RestLESSness

Mm hmm, yep: I am that person who, three years later and with little by way of explanation, picks up her blog once again and continues to witter.

Notable changes - I am:
* older than before, but younger than after
* bigger in some ways - smaller in others
* back in my Welsh Wales homeland - possibly for eternity
* living with a man, full-time, and by choice. A man that I love
* in transition (also known as job-free) (also by choice)
* restless... almost breathlessly so, at moments. Ill at ease from the toes to top and back down again.

Itchingly.

Leg-twitchingly.

My inner fidget is, well, doing just that. My nomadic inclinations are dancing the quickstep. I am quite, quite lost and utterly flummoxed by this curiosity called direction. Which one to go in? Who, if anyone, to follow? Where should I be (if a should is, at all, part of the puzzle)?

There is something in me that needs out. I am not an artist, but I feel the need to create. To express. To be so much more extant and in this place (life, that is, not the Grand Old Mothership of Swansea) - in terms of presence, not accomplishment. Not success - the word is starting to represent everything I want not to be; a sure sign that it's time to write my own definition and learn it by heart. By mind. By me.

Okay, so that's today's homework. Thank you ether, for listening and absorbing - I feel like we've been on a good six-mile strut together, you and I.

And, breathe my fellow thinking-living ones. Breathe and have a cup of something warm, kind, and thought-granting.

xx

Cells of fluff

When did life become
this
sticky-footed-head-melting inveterate marshmallow coma?

What is a when, anyhow,
to one mislaid in the maze?

Countless questions
and barely the concentration span
to acknowledge them.

Who's laughing
at
us
?

Slice splicer

Clutching at shards of a fragmented mind
Trying

to


be



whole

Gem

Are you beginning to feel a little pressured?

Resist it.

What's right will wait for you, patiently.

Jonathan Cainer (2011)

Fielding

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

Rumi

Will I be a Clare... or a De la Mare?

Love of its muted music breathes no sigh,
Thought in her ivory tower gropes in her spinning,
Toss on in vain the whispering trees of Eden,
Last of all words spoken is, Good-bye.

Walter De la Mare

[De la Mare approached death with great serenity. "My days are getting shorter," he told Joyce Grenfell. "But there is more and more magic. More than in all poetry. Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful." On June 20th 1956 he wrote to a friend about the midsummer leaf and blossom: "One looks at it partly with amazed delight and partly with anticipatory regret at its transitoriness." The next night, at 2am, the nurse asked if he was comfortable. "Yes, I'm perfectly all right," he replied - then he caught his last breath, gasped and died.]


I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes...
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And een the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

John Clare

["If life had a second edition," wrote Clare, "how I would correct the proofs." He spent the last 22 years of his life in a lunatic asylum in Northampton, forsaken by his former friends and family.]


(Why? Because I fear I know the answer to above question... yet in truth nobody knows. We think we're following in the footsteps of those that went before, but no two paths are identical - even if the feet fall together, the view from inside out can never be recaptured within a later lifetime. We're on our own. Quite, quite alone. (Living before) death: the final frontier.)


Notes from: Albery, N. (1994) (ed) Poem for the Day London: The Natural Death Centre 

It never rains but...

So, 6am. Hurrying from a complete all-nighter at King's to a morning's teaching, you take the wrong Northern Line branch from Kennington and alight back at Waterloo: where you started from.

Tired, grimy, pressed for time, you have over 10 minutes to wait at Elephant & Castle. Priceless moments are scuttling away as it begins to pour down. Impatience descends.

But then you remember.

You sit down. Watch the rain. Feel the air. Be alive.

Beijing comes to mind. You put on this song. Lean back. And remember Ru Da...