Month: October 2014

thoughts about things

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Thoughts about things

As someone I met on holiday said to me the other day, ‘you’re very analytical’.  I love thinking.  I love the way that thinking both expresses and creates the world, how your thoughts can shape your experience and enable you to make good choices and avoid traps and unearth more beautiful ways of seeing things.

One of the things I’ve recently realised I want to do is to capture how I understand some things, because I would like to just to hold still, even for a few minutes, thoughts that I experience fleetingly as butterflies.  This is the tricky thing with thoughts.  Quite often when I express a thought, someone says, ‘oh you mean …’, and I’ve noticed that even if they paraphrase my thought really quite carefully, I still feel, ‘no, not that’.  So there is a risk with writing these thoughts down that in print they stop being the alive creatures of my inner world, but I have decided that the risk is worth it.  Even if they are not exactly the living thoughts of my own life, they might be something else beautiful.  And of course, in my own thinking they all live happily together.  They are not a thought chart with lines and directions of power or control, they are a thought sea; you never quite quite know what is there, although you sometimes glimpse something amazing that lives near the surface, or even sometimes hops right out.

When I think of one thing, it’s often quite like all of the friends of that thing try to crowd in too.  ‘Me too, me too’ they say, trying to just a little bit elbow themselves into the limelight.  So I am going to tell all those thoughts that they will have to take it in turns.  I am going to try to give one thing at a time its moment in the limelight, but let’s all be aware that the others are humming with excitement very nearby and so while one thought is getting attention, the other things near to it are important too.

things I want to tell my children but might forget – getting up

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things I want to tell my children but might forget / getting up

Waking

By now you probably know there are three kinds of waking.  I will describe them to you and then you can see if you know them.

The first one is when an alarm goes.  This is set to remind you to be awake for something.  When you are grown up the most usual reason is to go to work, but it can also be to catch a plane or to be at a wedding on time.  For you, it will be to remind you to get up and go to school, and to do this at a pace that is calm and allows us to have happy morning time together.  Maybe sometimes I will wake you, but I want you to grow into the habit of believing that the day belongs to you, and setting your own alarm will help you to remember this.

The second kind of waking is when you slowly emerge from being asleep.  Usually you feel a kind of softness and it’s like you come from black and white into colour.  It feels all calm and beautiful and cosy to wake like this.  This can sometimes happen on an alarm day if you wake before it, but also on a day when there are ‘no alarms’.  This second kind of waking is one of the most beautiful feelings you will ever experience, so if you have it, enjoy it, it is a treasure.

The third kind of waking is one that you will hopefully not experience very often.  I am telling you about it so that if you do feel it, you will know not to be scared.  Sometimes as you wake you feel something that is like an alarm clock in your heart.  It sounds a loud inner call that makes you jump.  Usually this is because you feel sad or worried about something.  The inner call is like a little ping of panic.  If this happens to you, just lie in bed for a minute and tell yourself ‘I am loved’.  This will always be true.  And then hop out of bed and call to someone to tell you this as well.  They will help you and you will remember that everything will be all right.  Sometimes you will have to wait to see that this is true, and sometimes you will know straight away.  If you have to wait, be brave.  You are in the company of brave adventurers and everyone who has taken a risk in their life knows how you are feeling.  Don’t be afraid.

[untitled poem]

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My heart beats

question marks.

Though settled

inside, I still find uncertainty

echoing

loudly

through me and

throughout time

and into space.

Everything that’s

unresolved

drums out its

mysterious

rhythms.

My arms and legs

and mind

go about their

business accompanied

by infinitely

open futures.

And mine

unknown,

unknown,

unknown.

things I want to tell my children but might forget – Introduction

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To try to make myself feel a little bit at home, I’m going to use some writing that I’ve already done, as well as some things that I will write new when I have a moment of inspiration or recognition.

This is the Introduction to a book I am trying out:

things I want to tell my children but might forget

Introduction

Well, children, I don’t know whether you will ever read this.  When will you be born?  Will you be born at all, and if you are, will you want to sit down and read things that your mother thought and wrote in the existence she had before you were alive.

I don’t know.

But what I do know is that the other mothers I know are very often busy.  They are looking after people and if I ever have the luminous delight of having children of my own, of having you arrive in my life, it is likely that I will be busy too.  I will be brushing your teeth, and telling you stories, and finding you water.  Or perhaps driving you from place to place.  And for sure I will be weaving this in between other projects too.  Things that you might not understand until you’re bigger, but you will know that mummy is at work.

So I want to tell you all my favourite things about the world.  Some you will understand straight away, some you won’t understand until afterwards.  We can’t always recognise things coming up ahead, but sometimes we recognise them with hindsight.  What I am hoping is that you will find it reassuring to know that there is always someone who has gone ahead of you, but also find exciting that you are the first you to have ever lived.  You are unique, you have wonderful company.

I’ve wanted to write this for a long time, but now that I have started, I suddenly felt a hesitation of not knowing where to start.  The world is a big place.  So what I would like you to do is to put on your explorer hat and we are going to travel through a day, but also through time and space, to childhood, to adulthood, to literature, to real life, and everywhere we will discover treasures and everywhere you will have a memento to bring home with you, and maybe to put in box or pin on a wall and know that you belong to everywhere, and everywhere you put your feet belongs to you alone, and to everyone.  We have all been here and none of us have been there.

teetering

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You know when a baby is holding on to a table for that moment before she lets go and takes a tiny step all by herself.  That’s me.  I’ve tried bits of writing all over the place but I needed a little quiet space where I can explore what (else) I want to write and try out my own voice with different thoughts and forms.  I want to try essays and poems and snippets from embryonic books and epigrams and pronouncements and see what happens…