Winter

The days and weeks tick by. Sometimes I feel I am on watch in a cold, grey place surrounded by deep mists and everlasting twilight, as if I have to remain ever-alert, ready to act, hour after hour. I am growing lazy, all this standing and walking, a rifle or cupid's arrow slung over my shoulder, my feet cold, my mind at once swimming with ideas, hopes, possibilities and empty as a painter's canvas, white, virgin, masquerading as a white on white heavily misted interpretation of the woman I want to be or think I am. The sort of painting if hung in a gallery would not be to everyone's taste, but one needs just one heart, one pair of eyes to see, to love, not thousands.

So I am on watch in a place where nothing happens, an apparently plain canvas with nothing to say, no artfulness.

This is not good.

Should I try and leave the frame, go in search of adventures, life? And how? I am praying for colour to return and, at the same time, I am content, excited, hopeful, alive. I am thankful, grateful, amazed. 

Meditation

I am trying to learn to mediate. I want to do it regularly. Sometimes when I use the app I have downloaded for it (love the sound of the woman's voice) I feel as if I'm in a soup with bits in it. As if I'm in a blender on slow speed, bits of me, my worries, fears, neuroses, concerns, all swimming round and round in a cloudy soup and I feel mildly panicked. Then I remember or am shown or am drawn to a stillness in the centre, a place of utter peace and stillness. It feels like the beginning and the end, the source of love, light, all that is real and, unlike the soup, it is solid and light and I am it and in it and I know it to be true. Is this meditation? Am I supposed to do more with this? Go further? I remember "your job is to stand, simply stand" as the storms go past. So I try to not try, to strive, but simply (complicatedly) to just be. 

This is happiness. Yes, I want for a companion, a dearest to be around, laughing, a best friend. But despite their absence, I am the happiest I have ever been in my warm, white little house with a fire laid for later, a candle burning, a 7-mile walk in my loins, dinner ready. There is a pulse underlying the bricks, the blood, the stuff of "real" life. I am blissed out here at home, on my own, sated, full to the brim with thanks and things I love, people I love. This is happiness, this ordinary pleasant whiteness. 

Something deep in me has been seeking this pale peace forever. And here it is. I reach out into time, past reality, through the ages and rock and my soul kisses yours. I love you long time. 

I keep failing but apparently that's normal

My attempt to love others and be more open minded and positive and less judgmental would so far earn me, at best, a poor C grade.

Probably not even that. 

And that'd be on a good day.

In the last few weeks I have made some new friends and won over a few colleagues I'd never spoken to and who I had assumed a long time ago I didn't like and would never like. One is an older woman, she is mumsy and purses her lips as if judging everyone's round her. I couldn't stand her and would avoid her face, her looming sort of judgement. If she walked into a room I would turn away. 

The other day I was forced to sit next to her in a training session. Turns out she is quite funny and quick to learn things. She was good to work with. She might be judgemental, I'm not sure about that, but she wasn't at all dull in the same way nobody is dull once you get close enough to see them. 

It's both harder and easier to re-wire my thinking than I'd expected. I am enjoying trying to do it, but I'm far from making the changes I'd assumed would be simple.

But (and there's a saying that it's only what comes after the 'but' which counts) I recently met a man who told me how hard he had found studying for his PhD alongside working full time and he said: 'over and over again I failed, it felt I'd never get to the end, never achieve what I set out to, that I'd been kidding myself.' 

He persevered and three years later did earn his degree, though of the initial cohort of 14 candidates only seven lasted the distance and graduated alongside him. He told me that when he kept hitting walls and thought it was too hard, he learned that intelligence wasn't enough. He needed to think differently. So he learned resilience.

It's not very sexy, but resilience seems to be the golden ticket to lots of things in life.

I may have earned a lukewarm pass in my project so far (and that is flattering myself) but I'm going to try to keep going. 

Dictionary dot com says this about it:

re·sil·ience

  [ri-zil-yuhns, -zil-ee-uhns] 

noun

1.

the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc.,after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity.

2.

ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, orthe like; buoyancy.

Origin: 
1620–30;  < Latin resili ( ēns ), present participle of resilīre  to springback, rebound.

To me, 'Return to the original form' after being messed  around by life, by prejudices, by mistakes, is deeply comforting. 

I borrowed the picture from http://pattischmidtcoaching.com/articles/bending-with-the-wind/

Cliche cliche cliche

Cliches are cliches for good reason - pride comes before a fall is the cliche which came and snapped at my feet his week. Here's me thinking I'm on top of life, following bliss, learning to be kind, rising above petty nonsense, blah..... And then crash. The details of what happens aren't what matter, all the matters is I hit a wall. I must have let pride sneak in. 

Here’s some things I’ve learned...

1.       If I start to see someone as a potential new mate then the old flame I never quite got over will almost inevitably reappear on the scene as if by magic.

2.       If I ever think even for a moment that I am somehow better than anyone or above a certain situation, I will be taken down, usually by a small but embarrassing ‘fail’ in front of an audience.

3.       I don’t have to tell someone I’m becoming more interested in them or that I’m not.

All of these would seem normal lessons if I was 13 or 14. Not quite so great given I am a great deal older than that and either haven’t learned these things til now or, more likely did know them once, then forgot. Duh.

I started this blog as a bid to record attempts and failures to stretch my boundaries, to become bigger and better in life, in everything. I want to transcend the stupidest time-wastingly desperately tedious nonsense such as 1, 2 and 3 above.

I hoped to document that it was possible to rise above nonsense, to become bigger hearted, to live 100% conscious that we are all one, that life is bliss, full of joy and promise. And to somehow manage it while not on drugs (if you don’t count the wine, because we all know the “we are all love” stuff is not just possible on drugs, it’s kind of mandatory).  

I wanted to reach out and leap into this place and I will try again, but let’s just say for January 2014 I have become a lot more wrapped up in silly stuff than I’d hoped. Before the first month is out, my head has been turned, I’ve had a bout of jealousy so severe I had to leave the room and stomp around the block; I’ve become wrapped up in minutiae I had assumed, arrogantly, I had risen above (cue flagstone to trip over); I’ve fallen for a cliché life, like a wedding album with artful shots of shoes in black and white. The photos seem to be meaningful, an attempt to tell a story – here is my big day; here are my beautiful shoes – but the images themselves have become clichés and so, ultimately, devoid of meaning. That is what I want to avoid, becoming  a cliché, devoid of meaning.   

Roll on a new week.

We all know bliss. It is all we seek

Some of my attempts to follow my bliss have resulted in introspection, a sort of “poor man’s bliss”. Introspection can sometimes feel like a way of manufacturing transcendence or coaxing it back to life, like those paddles used in A&E to re-start someone’s heart. But for me, introspection is nearly always a cul-de-sac of self-absorption, a place where we consume ourselves, and get drunk on our own lies and hopes and self-talk.

I doubt any human has transcended being human, untouched by anxiety and fear and loneliness, except possibly Buddha, Jesus, Mohamed and the rest of that special crew. But I imagine if you say out loud you want to follow your bliss, to make transcendence a goal in your life, you would rapidly lose your friends and maybe even your livelihood. Most of us prefer to keep our mouths, our minds and our hearts shut about a deep longing to find peace, to somehow matter. It is easier to let the detritus, the nonsense, the lies and the constructs of who and what we are underpin our thoughts and actions.

And yet bliss persists – the idea of being able to rise above self-absorption may seem at once utterly real and utterly meaningless, as if transcendence is a shadow in the peripheral vision, there and not there, but we are imprinted with bliss. Like water, we fall towards it as inevitably as a drop of water falls towards the ocean.

I love how this guy, Sean Meshorer, describes bliss: http://seanmeshorer.com/what-is-bliss/

As part of his explanation is this:

Bliss is where happiness, meaning, and truth converge. everything—and I do mean everything—boils down to our (sometimes subconscious) pursuit of bliss. We pursue money or relationships because we think they’ll make us happy. We pursue our vocation, our hobbies, and our life’s passions because we feel they are deeply meaningful to us. We explore science, religion, and philosophical inquiry because we want to know the truth of our existence. Bliss is the universal place that these intersect, where all questions are answered, where every fulfillment is attained.

The phrase 'follow your bliss' is said to have been coined by Joseph Campbell who derived it from the Upanishads. Their complete works can be read here: http://hinduebooks.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/108-upanishads-with-sanskrit-commentary.html

They say that when you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that joy within you, all the time.

Sounds pretty darn good to me! 

Thinking about love

I want her to love me and especially -- more -- her to allow me to love her. But she doesn't, won't. 

Is this love? I am trying hard -- sometimes minute by minute, at other times a whole day might go past -- to put her down, put her wrapped in my tortured feelings down gently but firmly on a shelf or, better still, in a cupboard with a door which can be closed. Out of sight, out of heart.

It's like pulling teeth. Part of me I didn't know I had screams and tries to hold tight every time I manage to surrender her. I remind myself over and over like a prayer, she is just human, she is not divine, she is merely human, full of known and unknown flaws and frailties, hurts, absences. She is not divine. And though my head knows this to be true, and I put her away repeatedly, something of me is locked away with her behind the closed door. It hurls itself against the lock. It quickens my breathing. It screams in my face. It will not surrender.

I want to love and to love others. Gently. Patiently. To reflect their goodness or brilliance or gentleness or hope or whatever fragment of godliness they possess back at them. And to wave softly across infinite time and space, my god to their god, fanning flames, rekindling my own, too.

And I think this dichotomy comes from love, ceaselessly hungry to multiply itself, expand itself, seep outwards and inwards like the tide, leaving its mark on our beaches where debris is flung, stealing it back sometimes, wiping us clean, so the shore, our hearts, our souls are ever-changing, ever the same, unaware of the moon, waiting for water and the salt of tears which tell our tongues yes, this is love, this is pain, be glad of it.

Bliss (is the answer)

My sister said once "Follow your bliss, sis".
When I follow what makes me happy, or more accurately, blissed out, I am (kind of obviously!) very, very happy. 
Here are some of the things which have blissed me out in the last week:
- Pilates class

- Huge, long walk followed by huge lunch followed by playing with an open fire on a freezing cold night with one of my best friends and her friend
- Seeing flocks of birds scatter and fly high overhead as I drive to work

- Eating salted butter on crackers for supper
I think we owe it to life, others and ourselves to seek out things which bliss us out.