Persistence

Persisting is not really not one of my best attributes. I'm more like the autumn leaves making swirls of crunchy colour in the wind rather than the damp incessant persistance of winter rain. Both have their place. Perhaps i should go more for the intense persistence of the summer sun, or the boundless persistence of the ocean waves.

I come back to the breath

I’m in a sea i’ve not navigated before; wrestling with a demon in whose grip I’ve been helpless for what seems an age. The gusting wind brings the stagnant comfort of familiar smells just often as the enticing fragrance of undiscovered flowers yet to bloom. The sea surges, fear ebbs and flows; at times the water towers above me; at times I sit, slack sail going nowhere; at times I bend into the fast wind of change; at times the sea drops in sheer cliffs either side.
Drenched and weary from the last storm, raw from the confusing chaos of stress, memories, emotions, work and dreams, my anxiety squirms and wriggles, trying not to be seen. I keep looking, holding it in both hands, breathing, aware of the ebb and flow of panic underneath wrenching in my gut, eating at my mind.

And I stay with it, out of sight of familiar land. At least the stars are still familiar; well as familiar as a sky only a couple of months old can be – since the last time the sky slid into the ocean leaving an infinite black dome through which stars slowly, mercifully emerged: pin prick holes into worlds of light.

And as it always will, the sun rises, eventually. I know that chasing it just lengthens the night. You do not find the sun by hunting it, but by being open to the dawn while hunting in the world of shadows. So I stay with it, riding my anxiety with my breath, going deeper into places I’ve not dared tread before, consuming and being consumed, knowing that something, somewhere, will change, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Knowing that dawn will come, I come back to the breath.

Body thinking

The rain soaks into the earth. The earth moves as one body, the sun shines with it's whole being, everything dedicated to the task.
I need to think with my whole body. When i sit to work my awareness tends to concentrate rapidly in my head, i lose connection with my body. I lose presence. This phenomenon is, i would think, not an uncommon occurrence. For me it manifests in distraction, in skipping across the many things i have on and struggling to immerse myself in any one task. I boil rather than simmer. In other people i'm sure it manifests in all sorts of other ways.
A fun challenge.

Lost

Lost in the mazes of my mind, the world slips away from me.

Saying what you need to hear

I've been telling her everything i need to hear.

Persist. Keep going. Of course having a vision is going to kick your arse - it's the point, just keep going forward with open eyes.

Strange how we do that, and totally sensible. People and situations show up that help us to find exactly what we need to hear, even if it's out of our own mouths. Even if it takes us a while to realise it. Even if it's a tsunami bearing down on us. Such strange parallels shifting past within around each other.

I stand knee deep in a shallow water of pool gazing blankly at my reflection. The water creeps slowly up my pants like wax up a wick. Transfixed i try to work out who i see, lost in trying to see the depths of my reflection while the fish wriggle past and the stars wheel slowly overhead.

Depth isn't enough.

The act or art of doing

...i don't think it really matters what i do, it is more that at some point i must do something, and hold the course, and feel the world change. But the more what i do is from my heart, the more likely i am to hold the course and persist, and i know it is only in doing my purest heart desire that i shall attain the vision i hold of myself.

But to find that purest of intent? Ah, i must act....

Screen Grime

I cleaned my screen t0day, cleaned it of the dust and grime that had built up over weeks and weeks of waiting till i got exactly the right thing to clean it. It was a mere 10meters away from my desk.

Trolls and bricks

Failure lurks like a troll under the bridge, and not just failure but totally screwing up. The mash up of amazingness and stress is the pressure cooker of find myself in, more interesting at least than just stress. A lot more interesting.

The troll, however, has a magic and story all it's own and it's eyes glimmer with the memories of life, love and loss.

Words fall like bricks from a wheelbarrow, clumsy and not really what i wanted, i was carrying them to make a bridge.

Exhaustion

My brain falling into little pieces from exhaustion and stress,
Love, chocolate, sugar and alcohol all taking their toll
On what i think i should be doing, on who i think i am.

Everything feels thin, shadows dancing on a piece of paper
Torn out of an old crumpled up exercise book
And i too feeble to do anything but make rabbit shadows.

There is a way in which i betray myself by pushing too hard
My emotions scattered like toys in a playroom at midnight,
Yet the sharp edge lets insights out i normally would not speak.

There is a strange wisdom in exhaustion of not caring,
Of seeing things in a harsh light and not taking them on
But really i want to sink into the deep sleep of the ocean depths.

The simple pleasure of just doing what needs to be done. Of persisting till the work is complete. There is a deadline, a natural gas BBQ that needs to be converted to LPG so we can have a weeding party and sear flesh (both meat and vegetable) in the way only a BBQ does.

And so the nozzles i need to get are really rare, and after 3 days of searching i give up, and of course that's when i find them, and they fit. Then when i fit them, the BBQ doesn't work because it was wasp nest at somepoint in it's life and i have to clean out dead wasp bodies and hive dusk from the whole thing.

But then, voom and whoosh, it works, and i feel happy, satisfied.

However i know that if it wasn't for the deadline, it wouldn't have happened. And i wonder why this was so easy to do, and other things are so hard.

Quiet Melodrama

The house is quiet, black and white comic book film noir flickers through my head like a cinema scene from a slick film. Today was a skin of the teeth kind of day, making ends meet by doing way more than one day of work: in a focused flurry getting just enough words typed out to keep people happy, to keep afloat, to maintain the illusion that i'm not struggling with my demons everystep of the way, that i've not spent most of the week distractedly searching my soul and not being a well oiled cog. I wish i could focus like that everyday, but i guess if i did i might burn a hole right through the screen that my life plays out on; either that or get or so caught up in the flickering images i burn myself dry. I've done the later, and more than once. Now i fear it. I guess i don't have the faith i can do the former. Perhaps i don't want to. I guess i don't because i haven't, but then again i know i do. Or perhaps i believe that it will also burn me dry, that i'm afraid of my inner life being exposed as just so much tinder.

Or perhaps i just like being melodramatic sometimes, enchanted by my contradictions.

Work.

It feels like a fractured landscape, a world that struggles to keep its morphic field intact: doorways to other places and other lives keep opening and closing beckoning and demanding; I try to hold it to some consistency, focus this place into a coherent whole that can contain my attention till I choose to step out – which I can do for a short time – but inevitably it crumbles again when the slightest bit of attention wanders or the will wavers.

I must ask myself: is this the place for me? Or should I Alice in Wonderland like follow the rabbit hole and see where it leads, and how much how deeply do I need to trust and let go?

Again and again we start again

Again and again we start again
Again and again we start again
Again and again we start again
Again and again we start again
Again and again we start again
Again and again we start again
Again and again we start again
Again and again we start again
Until....