimpsy, the tors softly charcoaled, sky luminous and yesterday that fat moon in the east; the pony herds, little Galloway cattle and the black-faced Scotch sheep who do well on these sparse uplands; ravens, buzzards, snipe and as I near home an owl.

These landscapes stir something in me, and many of my poems push above the surface of the saltmud or the moor in my imagination.

My next collection, All the Missing Names of Love (mostly poems from 2004-9), is due out in early April, and here's one from near Bere Ferrers; inspired partly by Robert MacFarlane's profoundly beautiful book of the poem's title (they're mostly not bleak, though this one is I suppose, a bit; a certain despair in relation to really knowing another person; written at the end of a relationship):

Reading The WildPlaces

And look how it all inthe end

falls back into silence:

these walls, the battlesceded or ‘won’

(as if we don’t alllose);

the fertile fetch betweenus

quiet as the deserts

between stars.

I read yesterday how manytons

of photons strike us inthe course of one day –

how we’re more ‘gap

than join’.

Later, on the causeway

glimpsing the kingfisherstitch light

back across the mudflats,

I remembered that a Manxshearwater

in its life flies as faras the moon

and back; but us –

ohyes

I may kiss your mouthtoday,

molecule to dancingmolecule;

and still

what’s most real withinme

might remain unlaunched;

may never make the leapbetween

my heart’s dark lonelynebula

and yours.

© Roselle Angwin

a year to live... look well therefore to this day

2012-02-06T14:20:00.003Z

Maybe twenty years ago a friend and I worked separately but together through Stephen Levine's book A Year to Live. The core of this book is living as if you knew you had only one year to live.

In my New Year 'Thresholds' workshops I ask a key question: 'What would you change if you had only one year to live?' Its corollary of course is 'What's stopping you – what's really stopping you – making those changes now?' The answer, of course, usually involves fear, one way or another.

A couple of days ago The Guardian ran a piece on the findings of Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, who's recently written a book based on the five most common regrets of terminally ill people as they lie dying.

(TM drew my attention to it. 'Strange!' he said. 'Why don't they mention not getting enough sex??' No comment.)

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying states that these top five are (and note that all are within our own power to change, with the possible exception of the working one – although we have more choice there, at least in terms of what we consider to be essential to our lives in terms of expenditure, than we are comfortable with admitting):

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 'This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made...'

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. 'This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.'

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. 'Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.'

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 'Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.'

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. 'This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

And this reminds me of a deceptively simple Sanskrit teaching, over two millennia old. Perhaps you've come across it before?

Look well to this day
For it is life
The very best of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and truths of existence,
The joy of growth, the splendour of action,
The glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory.
And tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived
Makes every yesterday a memory of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore to this day.

water sutra, cut-up poems and dark matter

2012-02-05T19:10:00.000Z

After all that locking-tight of snow and ice here even in the mild southwest, today was a gentle gift of a day, almost-spring.

TM and I went to Bantham to walk a few miles on the coastpath. My dog's been with my daughter for ten days or so – odd to walk along beaches and not have her crazy-careering spatially-unaware inability-to-corner delight-and-exuberance-at-sand-and-sea accompanying us.

I must have got soft, too, at ten days with tiny strolls in place of my hour+ daily walks, because my legs are tired now, and it was only 8 miles. In my defence though The Man walks extremely fast, and four miles an hour on the coastpath is quite good going, though this is an easy section, via Thurlestone (with its inland lagoon/ley, wildlife refuge) to Hope Cove (and a pub lunch overlooking the water).

Incidentally, if you live in the southwest, I'm leading a half-day 'poetry walkshop' on March 25th from Hope Cove round Bolt Tail for the local AONB; apparently I'll be sharing how to see with a poet's eyes with the participants, and we'll be writing haiku afterwards with a cup of tea in the Fisherman's Reading Room. More details soon on my website, www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk (in fact I might have posted them already).

The sea was glassy and green, horizon lilac- and indigo-outlined. Bantham had a big rash of surfers on very flat laid-back waves; the sea tractor was ploughing through the shallows on the causeway between Bigbury (with its twin seas) and Burgh Island. And here again a guy standing upright 'out back' on a board with a single paddle – not seen this before until recently. I felt a twinge of envy at the kayaker paddling quietly solo offshore.

Scented jonquils are out already in the sheltered places! And at home the broad beans, socks knocked off (no, I am of course talking metaphorically) by the frost, have recovered their dignity and are back upright.

Yesterday was my wonderful monthly poetry group. Something alchemical happens in a deep and intimate group where we work with soul-stuff – because that is one way of looking at poetry; my way, anyway – and there's a deep resonance and trust arises. Plus some very interesting poetry grows out of it.

I decided to use one of Charles Bernstein's exercises where you borrow lines from a prose book. These kinds of exercises feel like cheating – I mean using others' words – but what they can do is kickstart associative thinking, as well as inject new energy via a different vocab and diction. The end result may or may not make a poem in its own right, but the creation of the piece of work does stimulate the imagination, give it a workout.

What you do is take a book with a two- or three-word title. You assign a number to each letter according to its place in the alphabet, with A being 1 and Z being 26. You then look up the page in the book according to each relevant number in turn. You then find a phrase beginning with that letter (that has become a number too).

Obviously the book you choose will colour the phrases you pick. Someone chose a gardening book; another a novel by Maggie O'Farrell; a book of essays; and I took Dark Matter, an extraordinary book by German Juli Zeh: a kind of detective novel rooted in physics and philosophy.

So my title translated to: 4,1,18,11 13,1,20,20,5,18.

Looking up those pages, I tracked down a phrase beginning, each time, with the title-letters (I hedged my bets by choosing a second phrase, in brackets below). So my starting point phrases were (are you with me?):

Doubt the most beautiful (Dozes in the porch)

A theory of physics (A man's ideas)

Relaxed quite the opposite

Knows is warm and dry

Merely of protons, neutrons and electrons (Murder certainly not something he has planned)

Always there

The age of quantum gravity

Theoretical physicists who are the architects

Encounter on the bank (Earth a little way off)

Raises a palm.

Before this exercise we'd already done two or three other exercises to generate a lot of phrases. I asked people to tear these up and mingle and recombine them (having swapped some torn-up part phrases with others). Allow, I said, for interesting juxtapositions.

I wrote two. Here's one:

Towards the Horizon

How we question who we are

(doubt the most beautiful

theory of physics).

The undertow jostles.

Cure for this sense of deep uncertainty:

lime-wash scent of the morning sea

here at Gyllyngvase; pied wagtail

in the wrack and kelp of the tideline

the singing of the spheres.

What do we have in common

with midnight's dark breakers?

The way they blossom into the seventh wave.

Protons, neutrons, electrons –

all encoded to mirror the metamorphoses

of space, planetary parabolas,

triads, fifths and octaves

in the spiral dance of phi;

snailshell, orbit, pine cone; and us –

recent visitors, unreliable witnesses

searching for continuity

in this long now, poised

like a memory of flight

(in the age of quantum gravity)

forever on the brink

of impossible transformations.

Yes. Well. It was fun, anyway.

Speaking of poems: I had such a kind review of my last poetry collection, Bardo, from Alasdair Paterson on stride magazine online (edited by Rupert Loydell, he who booked me to lead the workshops at UCF last week). I hope you won't think me boastful if I post it? It makes such a difference when another poet 'gets' one's work (and with Alasdair it's mutual: I so recommend his on the governing of empires [like mine, published by Shearsman]). I should just reassure you, if you don't know my work, that the poem above is not typical! here's what Alasdair says:

'Those of you already in possession of a smattering of Tibetan or the vocabulary of transcendence will know that 'bardo' signifies a transitional or liminal state (Latin has its uses too). Roselle Angwin's 'Zen take on psychogeography' examines just what it is we discover in the contours of place, how much we bring along with us, how much inner and outer landscapes and weathers interpenetrate and rock into some kind of equilibrium. The poems, many formally prose poems, are captivating and in places breath-taking, calm yet displaying a palette of emotional colours, always subtle and open to the world. Here are the connections between landscape and memory, landscape and belief, landscape and identity – one to read and re-read, to recalibrate the senses before getting out into the world again:

     water sutra

     just a slight thickening
    of the molecules that
     make up water

     the seal
     is almost more wave
     than matter'

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202012/Jan%202012/Paterson%20round%20up.jan2012.htm

animals: 'other nations, caught with ourselves'

2012-02-04T20:36:00.001Z

'We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.'
Henry Beston (from The Outermost House: a year of life on the great beach of Cape Cod)

~

From an early age I was lucky enough as to be brought up with animals, both as family companions and as wild species whom I was taught to recognise, respect and learn about, and from. Our house was always filled with animals, whether chosen pets or wild animals in various states of injury and healing (both I and another sister had wounded animals brought to us from when we were quite young).

It's inconceivable to me to live one's whole life without developing relationship with one or more animals. There's a dislocation, a dissociation, happens in a society where humans form an isolated stratum in the eco-system, disconnected in any real way from our near-neighbours. For a child, time spent looking after an animal is a natural and important way of learning compassion and empathy.

More, it seems to me that the measure of an enlightened culture is not just its treatment of other humans, but its treatment too of the animals from whom and with whom we've evolved. We have grown up as a species alongside (other) animals; and some, like dogs and horses, have been close companions to humans for thousands of years.

At an ancient and profound level our souls resonate with the animal kingdom, and we can learn much about our own species and this planet by learning from them and their (and our with-them) interrelationships. Spending time with the animal kingdom opens doorways we may have forgotten, and can restore a kind of meaning as we are reminded of our interconnectedness with them, and the whole great web of life. It's through the animal kingdom too that we can start to reclaim our healthy instinctual nature.

In shamanic cultures animals are recognised as spirit-guides, representing not only themselves but archetypal aspects of our human psyches too; they may well perform the role of soul-restoration.

Animals in vision and dream can be teachers. In shamanic practice, 'meeting' in the Otherworld of dream or vision a particular animal or type of animal three times is seen as significant, and the dreamer does well to find out all he or she can about the characteristics of that animal in order to see more deeply into his or her own psyche, and its messages and needs.

Animals can be healers: there's much documented testimony to the power of pets to alleviate symptoms in humans, whether psychological or physical (though of course that's a false dichotomy; my guess is that being around animals is restorative to the soul which in turn boosts the immune system). For myself, time out walking with the dog, time alongside horses, time watching the birds feeding in the courtyard is profoundly healing and uplifting; sometimes subtly, sometimes more obviously.

Today, with my poetry group here, over and over in my writing and the gaps between I returned to watching the birds, with their different characteristics: the woodpeckers flitting in – the youngster who hangs on the feeder motionless for ten minutes, digesting the nuts and preventing anyone else from arriving; the nuthatch with its insistent upside-down fierce pecking; noting the bluetits queuing up to sip drops of water from the forest of ice-spears on the quarry-face that walls one side of the courtyard, their comic acrobatics, their speed, their little tricolour faces and clockwork head-tilts; the little drab-shy dunnocks, hedge sparrows that are not actually sparrows at all but members of the robin family:

NEWS

Watching all day
the dunnocks
in the courtyard puddles
on their little stick-legs
playing 'grandmother's footsteps'
with the rain, with my gaze –

how big the world is,
how plural,
how unmappable!
And how wise it would be
to be in love with
transience.

~

As a child I was, and as an adult, too, I am entranced by those stories of animals who help each other, and help if needed humans, also, to survive: the stories of dolphins who raise drowning dolphins, and humans, to the surface to breathe; that video on YouTube of a small dog dodging traffic to pull its injured dog companion across a three-lane highway to safety; stories of dogs who trek hundreds of miles to find their human companion; those stories of children raised by gazelle, by wolves.

And how do we reward them? With captivity. With torture. With eating them. What we do to others we do, of course, to ourselves.

Our relationship to animals surely needs to change as we move towards meeting the spiritual, and material, demands of our time.

The transport of live food animals from Britain to Europe has started again. Calves just weeks old are shipped to Europe to be raised in the dark and have their throats slit for veal (darkness and bleeding to death makes the meat white). That is, if they've survived: far more often than one would like to hope they arrive broken-limbed or with dislocated hips from being dragged, pushed or dangled by one leg in being winched on and off planes or ships.

Geese are force-fed for paté de foie gras. Ducks are intensively-reared, and like hens de-beaked.

Pigs, these most intelligent of animals, are largely confined to tiny cages as breeding sows throughout the 'developed' world, where they literally go mad. Smuggled video cameras in abattoirs show pigs being kicked, punched; having cigarettes put out on their snouts.

Many if not most cows in the UK, hard though it is to believe, spend at least half their lives and sometimes all of them away from grass, close-confined in barns. If the big corporations have their way, much more of this will happen in intensive mega-dairies.

Salmon are farmed, which means that their natural migrations simply don't happen. In common with all farmed animals, quite apart from the misery, the intensive farming methods used, plus interference with their natural health and welfare means that disease is rife.

Shark are de-finned live for the tables of the East, being thrown back into the water to die.

Dolphins and whales of course are hunted for food.

Monkeys are, or were until recently if not any longer, served as 'delicacies' in Japanese restaurants where, live, they are penned by the necks and their brains eaten.

And dancing bears, caged, live a life of utter misery with rings disfiguring the soft tissue of their noses, being beaten and electro-prodded to make them 'dance' for tourists.

Of course this raises questions about 'right relationship'. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could restore animals to their rightful place, as respected co-habitees of this amazing planet – third in line from the sun, conditions just right for life as we know it; one degree hotter or one degree cooler and we wouldn't even be here – alongside us? How would it be to ease back on the pedal, to consider how many lives are given to satisfy our appetites, and whether those appetites and therefore lives lost are truly necessary?

For me, I made the decision at 16 to become vegetarian. It was also consonant with my Buddhist practice, in which I've taken the precept of non-harming. (I knew, too, that if push came to shove I couldn't actually kill an animal; if I could, maybe I'd feel better about eating it.)

For many years, though, I made my living as a shoemaker. This was part of a whole drive on my part to learn the basic skills of smallholding: growing, cooking, animal-husbandry, cheese-making, bread-making, wine-making, pottery, spinning, weaving, knitting, vegetable-dyeing, medicinal herbs, healing, woodcraft. And for many years I was aware of a deep-seated hypocrisy in myself regarding the use of animal products that involved taking an animal's life (as opposed to, for instance, eating an egg from a sterile hen – yes they produce eggs even without a cockerel in the flock – or wool shorn from a living sheep). From time to time people challenged me on the leather use, and I'd respond, glibly, that I was using up the waste 'you carnivores leave behind you'. But that was simply a pat answer. It is true that if one is going to take the life of an animal at all, one should perhaps use the whole of it, with gratitude. But I didn't want to be involved in animal exploitation at all.

So then I was eating cheese and drinking milk (albeit organic, which at least guaranteed minimum welfare standards for the animals involved), both of which practices involve cow pregnancy and the killing of unwanted calves, and in any case almost all the male calves; and although many cheeses use vegetarian rennet to set the curd, many still use an enzyme from calves' stomachs.

I'd always said that when my daughter left home (I'd brought her up vegetarian) I'd become a vegan. I didn't. It took me ten years, until very recently, to take this logical next step, ethically speaking.

I couldn't imagine giving up tea completely (I don't have many addictions, but that's a small one), and I couldn't imagine enjoying tea without milk. To my utter astonishment, I actively liked the taste of the Co-op's organic soya milk (and nothing's perfect: there is still the question of both food miles and processed foods); and it only took a week or two before I started to actively dislike the taste of cow's milk – too fatty, too animaly. (And it is, after all, made for calves – who wants bones like cows?? 'We are what we eat...')

Cheese has been much harder. I really miss it. I have found that for me the way forward is not to be utterly rigid. If I cut cheese out completely I crave it badly. My compromise has been that if I go out and there isn't a vegan option I eat cheese; and on a poetry day where everyone brings food to share, I usually do, too. Allowing myself to do this has had the desired effect: I rarely want to; but when I do, I really enjoy it, without guilt.

I confess I do still eat eggs. They have to be free range and ideally organic, and I prefer to buy them from flocks where I know there isn't a cockerel.

I'm lucky that The Man is supportive. He's been a vegetarian for many years, but relies very heavily on cheese, yoghurt and milk. We share the cooking, and he has adapted to cooking a vegan evening meal, topping his dairy levels up (big-time) at lunchtime. There are any number of really tasty vegan meals which many of us eat without thinking about it – veggie shepherd's pie, many cous cous and rice dishes, paellas and risottos, veggie spag bol, soups and stews, pasta and sauce, salads, ratatouille, nut and veg roasts, corn on the cob – and on and on. We mostly make our own dishes up, based on what's in the garden (leeks, potatoes, onions, garlic, purple sprouting broccoli, chard and errr quite a lot of cabbage). Yes, there's an issue with both iron and B12 – dark green leafy veg, nuts and veggie red wine (some is 'fined' with bull's blood) for the iron, Marmite or another yeast extract for the B12.

And now I've run out of steam. I don't want to proselytize; but if I say to you that we could feed ten times as many people, globally, on a veggie diet as on a meat one...?

And can I recommend the wise, beautiful and committed blog of fellow Buddhist and virtual friend, David Ashton, for his insightful and passionate responses to the eating (or not) of animals? http://davidmashton.blogspot.com/2011/06/mindful-blindness-rant-against.html

Also interesting is Jungian Jeff Howlin's blog; this one is on animals and learning from them:
http://www.santacruzpsychologist.com/blog/2012/learning-from-animals-why-it-matters/

west, again

2012-02-03T11:44:00.003Z

Plockton

Begin in the sudden rain and the almost-glimpse of a stranger more familiar than your own self

     you remember how on the hill the rocks rose up in a crowd, like sheep, and down below on the dark loch a single rhododendron shook out a purple skirt

     though the castle you thought you were seeking was not there
     may not be anywhere

but still that old blue boat bobs to the gentle swell of forage and retreat     forage and retreat     at the lochside stones

like a canticle of freedom

and round the point the ocean proper roars its praisesongs and laments

*

and somewhere else, west by west, a small boy on a big horse rides off into such a dream of happiness as he'll never know again

*

Kernow
The names fizz: Merrymeet, Doddycross, Menheniot, then all the Tres Pols Pens of this ancient kingdom, my homeland. Sky's still blazing further west again. On this hill a cloud of rooks at dusk, a tall engine house (finger of chimney beseeching or admonishing), lakes, woods
          and then without intending vision blurs and I'm back at Boswednack where the gorse flames in yes this sudden rain and the little fields are canted towards Lyonesse and over by Zennor dwarf black cattle stand and stamp in the lee of granite walls near the mermaid church

where I'm pierced by inexplicable driving joy and sorrow indistinguishable the one from each

*

like waking up in your own life for the first time and knowing it to be good to be true

*

Maenporth
Now, midnight, and only the white noise of the surf (obliterating thought) and the breakers' dark yawn translating into white blossom, spitting small white stones like teeth

a flock of dream-birds stalled in flight

and only this deeper and deeper white-noise silence
of not-I not-you
an animation
of shadows questions laughter
without words or thought of words
stealing identity
time and thoughts of time dissolved
no inside no outside

the great return

*

Gyllyngvase
February late dawn sun stage left waves freighted already with surfers and a raucousness of gull-mourn and that strange hazy clarity of light-with-frost erasing and making sharp simultaneously the headlands down to the Lizard, all the lost possible countries we could inhabit

and maybe do without knowing
maybe have     maybe will

the returning light, again

2012-02-01T07:09:00.002Z

From here, down near a roaring sea in Falmouth, Cornwall, where I'm running workshops in poetry and fiction for undergraduates, I'm cheating and reposting my last year's blog on Imbolc, or Candlemas – the light growing stronger here in the Northern Hemisphere now, poised as we are midpoint between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. I wish you light; and snowdrops, and hope.

imbolc, candlemas, the returning light

In the Celtic calendar, the cross-quarter days (midpoint between the solstices and equinoxes) are important fire festivals. February 1st/2nd is dedicated to Bride, Brigid, and I've lit the candles to celebrate the early light of spring, and floated them in hand-thrown little ceramic bowls of water. This is a 'quiet' fire festival, an inward time as befits the winter goddess'reign, and looks to gentle light rather than to the ebullience of fire – this energy builds as we move through the year towards the midsummer solstice, and then wanes again towards midwinter.

In Mexico this is still celebrated as the beginning of the Aztec new year, and it's seen similarly in Tibet. In the ancient Greek world and the Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone is released from Pluto's underworld kingdom now, and trails with her early flowers. It's also a time for cleansing and purification, letting go of winter's residue.

The last two mornings a thrush has started up a spring song from the ash tree outside the bedroom window. This white month, in the Celtic tree alphabet, is signified by Nuin, the ash tree, which is dedicated to Brigid (as well as the horse goddess), so this makes me smile. Yesterday as I walked along the valley stream a little (white) egret flew up from (presumably) fishing. Little egrets have colonised many of the Devon estuaries, but it's rare to see them very far inland. We're a few miles from the mouth of the Dart, but this egret seems often to roost in the trees here in winter.

And yesterday morning, too, I spent a couple of hours putting myself between the hunt and two hare in the field next to us (I'm delighted to say they survived, although not really thanks to me). Is it a surprise that hare, seriously in decline in England, are also companions of the Goddess?

from 'Entering the Wood'

February is coppicing

spring-cleaning the wood

remembering line, vaulting, architecture

thinning hazel scrub

to let in summer

when it comes

the pattern of our saws

their dissonant harmonies

weak sun on our backs

thin feather of smoke

and the showers of rufous catkins

around our feet

the mallet’s knock

its echo

on the road the erratic pulse

of traffic

we think of tidying our lives

– Roselle Angwin, in Bardo, May 2011, Shearsman

there is only the dance

2012-01-30T14:49:00.000Z

chill on the moorland's
invisible edges
even the rooks are sulking

this wet no-horizon day –

at the window
scribble of beech twigs
vowels of rain

here in the hall
we are a storm of leaves
blown on the music

this present moment –

on the dancefloor
of the heart
there are no exiles

big sky mind

2012-01-29T18:28:00.000Z

When I wake this morning I'm thinking about something Alain de Botton said in his essay in the little Guardian booklet on time (see yesterday's post).

He mentions that in a religious culture, time is routinely given to the soul. This, no matter how brief and informal, is a kind of ritual practice that lifts us above mundane preoccupations and reminds us of something of the eternal, whatever one considers that to be.

I think of Islam, and how when the muezzin calls prayer from the minaret five times a day the faithful simply stop whatever they're doing to pass some moments, or minutes, reconnecting with eternity, or the sublime, or the divine – in any case, with the spiritual world. It's a gesture towards the transcendent that reminds us that we are more than simply lumps of matter, and more than our thoughts, emotions, reactions, work, and the getting-through-the-day consciousness that can so bog us down.

De Botton contrasts that with our Westernised secular culture where our ritual involves, perhaps, a cup of tea and the news. Nothing wrong with that, and an awareness of current affairs is arguably essential in this interconnected world of ours. But is it enough? What happens to soul in this picture? How might we tend it in order to be aware of collective issues but be able, also, to remember that, no matter how pressing, how challenging, how disastrous, they are still all transient? How can we live in this world and still participate in Big Sky Mind?

It's easy to let our horizons shrink to the scale of our own troubles. We all need a frequent 'petit moment d'éternité' to stand between us and oblivion, or immersion in the demands of making our way in the material world –

bluetits in the courtyard; photo Francis Jones

– to catch a whisper on the breeze, share a hug, close our eyes and breathe, stand and gaze at a tree, the birds in the courtyard, read a poem, lift ourself like a buzzard free of our petty daily concerns.

We need to remember to wake up, which is what the muezzin is calling the faithful to do. We are spiritual beings living in a material world, and there is a need for a homecoming to something bigger than ourselves, bigger than tending the ego.

This is, in effect, the territory of mindfulness. Mindfulness is life with full attention to this here now and to all that is. It involves a kind of paradox: in being completely given over to the present moment one is also freed by and from it, as one is freed from the distracting mental or emotional tugs of both past and future. Then the sky at last opens up above us. This too is a way of bringing eternity into the present.

A Tibetan Buddhist teacher whose talks I sometimes attended used to speak of practising over and over painting with brush and ink a simple circle on paper. Then maybe someone would knock at the door, and he'd use that as an alert to full attention; and in that split second, as they say, of being taken back outward from his focused engagement he would go fractionally deeper before surfacing into 'everyday reality', and find that he'd drawn the perfect circle.

Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of using the telephone as a bell to mindfulness: counting to three, being fully present with that counting, before he answers the phone. I like to do that, when I remember.

I also like to use the practice of watching my breath with full attention, coming into and leaving my body; remembering that the air I breathe is breathed by all other living beings, a shared air; and within it are molecules of air circulating from all time, inhaled and exhaled equally by the bloke down the lane, a migrating goose, Martin Luther King, a prisoner at Guantanamo, the horses in WW1, Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, the Buddha, an ancestor in the Basque Ice Age refuges, and on and on throughout time.

As I think about this I remember that I have forgotten, lately, my practice of gratitude (my 'Attitude of Gratitude') with which I used to open and close every day: simply thinking of three things for which I'm grateful can open me up beyond my prosaic troubles and daily concerns. And no matter what one's situation (within reason), there is almost always something to be grateful for. In this moment I feel no fear. In this moment a primrose is blooming in the bank. In this moment a nuthatch comes to the feeder. In this moment I have enough to eat, am warm enough and have a roof over my head. In this moment I'm grateful for the friends I have. In this moment I am filled with gratitude for the fact of being alive.

photo Francis Jones

tempus, fugiting

2012-01-28T23:36:00.003Z

'In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to... stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment...'

Thoreau, Walden

On the Richter scale of Significant Personal Events it didn't even register; wasn't even a flicker of an idea of an embryonic tremor. However, I'm mildly interested to notice that I spent an hour and half earlier today writing a blog on how I never have any time (yes, me, mindfulness practitioner and mealy-mouthed advocate of the Simple Life, and liver of a very complex one). I then accidentally wiped the whole post, and spent the best part of another hour looking for it or its remains, futilely (well, I found some truncated version, aborted about a sixth of the way in).

The irony didn't pass me by; nor did the fact that somewhere within Said Blog, which amounted to a couple of thousand words (because actually it was intended to be a rough outline of a typical writer's week – that is a typical week in this writer's life), I was also questioning how it was that I managed to squander enough time as to never actually have time to write (and hoping in the journaling involved to uncover the lack of strategies in order to, uh, strategise).

Actually, that one is easily answered: most of my working time is spent on the admin involved in the fact that most of my income, such as it is, is derived from facilitating others' creative writing. But I suspect – I know – that is not the whole truth. In here too is my addiction to too much doing of too many things all at the same time, especially if they involve in one way or another communication/information/knowledge.

So, smiling rather wryly, I remind myself that I live in an eternal present. I will not, therefore, lose myself in the past and Things Undone, nor the future and Things To Do. I will live with serenity in the only time I ever have right here, right now, in single-pointedness. I am after all a meditator. I do know about simply being with how things are.

I came across this lovely tweet this morning: 'In the beginning you will fall into the gaps in between thoughts – after practising for years, you become the gap.' J. Kleykamp. (Am still working on becoming the gap; though sometimes it feels as if it's the join that's relevant, not the gap. But in Zen of course there is no join as there is no gap, either.)

Having agreed with myself that I will act as if I live truly in an eternal present with no rush or concept of rush and allow myself to sit down to eat a meal, simply to eat, and even take five afterwards just to read (that is before I take my pre-next-chunk-of-work-mini-break to wander round the orchard to notice the snowdrops and the song thrush; I haven't quite progressed to Doing Absolutely Nothing yet), I pick up today's Guardian. Out drops a little booklet on – TIME.

Well, of course I took twenty minutes to read it. Nothing I didn't know and much that I already implement; or, at least, know I should, and suggest my retreat participants might.

In James Long's timeslip novel Ferney the protagonist, anticipating the arrival of work-to-the-clock in late mediaeval England, says that this will be a bigger disaster than anyone can yet imagine. Up until the late Middle Ages working hours were determined by season and day length.

There was a time in my life when that too was the case. These hivernal and aestival (aren't those exquisite words??), diurnal and nocturnal rhythms are in our blood.

Time, if one lets it, especially others' demands in relation to our time, is as we know a tyrant. Our Western culture is organised around a dictated homogenised length of working day, regardless of our own preferences, needs, biorhythms (and I realise there are also some advantages to this); and, more, time is given a monetary value. Mostly we don't even question whether this is OK or not. But we could choose to reclaim time, at least a little of it, for ourselves.

How would it be to live like this? To take off our watches, switch off our phones, hide our clocks, just for a day each week? To be subversive; to spend the whole day lounging under a tree, watching a bud open, a snail move a few inches (or nowhere at all), the stars come out, the constellations wheeling past (or rather our wheeling through the heavens)?

Or as Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says 'Don't just do something; sit there!'

weather differentials

2012-01-27T13:59:00.000Z

I predict that somewhere there will be a light rain shower.
I predict that somewhere else there will be heavy rain.
Somewhere else again you might need to expect hail/snow/blizzards (delete as necessary).
Somewhere they say there is sun.
There again, cloud cover is possible, in all, any or none of the above.
I predict weather, basically...

All of these differentials will be, in due course, losing their identities*.

:-)

* I love it when the shipping forecaster says this

You need to read this article to make sense of the above: George Monbiot, The Guardian 26/1/12 (the comments are worth reading too): http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/jan/26/weather-forecasters-daily-mail?INTCMP=SRCH

one small amazing fact...

2012-01-27T12:59:00.003Z

http://www.pdphoto.org

What a little beauty, huh? Yep I'm still stuck on snails (see the brief book blog post on Intimacy of a few days ago).

And from that gorgeous book The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating here is a small and rather lovely fact: a snail has a heart, one lung – and a brain that, depending on species, has between 5,000 and 100,000 giant neurons. What's more, it seems that snails have been observed helping other weaker members of their genus to find food sources.

Think twice, dear gardener...

Earth Ages, change and pockets of turbulence

2012-01-26T11:34:00.002Z

I guess it's human nature to notice the things that others possess – I'm speaking materially here – that reflect our own taste, or choice. If you drive a silver car no doubt you notice silver cars everywhere, and conclude that there are a lot of them. If you walk a poodle, own an iPad, read The Guardian, for instance, you notice said items everywhere, I imagine (I don't own a silver car, poodle or iPad).

Psychology suggests too that we notice in others traits, both positive and negative, that are our own (and often unrecognised) traits. That's a whole other blog, or few hundred.

So it's the case, too, that when one is going through the mill, it seems that everyone else is as well. There may be an element of self-selection at work: one gravitates to others who will understand and offer support because they know the deal.

I meet in the course of my work a great many people who are deeply aware of the uncertainties and troubles in all our lives, globally, and who themselves are facing huge upheavals in their personal lives, and actively searching for more sustainable ways forward, both politically and in terms of lifestyle choices, and on a personal psychospiritual level. (TM would say that is because these people are self-selecting in that it is a certain 'type' of person, often, or someone in a certain type of circumstance, who will be seeking out the work I do [which is quite a lot more than 'simply' teaching people to write]. There is also the demographic, here, near Totnes – alternative capital of the southwest [with Stroud and Glastonbury], and a place that draws many people looking for a philosophy not entirely rooted in consumerism based on exploitation, material gain and status. It's not a coincidence that this is the birthplace of the Transition Town movement, currently growing exponentially.)

As many before me have said, we live in a time of unprecedented and massive change: climatically, economically, culturally, socially, spiritually. As far as we can tell, some of the challenges facing us may well be unique in detail and ramifications to our highly-technologically-developed culture.

If we don't want to destroy our species, let alone other species and the planet, we need to adapt, and fast; and if you take the worldview of interconnectedness that I do, what affects the one (individual/family/business/culture/nation/species) affects the whole. We are not isolated little units; everything we do has a consequence.

Times of great change require a strenuous response, and dedicated effort to effect the shift in consciousness that these times are requiring of us; and it is my belief that if we turn a blind eye the response needed will grab us anyway. It makes sense to go willingly, consciously, if we can.

I don't speak often about such things here as I'm wary of accusations of New Age triteness; but what can we expect from a time where the beginning of a new century and a new millenium coincides with a New Earth Age in the 2000-year cycle of earth ages? The last two thousand years, connected with the Christ, have been, some say, about learning to love and its shadow: the unleashing of hatred and aggression (the 'spiritual' warrior and the 'ego-oriented' warrior). Now, the Age of Aquarius demands a playing out of humanitarian values on a global scale, with an ushering-in of a more inclusive political and spiritual perspective.

Of course there is turbulence as the old and the new clash. Of course we as individuals will find collective issues mirrored in our personal lives, and vice versa. Of course those of us who are most sensitive will be conduits for collective issues (well, we all are, clearly; but the sensitives often pay the price). Of course how we handle all this will have a ripple effect.

And of course, we're not alone.

puffins on Staffa

2012-01-25T15:38:00.002Z

Was it last year, or 2010, when my 'Islands of the Heart' group on the sacred Isle of Iona accompanied me on Davy Kirkpatrick's wooden boat 'Iolaire' to Staffa, home to Fingal's Cave, where this magical hour silenced us all into stillness?

Just proofing for the last time my new collection All the Missing Names of Love (IDP April 2012), and this is in it:

On Staffa

At first they come singly, specks of dark spume
kited up from their rafting on the tranquil green-glass
sea; then in their twos and threes.

We hold our breath, let the slow
swell of the great Atlantic stretched to all
the directions breathe us.

On the western horizon a speck of dust
is a trawler; and below, the wooden boat rounds
the bows of the island and vanishes.

They crash land like parachutists with
their orange feet, webbed as penguins’,
asplay; rattle their wings in April air,

and one by one saunter closer, clumsy,
comic, their airborne elegance absent
here among the blond grasses.

On the cliffs, above the plaint of fulmars,
the puffins’ low chuckles creak like
antique hinges. They gaze at us

where we lie inches away, we who cannot
fly; they gaze from their strange exotic triangles
of eyes beneath gelled quiffs, black brows

crowning white cheeks; they with their stubby
rainbow beaks against our landbound drabs.
None of us moves. It’s in these moments

that we remember the truths behind words;
and recover an ancient longing; and our
kinship, our covenant, with wild.

© Roselle Angwin

puffin on Staffa: Beatrice Grundbacher 2010

this shifting land that is our life

2012-01-23T13:57:00.000Z

It's Sunday morning and I'm trudging up the track after a night of no sleep, caught in huge fear for my daughter's safety after an incident last evening. Ahead of me in the light drizzle are the remains of two sheep (not connected with the incident), and my body doesn't want to proceed. My heart doesn't want, either, to contaminate the place I call the Sacred Grove, to which I'm heading, with my panic. I turn. I trudge back down again, watching the loose boulders as I'm so off-balance – fear does that, doesn't it?

Worst, as a mother, is knowing there is nothing I can do to help protect my daughter other than accompany her as best I can, and preferably without letting her know how fearful I am.

TM came to the rescue, driving me the hour and a quarter (as I'd had two glasses of wine) late the night before, and has done a good job of being the dad a girl needs sometimes, the dad he isn't, the dad she hasn't had since her actual father left when she was small, and sorted what needed sorting.

Now, Monday, I am so glad that I listened to what I needed – dance – this morning, instead of what I should be doing (work). I think of my therapist friend R reminding me of how we need to discharge adrenalin, not let it build up in the physical and subtle bodies.

The music takes my body and I stop thinking. Sun streams in through the window and I choose a ray to dance in. As the music pitches towards chaos I let it shake my body and I'm laughing; and then as the music subsides I find myself lying on the floor near the tulips' yellow shout weeping, and allow the tears to trickle through my hair onto the floor, into the earth.

We carry so much pain, all of us. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. And it's OK. This is simply how it is.

My mother, a deeply religious woman, used to say we're never given more than we can cope with. Sometimes it certainly feels as if we are. I have felt lately as if I am a bird caught up in the stack of planes circling Heathrow, waiting for the obliterating crash. And then we reach, once again, the stillpoint, and remember how good life is, with its pain, its fear, its uncertainty; and we laugh and cry simultaneously. Of course we'll falter away from the stillpoint, and then we'll find our way back again. That's the dance.

This morning, in sun, the woodpeckers come as always; male and female. The landscape is starred in places with celandines, snowdrops, primroses. A little plume of blue smoke from the next valley rolls against the fallow fields. S is already busy with his chainsaw, early, thinning out dead blackthorn. Next door to him M and B and their friends have planted over the weekend a wonderful surging curve of native trees, 600 of them, in their field, below the orchard.

In our garden the broads beans are a few cms high, and the onions more again. Little reminders that spring always comes.

I led my annual Thresholds retreat on Saturday. Here are two qs from it:

What would you do, or change, if you knew you only had a year to live?

What's stopping you doing that now?

Drawing the Blank Card

I hear myself saying

the true ground is water

its mirror, its moon-pull

but what freedom, I'd say

in knowing that the truest

home is everywhere and nowhere

and so at last you

let go

in this shifting land

that is our life

its seascape saltcloud drift

what is there to hold on to

but nothing?

B emails me. Tells me of a mug she was given for Christmas:'Friends are like stars – you can’t always see them; still, they are there.'

In deep gratitude for my friends, human and otherwise.

Intimacy post no 3: addendum

2012-01-20T20:13:00.002Z

OK, it has a sort-of happy ending (for him). In a paragraph.

At a cost; mostly to others. Does that therefore negate it?

Or does authenticity score higher than keeping others safe (but in the dark) at the cost of being truly truthful?

What does compassion mean in these circumstances?

I'm talking of course of Kureishi's Intimacy.

Can I say, truthfully, myself, that it's better to live a lie and protect others, than be truthful to oneself at all costs?

'To thine own self be true,' said WS. 'Thou canst not then be false to any man.'

'Everything you want is at the other side of fear,' said someone called Jack Canfield.

Mario Petrucci's 'Letters to Ukraine' (12)

2012-01-20T11:17:00.003Z

The Day Digest [Ukraine] Publication date: 19 January 2012

Letters to Ukraine – 12

What do our commercials say about us? Imagine yourself an explorer from another galaxy, stumbling across Earth. For technical reasons, you can stay for several minutes only. You’re beamed down, by freak coincidence, in front of a TV during a commercial break, with no one about. Naturally, you assume this prominently located box must be an important information dispenser. You watch, assessing humankind’s primary concerns. [Do that, today, with the first commercial break you’re exposed to. Here are my own results: hairspray, computer equipment, cars, car sales, insurance, sweetly fizzy caffeinated drinks, comparative insurance, financial services, broadband, rail travel (first class).] Decades later, you return across space on a full-scale diplomatic mission. Earth is now practically dry of petroleum and drinkable water; nations are riddled with conflict, famine, disease. Many of its inhabitants are hairless from pollution and radiation exposure. But you’ve brought an offering, based on the research of your previous visit. No cancer cure, high-tech water purifier, or strain of wheat resistant to drought and toxins; no irresistibly peaceful, egalitarian philosophy. Instead, you insist on meeting the first-class humans, to whom you present a package of interplanetary insurance, intergalactic shares in electronics, and a cornucopia of petrol-driven cars, fizzy drinks and hairspray.

copyright: Mario Petrucci 2012

reproduced here with kind permission from the author

ps to Kureishi's 'Intimacy' (yesterday's blog)

2012-01-20T11:16:00.000Z

Well, Kureishi's book has proved gripping and engaging. However, I can see why it might have been billed as 'controversial': I see the narrator as both narcissistic (we probably all are), and misogynistic (that's less acceptable to me). Neither he nor his partner are likeable characters, and the book, I'd say, is sexual (genital-focused) rather than erotic (which is a much broader category addressing the sheer juicy vitality of being alive, in all its aspects, in all its lushness, its creativity, its fecundity, in all its celebratory passion, in my view).

In some ways it's a brave book, and the above doesn't stop me being engaged.

And the dilemma is not about solitude vs intimacy – that was my spin on it. It's more about the intimacy of monogamy with one specific person vs the so-called freedom to have intimate sexual relationship with another or others.

It's also a thoughtful meditation on what makes one person rather than another person special to us.

And it seems to me that the narrator is not capable of intimacy with anyone other than himself – but at least he has the latter. And Kureishi's writing is intelligent, sensitive, insightful and at times moving and profound. And quotable:

'I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in right relation?'

brief book blog: 3 on intimacy

2012-01-19T11:27:00.000Z

In the last couple of days three new (to me) books have come my way. All three are completely engrossing, which is a disadvantage when I'm working from home and disinclined, at the moment, to work.

Each book, in its own way, is about intimacy; one is a novel, one a poetry collection, one non-fiction.

Many years ago now when I thought I was going to marry for the second time, my fiancé told me about a vicar who said at a wedding he (the vicar) was conducting and T was attending: 'I want you to remember that, as you commit to each other now, there will be a time in the future when one of you, without doubt, will leave the other. Whether this is through divorce or through death, it will happen.' It seemed to me then, as it seems to me still, that this was a very wise vicar.

No, it's not gloomy and pessimistic. It's not that it's 'realistic', either. It's simply a very profound reminder, to me, that others are only ever 'on loan': that nothing is permanent, and we need, perhaps, to remember to make the most of this: of each relationship in our lives, and every passing moment. We can do this by committing ourselves to deep intimacy with the process, in its transience.

'In my beginning is my end.' It is not possible to have a beginning that won't lead to an ending, eventually; and each ending introduces a new beginning. That is simply how life is, in its cycles and phases. How much energy we expend, though, wishing it to be different!

Is there any one of you out there who can say with complete and total honesty that you have ever been in a relationship without considering the possibility of leaving it? Life, as I experience it anyway, is a perpetual balancing act of intimacy and solitude, with the balance in perpetual motion too (and we so often forget that intimacy with ourselves has to be cultivated before we can truly be intimate with another).

Anyway, all that's a preamble to Hanif Kureishi's book Intimacy. I'm 3 pages in, and hooked. A reviewer says it's about the 'dissection of male sexual restlessness'. It's primarily about the narrator's leaving of his marriage (maybe not the right book for you if you're feeling vulnerable at the moment; it's described as 'controversial'; 'coruscating'; 'excoriating').

Maybe I'm a masochist: I really enjoy reading about relationship, and I don't mind reading deeply painful and intimately honest accounts of hard things (though I can't stand violence and cruelty) – I loved Dan Franck's Separation, and McEwan's On Chesil Beach, bleak though they both are. One of my big favourites is Dunmore's Talking to the Dead. (One of the reasons I go to literature is to do with relationship: how other people do it; how processes in the human heart are brought to resolution, and if not, why not; how the human spirit is strengthened by facing up to stuff; how we triumph over disaster.)

The blurb says: 'Intimacy speaks to, and for, a lost generation of men: those shaped by the Sixties, disoriented by the Eighties and bereft of a personal and political map in the Nineties.' And it speaks to me, as a woman, interested in men: how different we are, how similar we are.

~

In the post this morning was Nina Bogin's poetry collection The Winter Orchards (Anvil). Good poetry, for me, is always about intimacy, though not necessarily in the obvious ways; more the way in which we as humans learn to pay deep attention to everything we encounter, and then recreate the sense of entry into that intimate encounter for a reader. Bogin is intimate with everyone and everything she encounters: human, horse, deer, plant, rock. She maps it all. I didn't know her work, and I'm captivated. Here's one:

'Glossary'

Black that means rock.
Moss that means comfort.

Lichen that means stone.
Path that means passage.

Rock that means shelter.
Nest that means warmth.

Hoofprint that means flight.
Turd that means food.

Feather that means battle.
Bone that means death.

Snow that means north.
Stream that means thaw.

Fern that means marsh.
Flower that means light.

~

This one is wonderful, wacky, exceptional, completely compelling. If you're into natural history and its little particular intimacies, you'll love this. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (Green Books) is exactly what it says it is, and I am smiling all the way through. It's by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, whose constant companion throughout a serious illness was – yes – a living woodland snail. It's a moving record, too, without any self-pity, of the severe confinement and introspection that comes with illness, and the questions and insights it can reveal.

I've always quite liked snails in an impersonal sort of way, and am gentle with them when they eat my veg, admiring their perfect spiral homes, removing them carefully and putting them over the hedge. But no, I would never have imagined that a book about a snail – a personal memoir, as well as a wide-ranging scientific study of a gastropod – would so engage me. I love it. Must be my age.

Here's what it says on the jacket: 'The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is an affirmation of the healing power of nature, revealing how much of the world we miss in our busy daily lives, and how truly magical it is. A remarkable journey of survival and resilience, TSWSE shows how a small part of the natural world can illuminate our own human existence and deepen our appreciation of what it means to be fully alive.'

In its smaller way it reminds me of that wonderful book by naturalist Richard Mabey: Nature Cure, another 'must read' for those interested in the therapeutic power of the natural world.

elephant, amnesia and ant holes... or 'don't give up the day job'

2012-01-18T13:27:00.000Z

last night, moon on the hill

how many times before
have I been bird, leaf
single blade of grass?

tonight, a small mist followed
me home

*
This made me smile: 'You are a divine elephant with amnesia trying to live in an ant hole.' (Hafiz)
*
Amnesia's doing fine. Divine elephant gone absent without trace. Ant hole's a tight fit this morning. Royalty statement for 6 months' sales: £9.31 (yep – no not a mistake with the decimal point, sadly). Rude words. That's for the novel, out last March. The poetry, out last May, hasn't earned any royalties yet – come to think of it, I've had no contract either... And both have had good reviews on amazon.

I say that: Imago has had 8 excellent reviews, 1 good, a couple of iffy ones, and a negative one (someone who didn't seem to have either got the point or maybe even the book itself... and perhaps had a hidden agenda...?). There's a rash of tickbox negatives on the positive reviews, if you get what I mean: '0 out of 1 people found this review helpful'. Tourette's sufferer? Since the negative review didn't have any rating, is there a connection between this critic and the rashmaker? Very interesting that all of the 5-star positive ratings bar the latest on the poetry collection, Bardo, have attracted the same '0 out of 1 person found this helpful' tickbox compulsion. Well, can't please them all. Stick head above parapet, etc.

I think people have this romantic image of the Writer chewing pen, swigging absinthe, pouring words like fire onto the page, selling work, swanning around gazing out of windows or over wondrous landscape, hands in pockets, 'don't interrupt me – can't you see I'm working?', taking long holidays in exotic places awaiting inspiration, etc.

The reality of course is that we write because we're passionate about it, because nothing else fills that place, because it's as crucial as breathing; but it's a really hard graft with long and unsociable hours and continual chasing of the next little piece of paid work in some erratic and uncertain writing-related field (or at least, that's how it is for me).

My accountant used to suggest I ran more courses, as they brought in more money. I did, and they did. Now they don't (it's a recession and too many institutions offer subsidised certificated courses). In 2009 he suggested I thought about supplementing my pitiful income by book-keeping (me?? Has he no soul?? Plus I failed my maths O level twice!). In 2010 he suggested I'd do better on the checkout at Tesco. I responded not. This year he didn't make a single suggestion. Am well beyond the pale (or is it 'pail'? Remind me what it means?), well-broke, irredeemable, dogged, pigheaded and sheer bloody-minded about doing it my way.

And – grit teeth – am not giving up. I love what I do. But I say to myself 'Don't give up the day job, girl.' Oh wait – this is the day job!

This is info from the 2000 Society of Authors' survey of UK writers' earnings:

75% of authors earned under £20,000 in 1999
The average writer's annual income was £16,000
Only 5% (82) of authors polled earned more than £75,000
Only 3% (51) earned over £100,000.
Although the national average wage was £20,919 when the report was compiled, 61% of the writers polled earned under £10,000
46% earned under £5,000, of whom 123 said that writing was their main source of income, while 14 had no other source of income at all. (My italics)

The level of advances is dropping. The majority of advances are under £5,000. Only 51% of writers said that more than half their works earned out their advances (advances are what they say they are: advance on estimated royalties. In other words, you get zero dosh after the advance until your book sale royalties earn more than the advance you were given). My first advance, in 1993, in the low 4 figures, was higher than any since, and the last 5 books have had no advance at all. Hey ho.

*

Lots and lots of stress lately. Bad news on the blood pressure front. Good news though is that the understanding nurse went off to make a cup of coffee for herself while I took five minutes to meditate in her room after the first high reading. After just these few minutes I'd dropped the systolic – top – reading by 20 points (bottom diastolic remains worryingly high). 'That's exceptional!' she said (of the reduced systolic).

OK. Time to get a grip. OK healthy wealthy world here I come. After I've made a cup of something disappointingly caffeine- and absinthe-free, looked out the window at the wondrous view, booked that exotic holiday on my earnings, and slouched around a bit more waiting for the Muse to descend... There again, I'm free to go for a walk whenever I like. Maybe now?

ADDENDUM: just had the library lending statement (PLR) for 2011. Hey! I earned £15.55! Enough for flour for 8 or 9 loaves! (Well, half a dozen organic spelt flour ones, anyway.) Or might it stretch to a bottle of absinthe?

The T S Eliot prize, John Burnside & black cat bone

2012-01-17T11:59:00.002Z

So we know that the T S Eliot poetry award, perhaps the most significant poetry prize in GB and worth £15K – not to be sniffed at by a poet – and also, this year, beset by difficulty and controversy, has been awarded to Scottish poet John Burnside, and deservedly so. There is no one else whom I'm aware of writing in the way in which he does. For me, his is a distinctive and powerful voice in the global world of poetry, and again for me perhaps the most original and profound voice in contemporary British poetry. He's certainly a personal favourite.

The Eliot prize this year has raised some ethical issues. The Poetry Society, embroiled as it was last year in internal strife, has had its Arts Council funding cut (imagine here a long rant on the fact that £8m of the Arts budget has been diverted to the grrrrr Olympics). This means that the award, funded for the last 15 years by Valerie Eliot, will now be funded by Aurum, a 'dirty money' hedge-fund issue for some people (me included), like BP's major-gallery funding. I can see the other argument: that money earned in what some of us see as unethical ways can, so to speak, be absolved of its origins via patronage of the Arts. I just personally don't buy it, and I admire the stand taken by both
the poets who removed themselves from the shortlist on ethical grounds.

'Alice Oswald, nominated for Memorial, a retelling of the Iliad, pulled out, saying: "Poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions." She was followed by the Australian poet John Kinsella, nominated for Armour, describing himself as an anarchist, pacifist and anti-capitalist, "and hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism".' (Guardian, 16th January 2012)

Controversy notwithstanding, I'm over the moon that this still-little-known poet has taken the award.

Burnside's liminal territory is unique in the contemporary English-language canon. It's not that Burnside could be described as a 'champion of the soul' – that would suggest self-consciousness, a deliberate attempt to import soul into his writing. It's more that soul, if that is the correct word, is a given in his territory; it infuses everything he writes, as breath infuses the body.With Burnside, you are standing at the edge of a forest, unsure whether the poem, and therefore you as reader, are canted towards the darkness of woodland or moving away, towards the light. But ultimately you get the sense – or rather I get the sense – that the poems' task is to take one deeper into the woodland in pursuit of – what? A glimmer on the wind? A truer light? A revelation that nothing is ever exactly, or even approximately, what it seems to be? An invitation to live deeper, knowing simultaneously that what we seem to seek will not be found in the form in which we think we seek it?

When reviewers speak, as they do (cf The Guardian, yesterday), of Burnside as a poet of the numinous, the immanent, they are right – and he is one of the few. But this is not fluffy New Age transcendence, but more an essential attempt on the wholeness brought about by marrying light with dark.

Reviewers have spoken of Burnside's latest, the T S Eliot prizewinner Black Cat Bone, as being a departure from the others. I don't think it is; rather it's a necessary progression, development or continuation of the territory that always engages Burnside: the mysteries of love and death, and the mystery of finding a thread to follow in the tangled forest that is, so often, our lives. This book may be more overtly 'accessible', though that seems a poor word to use in relation to this work, but if so, only because the narrative thread is slightly more on the surface than some of his poems allow. Slightly.

This latest, like its predecessor The Hunt in the Forest, has an archetypal quality to it, and Burnside uses to some extent the language and imagery of myth, fairy tale, magic. This one seems also to carry more liturgical references than some of his others; no surprise then to find that he was brought up, like me, a Catholic; as they say, one never manages to really leave the enclosures of the Church; one is only 'lapsed', not 'ex'.

In Black Cat Bone, as always, he offers the most un-self-consciously quotable lines: 'The only gift is knowing we belong / to nothing.' (From 'Creaturely') ; and 'I live in a separate country, white as the snow / on rooftops and stained glass // windows, the still of the woods / at furthest noon the only thought I have // and morphine skimming my mind, like the first / swallow in the courtyard...' ('Dope Head Blues').

Poignant haunting lines abound: 'the buds we wreathed in silk, for wedding nights, / discarded now, a summer's lease of green // gone back beneath the frost while, nonetheless, / alone in the furthest wood, a night bird sings //.

A personal favourite is 'The Soul as Thought Experiment', which opens:

Some days, it's enough to stand your ground.
Wind on the road and that coal oil and mackerel sheen
on everything you see; the wet

leylandii turned in the rain...

and closes with:

...where you cannot help but think

of kinship, at that point where snow begins
on some black road you thought was yours alone,
made bright and universal, while you listen.

I can't recommend this collection highly enough; although if you want an easier introduction to Burnside's work, start with The Light Trap (Cape, 2002)

at the still point, there the dance is

2012-01-16T15:54:00.002Z

Dance

On the floor

near where Shiva dances

a woman's hair

breaks gold-tipped

wave upon wave

beyond the glass

the cedar stretches

towards translucent

January blue

and beyond the tree

the heather moor

just

And after a break of nearly five years I am back, dancing, starting my week with this catalytic practice. Last week I posted Ravi Shankar: 'Sound when stretched is music. Movement when stretched is dance. Mind when stretched is meditation. Life when stretched is celebration.'

It is as natural for the body to dance as it is for the mouth to make sound. And it's hard for us, especially perhaps here in England, to let go enough to simply listen to the music, feel the beat in our body, allow the mirroring of the one in the other and dance with all of ourselves – or even, often, with some of ourselves. Fears inhibit us: fears of not being good enough, fears of being visible; maybe even fears of being present to all of ourselves in the dancing moment.

When I came across 5 Rhythms dance in my late 30s, it was – there is no other way of describing it, so forgive the cliché – truly transformative. I live in imagination, in my feelings, in the realm of possibility, in my head – but rarely in my body; although actually since beginning this dance practice, and making yoga a much more regular component of my life, I suppose I do now inhabit it more. (Learning African drumming on the heels of discovering 5R dance helped, too.) My dance teacher, Dilys Morgan Scott, was such an inspiration, too, and pushed me to realise more than I thought possible.

The universe is pattern, wave and pulse. If we are to be part of it rather than set apart from it, we can wake up to that in ourselves too.

The founder of Five Rhythms dance, Gabrielle Roth*, sees this dance as a kind of shamanic practice. What's more, she sees the five rhythms embodied here as underpinning all of human life and its cycles, whether those are to do with subtle inner cycles or more obviously reflected in eg love-making or childbirth.

In brief, the five patterns consist of flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. Each one taken to its peak will 'tip over' into the next rhythm (and once you complete the wave with stillness, then a little more energy pushed into it takes you to flowing once again), and I discovered, as people do, that dancing that five-pattern 'wave' would invariably free up energy and allow me to move through inner psychological stuckness. Even if I only devoted ten minutes to it the magic happened and a process was completed.

It is a personal process. There is no need for a partner (though transient partners may be met and connected with on the dance floor); there are no set steps. There is only one's own process in movement, mediated by music. And yet deep intimacy happens: not only with oneself, but also with the Others with whom one, in passing, dances. I learnt, not without a great deal of embarrassment and shyness initially, how to hold eye contact with one person and dance your dance in relation to them for up to twenty minutes at a time; how to be visible in this way and how to witness another's being visible – exactly as you are, exactly as they are.

And yet there is no striving – no steps to learn, no need to be anything other than what you are, who you are, in the present moment. Gradually you learn to trust the music, trust the dance, trust yourself to know how you are.

It becomes a whole-person meditation. And you learn to see yourself very clearly, because as one is in the dance, so one is in one's life. To adapt Anais Nin's phrase about our encounters with others, 'we don't dance the dance as it is but as we are'.

I was good at flowing: a so-called 'feminine' rhythm, being fluid, working with and around others, accommodating, yielding. I was good at chaos – letting go into wildness. I loved stillness – coming to rest in T'ai Chi-type postures very quietly, very slowly. Lyrical was harder – I realised that allowing myself to be silly, playful, with others was not easy for me unless I trusted them deeply. And I was terrible at staccato, to begin with. Staccato, the 'masculine' rhythm, has a firm pulsing beat; is about edge, angle and decisiveness, claiming one's space, saying no, defining boundaries, choosing whether or not to engage with another, holding to one's own course and one's own dance when in connection with another, or despite the pleas from others to join with them.

I danced a lot. My then-partner knew if I'd missed a session by an absence of a quality of inspired high-level enthusiasm in me; although a two-hour session can be tiring, you follow your own energy levels and you can drop out for a bit; or even spend the whole session lying on the floor, if you prefer to, and it is so invigorating that even one's quality of tiredness has a clean uplifted vitality to it.

Then in 2006, after my mum's diagnosis of Alzheimer's and my dad's stroke, my life imploded, and I have danced at most a dozen time in the last 4 or 5 years.

So it was an utter joy spontaneously to decide to attend the first class of this year with a new-to-me teacher, Kay (whose style is very different from Dilys'), and find that my body knows how to dance its own dance, make all the shapes (and has become very good, too, at staccato).

And just two hours allowed me to release so much of the pain, holding, inner conflict, tension and sorrow of the last particularly hard year; and to let in the many joys that occurred too last year: to embody all of them, and know I could greet them all.

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;

at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,

and there is only the dance.

~ T.S. Eliot ~

(from 'Burnt Norton', The Four Quartets)

*Maps To Ecstasy, Gabrielle Roth

were we only white birds

2012-01-13T08:45:00.000Z

In the Buddhist tradition, there is the idea of 'taking refuge'. At first I resisted this concept, but I have come to understand that it is about the ability to let go of the ego's needs to control and manage everything. When I manage this, even if only for a few minutes, the ocean rushes in to replace the petty daily concerns.

This week, I have been both enjoying and taking refuge in these words by the great mythologian Joseph Campbell: 'If the path ahead of you is clear, you're probably on someone else's'. Oh, well, then, that's good – because mine is thick in fog!

And I have been taking little moments of spaciousness out of the perpetual hurry to listen to the brook in the valley, the bark of the winter willows beside it blazing flame-coloured, the stream of thrush- and owl-call, and remembering to surf the swell of my breath.

And I took time out to go to a klezmer session with my lovely daughter. She and I too shared an inspiring and exciting hour pondering the range of the 'Music of the Spheres', and how the intervals in music, as in sacred geometry, the movements of the planets, the wheel of the zodiac, colours and 'soul-type', are not only reflections of each other but also enact fundamental cosmic principles, like the fibonacci sequence, the 'golden ratio'. Mmmm. Lots to say about that another time.

What all these moments offer are little islands of 'taking refuge', which paradoxically dissolve into oceanic consciousness where 'me and mine' stop being be-all and end-all.

And speaking of islands, all week these lines from W B Yeats have been going round my head, too:

I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,

Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;

Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,

Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

('The White Birds')

And as the time for my annual writing retreat on the sacred Isle of Iona comes closer now we're into 2012, I can hardly contain my joy. More on Iona and islands, too, soon.

the act but not the perpetrator

2012-01-11T08:55:00.001Z

Imagine here a sunrise, over the hill to the east, with ash trees silhouetted in pen-and-ink against a deep orange sky lightening to blue; one or two low clouds, bruise-coloured above, bellies flamingo-pink. The roof of my garden studio is frosted, lightly. It's been such a mild winter so far that frost is rare; and little dwarf irises are shaking out blue and lilac and deep purple glad-rags. Three separate thrushes singing in the valley again, early; one of them fluting a definite spring-song.

*

My friend Joe calls my huge hairy deerhound lurcher a 'part-time dog'. Joe's Dimpsy, a border collie, is permanently awake, alert and ready for action – manic, in other words, as collies, intelligent working dogs who need a lot of stimulus, so often are. Keeping a hound is a very different matter – all she does, really, is sleep; if she weren't so big you'd barely notice her there in the corner. She does love walking (loping, in her case), and also plays; but as long as I'm somewhere nearby she doesn't seem to need anything except a bit of affection. I've never lived with a dog so quiet, so easy, so gentle (though none of the ones I've shared a house with before have been anything other than 'kind' dogs either). And she's not terribly bright – takes a long time for messages to travel from synapse to limb.

Until last year I barely knew she had a voice. Then, as you might remember if you've been reading this blog a while, I had cause to exercise my own voice extremely loudly in the service of protecting a little trio of hare from a few dozen hounds and huntspeople. There aren't many things that anger me, but cruelty is one. I didn't know I had a voice like that, either – apparently people nearly half a mile away down the valley heard me, and my dog, too, who discovered a very deep and persistent extraordinarily loud bark.

We have nearly two acres of north-facing land on which (with some difficulty because of the steep slope and minimal sun on that aspect) we grow most of our own veg. The field has a woodland margin and a small orchard, which provide between them a sanctuary, and windfalls and berries, for wildlife. I'm very protective of the badger setts and fox earths here, and the hare flash through too at times.

Hunting with dogs (with more than two dogs, anyway) has been illegal in the UK since 2004, under a ban introduced by. the then Labour government. Since that time though the number of organised Hunts seems to have grown, in defiance (and the current basically Conservative government has promised to overturn the ban). Each pack has a minimum of 20 hounds, often many more; and can be followed by at least the same number of people on horseback. As one of those who campaigned for a ban I was jubilant when it went through, distressed when it was obvious that hunting was going to continue, if anything with more vigour because of the ban.

It's justified on the grounds of being 'tradition' (so was slavery, and children as chimney-sweeps, and wives-as-chattels), and in the interests of – ha! – 'conservation' of wildlife (despite the fact that UK numbers of eg hare are down). With foxes, it's easy: 'Look at all those lambs/chickens lost by farmers to foxes' (yes, some; and some loss is down to poor husbandry, bad weather, rampaging domestic dogs, corvines taking weak lambs etc).

We are not talking about hunting to eat here. We're talking about a kind of bloodlust. Anyway, suffice it to say that I feel strongly about imposed cruelty in the name of sport.

Yesterday I didn't have a very good day. It started with someone's graphic news in relation to a particularly horrific act of cruelty to a horse. The images in my head have really disturbed me. Plus I'm still reeling a bit from some unfair accusations from someone I love last week; then there's been Probate for my mum and some calls in relation to my dad's wellbeing from the Care Home, not to mention any number of calls from him asking about my mum. I had an aggressive email from a stranger yesterday morning, and news that an apparently-minor health issue of my own that I believed had cleared up needed further potentially invasive treatment. I have deadlines unmet.

So you can imagine that a pack of hounds pouring up the drive, followed by mounted huntsmen, having torn through a neighbour's field and traumatised the pregnant ewes, did not fill me with delight. My dog, Ash, alerted me long before they appeared – her ears are now finely-tuned to the hunting horn over many miles. My voice seemed to come to the rescue once again.

And then, as I was coming back home hours later in the dusk, a small elderly bitch whom I'd seen earlier trailing about half a mile behind the rest of the pack, was clearly lost, exhausted and ravenous, wandering around hours after the Hunt had gone, in the lane. Well, of course I brought her back and fed her, and shut her in while I tried to track down the Hunt (she trashed my studio, but that's another story, and it is clean-up-able).

My mum used to say 'Condemn the sin but not the sinner', which – even if you don't take to the word 'sin' – is good advice, on the whole, psychologically speaking. (Let's say instead 'The act but not the perpetrator'.) I've tried to follow this through my life, but we all have blind spots, don't we? One of mine is a certain prejudice against 'people who hunt' – even though I have a couple of very dear friends who do – if you are brought up in the English countryside it has often been part of the picture of rural life. They know that I have in the past been involved in disrupting hunting activities – and I suppose my actions last year, placing self and Dog between hounds/huntsmen and hare count as that. I know that they hunt; and we still love each other.

But The Hunt in general terms I suppose I do see, at some level, as being composed at least in part of people who have little concern about animal welfare – hounds and horses are pushed pretty hard too – and therefore it must contain a number of brutes. This is, I hasten to add, subconscious, largely; I am very well aware of the dangers of demonising groups and individuals, and do challenge it when I see it.

I quite enjoy being forced to confront my prejudices; having them squeezed into the open. Then you know what work there is to do, still, don't you? And when one of the Hunt members came to collect said hound, he couldn't have been nicer – and I don't mean smarmy. He was grateful that I'd found the dog, communicative, good on eye contact, engaged with a smile, apologetic for the earlier intrusion here, keen to listen to and respect my (quietly-voiced, at this point!) position ('Thanks for coming to collect the hound. I do need to tell you though that we're not willing to have the Hunt in our field, and we know for certain that these particular neighbours share our views'), understanding of why I might feel as I do, and gentle with the hound.

I came away smiling, feeling we'd built some bridges. My position on hunting hasn't changed, but if I met him in a pub I'd probably share a drink with him.

... in order to see clearly...

2012-01-10T09:10:00.000Z

Seeing Clearly

'Our practice is to meet life exactly as it is and to notice whatever fear, anger, or doubt gets in the way of direct intimate contact with this moment, bringing attention to that as well. Rather than changing something or seeking to get somewhere we imagine we should be, practice is about seeing clearly exactly how things really are and how we relate to them. Practice thus becomes an increasing intimacy with life just as it is, and there is nothing—including the ideas that we should be getting something or somewhere—that is unworthy of the clear, nonjudgmental attention we call mindfulness.'

Douglas Phillips, from Tricycle: the Buddhist Review

breaking the glass

2012-01-10T09:05:00.001Z

My Poetry School evening sessions have resumed. A starting point question, to which I return alone and with other writers, over and over, is what is poetry for? By now, I've collected 100s or even 1000s of responses to this question; my own personal responses are in the high 30s or 40s.

Two things I come back to, though: poetry is both refuge ('Poetry can save your life': Adrienne Rich); and paradoxically it is also a reminder that poetry, like life itself, is not merely soothing; it does not exist to cocoon us from the hard stuff, nor from confronting and expressing it.

For many people, poetry brings to a life something that cannot be found elsewhere; something of the soul. It's a necessity, not a luxury. Poetry is an intense way of representing and sharing intense experience. It can blast us into where we need to be, emotionally-, spiritually-, speaking.

I began my session with my monthly Two Rivers group on Saturday with this line from Jane Hirshfield: 'One of the laws of poetry is that no good poem can be wholly safe or wholly pure.'

And I think often of Chase Twichell's words (like Hirshfield, she's a Buddhist poet): 'Poetry is not window-cleaning; it breaks the glass.'

So here's reminder to us all: take a little risk in writing your poem. Veer off the predictable path. Keep us guessing, just a little...

a dream built block by hand-made block dissolving

2012-01-09T16:01:00.002Z

In the dark three thrushes start the day. Moment of calm, just dog and I and day sliding up the sky. In the distance the rooks begin, and woodpecker’s drumming ricochets round the valley. Already snowdrops, primroses, crocus, a few wild
d
a
f
f
o
d
i
l

and across the valley in the quickening January light I see that the little rammed-earth roundhouse with its arched hobbit windows and its not-quite roof, a dream built block by hand-made block and abandoned when the marriage broke up has, in the last days of torrents and gales, completely
d
i
s
s
o
l
v
e
d

And here we are, third planet in line from the one-of-many suns; I could weep for the terror and beauty of impermanence, and the dreams we offset against it, and this laden speeding-up small planet spinning through the forever sky, and we with our little lives clinging so tightly to the wrong things, the ones that can never save us from
o
u
r
s
e
l
v
e
s

on anger

2012-01-08T11:03:00.001Z

I come from a family of volatile Celts. Our emotions – or perhaps I should say rather our colourful father's emotions – were all too visible when we were growing up, and I learnt two things: when someone is expressing their emotions at least you know where you stand; and, counter to that, emotions are dangerous things.

We all experience anger – it's part of the human condition. It's also a useful alert to the fact that something is threatening us, something needs changing. (I find it useful too to consider that beneath anger is usually pain.)

What we do with it though is key. Some of us learn to express it only too easily – 30 years ago, as a young thing, I was one of those who too could express her negative feelings at full pelt, given a particularly volatile relationship I was in at the time. Others stuff it, when it tends to go inwards and manifest as depression, or somatise in certain types of illness. Others, damaged perhaps as children by another's frightening anger (and yes I am also that type), don't even recognise anger when they feel it; they 'numb out'.

So in my late twenties, when my anger was triggered, as it often was (in that same relationship), by an emotion so strong that it overcame the numbing out, I learnt to be good at lashing out. Since then, frightened by the force of my own anger, I have tended to repress it, and in the beginning, once I'd realised what I was doing, it would be days, or on occasion even weeks, before I recognised that the emotion dogging me was anger. I consider that I've made huge strides forwards in now only taking a minute to recognise anger; sometimes a second; sometimes I can name it immediately. I've learnt so much about myself and my experience of the world through watching my reactivity.

So far, so good. What happens next though is what's really important, isn't it? The received wisdom is to count to ten before expressing it – helpful advice.

But it could go further. Both Buddhism and the psychotherapeutic world – and I've been a Buddhist practitioner now for over 35 years (albeit with fluctuating actual commitment), and involved in one way and another with psychotherapy for 28 or so – suggest that the wise way to deal with anger is to 'own' it rather than project it – ie deal with it consciously, exploring it, noticing where and when it arises, experiencing it in the body, noticing and if necessary challenging the impulse to hit out, to blame another, examining the precipitating incident and our part in it – and what it might be stimulating in us, maybe painful past memories that have little to do with the current situation and the 'at fault other', in reality. Then we might also see what needs to change.

Then there is kindness, and compassion. 'My religion is kindness,' says the Dalai Lama. Buddhist practice is focused on developing loving kindness: when we understand that anger usually arises from pain, it is so much easier to empathise with another's situation. As I posted here a few days ago, Plato reminds us that everyone we meet is fighting a hard battle. When we remember this, we can use the arising of anger as a reminder to look deeper into our pain, or another's; to remember our shared humanity, and our vulnerability.

Buddhism too specifically reminds us that 'we are not our emotions', and that identifying our whole being too closely with them is shortsighted, and, worse, potentially damaging to both self and other. (And of course there is a shadow side to that too – thinking that we're 'overcoming' our emotions by simply sliding away from them, transcending rather than integrating them, is a danger; in other words detaching, rather than practising non-attachment, which is a very different animal: noticing our emotional reactivity while remaining still engaged and choosing not to throw the shit at someone else is not the same as simply suppressing, and pretending a serenity we don't feel, or over-rationalising.)

The breakthrough, for me, came in said passionate and volatile relationship, when one day my partner remarked 'All we do is react to each other'. Up until then, I hadn't even considered that, in any way.

Taking responsibility for our own 'stuff' and choosing how we respond to a trigger is so empowering. Once we see our anger for what it is it no longer has a hold over us. Psychology suggests that the situations in which we feel the biggest emotional charge are the situations in which we are most likely projecting on – seeing in – another stuff that is rightfully ours. The idea, too, is that claiming one's shadow parts, the bits we blame on another but don't really see in ourselves, frees up enormous psychic energy; and, more, we don't continue to ignorantly cause even more harm than we all already do in this fractured world of ours. (Oh so easy to say, hey?)

And of course that's not to say, in this view, that we shouldn't ever express that anger. If someone violates my boundaries I have a right to say 'enough'. But I can choose to do it in a way that's non-blaming, non-harming, and kind. (I'm talking about normal circumstances here, not eg situations of one-sided abuse, clearly). Of course, we – I – mostly don't. But we have a choice. And yes, of course lashing out can feel so satisfying – briefly. And then, for me anyway, in rushes the guilt, the sense that I've not been my 'best self', the divide created between self and other which is not 'skillful practice', as Buddhism calls it. And for me, as I already have high blood pressure, fuelling myself up on anger is not a helpful response.

What psychotherapy promotes in addressing issues in a non-inflammatory way is taking-responsibility-'I' statements rather than blaming-'you' statements. Saying (eg) 'You're such a selfish shit; you never think of anyone but yourself' is not helpful; but 'When you do x I feel afraid that my needs don't matter to you' is honest, and skillful, and can open a dialogue. So: statement of fact ('When you do this'), followed by 'I feel', followed by expression of ideal scenario: 'What I would like is...'.

I have also taken the Buddhist precept that requires that I 'make every effort to resolve all conflicts, no matter how small'. So I do my best to extend myself, I do try, to sort out tension and difficulties. But I can't take responsibility for another's response to the situation – thank goodness I recognise that, too, these days.

Over the last few years in a time of deep family trouble and much change personally and interpersonally, there have been plenty of opportunities for dealing with anger – mine and another's.

Leaving aside my most intimate relationships in which the work of making conscious goes on, day after day, whether one feels like it or not, I've noticed a pattern emerging in which I see myself making attempts, often seemingly unilateral, to resolve things before feeling there's nothing more I can do other than walk away.

I hate disharmony and conflict. This can make me at times over-accommodating and over-adaptive. Nonetheless, I'd rather go the extra mile than be too proud to reach out, and I've never found 'sorry' hard to say. This week I've had cause to notice that I also, these days, recognise my own limits: I will extend my hand to someone in the service of healing a rift 3 times before walking away if my hand's not met. In the past, I'd have tried and tried. But taking responsibility doesn't obviate the need for self-respect, nor does it mean being a doormat; and also other people of course have a right to react to their own emotions in whatever way they see fit, and it won't necessarily fit mine. But I don't have to be, as Susan Jeffers so poetically puts it, a butterfly dancing near an elephant's arsehole.

And lest I now sound unbearably self-righteous, let me tell you how much, sometimes, I want the sheer crude simple reactivity of hitting out, metaphorically speaking, and walking away with no further thought about it all. Trying to be 'conscious' is so b****y exhausting! The simplicity, the seductiveness, of that blind instinctual F*** o** response to the apparently uncaring world in which we so often feel so lonely, so hurt.

Thresholds 2012 (day retreat)

2012-01-05T13:48:00.003Z

If you live close enough, and would like a day of intensive and quiet reflection, here for the 20th year is my January Thresholds workshop (am working on an online version!):

THRESHOLDS 2012
creating the year you want
one-day intensive retreat
nr Totnes, Devon, Saturday 21st January 10am-5pm

The 20th year of this workshop in its various incarnations! This day is for you; is about revisioning your life: taking stock of where you’ve arrived and dreaming the future. It’s a day of intensive and focused personal writing prompted by questions from me, guided visualisations and small ceremonial moments to let go of the old and welcome the new. It’ll be punctuated by refreshments and times of groupwork. This year we’ll be using the idea of the hero’s journey in myth and fairy tale to explore your heart’s deep longing.

Directions on booking
Fee £35 by cheque if postmarked on or before 12th January; £40 thereafter to arrive before 21st, £45 on the day (but I need to know you’re coming)
Bring a veggie dish to share; pen and paper; indoor shoes; an extra layer (though the woodburner will be lit in my garden studio); an open heart.
See website for booking and details

www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk

roselle[at]fire-in-the-head.co.uk

'The Peace of Wild Things' (Wendell Berry poem)

2012-01-05T09:42:00.002Z

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~ Wendell Berry

'sound when stretched is music'

2012-01-04T09:29:00.001Z

I got my elemental blast on the beach. The Man and I, and of course She Who Wears Her Grey Matter on the Outside, who is ecstatic at all that sand and other dogs, went to Bantham through the flooded lanes and past the flooded fields, and it was a wild wild afternoon of dancing silver light, crashing waves and huge winds. The light was coming and going (I so wish my camera was working, must send my dropped-in-the-stream mobile off to be fixed) – a painter's dream, with moments like Blake's finger of God sending shafts of blinding illumination down to the chosen few million molecules in select areas on the sea's surface. The sea-tractor still seemed to be operating between Bigbury Sands and Burgh Island, and way out back a windsurfer's sail like a bird's wing was tacking across the breakers.

A young guy was kitesurfing, speeding back and forth across the choppiness at times hair-raisingly close to the rocks in the muscley wind, and I watched spellbound from the headland as he leapt 10, 20 feet in the air, landing with balletic cat-like grace each time. I think there's a metaphor in that. I'd love to kitesurf (after all, I haven't broken any bones in a while; not since I last came off a young horse and broke ribs and collarbone...!).

The light unexpectedly turned from silver to gold as it faded, and as we went home Dartmoor was sketched in luminous and docile to the west.

In an effort to make my work more viable (though my latest set of accounts seems to suggest this is near-impossible) I attended a wonderful day run by Aune Head Arts at Dartington back in the early summer, called 'I Hate Facebook – a day for artists'. Tony, who led it, is both an artist himself and a sussed electronic guru. It was fun, and having resisted social media always I was seduced into setting up both a facebook account and a twitter one. Yes, it's true that you can waste a lot of time. However you can be selective with both on the feed you subscribe to, and I have chosen to receive tweets only in the fields of philosophy, psychology, spirituality, poetry, mythology and eco-activism. I'm impressed with the quality, and often some little thing implants itself as a seed for the day.

Today's was these words by Ravi Shankar:

'Sound when stretched is music. Movement when stretched is dance. Mind when stretched is meditation. Life when stretched is celebration.'

Oh and yes there has been a small knock-on effect in that more people are coming to my blog, to my courses, to buy my books. I think it's almost impossible today if one wants to live by art in some form to ignore the electronic; and I have enjoyed and found inspiring the dialogue with like-minded people, living as I do a fairly reclusive life for much of my working time.

I possibly posted this last January. If so, forgive. Here it is again, with this time the knowledge (hooray!) that it will appear in my new collection All the Missing Names of Love in 2012.

Leaf vernacular

How many years did ittake, how much rain

and bone and sun, howmuch loss composted

into black peat to make thisleaf, just this one

new leaf flickering greenin the January ditch?

flowers, holy wells, da Vinci's 7 principles, and battery hens

2012-01-02T18:43:00.001Z

Wild gales sweeping the valley here in the southwest of England. I long to be on a high place on the moor, or the coast – this is I think the first time in almost my whole life when the Christmas and New Year season hasn't included at least one long walk on Devon's beautiful beaches; preferably the three miles of open sand on my childhood beach, Saunton. Somehow the year doesn't quite start until that happens.

My sister made it back up to her remote Scottish home overlooking the ocean just in time to miss the worst of the blizzards.

And what might have been a very difficult and turbulent new year here, with the loss of my mum fresh in my heart, and a deal of personal inner turmoil, instead was a warm, uplifting and loving time, with F and H, two of my oldest and most-loved friends, spending it with us.

*

There are a few wild daffodils in flower already, and already too the hazel catkins have shaken out fully fluffy tails. The first witch hazel flower burst out in the courtyard yesterday. And opposite Malcolm's pig field the little starry violet flowers of periwinkle have been blossoming all year. Periwinkle – vinca major, I think, from memory – is a plant from which medicine derives a cancer cure. (Periwinkle are also 5-petalled, another of the flowers dedicated to the Goddess, and later, Mary.)

*

A close friend has reminded me, via the gift of a beautiful new book on Holy Wells, of my old commitment to clearing out the old wells of this peninsula, a 'dana' (gift), in Buddhist jargon, that I began in my teens and have only kept up very sporadically. This is an actual gesture but it's also a symbolic one, of course – the waters of the world need to be kept flowing, and one of the most poignant symbols of The Wasteland in the Grail Quest mythos (echoed in the poem of that name by T S Eliot which drew from this source – no pun intended ) was the rape of the Well Maidens (the divine feminine) and the drying-up of the wells, which of course led to drought and famine.

The waters of the world are also the waters of the heart, according both to many indigenous teachings and also to archetypal/Jungian thinking. The Wasteland is a warning of what happens, individually and collectively, when the feeling nature, the heart-ability to empathise, is left out of a culture.

*

And speaking of the heart, I subscribe to a daily Buddhist teaching into my inbox. At a time of huge personal turmoil it's so easy to disengage, even if only temporarily, from the demands of remaining entirely present in all our relationships, especially when the going is tough. Here it is, from Tricycle magazine:

'Committing to Friendship
You do not learn non-attachment by disengaging and avoiding the intensity of relationships, their joy and their pain. It is easy to disguise as non-attachment what is not non-attachment at all, but your fear of attachment. When you really care about someone and you are willing to commit to that friendship, then you have fertile ground to learn about both attachment and non-attachment.'

*

A note of things positive (well, a little more positive) for a few million battery hens in the UK: at last the ban on tiny metal cages has come into force here. A hen will no longer have to spend her entire laying life squatting on the barred bottom of a cage so small – smaller than an A4 sheet of paper – that she can't turn around. She will still be caged, and her allocated personal space still tiny, but now she will have some room, if not to roam, at least to turn around and squash through a crowd of hens instead (90 hens per cage, with a personal space of only 750 square cms, but free-moving, ish, at least). A step, but still only a step, towards the kind of humane awareness we need to bring to call ourselves in even a small way an enlightened society – that is, for my purposes here, one in which exploitation of all other beings is phased out in favour of a deep awareness of what we do to one we do to all.

In December they were rehoming many battery hens. My daughter took three, to spend the rest of their lives with her small flock roaming free (and with a great view!) in the fields edging the moor.

*

H and I were talking about Da Vinci's 'Seven Principles' and their relationship to creativity and holistic living. I'll list them here for you, and if you are sufficiently interested, there's a book that unpacks them (in a self-help hands-on kind of way): How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci: seven steps to genius every day, by Michael Gelb. I think these 7 principles are remarkable. The definitions below are taken from Gelb's book.

Curiosita: an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning
Dimostrazione: a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes
Sensazione: the continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience
Sfumato (literally 'going up in smoke'): a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty
Arte/Scienza: the development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination, 'whole brain' thinking
Corporalita: the cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness and poise
Connessione: a recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

I wish you all a happy, fulfilling, creative, insatiably curious, connected, loving and peaceful 2012.

Sennen Cove (poem)

2012-01-02T08:57:00.001Z

Blackbird

This is not the colourless season

of margins and absences

This is the black and white time

Sharp in the dawn this one pure note.

Thorn Tree

Wind, monoliths, salt on my lips

This high hinterland furrowed

by plough, waves of lapwing and fieldfare

Me, resilient, gale-swept.

Glass

January’s first day, and everything

yet to be broken

Washed, untrodden sand; deep sky;

this wave, caught at its curl’s apex.

String

Kelp, green weed, boulders like seals

Everything always the same, and forever changing

I am the tether

of this moment’s kite.

Tide

There is the white sand

and there my welling footsteps

There is the prowling tide

and then only water.

What-are-the-birds-doing-with-the-December-sky rap

2011-12-31T09:56:00.003Z

Winter lounges, sodden and unused –

the sky is a washing-line of sorrows.

At night, the stream talks to itself;

becomes a dance floor for wintersong.

The wind does not care for my

predictions or predicaments; likeeverything,

it suspires, expires, rises again.

Day wakes, laden with blue.

I wonder how much words weigh,

and why the oak log splitting under the axe

shows sinews haphazard as memory;

and how it is that we can hold on

to nothing, even love.

All truths in the end are symbolic.

I am a metaphor for transience,

just as a bird is a metaphor for flight

– how a synchronisation of starlings

is an incarnation of wind,

maybe an act of God.

When the ash tree fell in the woods

its bunched keys hung like a roosting

flock of pipistrelles.

In my sleep, I said: leave

access points under the eaves

for swallows, bats, angelic hosts.

You heard me. Held me close.

hiatus, line break, passion, love

2011-12-28T20:48:00.002Z

It's an oddly liminal space, too, these few days between Christmas and New Year. In some ways it's not easy, though I'm not sure why. Christmas is a time for friends and family; so is New Year, but in between I feel introverted and solitary. It's a hiatus, a line-break. It works if I'm away somewhere solitary, say by the sea – preferably on an island – but it's not an easy time, for me, to be with others. (Perhaps many of us feel that, if we're honest.)

I've had no time for solo freewheeling, for reflection and introversion, for a small descent to the Underworld; relevant to this time (in fact necessary to the season, symbolically and psychologically speaking), and especially relevant to me this year, with the recent death of my mum and a number of personal tumultuous events. It seems important to make time to process stuff as one goes, and I haven't yet been able to; so rather like Odin (in a less godlike and grandiose way, of course!) I still feel suspended from the World Tree.

But in my suspension my mind defaults to its continual preoccupation: what is love?

I think of the many shades of love. I think of how easily we confuse co-dependency, lust and ego-massage with love. I think of the kind of love that requires being in pain. I think of what my teacher Joan Swallow said, when I was 30 and really didn't want to hear this: 'All romantic love is a projection'. I think of what Scott Peck says, in The Road Less Travelled: Love is an act of will. A verb. I think of what whoever it was said: 'Love' [ie romantic love] 'is an image focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with the least distortion'.

Cynical? No. Just that our desire to desire and be desired is of the ego; and that kind of passion, unknown as it seems to have been until the C12th in the Western World (yes – really; more anon), at least as a basis for marriage, until then (and that's still the case in the East), is amazingly heartstoppingly wonderful; a true peak experience – and not enduring; or at least not enduring if comsummated. I think of how we put on another – a human other – our desire for transcendence, for union, for the 'divine', or the sacred.

What is it that the soul needs?

I think of passion, and how necessary it is to live with fire. Seems to me that passion is what gives rise to creativity, via yearning – but passion comsummated goes quiet till the yearning arises again; an endless cycle of need and fulfilment. That's one significant and essential facet of love. But is it actually 'love'?

And I think of other quieter types of love. What is 'steady-state' love, for instance?

This more solid love, the love I have recently been musing on, a less obtrusive and glamorous love altogether, has I suspect more to do with extending oneself for the sake of another over and over, without recognition; quietly, unassumingly, gently, compassionately. It's about wiping up the shit, about not telling everyone that you just did, about stretching yourself further than you thought you could bear, beyond limits, without being a martyr. It's about learning new ways, maybe. It's not about ego-fulfilment.

I say this because I recognise that the strain involved in telling my dad, over and over, with immense non-patronising patience so as not to humiliate him, the same thing several times an hour but as if for the first time – that yes, my mum is indeed dead; that yes, he was in the bathroom to brush his teeth; that yes this is where I live and he doesn't but we're very glad to have him, that yes it's Christmas, that yes it's hard for us all, that yes he does indeed need to put his T-shirt vest on underneath his shirt, that yes – this once, twice, even several times throughout the night – yes, the bathroom is just there, across the hall – all this is closer to love than all that eros and yearning and restless desire and unrequited suffering stuff fixated on another to gratify my own needs that my younger self liked to put herself through.

And in thinking about all this I have, this Christmas season, thought over and over about Oriah Mountain Dreamer's wonderful 'The Invitation', with its wisdom; a shaping spirit for me the last 12 years or so.

I have been thinking too about how essential it is to live authentically, to live from the heart.

Here is her invitation to me, to you, to us all (and just so you know, when she speaks of 'faithless' she is speaking of the ability to be faithful to oneself, to follow one's own star, no matter what the cost):

'The Invitation' by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

www.oriahmountaindreamer.com/

It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

the return of the light

2011-12-24T11:25:00.001Z

I have been trying to find a suitably profound, original or unusual thought to post for this western festival of the returning light (here in our largely Christian culture symbolised by the Christ), but there is too much to say, and too little.

My memory though has kept returning, the last few days, to a little phrase of Plato's I believe that I posted earlier in the year, and it seems as good a reminder as any, to me, for me, this Christmas, of 'right relationship':

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

And just for the craic, the above is a photo that I'm sure I've already posted too, and I'm posting again because I like it, because it's a personal reminder of good and magical times, because of its resonance as a threshold place, and because even when it's crowded with tourists Dyn Tagell – Tintagel Castle – still partakes of something of the liminal, poised as it is between earth, sea and sky, like us all.

So to you all, I wish you blessings of the many worlds at this gateway time.

winter ghosts, synchronicity & David Whyte

2011-12-23T13:19:00.002Z

When I wake the clouds are dirty and piled outside the window. I'm feeling uneasy and bereft – in my dreams I'd lost my mobile (means of communication), my purse with my bank card (means/currency of exchange), and my mum. The only one literally true is the last, and with the bereavement fresh and Christmas nearly upon us the clouds are like my grief piling up behind a nearly-closed door.

Christmas, like the winter solstice, I think, may be about the joy of the Light returning but is also about absences and loss: in order for the new to be born something of the old order has to die. These absences, private sorrows, are an undercurrent for many I think at such times of collective celebration – they may not affect our ability to 'have a good time', outwardly, anyway, but they are like the Bad Fairy in folk-tales: they too need acknowledgement, a little space to themselves, or they wreak revenge, these Winter Ghosts. I think we should each of us have a little solo time built in, for reflection, between now and the early New Year.

The Man and I have worked well together the last couple of days towards this, our first Christmas together. Nonetheless, as we stand together against the radiator near the Christmas Tree (a lopped top from an evergreen in our little woodland margin), I'm aware of how people pull away from each other as well as together, and aware of his sadness – his children, who usually join him for a huge family Christmas in London, are in Australia this Christmas, where they live. Instead we will have my father, distraught, short on memory and grieving, and needing a lot of support. My lovely daughter will be here in between trekking back across the moor to feed animals. My mum won't.

*

So I stand here reasonably warm at the kitchen window, watching the woodpecker at the feeder, and instead of focusing on my loss make a decision to return to a moment of gratitude that I'm not sleeping under a bridge, holed up in Guantanamo, looking for missing relatives in flood zones, scared for my life in a war zone. How easy I have it, and how easy to let a sense of disgruntlement or sadness take over all perspective. How blessed, how fortunate, how loved I am.

*

Poetry is a small consolation for myself, with this first cup of tea, now alone in the treelit kitchen. I pick up David Whyte's book The House of Belonging, and turn to the prefacing poem, a favourite of mine, by David Wagoner. Exactly as I read the line 'No two trees are the same to Raven' a pair of said birds swoop low over the roof of the house and flip towards the valley, jostling, jouncing, mock-fighting, all the time uttering that wonderful deep-throat cronk.

Do you know what I mean if I say there are times when we are really in tune with everything, when synchronicities abound, when harmony is what shows itself, we're in 'the universe zone'? I mean when you know what's going to happen next, what someone's going to say next, who it is telephoning before you answer (even though you've not thought of or spoken with them in months or even years); when you know that conjunction of event is going to follow conjunction of event.

My belief is that truly living in accord with essential nature, given sufficient mindfulness practice, we could more or less dwell in this zone; but who of us is sufficiently alert/aware all the time? I'm aware though that there are periods when I notice this more than at other times: it's a mirroring of that quantum reality, perhaps, where photons – do I mean photons? Electrons? Neither? Linked particles? Anyway, sub-atomic particles – have an instantaneous/simultaneous effect on each other, ultimately indivisible.

This is C G Jung's 'acausal connecting principle' ('synchronicity'); so my waking dead on the dot of the moment of exact solstice yesterday morning, coupled with, for me, an unusually high level of telepathy alerts me to recognising the frequency of such experiences. I notice that for me these periods where conjunct events tumble over each other in my awareness happen for between 3 weeks and 3 months at a stretch, and I am not sure what it is that creates that heightened sensitivity in me (I say that as I imagine these events are happening synchronously anyway; sometimes we simply don't notice them, though of course we can train ourselves to).

*

But I wasn't going to talk about that, but about poetry. In fact I was going to let the poetry speak for itself, so here are a couple of stanzas from David Whyte's 'What I Must Tell Myself'.

Watching the geese
go south I find
that
even in silence
and even in stillness
and
even in my home
alone
without a thought
or a movement
I am part
of a great migration
that will take me to another place...

When one thing dies all things
die together, and must live again
in a different way,
when one thing
is missing everything is missing,
and must be found again
in a new whole
and everything wants to be complete,
everything wants to go home
and the geese travelling south
are like the shadow of my breath
flying into the darkness
on great heart-beats
to an unknown land
where I belong...

Winter solstice

2011-12-21T22:16:00.000Z

First you need to shed all you know
or can name
then you need to step out of
your shoes, your shadow, your own
light, and your home. Strip
naked as the four winds
and forget being upright
unless you want to dance, and then
dance the stone row to the stone circle
and allow the sky to take your voice.
This is the season of yew and periwinkle
of Persephone's descent
to the winter god.
Watch for the barn owl
and Hecate at the crossroads
and prepare to hang from the World Tree
until you are sobered by silence
and stillness, and the great
white unending song of the spheres.
Kneel on the earth until
you become a reed, a snail, a fox,
another word for truth.
Be the berry in the dark stream
that the water bears away.
Transformed into all
you may be, step forward and cross
the threshold, gateway to gods
and ancestors, to what will endure
beyond all that you can imagine
of the play of particle, of wave –
take the hand that's offered, step through
this gateway to the light that burns within
which now you’ll never lose again.

~ Roselle Angwin

merrivale for the midwinter solstice

2011-12-20T09:55:00.000Z

I walk the dancing circle with its little stumps of stones: widdershins, then sunwise, then widdershins again, and once more sunwise. I stand briefly at its heart, omphalos, the place where heaven and earth meet.

My fingers are too cold to write. There's an icy northwesterly, the roads I've travelled potentially lethal in places. Bodmin's moors beyond our Dartmoor are visible, receding away towards the Atlantic. My back is giving me some pain, reminding me of the need to slow, to be gentle, to take the journey inwards to the cave bear of the heart.

We're moving towards the shortest day here in the northern hemisphere: point of maximum darkness. Some of the megalithic monuments of the southwest (notably the Cornish fogous), oriented as they are to the midwinter solstice dawn, once served, we think, an initiatory purpose, where the one to be reborn was holed up for three days and nights in darkness, to be baptised by the first new fingers of sun entering the darkness (think of Christ in his tomb for the three days and nights, Odin on the World Tree).

This is my Ground of Being day to mark the turning points of the year and our relationship with the natural world with walking, silence, companionship, writing. R, who hasn't missed a single Ground of Being equinox/solstice day since he first joined us for the autumn equinox 2010 (despite 90 miles each way, despite almost impassable for him and completely impassable for me snow and ice last winter solstice, and despite the fact that I missed another, myself, for illness), tells me that in Chinese thought the solstice is the time when the ascending yang triangle and the descending yin triangle are at their furthest points away from each other. I read this as the impulse of the masculine principle towards heaven/spirit, the impulse of the feminine towards earth, soul.

Mithraic traditions, according to Caitlin and John Matthews*, ascribed to the midwinter solstice in Capricorn the Gateway to the Gods, an individual journey of the spirit of this time: hard, dark, solo travelling towards the returning light. By contrast, the midsummer solstice in Cancer (ruled by the moon, the feminine) is a collective celebratory event of full light, maximum fecundity, the Gateway to the Ancestors.

However, in the pagan Celtic Wheel of the Year, the period between Samhain, the Celtic New Year's beginning, on November 1st, and Beltane, May 1st, is the period belonging to the earth goddess (as opposed to sky god) – an inward time of descent and darkness and rest.

As always I am pulled to the stone in the west; and west is the place of the ancestors, of water, of the feeling nature in the medicine wheel of the year. I think of my mum, having recently joined the ancestors:

now that she

can’t make the journey

I walk to the centre

for her –

a single heart

I think of my journey from midsummer to here, with its losses, deep sorrows and troubles, and its points of light and laughter too. What have I gathered in, what do I need to shed, what helpers and sources of warmth do I have at this time?

And I think of all the love that's sustained me through this year, these times; and how love never runs dry, no matter what shape it takes.

*

On the drover's track, the raindrops on mossy unleafed branches are so spangled with light that I'm dazed, breathstruck. Who needs Christmas tree lights? Who could imagine plastic a substitute?

*

Tonight the owl’s voice

glitters with frost

I want a dress

the colour of moonshine

I want to slip

into

the invisible –

I want to be

both found and lost

~ Roselle Angwin

* The Western Way, vol 11

in all these moments I make my home

2011-12-16T11:25:00.000Z

Times when life is so intense, joy and despair are so close together it's hard to tell them apart. Big loss, like big love, blows your heart open, doesn't it, and then the distinctions between feeling states become not just blurred but almost irrelevant. You realise that they're not just 'two sides of the same coin' but they are the same. And still feelings are only – and what a big 'only' – the way we humans navigate this wonderful terrible world of ours, map our place, register the impact of the fullness and the richness of it all, register our being in relationship to it all, engaged with the delights, engaged with the suffering. They're our natural human response to impermanence, flux, uncertainty. And maybe what matters is not whether we're happy instead of sad, but whether we can let all this take us deep, hold the doors of our heart wider open.

So this morning my response to everything is happy and sad at the same time – and that's ok. I can occasionally remember in moments that I don't have to identify the 'I' of me, whatever that means, with my labile emotional responses – though of course I do, unless I remember the irrelevance of the microscopic dot of 'me' on the face of this one small planet, and remember too that my emotional response to the world is only one part of my wholeness.

How it is today: the lull of a clear high sky for an hour. Then a deep wash of slatey-indigo rushing up from the west, eclipsing the moors; a handful of seagulls flung pristine white against the darkening sky. A rainbow bridging the lane. Brief and insistent smell of the sea, inland as we are, lifting my heart and tossing it out to the breakers. A wild and sudden deluge of hailstones, drenching dog and me. A small residue of hurt from someone's reaction to some words of mine. A residue of hurt for that person, too. A memory of the robin, yesterday, flying to my hand in the Zen garden at Dartington where I sit for a while after the radio show. My fleeting pleasure at the gentle order – raked waves, rocks, shrubs – in front of me, in the face of my own shambolic lifestyle. The kindness and generosity of friends. An alert from a course participant of a poem by Jorie Graham that I didn't know (www.poets.org, search for her name and 'Embodies' – she's reading it). Some texted poetry jokes that make me chuckle. A half hour's lucid and upbeat conversation with my dad – almost like the 'old days', pre-stroke, pre-bereavement; and we laugh. And oh yes another little wild strawberry, and the new gorse flaming yellow in the hedge. A breakout of jewel-red little mushrooms, edible. My mum's handwriting, a small note with the words for 'thank you' in Irish, from years ago. Breakfast with an old friend, he with whom I've shared many journeys. Yes, and the woodpeckers each morning at the feeder... in all these moments I make my home.

the next military dictatorship

2011-12-15T07:13:00.002Z

It's hard to know now where to look to find a democracy, or what it looks like. So Obama has decided not to veto a bill that's gone through the Senate and is now to be addressed by the House (basically a Republican body). This new law ignores the U S Constitutional Bill of Rights, giving the military powers to arrest suspected American terrorists (very loosely defined) on the streets, on home soil, and hold them indefinitely without trial, at for instance Guantanamo (what happened to that election pledge of his to close down the camp at Guantanamo Bay?).

Isn't this one of the criteria by which we recognise military dictatorships in the more brutal regimes?

'"It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent."' (The Guardian)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/15/americans-face-guantanamo-detention-obama

Plus ca change...

the art of conscious relationship

2011-12-14T10:40:00.002Z

It's seemed to me for many years now that the path of conscious relationship is as valid a practice as any (other) spiritual path, and arguably increasingly urgent in this poor fractured conflict-ridden world. For me, it underpins all my spiritual practice (or at least that's the intention – easy to say, of course. So I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I'm constantly aware of its demands and necessities, its tug at the hem of the psyche.)

Mystics have always said, and science via quantum physics is validating this, that everything is relationship, from the grandest cycles to the smallest imaginable organisms or events. Everything. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and everything has an effect on everything else.

This is so elegantly demonstrated in particle physics where two particles can be charged with interaction with each other, and the one can be shown to change the other instantaneously, even 'if they have travelled to opposite sides of the universe' (Michael Brooks in The New Statesman, more another time).

You'll see the thread I'm following: one I keep coming back to in these posts. This particular thread for me connects not only to Zen and pagan/arcane spiritual practice, but also to my days of studying myth – initially at university (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic; my focus was on the body of Welsh and Irish mythology), and then later in my transpersonal psychology training, rooted in Jungian and archetypal thought.

A determining, even epiphanic, moment for me in my early 30s was a blinding revelation in relation to my own personal history and the way some mythic stories addressed aspects of this.

Myth embodies in story form the truths of humanity, and the wisdom of a culture, and offers us solutions or resolutions to the dilemmas and crises we all meet. I fell on the Grail mythos (much of which I'd read in various ancient languages at university, where the struggle was simply on translation and the content slipped by!) as others turn to the Bible, and then read all the Jungian books in relation to the deeper symbolism of the Grail stories (which, as we know them now, were adapted during the later Christian era from a body of much older knowledge, sourced probably in ancient Egypt and ancient Europe/Britain).

Meantime – this is in 1990/1 – I was building on my own personal inner work to create a series of workshops called 'Myth as Metaphor'. The rest as they say (as they say) is history.

OK I'm wandering a bit. Focus, girl.

If the ego seeks gratification, the Self seeks transformation and unity. (Here I'm using the 'Self' as Jung used it – the larger 'higher self' that is not focused on gratification of the hungry little ego, but on growth and potential for consciousness and the wider requirements of the collective.) We are all part of much bigger cycles, and as Dr Guirdham said, in a very real way 'we are one another'. But if you're anything like me, your tendency too will be to view everything 'out there' as if it's separate from you (me, us). Then our world becomes dotted with fragments of disconnected 'its' that we push around as if they were dead, to feed our appetites.

If we make our work though that of reclaiming the journey to the Self something changes. This is what so many of the Grail myths exemplify – the journey from the self-seeking nature of the immature person to the perspective of the mature adult who can form relationship that at least some of the time is not toxic and completely driven by the need to 'get' something from another; and in which evolution of consciousness and service play a determining part. I suppose that's the journey from 'love' to Love, too. At least, that's the theory!

Reclaiming our 'stuff', taking responsibility for our shadow, the unevolved bits of ourselves that we project out there and see in or dump on another but are blind to in ourselves seems to be the fundamental starting point. Rather like (I imagine) lancing a boil, there is such relief in reclaiming this stuff, pain notwithstanding (or maybe I'm simply a masochist!) – so much energy is locked up in all this projection!

Of the many books on all this that I possess or have read, one I come back to over and over is James Hollis' The Eden Project – in Search of the Magical Other, 'a Jungian perspective on relationship'. I can't help feeling this should be on the curriculum in all secondary schools. I want to tell everyone interested in relationship – that is, everyone – to read this book!

I have been using this work as a kind of guidebook/handbook/map for many years now, and it has come into focus again this year as I work through it more intensely as part of an important (to me) and significant (ditto) collaborative project.

There are a series of questions that Hollis raises that now underpin my journalling. In case any of this resonates with you at all, I'll copy them out. What I put down below is a very slightly adapted form of JH's questions.

The fundamental question
'What am I asking of this Other that I ought to be doing for myself?'

Its corollary
'What am I doing for this Other that s/he ought to be doing for him- or herself?'
(I think this is mine rather than JH's, though I may have misremembered – this is a big lesson for me, being both stubbornly independent and also over-responsible)

Other necessary/related qs:
Where do my dependencies show up in my relationships?
How do I repeatedly constrict myself through my historically conditioned attitudes and behaviour patterns?
Am I taking on too much responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of the Other? Am I taking on his or her journey at the expense of my own?
Am I living my life in such a fashion that I will be happy with the consequences of my choices? If not, when do I plan to start? What fears, lack of permission or old behaviours block me from living my life?
In what ways do I seek to avoid suffering?

AND: in what ways do I avoid intimacy?

*

'The way we live our days is, of course, the way we live our lives.' Annie Dillard

Word Quest: radio interview

2011-12-13T22:04:00.005Z

If you have nothing better to do on Thursday morning (or indeed during the odd hour thereafter) – pour a coffee, put your feet up and tune in to local radio, or listen online ...

Thursday, 15 December, Wordquest FM
10:00 to 11:00am A discussion with Devon writer Roselle Angwin

102.5 FM in the Totnes/Dartington area or live on-line at www.soundartradio.org.uk <http://www.soundartradio.org.uk>

If you miss the live or on-line broadcast then download the podcast here:
http://www.auneheadarts.org.uk/site/projects/wordquest/downloads_podcasts.html <http://www.auneheadarts.org.uk/site/projects/wordquest/downloads_podcasts.html>
along with podcasts of previous programmes.

This is the last Wordquest FM broadcast until Thursday, January 12. Thereafter it resumes, weekly, on Thursday mornings from 10am to 11am.

metaphors and 'the long dark teatime of the soul'

2011-12-13T11:46:00.000Z

After a pretty intense term with my Poetry School students I thought it was time we lightened up a little for the last session. The usual format is a week-by-week rotation of close reading of poems in the Staying Alive anthology, then a session writing our own work (usually inspired by one of the poems in the book), followed by an intensive feedback session on the participants' work.

Last night we brought food to share and our favourite poem from the anthology, and I opened the session with a more playful way in.

I spoke yesterday, partly in relation to Andy Brown's blogpost, of my continual preoccupation both as poet and poetry tutor with the way we use the details of the concrete world, as perceived through the senses, to convey the abstract.

One of the things poetry can be very good at is enabling us to see experience in a fresh and different light, out of a different pair of eyes, and recognise it as our own.

Often it is the element of surprise that enables us to see something afresh, as if for the first time; and in poetry, as in jokes, it is often an unexpected juxtaposition that suddenly seems so right, so apposite, that brings the 'aha!' moment. That's why Douglas Adam's title above has the resonance it does.

An exercise I do with groups as play has this undercurrent of serious intent. I ask people to make three lists: one of concrete nouns ('doorframe', 'woodpecker'), one of abstract nouns ('grief', 'transience'), and one of either verbs to be used as adjectives, or adjectives themselves. I then ask people to combine them into phrases with an eye to surprising conjunctions and juxtapositions.

Often the phrases are just nonsense; but sometimes they really illuminate something. While the results in themselves are often too blowsy to be usable in a poem, they can prompt writers into extending the range of the metaphors they use, and to think more consciously of the impact of words in conjunction.

Here are some off-the-top-of-my-head examples:

the dusty drains of disbelief
the withered bough of grief
the scuffed patina of the afternoon
the peeling lacquer of pretence
the cracked lacquer of despair
the snug jumper of friendship
the pouting squalls of superficiality
the leaking ink of insincerity
the grimy vat of jealousy
the narrow vault of despair
the unadorned wimple of apathy
the scented bower of early love
the mean corral of emptiness
the hardy arbour of belief...

Andy Brown POETRY

2011-12-12T12:45:00.000Z

Anyone who teaches poetry will be aware of the struggle involved in getting new writers to move away from the impetus for inclusion of great and sublime abstract ideas and phrases, initially more 'poetic' seeming, to a more-apparently-mundane use of the concrete and the sensory. The more I teach poetry the more I come to appreciate fully the art of poets like Robert Hass, James Wright and Jane Hirshfield, who allow the concrete to shape the poem but also intuit the exact proportion of abstract to concrete to enhance rather than undermine the poem.

One of the participants on my Poetry School course in Exeter drew my attention to this great blog by my friend Andy Brown, who heads the creative writing programme at Exeter University. Oddly, the ground he's covering resonates with a session I led last week on the Anne Carson poem that he mentions (this appears in the Staying Alive anthology which is the core text for my course); and he also mentions kennings, which we too spoke of. Andy and I both appear in the New Exeter Book of Riddles (now not so new) – and ditto.

This is an excerpt from his post:

*

Thisness and Thusness: Thing Theory

In the writing classroom I regularly find myself discussing the central aim of poetry to make something that is absent become present. It seems to me one of the most basic concepts to understand in writing a poem. How do we make what is not there, appear as though it were?

T.S. Eliot of course came up with the idea of the Objective Correlative – a way of using concrete objects to stand in for abstract emotions. It has become an orthodoxy in creative writing, underpinning the endlessly-touted imperative “Show Don’t Tell”. And it is in his stead that the Canadian poet Anne Carson, for example, writes about her father’s blue cardigan (the present object) to stand in for the abstract idea of loss (the absent). Don’t name the loss, we teach, which is abstract and absent by nature; simply write about the empty cardigan.

If you're interested in poetry I highly recommend this post.

Andy Brown POETRY

cursing on the rowan tree

2011-12-10T12:17:00.001Z

In the orchard, migrating thrushes, blackbirds and redwings are feasting on what's left of the windfall apples. The hedges are laden with berries, this year, thank goodness, for the birds.

In the valley, after all the rain we've had, the stream is having a number of different conversations, each at its own register. Walking the footpath I see that several hazel are stretching out new leaves alongside the catkins – they must have had a shock last night with heavy frost.

Simon's cut back an elder – oh no! – I had a few words with it as I brushed past yesterday, reassuring it of its longevity (it was admittedly blocking the path, and a few skidmarks in the slopey mud suggest people have been going past on their behinds as likely as their feet). The local smallholders tend on the whole to leave nature pretty much to do its own thing, and Simon works conscientiously to keep to minimum impact while still tending the land – coppicing, steeping, harvesting the pruned wood to make hurdles and heat his house, leaving the land always looking cared for but in harmony with its environment. He'll never cut a tree unless he feels it's important to do so. I thought the elder was safe. In ancient Celtic times it was a serious crime to fell an elder – a most sacred tree.

Which brings me obliquely onto what I want to try to talk about. I was going there yesterday with my blog on karma but stopped short – partly because my braincell hadn't quite mapped out the scope of the terrain I want to speak of, and partly out of cowardice, as it involves speaking of personal and potentially, for me, painful stuff.

Here's a first foot into that landscape...

I'm thinking of the aboriginal concept of bone-pointing. It was commonly accepted that if the tribal medicine man, or an elder vested with such power, or simply an enemy, 'pointed the bone' at you you were dead. In our European culture, the equivalent is being cursed. This is the black side of magic (where white magic is used to heal, black is used for harm).

Yesterday I touched on the concept of belief – how a belief, a thought-form, will shape our life; and how much more dangerous that can be if that belief is not made conscious. If a culture supports a particular belief system, individuals in that culture will also, subliminally or more consciously, tend to hold those beliefs, at least unless they're aware and bold enough as to challenge them.

What is interesting is that 'bone pointing' or the equivalent doesn't seem to rely only on the fact being conveyed with the victim's conscious knowledge; in other words, it seems to work even if the victim hasn't been told that they're being cursed.

I don't know the scientific materialist's view on this, but anyone who is not the most emotionally detached hardline materialist, philosophically speaking, must be aware of the fact that information can be conveyed to another person not just verbally nor just via body language, but wordlessly via the emotional nature. This realm, the emotional, psychic or astral realm, is a collective place: C G Jung called it the collective unconscious. Our emotions do not respect the boundaries of the individual physical body. Messages are transmitted through this dimension via a kind of intuitive perceptive ability, telepathic at times in its scope. Some people (those with a high level of imagination and empathy, often) are more skilled in receiving and transmitting in this realm than others, but we all (I believe) have this faculty, and it can be developed through meditation and other practices.

I assume that 'cursing' someone makes use of this mode.

That is a digression really from what I wanted to speak of, and deserves a great deal more attention than I can give it here. But coming towards what I want to speak of, I'm thinking here of Gavin Maxwell's belief that his former lover, the poet and mystic Kathleen Raine, cursed him on the rowan tree behind his house on the hill at Camusfearna (Maxwell wrote the wonderful Ring of Bright Water, a book on his time living with otters on the West Coast of Scotland – a book that shaped my childhood and later life, and the epigraph to which, a few lines from Raine's poem that titled the book, determined me, aged 11, that I wanted to be a poet). After that time, Maxwell's life deteriorated dramatically, culminating in a fire that destroyed his home, and his later cancer; for which Raine held herself responsible.

OK, so this is the hard bit to talk about. As you'll know if you've followed my blog, my mum died four weeks ago. I have been thinking for the last six weeks about an incident in the late summer.

My mum had Alzheimer's. One of the implications of this is that someone with that condition is very easily disorientated; there are few, if any, points of reference, and she found it hard to be separated from my father and taken out of the home where they lived. However, the GP felt that a large mark that had appeared on her forehead needed investigation, so referred her to the hospital as an outpatient, as she feared it was a carcinoma. One of my sisters and I took her.

My mum had had a lifelong terror of hospitals. (She herself was almost never physically ill, but two of my sisters had life-threatening illnesses in their childhood; one of them to the point where she was in intensive care.) We had developed a habit of rather protecting my mum from the world, as in many ways she was quite childlike, and the more so with Alzheimer's.

Anyway, we took her, and the whole trip was quite traumatic; but as nothing compared to the trauma of the way the young female surgeon shocked my mother. Rather assuming my mum was deaf – which she wasn't – the woman examined the lump on her forehead and brought her face close to my mum's, making eye contact. 'You've got cancer!' she bellowed – hardly a skillful way to tell anyone, least of all someone as sensitive as my mum, who was, of course, deeply shocked and upset.

The reason I mention this is because, 10 days before she died, we discovered that my mum was very seriously ill. Even those of us closest to her had no idea. As I say, she has always been more than robust physically, if not so much emotionally. We decided that it wasn't in her interests to hospitalise her for further investigation/ops which she might not in any case have survived, and where she'd have to face it alone amongst strangers; more especially since it became obvious very quickly that this was terminal, and she'd be much more peaceful dying, with my dad beside her holding her hand, and us, and a great deal of love and care from the care staff, in the suite of tranquil, light-filled rooms looking on to the garden, in which they lived. It seemed important to give her continual family company, and her beloved Mozart on in the background, and low lights. But the doctors thought, from the severe and sudden significant blood loss, that my mum must have had cancer, internal cancer. And none of us knew; there had been no sign of any prior pain or discomfort of any sort. The journey from that point to the end was swift, and more or less painfree. I also know that it was the right thing for her, and that it happened exactly as it 'should', and the timing was, at some level, her choice. It was undoubtedly the best thing in the circumstances; and despite our sense of loss I still knew that at the time.

When it is one's time to go it is one's time to go, however it happens. There is no avoiding death.

But it does cross my mind that if someone 'in authority', in a position of power, speaks with enough conviction, a vulnerable and impressionable person might internalise that message and manifest it.

Who knows? 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy', says the great man.

And you will understand that I'm not attributing blame; the young surgeon was doing her job, was acting in my mum's best interests, she thought; and if she was emotionally clumsy, or ignorant of people's sensitivities, perhaps – well, so are many people. My mum was particularly sensitive. It's also quite likely impossible that any serious illness can be manifest in a matter of a couple of short months; though it might well have been accelerated (and given where Alzheimer's takes one, and my mum's gradual but inexorable deterioration, I suppose there is a case for saying that might not have been the worst thing imaginable). As deaths go, even in the middle of grief I can see that this was a 'good' one.

So I might be adding one and one and arriving at 42; or, maybe, to quote one of my mum's favourite phrases, perhaps it was a straw in the wind.

karma (take 2) (or more)

2011-12-09T08:46:00.001Z

Pre-postscript: uhoh – perhaps you've been paying attention to my blog better than I have. Or maybe your memory's simply better! As I typed out those words from the Dhammapada this morning I had a sense I'd done this before here. Hmmm; yes, it seems I have; and only three short months ago (put it down to stress; if you've been following this blog you will know that the last month has been very challenging). Anyway, I'll let this stand as it takes a slightly different angle from my previous posting, but apologies if you're tired of that little phrase at the bottom!

Underneath all our ecological and economic crises lies, it seems to me (and I'm not by a long way the first to articulate this of course), the urgent need for humankind to take a leap in the evolution of consciousness. If we want to survive as a species, and if we truly care about whether or not we take down the rest of the planet with us in our thrashing and posturing destructiveness, we need to change, and fast, in terms of our awareness and the outcomes of the choices we make: looking at our greed, our megalomania, our potential for hate, our fear. Staring it in the face, individually and collectively, until we really know the shape of it. Everything else is sticking a plaster on it.

One of the great contributions this last century to consciousness has been the pyschotherapeutic movement. It seems to me that the integration of psychology into our spiritualities – and vice versa – offers us a potentially huge way forward, and this is happening in some areas.

What this conjunction offers is an engaged way of living in the world, where we learn what it means to take responsibility for our movement through it and the consequences of that on self and other. I remember too those words of Jung's: that with increased rights come increased responsibility. This doesn't seem to have hit home really, looking at the way we humans are in the world.

One of the things that has appealed to me always about Zen is the potential for bringing awareness to each moment, every moment, and how we relate to it (this is common throughout Buddhism but shines clearly in the stripped-down-ness of Zen). In emphasising as it does the interconnectedness of everything (as does modern paganism, which has also influenced my life through shamanic and druidic practice) it reminds us that every personal thought/word/action has a consequence – again at least potentially – in the collective, in the way (this is an image frequently used in Buddhist thought) that the ripples from a pebble in a pool spread out. As in good poetry, the personal also opens out into the universal.

One of the many things psychotherapy brings to this is an increasing awareness of our patterns and habits, our beliefs. Once we bring these subliminal conditioned patterns of being into the conscious mind we have some choice; whereas as long as they reside unnoticed in the subconscious they continue to drive us and, in their relative automony, can wreak havoc.

And to karma – a widely misunderstood term in the West, it seems. Karma is simply the consequences of actions: harvesting what we sow, in other words. It is not merely a kind of balance sheet of good actions/bad actions for which we'll reap reward or be punished at some unspecified later date – or at least, that is only a crude representation. What it is is an awareness that everything we do has an effect; and the consequent notion that the more awareness we can bring to our way of being in the world the more liberated we (and others affected by us) will be.

Implicit in karma is that our thoughts and beliefs about the world really do shape our experience of the world. This is of course a self-perpetuating cycle – 'the wheel of karma' applies here too. This is relatively easily empirically tested; and there are a number of studies that show the way this may work in relation to others. I'm thinking here of the well-known experiments where a teacher was given an unfamiliar class of pupils and told that they were underachievers. Whether or not this was actually the case, the pupils all underachieved in the tasks they were set. A different teacher was given the same group of pupils and told the opposite – that they were all exceptionally gifted. Guess what?

So if we believe – or are told enough times – for instance that we are powerless, that is the tone we will tend to attract and manifest in our lives, putting it crudely. The reactions of the world to this will reinforce the belief. If we believe that the world is 'dog eat dog', that is what we will see, that is what we will buy into and enact and that is what will appear to happen to us too. If we live by the sword, etc. (I know this is crude as well but it will do for now.)

One of my bedside books, falling to pieces now as it's lived there for more than 30 years, is the Pali text The Dhammapada, a little collection of aphorisms incorporated into the Buddhist canon some time before the Christian era.

Here's its opening aphorism (in Juan Mascaro's translation):

'What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.'

So simple; so revolutionary. I have to remind myself frequently never to underestimate the power of thought.

wuthering heights

2011-12-08T16:58:00.001Z

– but not as you remember it from reading the book at school. This is Andrea Arnold's version, the recent release, with a black guy in the lead role. It is breathtakingly beautiful visually, brilliant in its radical interpretation, inspired – and brutal, gruelling, grim. Inevitably and rightly, the brutality visited on the young Heathcliff conjures images of the not-then-obsolete slavery; still not as obsolete as we would like to think, any more than racism is. It's psychologically potent: a compelling meditation on the madness and destructiveness of obsessive love; it's shocking in its scenes of how cruelty begets cruelty; it's harrowing emotionally. As Sophie Mayer writes in The Guardian: 'Arnold makes powerful sense of Brontë's novel and its passionate argument, long recognised by feminist critics in relation to Catherine: that there can be no true love, because there is no true freedom in a society where there is any form of power and domination.'

It reminds me too why I so wanted to loosen the grip on my psyche of those tragic romantic tales with which I was brought up (we all are in the West). It made me feel grateful to do the work I do, live the life I live, be loved as I am, have the minimal comforts which at times I despise.

Work has been relentless. My father's distress at the recent loss of my mum has been relentless – exacerbated by his loss of memory. My own sense of loss has been very unrelenting too, and I have felt pretty close to the edge recently myself, and this afternoon was supposed to be a spontaneous Treat to Self – a way of focusing on something other than the heaps of undone work, my dodgy financial situation, and what on earth we are going to do about my father.

Can I recommend it to you? I don't know. Yes, I think, as long as you are not feeling emotionally overwrought in your life, though I do have psychological and ideological reservations about the wisdom of (sorry, that word again) unrelenting, unmitigated darkness and unhappiness.

Am I glad I saw it? I don't know. (I nearly left partway through – the fact that I was hemmed in and that I was also hoping for some kind of resolution made me sit it out.) I like being challenged; I love story, film, and so on; I like intense, deep, arty; I don't mind dark. But I do hate brutality; and I also have a hyperactive imagination and am very impressionable visually. This will haunt me.

I might have been better going with TM to Chagford, a pretty little market town on the moor where I have a lot of friends, for an easy and undemanding cup of coffee and a swan around some arty shops, plus that wonderful drive across Dartmoor – the wuthering heights without the graphic violence.

a rant on being unemployable

2011-12-08T09:13:00.001Z

My accountant rings. 'I have a word for you,' he says, in his Welsh accent. My immediate reaction is delight – sometimes friends and I do this for each other, to take our poetry off in a new way. 'Prevarication,' he offers.

Gob not connected to brain here. Naivety wins out over cynicism, as usual, too (plus in my defence I am immersed in something creative). I have already started to say 'Oh I'll see what I can do with a poem about that –' when the penny drops.

'Can I leave you with that then? And by the way when are you going to come to that rugby match?'

'When you come to a poetry reading, Steve.'

Yes, my accounts are well overdue. He's good, Steve, and we know each other well.

During my longish time living alone with my young daughter, two men became very significant in our fiscally-impoverished (but very rich in terms of lifestyle, interest and soulfood) lives in a rented wooden thatched house up a boulder-edged, beautiful and remote lane facing Dartmoor, quite a long way from a town, and a few miles from the nearest village: the mobile mechanic, Mike, who sorted out for very small sums my succession of interesting and impractical old Citroens, 2CVs and vans; and my accountant, without whom I wouldn't have been able to get by – in those days there was a Welfare State, and my lone-parenthood plus very low income from handmaking garments and footwear and no other kind of financial support qualified me for Family Credit help to feed and clothe E, and help towards the rent; but only on presentation of self-employed accounts from a bona fide accountant. The help much more than paid his bills.

In those days I had to drag in from the adjoining woodland and saw up my own logs before there was any heat in the house; and as I was working all the hours that my daughter was either at school or in bed that meant that it was an endless chore, and, this being Devon, the wood was usually damp. (However the beautiful thing about a Rayburn is that we did all our cooking on it, it heated the water, dried the clothes and the wet logs, allowed the dough to rise and warmed E's bedroom above it.)

Later, when I moved into part of the old farmhouse on the Buckland Abbey estate (long story), I added to the list of Essential People (obviously topped by friends and family) the local couple who logged and brought us wood, also cheaply; and the farrier: we'd acquired a small pony for E, and my friend Ian swapped hoofcare for human footwear, as I was then making my living through shoemaking.

Even my accountant swapped figures for boots, as did the friends who made my furniture, crockery and some of my clothes. (My doctor bought my shoes, too.)

I love the barter economy. It's not the same with poetry (although my vet did recently swap a treatment – she's also an acupuncturist – for the two new books).

A lot of my work behind the scenes is unpaid – promotion, admin, enquiries, chasing work, booking, planning, advertising and preparing courses and paying non-refundable deposits on venues never being sure that the course will fill enough as to be viable, submitting poems, essays and manuscripts, and giving feedback to/doing favours for other newer writers.

People tend to think, too, that if you're lucky enough as to be able to do something you love doing, full time, and it's something that doesn't have any obvious commercial value, that should be its own reward; so I am asked a lot, as no doubt many other professional poets and writers are, if I could 'just' look at this manuscript, these poems, give this reading; with no expectation of a fee.

So if I sound grouchy it's because I have finally overcome the prevarication and done my accounts. Depressing. Steve has been telling me for years that I'd be better off on benefits; and, more, that I'm going to be a very poor old lady. (Of course I have no pension, insurance, security, ability – should I wish to have one – to raise a mortgage in my own name; plus anyway my native Westcountry has mostly been sold to people with London incomes.)

I guess it's not surprising in a recession that my earnings are down for the third year running, though I am working as hard as I ever have – often 6 days a week, certainly. Sadly, the expenses, legitimate business expenses, are not down. In fact the two sets of figures are almost identical. The Man looks at the two columns in utter disbelief. 'How on earth did we manage to eat this last year?' (The deal is he pays most of the utilities bills in the house – I do my garden studio bills – and I buy the food.) The answer is entirely courtesy of a very good friend; she who has sponsored this blog this year. Thank God for friends.

Despite media attention on 'success stories' like J K Rowling, and prize money such as that of the Man Booker, a Society of Authors survey showed that almost all professional authors, in the UK anyway, earn less than £20K per annum; and somewhere between 75% and 90% of those less than £10K. I'm one of the latter. Royalties on my several books that are in print, coupled with those books of my own that I sell at eg workshops, bring in a total that usually doesn't quite make four figures.

The rest is courses and mentoring, an occasional (paid!) poetry reading.

Thing is, I don't really value money, so don't pay it the dues it might need to grow. What I value is living somewhere that inspires me, and living simply with as little impact as possible (which is just as well), doing something I was born to do; something I really love, that feels authentic and true to my vision and values; whose worth isn't measured against dosh in the bank – wrong 'language'. What's more, feedback seems to suggest that this work, in its small way, is valuable; and it also doesn't add to the sum of harm on the planet. But this is not part of the capitalist ethos.

Each year I come to this same place: how is this sustainable? Will I still be giving workshop in my 60s, my 70s? Will anyone come? Will schools want an elderly woman giving supposedly-inspiring workshops on poetry and the environment? Can I continue to get by on so little?

And then is the thought: what anyway is the alternative (short of writing the bestseller – but my interests are too non-mainstream, and I also know I'm not a top-flight author)? I have few marketable skills, and am, after all unemployable after 30 years of this!

So here's to the strange kind of freedom of the self-employed. My English A level teacher once yelled at the group of 17-year-old boys messing around at the back of the class: 'What you don't realise is that when you leave here you'll be finding, one way or another, that life will imprison you. What I have is the thankless task of at least trying to give you the means to choose your own prison!'

Mine's pretty good, thank you Mrs W. There are fields and birds and trees through the window; and if I choose to get up now and take the dog out into the wet gale and enjoy it, and make up for it later, there's no one standing over me and watching the clock. And – you know – I think I might just, pressure of work, grief over my recent bereavement and lack of money notwithstanding, take this afternoon off to go and see 'Wuthering Heights' before the arts centre cinema stops showing it. I could do with a treat; and right now its dark moodiness will do me fine.

*

A plea: support an author, or poet, this week – not necessarily me – and buy a book! And if you do want to buy a book from me (Christmas coming up and all that) I have a special deal at the moment – see back to the Fire in the Head programme post a few days ago. And then there are those courses – buy a loved one a bit of a course? :-)

merristems

2011-12-07T10:48:00.001Z

All night storm
now a northerly with sleet in its teeth
snow of sheep on the far hill
and still
the thrush sings spring
from the ash's soot-tipped merristems
and hazel catkins come

getting out of your own light

2011-12-06T15:18:00.001Z

This is another of my MsLexia columns about the writing process...

I guess we all know the blank page syndrome. It seems to methat one of the biggest problems for a writer is feeling that every word has tocount; that sullying the blank page with less-than-perfect expression meansyou’ve ‘failed’.

This is not helpful. I open everynew workshop with a reminder that you ‘can’t get it wrong’; and also I like toquote that ‘you’re not a failure because – this time – you didn’t “succeed”;you’re a success because you tried’ line. Zen writer Gail Sher* has Four NobleTruths for writers: Writers write; writing is a process; you don’t know whatyour writing will be until the end of the process; if writing is your practice,the only way to fail is to not write. Asshe and Natalie Goldberg both emphasise, what counts is the intention: youcommit to showing up, and you show up. (That’s not to undermine the needsometimes for serious content; it’s simply to not have the guillotine of theproduction of perfect work endlessly poised above your head.)

What’s more helpful is the ideaof letting oneself play; improvisation (which we do every time we open ourmouths), letting words tumble out onto the page unsupervised and uncensored. Inother words, allowing yourself to write rubbish in the faith that somethingless-than-rubbish will also emerge. It helps to approach the blank page eachtime as if it’s the first time, with no expectations other than the enjoymentof placing words on paper. The ideal state is one of relaxed alertness, a receptivesurrender that will allow the unconscious to do the work.

Play is an important part of thecreative process. As we age, unless we make time for it or work in creativefields, it is easy to forget to think associatively, instead channelling ourthoughts along more linear highways. Play allows us to bring disparate elementstogether, to make surprising discoveries, to make exciting juxtapositions. It’sanother way of making room for the imaginative and associative aspects of thesubconscious to feed in to the process; remember C G Jung’s sandplay box inwhich both children and adults allowed to emerge what they couldn’t easilyotherwise articulate.

Two suggestions this time: 1,show up daily – make time to sit with the blank page with no agenda. 2, practiseassociative thinking throughout the day: get into the habit of jotting downsimiles and metaphors as they occur to you. What are the things and situationsyou perceive like? What might they be? Iasked a sculptor friend of mine what bunches of ash keys might be, creativelyspeaking. ‘Tadpoles feeding; clusters of notes from Beethoven’s unfinishedsymphony; all the punctuation left out of a James Joyce novel’ were some of ourjoint suggestions.

Beconcrete, be abstract: as one primary school boy said, the exploding dead headsof cow parsley were fireworks; and they were also like anger.

Simply get out of your own lightand listen to the pen. Just write, and see what happens.

* Gail Sher: One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers

on regeneration

2011-12-04T12:53:00.001Z

at the waterfall
where I put a word down
and then another
where night and day
amount to the same thing
where 'no beginning/no end'
makes as much sense
as anything else
where the boulders take the hit
of photons with
all of themselves
where rain and sun marry me
to earth air water
where I give up my name
where I am another glyph
for silence

*Alasdair Paterson's new book on the governing of empires has each poem title beginning with 'on', a motif I borrow for the title of this one.

never too late for redemption

2011-12-02T21:30:00.001Z

A swirly blanket of ice on the car this morning; the sky translucent and beautiful. Bright berries decorating banks, filling ditches; apples bobbing at the lip of the leat. From the woodland margins flocks of migrating redwings take off with a harsh chattering clatter at my approach. I don't think I've ever seen so many fungi as this autumn, and have found myself with a new caution – I used to be so confident at identifying edible species, and have had so little time to forage the last few years that I now doubt my eye.

And now again storms and gales...

It's nearly a year since I started this blog. I've loved the journey. Walking the dog this morning I was asking myself why I started it; why I write it. Answers are numerous and tangled: it's a creative journal; it's a discipline; it's a practice; it's a way of communicating; it's a way of working things out; it's a way of sharing and making connections with like-minded others; it's a way of expressing myself; it's a way (let's be honest) of also bringing more people to my work, which is crucial when you make your living in the arts.

It's a way of remembering, when snowed under (ie 95% of the time) with admin, prep, promotion, emails, enquiries, tutoring, mentoring, writing references/blurb/reviews of friends' and students' work and one way or another facilitating others' writing, or seeking commissions/contracts/publications/future workshop opportunities, that I too write... and some days it is the only 'real' writing I do. So yes it's a way of remembering.

And mostly it's for the same reason that I write anything – because I have to: because nothing else fills that writing-shaped gap; because I feel ill, or - not quite fraudulent, maybe inauthentic – or dislocated, disenfranchised, deracinated somehow if I don't, on a psychic or spiritual level.

It's been interesting to see what things have caught my attention. I expected to write a lot more about myth and psychology, about writing poetry and novels. I didn't expect that birds would make an appearance so very often; nor that almost each post would contain nature notes. I didn't expect Zen to be as prominent.

I knew it would be addictive. I didn't quite know why. I had no idea of my audience; and I had no idea of their (your) loyalty. I had no idea when I started how much pleasure writing this would give me; nor the fact that blogging is different from other writing activities; nor how much I'd love reading others' blogs.

And I have been so touched by the kindness and generosity of so many people, commenting on the blogs here or emailing me to speak about them. A big thank you for your participation in this year – it really does make it feel like a shared conversation, a joint project, collaboration almost, and you have enriched my life.

I hesitate to start to talk of this because I'm not sure I'll stop; but otherwise it's the elephant in the room.

I am only just beginning to glimpse what it is to lose one's mother. Because my father's grief has been so huge, and because a stroke took his short term memory out five years ago which means that he rings one of us (myself or one of my three sisters) or even all of us several times a day to ask us endlessly what's happened to our mum, there has been no space to grieve ourselves (though clearly having to face it all over again many times a day means we've had to let some grief in, grief for him as much as for us). There's also, of course, all the practical stuff to do after a death.

So I haven't really let it in properly, yet; but one part of my mind is pretty constantly preoccupied with it, even as another part notices the quality of light, the buzzard in the oak tree, focuses on what needs to be done; can still laugh, still engage.

My mum had Alzheimer's. Over the last eight or so years we watched her gradually withdraw from the world. She'd had a brilliant brain; had trained as an engineer, also been a pianist and artist; was a member of MENSA; always loved language and etymology, and not long before she succumbed to the more damaging progression of Alzheimer's she completed each day, and once won, the Times crossword. Even recently she still managed to keep some aspects of her connection with language going.

It's the little things that hurt, of course: reminding myself I have to speak or think of her in the past tense; not being able to tell her one of her favourite little jokes ('Where did Napoleon keep his armies?' 'Up his sleevies') to make her smile, or listen to her making a pun or wordplay; putting back on the shelf the little treat I've just automatically picked up for her in the shop – some fudge, maybe, or some blueberry-yoghurt-coated raisins; some handcream, a magazine. Just now I picked up her address book, and the list of our names with Christmas present ideas beside them in her handwriting that fell out dealt me a blow in the solar plexus as excruciating as if it had been physical.

But really she'd already let go. Though she and I had always adored each other in a simple warm relationship, the truth is I guess she stopped being my mum some time ago.

There were compensations. She was peaceful; she lived in a constant 'now' – in her more lucid moments when she apologised for her memory losses, I'd laugh and say that she seemed to have achieved effortlessly what I'd spent all my adulthood in Buddhist practice trying and failing to achieve, and she'd laugh too. And she and my father the last few years, ironically for the same reason (memory loss) caused by different illnesses, found a happiness that would have seemed inconceivable when they were both fitter and younger, their relationship then being so turbulent and so seamed with incompatibilities. This has been the greatest gift of the last five years, in among a great deal of difficulty and pain. Never too late to have a happy marriage.

And when one comes to die, how better than with minimal suffering, at home in a peaceful room, having just seen all your family, and with your spouse holding your hand, telling you how much he loves you and how beautiful you are?

'never enough darkness to extinguish a single candle'

2011-12-01T08:12:00.001Z

Yoga after such an absence: night dropping, rain fingering the roof, candles in this simple uncluttered space where I can breathe out again, come back in. The myths all tell us that the way out is the way through – that one has to enter the darkness. My shape on the floor is the Hanged Man of the tarot, Odin on the World Tree – let go into earth – all that I am, that I think, that I possess simply falling away.

I listen to the tides of blood breath brain; remember John Cage in his an-echoic chamber expecting utter silence and hearing instead the high whine of his central nervous system, the deep hum of his blood.

I am slowed back into three dimensions, borne up on my own tides. Simply to rest in the ground

of being

(where I have known earth and the flight of birds, the silken shift of water and the wild exuberance of fire).

Sister owl sounds the night – one pure long white note – and I ride it until I am home, again, everywhere

fire in the head course programme

2011-11-30T11:01:00.001Z

Today I'm cheating and posting details of my forthcoming events, in the hopes that any of you near enough might need a shot of inspiration; or any of you at a distance might decide you want to dedicate a half-year to strengthening your poetry or starting to knock that novel into shape via a correspondence course.

Or you might want to take me up on my book offer – Christmas presents?? And of course I'd love it if you mentioned any of this to writing friends, or friends interested in the human potential movement (this is as close as I can get to labelling the workshops that are not specifically just writing, but more to do with psychospirituality and consciousness)...

I’ve listed the workshops under weekly sessions, day courses, residentials and correspondence courses. I’ve postponed the two scheduled for late November and early December this year (see bottom) because of a family bereavement; they’ll be rescheduled for some time next year. Please keep an eye on the website – address below – as I’ll be updating it frequently as new events are scheduled. All details should be there soon (use the drop-down menus).

You’ll see too my radio slot; and at the bottom a book offer.

Radio

I’m the guest on Aune Head Arts Wordquest programme on Soundart Radio, 10am Thursday 15 December. I believe it will be available afterwards on <http://www.auneheadarts.org.uk/site/projects/wordquest/downloads_podcasts.html>

Weekly sessions

Poetry School I’ve been working with a wonderful and dynamic group of poets in Exeter, Devon on a Monday night this term. You can sign up for the new 10-week term in January (beg. 9th, 7-9pm) at www.poetryschool.com, or tel: 0207 582 1679. The group is a mix of new and experienced poets, and we base our sessions on the Staying Alive anthology. Do join us!

Day courses

Ground of Being on Dartmoor at Merrivale, solstices and equinoxes: these happen (assuming I’m not iced-in!) 4 times a year all day on a Sunday. We walk and write slowly and in silence under my guidance, share some of this writing, and go out no matter what the weather. Next two: December 18; March 18. Bookings needed asap! See website
Thresholds the 19th year of this course! Writing as a tool to explore what your creative heart and your soul need for the coming year: how have you been treating this wild and precious life? Nr Totnes; Saturday 21 January (again, ice permitting). Details on website soon
Poetry Walk come and walk round Hope Cove and Bolt Tail with me for the local AONB, and then write bright moments from it... Sunday March 25, 1pm-4.30pm – only £4 (£2 children). Book with me but see more on www.southdevonaonb.org.uk

Residentials

Islands of the Heart Isle of Iona, April: this retreat is now full with a waiting list. I’m considering an eco-writing retreat later in the year on Iona or Mull; we might be ‘roughing it’ a little more than we do at the wonderful Argyll Hotel; if so, it will also be cheaper. Please let me know if you’re interested
Zen & Poetry I’m intending to offer this again as a weekend residential at the lovely Barefoot Barn in Chagford on Dartmoor in May. Details soon
I am considering some creative writing courses aboard a yacht in Cornwall. More soon

Correspondence courses

Elements of Poetry 6 I’m inviting applications now for January-July 2012. This 6-month intensive course has been widely acclaimed.
Storymaking (writing a novel) this too is a six-month course, and you can sign up at any time.

Book offer

Between now and the solstice, 21 December: Buy any two of Creative Novel Writing, Writing the Bright Moment, Imago (my novel) and Bardo (poems and prose poems), from me direct for £12 plus £3 p&p (UK); or 25% off a single book plus £2 p&p...
And look out for my new poetry collection, All the Missing Names of Love, from IDP next year.

www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk
Twitter: @qualiabird
Facebook: Roselle Angwin
-----

NEW BOOKS:
IMAGO (novel, http://www.indigodreamsbookshop.com/#/roselle-angwin/4548104337)
BARDO (prose poems, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/angwin.html)

‘In a dark time the eye begins to see’: the healing power of writing, Sunday 20 November, nr Totnes POSTPONED

‘If no one speaks of remarkable things’: writing about being alive, Sunday 11 December, nr Totnes POSTPONED

Towards Daybreak

2011-11-28T07:34:00.001Z

Two owls
speaking across the dark
day glides towards us
like this mist across the water meadows

glances on
that lone sheep
insubstantial as a thought

nudges the new
witch hazel
towards its heart-of-winter
blossoming

I think
how it is that we might
pass a whole life
seeking a light we once thought
outside us

when all the time
it is within

'The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death'

2011-11-27T18:13:00.001Z

Not long after 9/11, I was due to lead a workshop with primary school children in rural Devon. As in many rural areas, multiculturalism as a lived concern is an irrelevancy, as other ethnic groupings are almost non-existent. Also, as in many rural areas in England, especially impoverished ones, the prevailing political current is right-wing, and not terribly well-informed. (Obviously, I'm making a gross generalisation here; but having been brought up in rural Devon myself I'm allowed to pronounce!)

Going about the place after 9/11 it was common to hear children spout deeply anti-Muslim stuff, presumably having heard it from parents.

The workshop was to take place in a museum which also houses a collection of fine Barum ware: pottery thrown from the local earthenware clay.

Like so many of us, I feel deeply troubled by divisiveness and its implications, and by how swiftly hatred is inflamed. Driving up to the venue I was musing on the tragic events of the past weeks, politically, while a bit of my mind was occupied also by the day ahead, and how, as workshop leader, I can encourage children to think inclusively in relation to the world we live in. Suddenly inspiration struck: I know by heart a little poem by the Muslim mystic and weaver Kabir, the C15th poet reputedly connected with Sufism (which the exquisite mystic poet Rumi is credited with starting).

The poem was to prove a good starting point for a discussion of what Islam has brought the West (it's easy to forget the elegance, wisdom and breadth of Islamic art and culture, brought by the troubadours through Spain to Provence whence it spread; and not least the Courts of Love, so embraced by Eleanor of Aquitaine, which changed forever not only our relationship to – believe it or not – the Divine Feminine but also to romantic love, which simply didn't exist in northern Europe before the C12th. See also my novel Imago.).

As well as providing a counterpoint to knee-jerk anti-Islam fundamentalism, the poem was also literally relevant to the pottery collection on which the first part of the workshop was to be based, as well as opening a discussion about who we are and about inclusiveness (yes I did indeed feel very smug!).

The reason I mention all this is because I have been listening to the wonderful album 'The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death' by the late Scottish Romany musician Jackie Leven, who died a few weeks ago. The poem here is recited on the album by the deep-voiced Robert Bly, he of Iron John fame.

'Inside this clay jug
there are canyons and pine mountains
and the maker of canyons and pine mountains.
All seven oceans are inside
and hundreds of millions of stars.'

everywhere is Walden Pond

2011-11-26T19:31:00.001Z

I've been thinking the last few days, as I do often, how it is that poetry offers something, something that speaks to the soul, in a way that little else except perhaps (for me) being out in wild nature does.

I've been trying, and failing, to locate in my copy of Walden Thoreau's quote about having gone out into nature, at Walden Pond, to live deliberately – did he say 'to front life deliberately'?* (I know I could google it but I wanted too the context. I'll post it when I find it.).

As always with Thoreau, every page yields a score of quotes, so I took a diversion or three. Here's one: 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation... But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.' (Had you forgotten that it was Thoreau, not Pink Floyd, who said the first bit?)

Anyway, it seems to me that poetry, too, is that: an attempt to live life deliberately, to not have it pass by unseen and unheeded, to not live at such full tilt that we leave our souls behind in the dusty foothills as we scramble for faster and more of everything.

I think about Lucien Stryk's words that I quoted the other day about our lolloping around the universe not paying attention, scarcely knowing who we are; and I think poetry is an attempt to counter that, too.

Poetry is many many things. I've written on this at length, elsewhere. And one thing it is is a way of making sense, both for ourselves and others who may read it, of this life, of the experience of being, of our need for meaning. It's a distillation, a crystallisation, and in its way a holograph: in the microcosmic we may see the macro-: in other words, the personal can, in the hands of a good poet, open us not only to the universal but also to the universe.

* Found it: 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.'

I confess I succumbed to google; and found it on a blog for the wonderful Buddhist magazine 'Parabola'.

from 'Requiem'

2011-11-24T13:41:00.001Z

2

The start of her long migration

 back into and lifting off from 

earth

I walk in this first frost

 dawn, slow red burn slicking the east

Jupiter and the stellar night fading

From the old oak above me
buzzard sweeps a wide circle
and heads west

gives itself to air
to everywhere, nowhere.

~ Roselle Angwin, 23rd November 2011