Washing up

I wash up

Against the sand 

With the salty water

Brushing against me 

calming my heart

Soothing with it's wet whispers on my skin

I look up and the grey sky shifts a little

Sun emerges rising

Spreading light freely 

No sharp edges

Only indentations in the clouds

I long for its warmth

As the cold water stings my ears and 

The breeze bites at my clothing

Only self remains within the folds of light

But she is too far away to answer my calls

Instead I let go of my breath

And allow the air to swim freely in my lungs

Moving my body towards home

To husband and children you are my home.

Pain/Freedom

Physical pain can be very difficult to deal with. I have been living with different forms of pain in waves for the past 25 years. That's my adult life. For many years it was a few days a month. For the past ten years in can go on for days and weeks and months. At the moment it is weeks. I find myself also struggling in anxiety around it not ending. So then breathing becomes tricky too.

What does this have to do with community development? It makes me stop and forces me to look in...really deeply until I can re emerge out into the world of sunlight and movement. What I find there is wells of despair and wells of compassion....I have drawn water from both. And from this I understand suffering and the effort it takes to lift yourself out of whatever is holding you under. I bring this to my own humanity and towards people I want to work amongst. I understand that time takes a long time, that there is no really beginning or end, merely cycles or waves, going in and going out. Just as we breathe in and out withoutthinking. We long for connection and belonging while also longing for escape. 

When we allow ourselves to show up just as we are, with all our own pain and wildness, we bring a more colourful and interesting pattern to each others lives. We help each other flourish and this for me is community development. 

So while it really is the end of the world to have to mentally work myself through this pain, it brings life into a sharp focus that in the everyday ordinariness we can somehow miss or lose sight of. This can be freedom, the forced relinquishment of the ways in which we see the world, opening more into appreciation and wonder. 

Writing from the heart and other difficulties

...words...don't come easy...to me...

I am in recovery. I love community/arts development work. I find it exhausting because I give it everything I've got...and feel that it is deserving of this devotion. But there is a cost. This cost is my inability to write while I'm living through it. I sit down with all these words floating through my mind and just can't get them out through my fingers and into some kind of form.

Part of this is the desire for honesty in my writing and not all of community development is a bed of roses....or maybe rather it is, thorns included. I feel nervous to put into permanent record the things I haven't worked out from my side. How to communicate with people when every conversation feels like an attack. How to find out practical information from an organising body that is the opposite of organised, how to keep the dream alive when you feel despairing of just getting to next week. All of this with the highs of genuine collaboration of ideas and purpose and direction, great conversations about story and how crucial it is for our lives etc, making connections across country, across the country and across the world. It's a mixed bag and feels good now it's coming to a close but I lost my ability to write and I'm wondering if this is important or not...or does one lead to the other, times of darkness and light, going in then emerging out....no easy answer ...only to just keep going, to write when I can and maybe consider that there is a preparing that happens and a readiness that emerges of its own time, that this time is ok and necessary. 

This process is mysterious and I have always loved a good mystery. 

Washed

What was my name before I was born?

A beginning again

Going beyond the rudder....

Poetry in residence.....2014

The way in sometimes takes time and space.....gentleness with ourselves is a way....this work was about stopping people in the moment

Going in....

A lot of time writing for me is about quiet and anything but writing. Lots of thinking and seeing and phrases float through my mind....I may get hooked on a sentence or a word....I may be captivated by the breeze as it gently sways a silky oak branch and the leaves seem to shimmer....it used to really frustrate me, this time of brewing.

But now I realise that I have to let it be and thicken until I can't possibly hold it in a moment later... and I sit down and write for 6 hours and still not want to stop! I love this time. I feel free and purposeful, a sense of satisfaction unlike any other....and at times when I'm lost in it all I dream of days like this....of there being endless days like this. And then it begins again....

I feel the same whether I'm writing poetry or a project outline... The clarity of expression that emerges and the sense of direction is such a relief. The perfect piece for me is the marrying of words that form an action with beauty of their form across a page...font, spacing, and colour become significant....the word formations become an image just as much as something to be read...I feel as if I'm aiming for a kind of subversive absorption...my meaning transmits without effort. Constantly and effort to be effortless!

And yet the honesty of my effort feels as important as the final work as presented...in fact it feels more important and can sometimes feel too much, too overwhelming....but then the last full stop is tapped in and something in me unwinds and I breathe differently and I know that a new work will soon begin....

Feeling moody/going in...

There are so many tears....

Edmund Pettus Bridge. Sometimes a location becomes a place because of the journey people make across it....both the inner journey of faith or philosophy, and the physical journey of putting one foot in front of the other with many others. 

Today I saw the film, Selma, based on a few months in the life of Martin Luther King, and the battle of non violence he and so many others waged in order for African American people to be able to vote in freedom. 

It was a powerful movie and I cried many tears as mothers lost their children and hatred was allowed to flourish and have free reign over human bodies.

What I cried mostly for is that these same battles continue....for both women and men to feel equal, for religions to respect and make room for each other, and for all children to be allowed to grow and feel as though they can all have lives that they want....to live in freedom. 

In our daily lives, for me this means what can I live with? What is acceptable to me? Sometimes (many times!) these questions way heavily and can lead to despair in the knowledge that I can do so little....but this is not true. For real freedom comes from within and this to me is the ultimate battle line.

Ghandi tells us that non-violence "the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man"

This means we have to look deeply at the violence which exists already in our selves - our anger and our heartache can be destructive and debilitating, and can lead us into violent words and actions.

This morning I heard a mother berating and swearing at her teenage son in front of many people and I felt helpless in my own anger towards this woman creating a major scene while accusing her son of embarrassing her. I wanted to tell her many things but felt afraid of making things worse for her and her son and myself. So I kept on walking past. But also felt like this was a kind of cop out too. I really wanted to be able to step in with them and speak the right words that would calm the situation and make it clear that they will both be alright and that they both can speak from love, that it is possible to give respect and dignity towards one another, but I didn't know how to do this in the moment.

So today I also cried for this family that speaks with such violence and probably feels unloved by the world. And I find the courage to examine myself and see much anger and hate and war still lies in my own heart waiting for opportunities to pop out at very 'inappropriate' moments and usually launched at those closest to me.

Dr. King spoke about the power of Non-violence...

"Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals"

This is a very powerful way to come together to change big wrongs and make life more free for all of us...but unless we are that way with ourselves, and challenge ourselves in our own righteous angers and resentments, the battle remains skin deep. The ultimate struggle is in our own hearts and minds...and when we can bear this, we begin to grow the space within ourselves to truly see another...

So what do I do in the face of all this? I pick my battles...I practice compassion for myself knowing that I have the tendency to feel especially protective of children and I know that I feel scared of evoking more violence...so I take stock and work with what I can...I breathe and practice non violence with myself and my family first...then I try and make it grow by watering seeds of compassion and joy in others...and I speak up when I really can't bare it a minute longer! 

Don't just do something. Stand there!

I think the most difficult thing to do in life is to do nothing....and today for me looks like resting. I have a book I am into, the fan is going full boar, doors are wide open to catch any hints of breeze, the ocean is loud in the background, and only the sounds of car doors and birds seem to penetrate today. A good day for rest.

I experience a lot of physical pain and then I get really tired. In the past I have felt enormous amounts of guilt for needing to just lay down in a quiet space, and to sometimes have to just keep on going because someone has to wash clothes and cook dinner. Guilt for resting. Guilt for not resting. Not easy.

And then I realised that it is important to take stock and deal with the reality of each of our lives. Mine at the moment involves a degree of physical suffering for which I have no ultimate cure answer to, and so I just need to do the best I can, when I can.

My husband accepted this long before I did and my children just roll with it...so I am now too!

Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another, writes that "Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful", which rightly suggests to us that these time outs are crucial to our well being. And this does not suggest a ten day luxury spa holiday, but rather a slow stroll around the neighbourhood, or an entire afternoon just to do baking, or a couple of hours put aside in the morning to read a good or bad book. The choices are ours and when we act in these our life becomes more pleasurable and we gain more space within ourselves to be there for our families and our friends, and even to offer up smiles to strangers we pass or sit next to on the bus. This spreads our little happinesses very far!

Deep Listening

Deep Listening

The kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another human being...

Yesterday, my youngest daughter stood at the top of the stairs and screamed so loud I felt the vibrations through my bones and felt certain the trunks of the trees around her would splinter. Two groups of picnickers close by would have felt the earth tremor and I felt like I must be the worst mother on the planet...I also felt incredibly annoyed/embarrassed and incredibly helpless. We continued in this way down to the beach and I through down my wrap and ran to dive into the ocean. As I came up though the water I could see her where I had left my wrap, a little girl playing quietly in the sand, writing and drawing and making patterns. I still carried a lot of tension in my body but I listened to the sound of my heart and could feel her breathing even from a distance and so I approached her speaking quietly and encouraged her to go into the water. What I managed to do, and have not always been capable of, was to listen to my own thoughts and not act on these, I listened to my own needs and felt that if I could make it to the water the natural elements would support and nurture me, and I could return to her and really listen for what she needed, even if she didn't actually speak words to me...

"To really listen to others, say David Rome and Hope Martin, we must first learn to listen to ourselves...Deep Listening involves listening, from a deep, receptive, and caring place in oneself, to deeper and often subtler levels of meaning and intention in the other person. It is listening that is generous, empathic, supportive, accurate, and trusting. Trust here does not imply agreement, but the trust that whatever others say, regardless of how well or poorly it is said, comes from something true in their experience. Deep Listening is an ongoing practice of suspending self-oriented, reactive thinking and opening one’s awareness to the unknown and unexpected"

Opening oneself to the unknown...this is the bit where we can instinctively pull ourselves up...its like looking over the edge of a precipice but not seeing anything but darkness, maybe hearing calls from below but how do we throw ourselves over this edge?

For myself this is an ongoing journey, what I realised is that my daughter is not sleeping well, she is feeling afraid of the shadows at night and this is leaving her very tired and uncertain during the daylight hours. This means she is vulnerable and sensitive and needs a lot of TLC. It's not easy to give TLC to someone who is literally screaming at you, so yesterday I took care to do what I needed to do in order to be present and really be with her. It hasn't entirely stopped the screaming but it means we are still caring for each other and we can have quiet little chats when the screaming stops with no hard feelings building walls between us...trust remains. 

What has motivated me to keep walking to the edge and leaping off is that I know it is not only making my own life happier, but it is easier for those whom I love most in this world to be around me and to share our life together. It's easy to be kind to strangers, but it is vital to be kind to those we live with and spend time with every day, and mostly it is imperative to be kind to ourselves. Learning the ways in which we can really nurture ourselves frees us to have more space for those who need us or just want to hang out with us in coffee shops or go dancing...it also allows us a sense of humour...inappropriate jokes about ourselves are completely necessary on this path as it is often arduous and requires lots of laughter to get us through each day of it!