Are the voices in my head too loud for you?

PMT and a sense of humour deficit

There are days when being even remotely charitable is an effort.  Today I could pass for a cross between Voldemort and Genghis - much maligned I gather after watching a recent documentary.  Bad hair day doesn't touch it.  This is Premenstrual multiplied by volcanic activity of an evacuate the area kind.  This is - "Who said anything about a warning?" mode - and "What part of No don't you understand?"  This is when Charity is a girl's name and Generosity is a hybrid rose. 

I am essentially ratty, restless and sporting a particularly bold, garish sense of humour deficit.

I was talking last week with someone who very much had my best interests at heart - and sensing an underlying rodent quality emerging in a normally ebullient individual, recommended an hour to myself each day.  My laughter was hollow - but partly because I knew just how wise and true the advice was.  Partly because I just didn't have the time! 

I have been burning the candle at both ends - and there has been less and less down time in recent weeks.  When this happens my sense of irritation grows palpably.  I resent the time everything takes and I tend to beat myself up with the efficiency of a trained assassin.  Time to take my time doing nothing seriously.

With guests needing to be settled and fed this evening in the retreat space - it won't be this evening - but I have a cunning plan.  I am hoping to escape into the caravan I use as an art studio.  I haven't done any serious painting since before Easter and this is undoubtedly one of the reasons why my spirit is doing a passable impression of a toddler's rusk.  I guess because I work with words all the time, painting has a special place in my heart as I find I genuinely think differently and relate to the task in ways that seem to clear my mind and invigorate me.  My plan is to sneak in there after morning chapel and re-emerge to a coffee and a natter with our guests an hour or so later.  Bliss.  I feel better just think about it.  Where's the hollow laughter now, bitter and twisted one?  Excess to requirements I think!

Our son has been home for the summer holidays for a week or so.  He is growing up fast and we are very committed to honouring that - but he is impulsive - so we are trying to keep our boundaries consistent.  It's amazing how quickly we get out of practice now he is away at school, at the whole business of parenting a special needs child.  As I write he is out in the garden with a huge, bright red hard hat on, ear defenders in place and is wielding a massive petrol driven strimmer- his first go before he helps out with his preferred occupation - mowing on the ride on mower called Ermentrude.  What else?  Like most thirteen year olds he struggles with the concept of helping out around the house - and with his added idiosyncracies grapples with the business of staying on task.  Oh, dear, the door has banged.  Shorter than even I anticipated.  He now thinks he may have repetitive straininjury.  The strimmer was a bit heavy.  I wonder aloud if that means he won't be able to use the computer to play his games?  I am reassured that it will help heal it.  Not.

(Just a hint of grummmph creeping back in!?)

Deep breaths and counting down from 300, 299, 298, 297...

Nelson Mandela's Inaugural Address:

I found this when I was browsing my Common Place Book:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that frighten us.

[Nelson Mandela's Inaugural Address]

Dramatising Religion and Death

I have been re-reading the script of Once a Catholic.  It's a rather dated take on a Convent Education, but it still bounces off the page and made me smile.  I've never directed it, apart from a small junk when I still taught Drama at a gal's independent school in Cambridge.  It's hard to imagine me doing all that now.  Teaching in an independent school etc...  Still a woman's got to live!  I think the school must have been pretty desperate to have appointed me.  I wasn't very happy there - but some of the youngsters who came through the system were truly outstanding and the small GCSE group who performed a scene from this play were exceptional.  At least one has gone on to become a novelist.

Another life.

I tuned in this morning (any excuse) to a new comedy series set in a monastery on Radio Four. I had high hopes.  It may warm up in future episodes now we have established the characters, but it sounded a little trite on first hearing.  Very good to hear Roy Dotrice taking the lead.  He has an extraordinarily rich voice and can capture diverse emotion with his cultured inflection.  I'll listen again for him I suspect - but at the moment I won't be rushing out and alerting friends to tune in!

Couple of days to do housekeeping things and catch up with chores.  Caught an interview with Barbara Pointon while I slurped my porridge this morning.  Barbara taught music with her husband at The University of Cambridge. 

Malcolm developed dementia and Barbara gave up her own career to care for him.  I remember watching a very challenging documentary about their lives, coping with dementia, some years ago.  It was profoundly moving - and I think at that point Malcolm could still occasionally sit and play the piano even if so many other aspects of his quality of life were very seriously impaired.

Malcolm died last February.  At the time of his death it sounds as though a follow up programme was being made and in this documentary which is to be aired on 8th August, we will see Malcolm die on screen.

I knew them a little, in their academic life, as I was an undergraduate at the same college.  I am pleased and utterly supportive of Barbara's honest and at times, courageous campaigning not just on her husband's behalf but to raise society's awareness of the actual emotional and financial cost of dementia.  I am not sure I am so comfortable watching a person breath his last who has been unable to give his permission to be filmed.  I am not sure if I do think a carer has the right or can be given the right to make this decision on behalf of the person they care for.  It could be, and of course we are not privvy to this information in a short TV interview, that long before Malcolm became incapacitated, he made a Living Will - and his personal wants and needs as he approached death were fully complied with.  I am surprised the relevant bodies who monitor the ethical implications of such documentaries haven't had more to say.  Perhaps we are now happy to allow the media to decide on our social, emotional, spiritual and ethical values - and watching a person die who is no longer himself because of a degenerative brain disease is acceptable.  I am not entirely sure it is to me.

St. James and Work Avoidance

Do you ever have one of those days where you are caught out doing a thousand other things and realise it is after 4pm in the afternoon and haven't really started 'proper' work yet?  In the days when I was an employee this would be a day when I would be less focused and probably hoping for a knock on my door and a legitimate interruption!  These days when I am self-employed it is all too easy to start the working day when other things are done.  This is especially so during the summer holiday period with my son home too!  Today I took my husband shopping for clothes.  Something we both hate doing and I shaved the Newfoundland - bottom half (horizontally not vertically).  Now waiting, literally, for the tide to come in at the bottom of the garden so that she can go for her skin invigorating swim!  Now I've settled down to work - what do I do?  Blog!  Has this woman no personal discipline?

St. James' Day today.  Fishermen have it right - intense periods of work and then time...  for family; the mundane business of maintaining boat and equipment; for self.

I always imagine James as a man of few words, but I read that his martyrdom was partly in an effort to shut up the evangelists proclaiming faith in Christ - so if the words were few they were certainly effective!

Sun, sea and intuition

Delightfully mixed up day.  Although mostly focused around Theological Institute business, I travelled across the Highlands to a small village to visit a candidate for ministry.  After an excellent meeting, I was picked up by my partner and son and we went to a Perfume Workshop for lunch and a mooch round.  I was all set for aromatherapy oils and massage creams - but no, it was pretty much a fairly standard Highland eaterie and wee shop.  They all seem so similar - few rows of not always gifted artists' dabs; some smellies and scarves (why import from Italy - have we no notable local weavers?  Probably not); the inevitable luxury pots of mustard and chutney and a pricey restaurant.  The view, on one of the few beautiful days this summer was breathtaking.  We sat outside with Coronation Chicken open sandwiches which required a second mortgage and were lost in the shear beauty that surrounded us.  The light played on the water in an incredible way.  It truly did glitter.  Tiny, ever changing jewels, shimmering and quivering.

Jessie (Newfoundland) and Rainbow (Guide Dog) kept us company at our picnic table.  Jessie seemed to yearn for the water - and I will let her swim tomorrow on the shore if the weather holds.

Stunning drive home through more breath-taking scenery.

Back to work with a bump.  Calls and reports.  Supper to cook and shopping to unpack!  Still feel as though I have been on holiday today.

Themes around for me today:

Enjoy the moment.

Delight in what is given.

However hard - stay authentic - be what you are and don't try and be what people would like you to be.  It's a much harder life in the long run.

Never judge a person on what you have heard; talk to them and much, much more important listen.  Have the courage to connect.

Use your intuition and don't give people the benefit of the doubt when you know they aren't for real deep in your heart.  Authenticity is about recognising and owning your insights not just your actions.

Old friends who encourage and engage are worth their weight in gold.

Old School Friend, Kindness and Anal Glands

Brilliant to intersect briefly with an old school friend today - we are spending time together this summer - and we are going to a gig at Nairn Jazz Festival - both families.  Excellent.  Good to have a wee blether and prepare for her and her family's trip North.  It's thelittle things that count and I am excited to see her and her husband again - and meet their daughter.

A wonderful poem arrived today from a friend from my under-graduate days who now lives in the States.  I have been blessed with attentiveness:

  Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye, from her book, The Words Under the Words

The sentiments expressed touched me deeply.

Less work achieved today than I would have hoped, but I enjoyed a trip to our local vet as it was a chance to touchbase with people who are important and precious to us as a family.  Jessie, our Newfoundland is suffering with her skin and is to go and be shaved and shampooed.  Vet's orders!  I suppose she will look like a feminist dog after this - and take after her human mum in this respect!  Maybe she should have a touch of purple hair dye too - and we can look like a related pair of Gremlins after the transformation!!!  Jo - our rescue collie is older than expected we heard today - thought now to be about 8 instead of the 5 we have been taking him for!  He has had blood tests.  Mungo - our in your face collie x, had his anal glads expelled and I learnt how to do it!  The latex glove nearly set me off - but it was actually quite interesting once you thought about the mechnics of it!  Poor lamb - the indignity of the practice with mum rather than the much more skilled vet!  Still, he got his own back - a projectile spray over my hair, glasses and left shoulder.  Just as well we came home by car - I would have been trailed half way around the Highlands if I had walked by a pack of dogs! 

Shower.  Hair wash.  I am forgiven.  Mungo is fast asleep with his head keeping my feet warm.  If only it was this easy to let go, forgive and experience restoration within our human relationships!

Mary Magdalene

Today is the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene.  It doesn't get much more encouraging that St. Mary M.  Caught up in an image of herself as pretty much worthless; used by men; outcast by society, she is transformed by the Carpenter turned Teacher who shows her that she is worth more than a quick grope for a few shekels.  That love is more than sex and that she is worthy of love, respect and esteem.  She is to be placed in the highest position and awarded the most sacred of tasks.  Her vocation is to proclaim the greatest mystery of all. 

I love the words introducing her in Exciting Holiness:

She was privileged with the first appearance of the risen Lord, who sent her to take the good news of the resurrection to the other disciples.  The commission earned her the title "Apostle to the Apostles" in the early Church.

I wonder what she'd make of Church today?

I wonder how transformed ministry would be if we saw it as a sacred privilege to proclaim the most profound of mysteries in the Universe.

Promises, Promises

After what looked like an inauspicious start with work avoidance on my mind, I have spent a brilliant day creating the draft Rule for St. Columba House Community.  It is still very embryonic but it feels good to see thoughts all down in one place and in some order.  It now needs to go out to people with a possible interest in setting up community to see how it needs to be honed and revised.

The day was made complete with a brilliant call from a most special friend; one of those people you can depend on because they know you inside out at the deepest level;  someone I think of most days - but rarely call - the mutual excuse of busy lives I guess and not wanting to be a nuisance.  We caught up and collected thoughts.  We slotted back into a previous groove but with new experiences and wiser perceptions of oursleves and others.  We chewed over the Church and society - and realised there was still just enough time to change the world - if we chose to.  I enjoyed myself hugely.  I won't leave it for ever to return his call.

My son has arrived home from special school.  He is 'attached' to his computer playing Sims Pets II and giggling away as dogs in high heels with attitude - fight - and that's just the boys as far as I can see.  He seems comfy enough and has slotted back into things.  The most miffed in the household on his return will be the cats who sleep on his bed all night when he is away! 

A Lack of Motivation

Languishing in bed with dogs squiggled into the gaps, the door open onto the decking hinting at a grey, benign day - unlike much of the UK and I can't help but count my blessings.

Reality is challenged by a peak - actually a long, fascinated glare - at Big Brother 8.  Some of the people sound just like they have uploaded a combination of Little Britain and Cathering Tate.  Both fantastic comedy shows - but surely intended to be a satirical/ironic take on reality with the volume turned up a little to emphasise the point, rather than a window into the souls of individuals?  A case of reality immitating art, I suspect.

I am wondering how much longer the Big Brother format will run?  It feels a bit tired to me - or maybe I am getting old.

Dido our Golden Retriever is keeping me company as I type because she has sussed I have some dog treats in my pocket - normally she is snoozing wherever she feels comfiest - my mum's study bedroom is her favourite spot.  They are a similar age and appreciate their comforts.  Dido makes herself at home in the warm with the occasional cuddle and the pleasant and constant hope of one of Nana's biscuits.

I must get on before I decide to curl up and watch DVDs with a duvet and a large mug of chocolate.  Dido is a profoundly sensible dog!!!! 

I can.  I will.  I must.  No, really.  I should.  No.  I will... Work - well for a bit anyway.

Certainty, Holidays and Adopting Ferrets

I am very envious of people who know; deep at their core; individuals who have the strongest, driven sense of purpose and are never plagued with significant self-doubt.  I am impressed, but at the same time slightly disconcerted.  I sometimes intuit that I am listening to half a person and not the whole integrated being when I hear them at their most energised.  Then I temper this with rationality and tell myself I am being bitter and twisted just because I do not share that rooted sense of certainty.  That's my lame excuse of an introduction to the growing sense of vocation I am feeling and a nod of recognition at the sneaking fear that my growing sense of the way forward for me might make me a wee bit driven and blinkered too. 

I am a bit spooked - and yet utterly thrilled.  I am on the thaw; more positively - on a slow burn to simmer.  But I am by temperament and intellect a doubter and I take time to warm up about ideas and opportunities.  People are a much more immediate and sure-footed encounter!

A week or so ago ideas about places, people and possibilities were buzzing around me like a wrongly requisitioned spell in Harry Potter (my fault, I am disinclined to read product manuals before I fiddle). 

A house with extraordinary potential has appeared on the market in Lochgoilhead - the home village of Alan Johnstone's parents.  I have been sneaking a sureptitious peak at a charge which has recently advertised (they deserve someone who will not only love them and nurture them - but give them 100% in pastoral and person-centred ministry, I would be looking over my shoulder I am ashamed to admit).  And I was exploring in greater detail - what is community going to look like practically.

Part of the reason why I take a while to become enthusiastic about potentially transforming moments is that I am highly intuitive.  This is a tremendous gift and a huge pain at the same time.  When exciting new prospects occur they often feel to me as though I can see multifarious possibilities simultaneously within a split second of engaging with the prospect.  Rather like a cascading firework in 3D.  The pain about intuition is that he is a playful lover and unless he is earthed in prayer, experience and significant rational consideration - he can take me into areas where angels would fear to ...

So I have learnt to stay open to possibilities, but not so open that I am manipulated or distracted into areas that will be counterproductive, personally or vocationally.  My underlying belief is that I am called to love my neighbour as myself.  If I am not taking my needs seriously, there is a danger I will be exploitative of others as I find ways to get my neediness met inappropriately.  The first sign I am doing this is when I become impulsive...  It doesn't work all the time - I'm human - but it is a valuable benchmark especially when possibilities are literally whistling through the air!

What I have done over the last week is to use some spare time to review my giftedness and future aspirations in silence and prayer.  Your will not mine be done - but spell it out Divine One - I am not in the most God-centred, facilitating the Almighty mood.  Shout.   

I have placed each possibility that has been presented to me into the jigsaw of life on the terms that I currently understand it.  I have found this a profoundly loving thing to do as it has encouraged me to think equally about how the outworking of an invitation will impact on me (practically and emotionally) and on those I will encounter in the possible futures.

I have recognised:

*    Community is first and foremost founded on the vision we are evolving, but it is being turned into praxis by my partner and by myself.  If our needs are met, so it will become attractive to others.  I have a suspicion that there is wisdom in appreciating that many will help evolve the idea of community and fine tune it, but few of those currently in dialogue, will ultimately be in a position to test a vocation to live the reality.  I am very content with this although sad in one sense, but it does underline the organic nature of process.  It also reflects the fact that whatever we do - some will feel it isn't for them.

*   We have a family joke which is - If you want to make God laugh tell her your plans!

Well, I did.  And the angels have danced and clapped - and now they are offering their own ways of being community - offering differing weights to the various components of community we have discussed and remain comfortable owning. 

I was excited to bursting point when I first thought it could be possible to slant community in particular ways - then I moved into the cerebral/rational.  The walls to protect the precious kernel of the original plan began to erect themselves about the possibilities.  I wasn't sure I wanted to share - not at the deepest level.  Risk the vision could be messed around with by association.  Get over it the angels cried.  I have.

What use is a visionary idea if it cannot be adapted and scrutinised by those who have fed and nurtured the egg and embryo - the Anglican Church?  Yes, a few of those in communtiy will be radical and will rifle feathers - but some will not.

What is the point of a community who claim they want to nurture, inspire and challenge the Church if they are not in some way prepared to be a full part of it?  Independence is a mixed blessing.  It can lead to a lack of accountability and even self-indulgence.

The angels are swaying - if they join hands and start singing Kum by yah - I am out of here!

My mum is a seriously engaged human being.  I want to go on holiday this summer en famille.  The timing isn't good for her - and I was grumpy in response.  Positively hurtful.  Easy to be Benedictine and see Christ in others and forget to see it in the woman who gave me life.

Yes I would like a holiday - but I would just as soon have some quality time with her and with the rest of the family.  With an extended family ranging in age between 13 and 83 this isn't that easy - but I reckon french cricket, picnics by the sea, trips to our favourite haunt - The Ceildh Place in Ullapool with a venison burger will be just fine.

Ferrets.

My partner took his grandchildren out to supper last night and discovered to our mutual delight they have ferrets, chickens and dogs now!  The ferrets have had kittens and he phoned last night to ask if we needed a couple.  I was tempted but my sense is that they pretty much have to stay caged unless you are handling them - and I think we can't claim we need ferrets.  The relief in his voice was unmistakable!!!  I would have called them Basil and Gregory or Hildegard and Withburga.  No ferrets.  The chicks appeal though - but where we are foxes are a huge issue.  Not sure how our two cats Cuthbert and Teazle will be around chickens.  Worst case scenario - unexpected organic roast - eeeeewh!  No, maybe not chickens just yet until we can think about a nice, big run.

That's life.