All Fingers and Thumbs

I'm afraid to google the term 'rechilding' in case it goes the way it did when I searched for 'adult play' a few years back. Is sex still the most searched for thing on the internet? Hard to remember that when you tend to type in things like 'yoga for sore feet' or 'quince gin recipes'. Anyway, all of that to say that I asked November for a beautiful day, after the first of the month dawned with the lowest of skies. To my delight today could not be more different. Blue skies, bright and warm, so I asked my too often ignored inner child what it wanted to do this morning. Taking a banana smoothie to the park seemed like a very easy request to grant.

 It's a big yawn. A soft exhale. A carefree squawk of laughter. This year has been utterly different from what I hoped and planned for at the start of the year. It's brought many challenges and many unexpected gifts - more often than not out of those challenges. The end of the eternal winter and the start of the spring found me very low and I reached out for help. Antidepressants and counselling. Life rafts that have helped me float on through a year where the physical constraints of my knee injury had taken away two of my greatest balancers: regular yoga classes and long, wonder full rambles. They continue to help me now as I wait for an operation on my knee. Wait and unravel. Slowly slowly. No matter how slowly I think I am going there is a level beneath that my soul craves. Not a standstill but ponderous, languid, incremental. I write this from my room of my own. Feeling a pull back to this virtual space as I seek to kindle sparks of inspiration. The eternal building...

Today is a classic wet winter Sunday, grey grey with just the slight twist of snowflakes in amongst the rain drops. It's the kind of day that reminds me of teenage doldrums, school tomorrow and cooped up inside. Our house used to have downstairs rooms that all flowed one to another and I'd get trapped either in my bedroom, or out of it, with an armchair full of snoozing Papa between me and wherever I wanted to go. He has always had a lot of back problems and was in such constant pain that waking him from a snooze was a little like waking a bear from hibernation. I guess I have much more empathy for him as I get older and creakier! I'm not having the most fun with some of my body at the moment, I injured my knee in November and rehab is slow, and has felt a bit backwards the last couple of weeks, as I just try and take a short walk on top of the essential steps to get through a day. Still, these days grey out and being sofa bound says craft, craft, craft rather loud...

Sky and mood are both a lot brighter today, though hibernation is definitely not over yet! It was lovely but very chilly in the park today. The trees were filled with long-tailed tits searching for whatever tiny bugs it is that they eat. Their tiny chirrups were the most lovely soundtrack to a beautiful walk, though how they keep their tiny selves warm is beyond me and my six hundred layers. Stitch by stitch I made a sock and got myself through a tough few weeks. Feeling low for a whole host of reasons I'm so glad that I found my way back to knitting on something absorbing. That old sanity saver has really worked its magic again. I know I've still got to make the other sock but I feel like a knitter again. The surest sign that the old addiction is back is that it's only willpower and cold toes that have kept me working on this sock. Suddenly all the dreamy patterns on Ravelry are calling me. I have a hundred different sock patterns I want to start and to t...

Yesterday I was introduced to the work of Sharon McErlane and Net of Light  by my lovely Sas , it resonated with me so powerfully and the timing! I am working with Meghan circled with women Returning to the Fire,  and it was one of the moments when you just have absolute faith that you are exactly where you are supposed to be. A moment that I could feel through every cell my connection to the Divine, my oneness with that energy. Purest magic. This morning, out there under my trees, I was thinking about how we shine our lights.... or not. Wondering how we find the beacons among the tides of sleepwalkers. Thinking that if we shy away from showing our true selves we are short changing ourselves and the world. I believe one of the gifts of navigating through darkness is that you can see the closest light to move towards. No matter how small. So here I am being that little light, writing on a blog that not even my Mum reads any more :) . It would be so easy not to post this,...

Not so much progress with the stitching this week. A little more filling in of the bark, a lot of not actually stitching. I've been so tired that making space for even ten minutes of daily craft time has been a stretch. Inspiration required, luckily it's literally on my doorstep! I took a few moments out there with the source today. Through the rain and cold spring is coming. The branches are full of pointy blossom buds, progress with the start of building work is slower than expected so I may yet see this beauty bloom again. I won't be hustling this project along. This makes me notice that though I often bemoan the pace of life I then also often drive things along. I can't bear inefficiency, maybe my definition of efficient just needs a little tweaking.

My beautiful tree has had her branches tossed around by storm Doris this week but is soaking up the sunshine out there today. Such a joyful "after the storm, spring is coming, soon, promise" kind of a day. All of my daily ten minutes craft prescription time plus a fair bit more has been dedicated to tree stitching. On Sunday I just parked my tired, achey little body by the door and stitched until I felt a whole lot better. That restful absorption is the craft therapy magic I think. I love that the trunk is emerging, and is feeling really true to life. She's looking a little more silver birch than plum right now, but the choice of the sideways stitch to reflect the striations of the bark makes me happy.

I have embarked on an epic project. I want to caption this photo "can you tell what it is yet?" with Aussie inflection but that phrase from my childhood is out of bounds these days. Anyway it's a trunk. Of a tree. I'm stitching a portrait of my most beloved plum tree . Everyday companion for the last twelve or so years, we haven't got long left together. I don't think I will see her blossom again. Sob. We're most likely having an extension built. It will be amazing to have more space but I wish, I wish, I WISH I could keep my plum tree too. It won't work. If anything it's too close to the house already and should long ago have been dispatched to the great orchard in the sky. I feel like a sentimental ole fool, what a palaver over a tree. Then I think about how many memories are wrapped around that trunk and nestled in the crook of her branches and it makes a little more sense. I love that tree and enjoy it every single day. I am lucky to have s...

... the mercurial moods of autumn: from the the bold, dazzling colours gleaming in the sun, through golden twilights to murky, mysterious misty mornings... pigeons cooing and moulting a hundred feathers... my dear Auntie Jo... the bite of wind that brings roses to my cheeks... Luke Sital-Singh serenading me... finding a peaceful path through complicated relationships... the ginkgo trees in the park... the smooth, golden bark of the eucalyptus... oh all the trees, always... chai tea... Halloween... my little spare room space... rose petals... baba ganoush... the smell of incense... a weekend filled with friends, Friends...

Just back from our three-weekly date night with a stack of new reads. Love the freedom in library picks, choosing on a whim, judging by covers, blurbs, mere fancy much more than when I am paying for a book. I find it easier to stop reading too if it doesn't catch my imagination. Back it can go and nothing lost. Our little library visit has been a regular in the diary since my trip to the States last autumn. I visited two glorious libraries in Provincetown and Boston . Stunning buildings with huge collections that made you itch to just pull up a chair and stay all day. The previous summer I visited the most delightful gem of a members' library in Providence that seemed so perfectly formed it could have fallen from the pages of one of the novels it housed. They seemed to honour the beauty of the books that lived within them and like they would capture and create new bibliophiles second by second. I felt like our libraries paled into the background against these widely varie...

Oh how I yearned for a long, languid summer. Dreamt of sinking in to a deep ease in my body and the days. We bookended the months with an early June and a late August holiday. Quiet, beautiful country times to enrich the experience. Lovely as those weeks have been (are being) this has not been the summer of my dreams and desires and therein as ever lies the crux of the hurt. Wanting my experience to be other than it is. I feel like I've written so many versions of this post over the past few years, there's frustration with that of course but also some understanding that this is the way it will be until I find a rhythm of acceptance and surrender. Underneath knowing that perhaps it will even always be this way, perhaps this is always going to be my brick wall, thumped into periodically as I spiral around my days and that is okay. It's not about how you fall, it's about how you pick yourself up. I have been surrounded by love and beaut...

It's been a sticky sort of a week - aches, fears and frustrations swirling and if you'd asked me what I loved on Monday or Tuesday I might have struggled to find an answer. So the first thing I love today is that I feel fondly enough about life to make a list of loves! I'm also loving - warm sun paired with cool April breezes, birds in flight, my new stack of library books calling out to me to be read, making lunch plans with friends, yoga, vanilla rooibos tea, feeling visible, my four colour biro, being at the start of a season, knowing that it is a full moon tomorrow, jacket potatoes planned for tea, soft cat noses, blossom, blossom and blossom, Artweeks soon, online shopping, the thought of tucking in to bed tonight.

...and how and why and probably who. I'm a curious orange and spend so much time in my head with the serving men as the mighty Kipling called them in The Elephants's Child: I Keep six honest serving-men: (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Where and When And How and Why and Who. I send them over land and sea, I send them east and west; But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest. It's the last bit that trips me up, I spend so much time working them that I often forget to give them a rest. I have that poem on my pinboard at work, as a researcher it pleases me greatly to come back to those questions when I've been sidetracked off in to a blind alley. As a human Being I often try and use them to stop me getting in to blind alley, even though I know that getting somewhere you don't ultimately want to be can actually bring the greatest learning. I spend time trying to think my way throug...

Just geeking out about the extra day. Remembering where I was four years ago, so bitter that the extra day was a work day. So grateful that is not my feeling today. So grateful for the bright, blue sky and sunshine and the crazy birdsong extravaganza going on out there today. Love this quirky little fellow of a day. The Google Doodle today has a little bunny for 29 leaping in, easing into a spot he makes for himself between 28 and 1 and snuggling down. Very pleasing to me. There's something so quaint and anachronistic about our calendar, I see something rebellious about today. The fact that our orbit doesn't fit nicely in to the box of days we offer it and so we have to make it work a bit better, make it room with an extra day every four years. I like that. I guess I identify with that. I feel like the extra bunny a lot of the time. Trying to find my space. I watched X+Y at the weekend and sort of loved it and sort of hated it. The ending? Anyway it left me sobbing, wret...

This week has been the shadow of the light of last week. Squashed by a stomach bug less than 24 hours after I typed the last post. I might have been relishing all the colour of my life but then you find another perspective and it's been a black and white fortnight. In the grey I have found self care and compassion that validated all I wrote. I said thank you for the opportunity to reinforce my progress. I laughed. Also I cried and felt flat and sorry for myself. Yet always out of the harder bits of life come the biggest lessons and I tried to welcome that. I saw how afraid I am of doing nothing. I think I have cultivated time for stillness. Another perspective could be that I have created safe little pockets to dip into. I write this to help me remember when I am in the swirl of busy and exciting bemoaning the lack of peace and quiet: I create the swirl to avoid the quiet. That the quiet scares me because of what I might hear. I promise to try and listen.

Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life. Care of the Soul - Thomas Moore A regular week and an irregularly momentous one. Play and work. Work and play. Plenty of rest. Full in the flow of the remarkable and unremarkable. My basic routine has space for quiet ritual, for time in nature, for movement and stillness and space to do what my heart calls for in the most playful of ways. The simple everyday is so very good for me now, care fully curated, and I reap the rewards of that in health and energy even in this fallow time. More particularly there have been delicious moments of note. The weekend brought time with friends, talking about the things that really matter and just being together - that amazing gift of time with people who really see you. This Tuesday I had one of my fortnightly coaching calls with Jen , we're just sprinkling magic on the mundane, recognising the sacred or as the oh-so-eloquent Mr Moore would put it applyi...

These holidays with their sparkle and bustle are quite the distraction. In years past I used to associate this time with the pinnacle of winter, as if  I were saying "shortest day done, mince pies eaten, new year rung in, righty ho lets have at this spring business then". January and February dragging on drearily with the dark and cold were quite the anticlimax and time for restless blues. Then we had a proper snowfall one January and I had to actually slow down to something like the right pace for me, it was a revelation, January and I could actually be friends. Now these approaching quiet months seem like so much more the point to me and my traditional mid-December funk at being caught up in doing too much makes perfect sense. This is my big rest time, a natural lull in the cycle of the year. I think I must have been a hedgehog in a former life. The idea of lining my house with leaves in autumn, battening down the hatches,  emerging blinking somewhere towards the end o...

So this run up to Christmas business is still hard even when I am feeling healthy. Is it almost more so because my in-built excuse for why I'm not participating at my imaginary shiny elf level is missing? Physically I'm tired, but no more so than is to be expected at this waning of the year, when it is more dark than not and cold rain wants to send me indoors whenever I try and venture out. This time of year is not conducive to running around and seeing all my friends, making a ton of gifts, finding the perfect artisan made options and decorating my nest to new levels of magical grotto-ness and yet I still tilt at that. Just avoiding grotty feels like a challenge enough. Is it a challenge set to torment anyone with an imagination? I can visualise the looks on my loved ones faces as they unwrap the (sparkly with seven bows on top) thoughtfully chosen, ethically sourced/personally hand crafted gift. I can see the glittery magic that I want to wrap around me as I float serene...

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue she stripped her mind, bound it and collected self-contempt by the heap.”  ―  Toni Morrison ,  The Bluest Eye Once upon a time there was a girl who was gifted two Buddhas. One came all the way from Laos, was cast in metal and was a slim, elegant, beautiful figure in a perfect lotus position with the serene smiling/not smiling expression and seemed a very authentic depiction of Zen calm. The other came all the way from a gift shop in Bristol, was cast in clay and was a sprawling, fat bellied, beaming guy who looked like he was too busy having a good time to worry too much about achieving enlightenment. The girl moved house many times in the years that followed and the authentic Buddha came with he...

Peace be with you.