Are the voices in my head too loud for you?

Living Out of a Rucksack

When I was a young adult I used to reckon that if I needed to I could take everything I needed in my life with me I could carry it all packed in a large rucksack - with guitar in one hand and a dog in the other.  Having spent three days unpacking books in my new study - and that's not even in any particular order - I am shamefully aware that times have changed and that I possess a multitude of riches.  The creation of my new studio and study is certainly a labour of love and ingenuity.  Somehow it is enabling me to reclaim an identity and to celebrate so many things I have put on a back burner for much of my adult life; a passion for the creative arts and music; humour; scattiness; silence.

 

It has been a very healing experience to bring together the last of my parents possessions into my new space.  They are finding their home in amongst my own belongings; everything from press cuttings and reviews to holiday snaps and certificates of achievement.  I was looking at my father's old business books earlier which now reside in amongst my own writing and journalling books and they looked utterly at home.  We inherit more than we realise.

 

I struggled quite a bit with the level of coverage given to Princess Diana when she died.  The public emotional temperature seemed feverish and delusional.  Now Jade Goody has died; a woman who has undoubtedly had a tough life and faced her death at an impossibly early age with fortitude, we are courting similar rituals once again.  The flowers outside Goody's home; sychophantic TV presenters and commentators discussing her as a wonderful, courageous woman when they were the first to destroy her when her behaviour in The Big Brother  house was gauche and inappropriate.  What finally made me flip my lid was hearing the Bishop who blessed Jade's marriage speaking on Radio 4 on Sunday morning decribing her as a modern day saint.  Hell's teeth - the Church really is becoming Hello magazine for the religiously inclined.

 

Mohican

My family seems to have expanded overnight following an emergency trip down to Somerset just over a week ago.  Sadly my sister-in-law died and in the process of preparing for her funeral - we found we had time and space in the area to explore.  In all the years I have known my partner we have never been in Somerset, my partner's home area - unencumbered.  Small children in tow; elederly parent to hurry North for - all played their part in never having time to catch up properly.  This trip I at last met some of the cousins I had heard so much about over the years (a joy) and began to get my barings in the countryside that my partner once called home. 

 

I have a tiny blood family by comparision - so it is taking me time to adjust. I keep pinching myself and thinking how very fortunate I am.  We seem to have things in common - a love of horses; gardens; trains - all good.

Back in the Highlands - it is life-giving to smell the freshness of the air and feel the sea in my face.  I have been busy - still - with the momentous task of moving my study into The Sanctuary - but I am beginning to think about colour schemes for the new guest room.  Spring is in the air.

 

It's been brilliant to have our son home for ten days - he now has a gorgeous mohican haircut courtesy of his mum and a razor - we have our uses!!!

 

The dogs are mortified to see removal boxes out - but relieved in some measure to see them only going as far as across the courtyard!!!!

 

 

Eye Time

Went to the eye clinic this morning for a check-up.  Have been referred to a low visual aid clinic.  Hopefully this will provide me with an array of binoculars, glasses etc... which give me greater acuity and independence.

 

 

 

Back in the Loop

I am sorry it has been a month of Sundays since I last blogged.

 

It has mostly been good news in that I have been doing rather than wondering about it.

 

I'm at a deliciously intriguing crossroads.  Contemplating the future and discerning where my limited energies can best be focused.  The lst few weeks have brought up opportunities to explore future possibilities.  The death of my sister-in-law took me back to priesthood and service.  I became an artist as I prepared a rather kookie but unique memorial bench in her memory for her residential home.  On again - the chance to write - a poem in her memory.  It all fitted.

 

Back up here in The Highlands - the sound of the geese of the bay was like a homecoming parade.  Thoughts are straying to returning to my partner's home area of Somerset; he has so many friends in the area and there are possibilities- but there is no doubt - our heart is here.

 

Dogs are out of kennels and looks like fluff balls - all shampooed and beautiful.  Home, is it where the heart is?

 

Graciousness

I had a wonderful phone call with one of my Great Ones today.

I was reminded of the graciousness of God.

Gently nudged towards returning to the discipline of prayer and genuinely 'enjoyed' as a fellow pilgrim.

The conversation was worth hundreds of pills.

Little Boxes

I cannot get out of the study for boxes. 

 

Have just found my diaries and am having to be exceptionally disciplined not to sit down and read thm all cover to cover.

 

We're Off!

The menfolk are lugging huge bookcases across the courtyard and into The Sanctuary interspersed with boxes brimming with books.  It feels like we are moving house - laughter is in the air and some excitement as well as a degree of huffing and puffing (our son) and counting to 10 and tryng again with our son holding it this time!!! (my partner).  I love the way they are both distracted by possibilities;  Humphrey fancying a swim - sends both my partner and Newf off to the sea for a few minutes; a quick 'round' of computer game, roll on the drums and run, jump and scream down the hall from our son.  The photos of Humph are beautiful - and as I fill the hall with boxes our son is learning a new skill - the high-long jump.

 

The news suggests that all our careful plans at recycling are ending in landfill anyway!  Just NIMBY.  When we will learn not to exploit our neighbours and the finite resources of the planet.

 

I was looking up very old friends of my parents on the web last night.  One thing I would like to do is to get to know a little about my father through other adult eyes outside the family.  He died before we were able to relate as adults to one another - which probably explains that with one, very notable and precious exception, I have always had a distinct attraction to the older man (actually even he is a tiny bit older)!

 

Amazingly I discovered that the husband of a great friend of my fathers - one of his favourite acts in Blackpool died - last July.  I read his obituary in The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent.  I think, on reflection, The Independent's obituary was the best.   However it renewed the urge to go and see a person I used to delight in sitting in her dressing room, watching her put her slap on ready for the matinee or evening performance.  She was always the same - and my recollection is that she and my father had a warm friendship.

 

Back to more books - separating the sell on e-bay from the ones I love...

Actually that's a very good way of looking at life.

Born to Be Wild

First day of the year and we still have a fierce frost which has clung to the landscape for several days sometimes with hours of very atmosperic fog giving us a sense that we are completely cocooned, unable to see the nearest houses just a third of a mile away or the Black Isle four miles across the water.  Strangely comforting - like a macro duvet day!

 

The men folk have been beavering away in the library moving a LOT of books over to The Sanctuary.  The Library will become my son and my music room.  I haven't taken music seriously for years - but after a recent inspirational letter from an old school frined I felt a sudden sense of loss.  I gave up performing as a singer and folk musician pretty much as I was ordained.  I was given some advice - can't remember who it was - although I have a suspicion - that as I was to be ordained - now was the moment to move into ministry as my vocation; my life; my duty and at times with a sacrificial heart in the service of others.  Silly advice and left me as half a person during the early years of ministry, trying to please and live up to unhealthy expectations of myself.  I used to be a bit of a religious sentimentalist.  Not even a vocation loves you back - it can lead to a certain rigidity and judgementalness which is lost by being ourselves in service; not killing ourselves with some delusion that only we can do this thing.

 

I have spent many an academic year nurturing those preparing for ministry in the very serious agenda of self care and the theological roots of pastoral care and reflection - in a sense redressing my own hideous mistakes!  Looking back I wish I had attended some of my own classes as an Ordinand!!!!

 

So - an early passion is being revisited.  I have sore pads on my left fingers from picking up a guitar yesterday - but I won't have missed for the world the jamming session with my son on keyboard.  He has an excellent ear.  Today he has ransacked the vestry in the chapel and brought over the drum kit we bought him when he was about 7 to try and help him have something safe to relieve his frustration on!  He has returned from school this holiday able to play quite well, and I have been listening to him drumming alone with us both singing at the tops of our voices Born to Be Wild!!!

 

Saw the New Year in with Maestro Jools Holland.  I am in love with Annie Lennox - an inspiration.  We had watched Mama Mia! and I guess I am the only person on the planet who thought it was seriously rubbish - not even inspiring arrangements - it was a parody of what was already a parody.  Meryl Streep does her best with poor dialogue (I hope the dosh was worth it) and Julie Walters (I adore - and had just finished her biography earlier in the day - which is an OK read - do borrow mine) seemed to be simply making up the numbers.  It must be a national hysterical response to the credit crunch or some such.

 

Back to packing boxes...

Resolutions

Christmas was rather like the curate's egg - good in parts.  In addition some moments were spectacularly healing - not least two e-mails that fed me to the core, absolved and upheld me.  Bless you Great Ones - you were already hugely admired; now I have gratitude as well and a deep sense of being recognised as myself with all her distortedness and quirky individuality.

 

Saw Psychiatrist on Christmas Eve and I am free to describe myself as Bipolar with schizophrenic tendencies or Bordeline Personality Disorder with Schizophrenic and Bipolar episodes or Schizohphernic with Bipolar episodes.  I still prefer Jane frankly.  For those of you who tend towards the view that this is a lot of fuss about nothing; a sort of childish lack of emotional control; or an attempt at entering the fashionable celebrity elite - I can tell you fairly and squarely I would have done literally anything this Christmas to have avoided the major relapse that the family witnessed and I endured.  It was agony - physically hurting when I plummeted to the depths - and felt myself a burden to my loved ones and society.  Looking back I don't believe there was a trigger to all this.  I felt as though my brain dried up, which I now associated with a Dopamine deficiency and I slipped off my perch into a very serious attack of the doldrums.  In bed and not speaking.  A real pain in the bottom and the ultimate party pooper rolled into a sausage shape in a duvet.  Emergency CPN aasistance has brought me back to consciousness - sadly medicated - so that I think I sound like Dory in Finding Nemo - but hey I am upright.

 

This years' Resolutions:

 

Loose enough weight

Write every day without fail - whatever my mood - back to basics.

See if I can avoid talking about my mental health outside consultations for a month (widen my focus).

Continue to plan voluntary work focusing on Peace, Justice and Reconciliation

Paint a self portrait

 

 

 

 

Farmhouse Flutter

Well now, never say you have your plans sorted.  At least not in this household.  We delight in fluidity and new experiences and without intending to - we have had a fun few days full of new ideas and possibilities.

 

I had an idea...

 

I can hear the laughter from here from the clergy and people at St. Thomas's!!

 

...But I did, honest.

 

It's taken me a while to own that I would like to be doing something outside my writing and art.  I am looking into some possibilities right now.

 

Today we went to look at a property.  Quite a surprise move - but something about the house caught me.  We viewed and with the exception of our present house, it received the highest joint score we have ever given a property - and that was on a first viewing.  We intend to go back and view again after Christmas.  Of course it is a buyer's market just now - but that isn't so bad.

 

The house is a former farmhouse adjacent to a now a tenanted farm.  Built circa 1790 it has the understated simplicity and lack of pretentiousness associated with a working person's abode.  Although seriously over-priced (in our view) in the current market, it has a certain quirkiness and gentleness.  It hugs you and is very welcoming.  It is still a wee way from civilisation - but has proper neighbours - and is a mile from real civilisation - shops and such - although the hill is steep and the best that can be said about it is that it would make me very fit - as it is a 1:7!!!!  Oxygen and glucose tablets are very much part of the travel kit.

 

I suspect other properties will come up of a similar age and character in the area - but... well this one is cute and I like the location which is a bit rough and ready - agricultural and rural - and honest somehow.

 

The nearest conubation, we have been getting to know in recent months as we have friends in the area.  It is a gentle place with all the bits and bobs associated with large villages or small towns going on.  It reminds me a little of Woodbridge - but without the glories of the Deben and wthout such a comprehensive array of consumer outlets.  It serves a fishing and agricultural community as well as tourism.  However it has the optimism of a terrier and no sense that it is a wee creature in reality - it has festivals and happenings and a very friendly atmosphere.  I am very taken with it.

 

It reminds me a little bit of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia.  In that it has that small town sense of just about everyone recognising everyone else and having a keen sense of each other's business.  Heaven only knows what would be made of our idiosynchrocies - it would be a hoot finding out though.  I love the different businesses - a pottery, emporium, food shop etc... all there and giving a compact, content atmosphere.

 

Aaaah!

 

Deep sigh.

 

We'll see.

The hill is a 1:7 - no skis and the dogs will never make huskies...

I can feel the adipose slipping away from my body as I learn to cross-country run through the Highland countryside to buy the groceries and pick up the paper each day, hoping like Mapp to hear or see "What's new, neighbour?" Maybe I should buy a wicker basket and a floral dress?  No, I shouldn't tease!  I think my walking boots, jeans and a thick fleece are the order for the day - and a smile.  I haven't seen so many smiles in ages!

 

I am also taken with the fact that a near neighbour to the house is a steading converted into studio spaces - with metres to let...

A creative aura.

Mmmm - yummie.