I cut my rags too thin.

“To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle and fearless….and to draw out without evasion the lessons learned from difficulties.” – The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, author Soygal Rinpoche.

My mat looks solid, but is actually fragile, and ephemeral. I cut the rags too thin, by mistake and, even as I plaited them, I could see the fraying begin. Paradoxically, it is still yet also in motion as it frays. To see the fibres coming apart we would have to look down a microscope, but we can see the result of the unravelling.

Once I got over my impatience with myself, for cutting the rags too thin, I began to find the fraying mat interesting simply because of the fraying. I have “let go” of what I wanted it to be and am now enjoying the juxtaposition of control and chaos.

I see from the front cover of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying that I found this book in 2009, and I consider it a cornerstone of my library. Other inspiration this month, is the English springtime and the smell of the earth after rain.

We Are But Flowers That Glide

The Flower

(By George Herbert (1593-1633))

(extract)

…..

          Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart

Could have recover’d greenesse? It was gone

               Quite under ground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown;

                                           Where they together

                                           All the hard weather,

               Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

 

               These are thy wonders, Lord of power,

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell

             And up to heaven in an houre;

 ……

               And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

And relish versing: O my onely light,

                                     It cannot be

                                     That I am he

                 On whom they tempests fell all night.

 

                 These are they wonders, Lord of love,

To make us see we are but flowers that glide:

                 Which when we once can finde and prove,

Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.

…………..

  

This poem is my inspiration today because I find the concept of visiting heaven and hell in an hour a very modern idea. It seems that this up and down experience must have been fundamental to human beings over the centuries. Whilst a lot of things have changed, I feel I could sit down with George Herbert and feel some sense of connection.

Surely a self-help book must be published every minute of the day. My local library has a shelf of books they call “Prescriptive”. Yet most of the situations, if not all, we humans get ourselves into are explored in ancient literature and literature of earlier times. Whether I’m watching a Shakespeare play, a modern play, reading a “prescriptive”, or seeking spiritual guidance from those in “the know” I totally comprehend the errors the characters are making. Yet, it doesn’t stop me from getting myself into the same situations and from oscillating between “heaven” and “hell”.

 We have all the wisdom in the world, and we are constantly in touch with that wisdom through cultural and spiritual sources, and yet we fall over and over again. Is it just that the human race isn’t really that intelligent? How many times have I said, “How could they put up with that?”, only to find some way down the line “how” one puts up with it. It’s almost like someone has listened to what I said and then thrown me into the situation, with a sprinkle of salt for good measure. Or is it just that so much experience is just common ground? The “individual” just a rock eroded by the mighty tempests?

 

Other Inspiration This Month

 

I must add my words of gratitude for the life of Dr Maya Angelou who recently passed from this world. Her books and poems have given me not only great enjoyment, but also tremendous inspiration and wisdom. They will definitely put my suitcase over the weight limit when I head for the desert island.

 

And I’m currently working my way through The Embroiderer’s Workbook by Jan Messent.

 

In my next blog I might take a look at Meditation.

 

 

Paradoxical Muse

(work in progress, Angie, 12/13)

Paradoxical Muse

Masquerade roses change tender colours,
a mixture of hues and ambiguities,
cultivated, yet paradoxically like a wild rose.
Their petals fall too easily away from their centre.

A child’s map takes you straight
to what you really need to know,
home, park and sweet shop.

But sometimes, when the wind catches
the chimes, you sound lonely and lost.

Maybe though you’re just a triangle.
We start at one corner, move to the next,
I can’t keep up.
Just like a kid chasing after someone on a bike,
until they’ve gone.

(Angie, 12/13)

For my festive blog I decided to write about muses, probably because I’ve been reading the diaries of various female artists. My next blog will be in the New Year and perhaps it will feature a few walking reveries. Until then, I hope the muse will be with you all and I wish you all health, peace and prosperity. Thank you so much for reading. Here are a few ideas on muses….

Boyfriend with a guitar never did write me a song. I suppose it wasn’t an unreasonable daydream at the age of 18, the longing to be a muse. In Greek mythology there were nine muses. Thalia was in charge of comedy. Perhaps I had a chance to emulate her. There wasn’t a muse for farce. However, to go back to my daydream, as defined by Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, a muse is a: “…goddess or woman who inspires a poet or other creative artist.”

What was my youthful motivation? Was it an altruistic desire to be of service to the arts? Did I yearn to be part of the creative process? Did I think that if I provided inspiration I might have this reciprocated? Did I want to be immortalised? Did I need to feel that I could control someone? Was I just vain? Had I read too many books and stuffed my young head with nonsense? Did I suffer from some voyeuristic erotic fantasy? Or did I simply want someone to reassure me that I was attractive, over and over again.

I have been inspired by temporary muses myself, bonfire night sparkler types of muses. They were an unstable kind of inspiration, exhilarating at the time, but it was a relief when my mind was free again. I have no objection these days to spreading a little inspiration. However, the desire to be a full-blown muse has waned. It seems a desire that is age appropriate to the young, in more ways than one. For whilst it is fascinating to read about the famous muses, Maude Gonne, Janey Morris and Picasso’s many women, for example, it seems to me that it is the young who have time for such distraction, and time to suffer. For my reading leads me to the conclusion that the anguish in such relationships was as intense as the passion.

I’ll leave the last word to Gwen John, artist, who seems to have experienced the highs and lows of musedom through her relationship with Rodin the sculptor.

27/08/13

“….Today I woke unwell. I have hurried dreadfully to meet R. He did not come. I have a headache and long for the sea.”

(Gwen John Letters and Notebooks, edited by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Tate, 2004)

Click on the link for some great muse quotations.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/muse

The Audacity to Blog – My blog is one this month!

To celebrate my blog being “one” (I deleted my first attempts) today I will write about freedom

I was huffing and puffing my way up a hill on an organised walk, when suddenly a young boy cut gracefully across the path. He took the hill with ease to hide away in a rock formation “lookout”. That looked like freedom to me; as did the sound of children’s voices as they played out. Sadly, for some children the freedom to play is no longer an option.

Is it possible to be “free” once we have left our childhood behind? Does freedom begin to decline with the onset of homework deadlines and other responsibilities? I did disagree with my children being churned through the SATs testing system whilst in primary school. Some would say that such testing helps the children to achieve their “potential”. Perhaps children have other potential that can be harmed by too much pressure and testing. On the other hand, science and testing achieve many things and perhaps liberate some people to live a fuller life. Yet in our testing, knowing and analysing are we not taking away autonomy and privacy from the individual? Of all the novels that I ever studied, George Orwell’s “1984” is the one that seems to speak the most truth to me, and much more so now than in 1984.

Many years ago, books about people who managed to survive imprisonment fascinated me. Such books as: “One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich” (Solzhenitsyn), Midnight Express (Billy Hayes) and Audacity to Believe (Sheila Cassidy). It seemed to me one of the noblest things a human being was capable of was to resist being degraded by their captors; remaining free not broken within their own mind.

Recently, I’ve read “La Prisonnier” by Malika Oufkir (and Michele Fitoussi) it tells the true story of how a whole family, the youngest three years old, were imprisoned for the whole of their youth by the King of Morocco. This punishment occurred after their father, General Oufkir, was involved in a plan to assassinate the King. Detentions such as this, a large power taking vengeance on the weak, seem clear cut and easy to condemn. Yet, are any of us free from our own little dictators?

How often does someone impose their judgement upon their family and friends? OK, we might not physically imprison our friend when they do something that we have judged them for, but we can certainly go a long way to punish them through estrangement. How many times have we imposed our “way” on someone else, though they protest they are miserable, because we feel that our judgement is “right”? Blake’s poem “The Clod and The Pebble” expresses this well:

“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite”

Oufkir makes a point in the book that, although she had been deprived of all the normal experiences of a young woman, when finally released she found the pettiness of the daily lives of her friends a wasteland. Is living and freedom really to be measured by experiencing things such as travel, driving, parties, and collecting supermarket “points”, or is to be measured by being in control of one’s own mind. Hopefully one can find some kind of balance.

Going back to my image of the youngster running free in nature, is it possible for him to remain free once he leaves behind his childhood? Or is it just that there are many different kinds of freedom?

– La Prisonniere, by Malika Oufkir & Michele Fitoussi
– Audacity to Believe, Sheila Cassidy
– Midnight Express, Billy Hayes