A right to be

Perhaps I should clarify what I said in the previous post. It's not that I don't have anything to say at the moment. What's happening is that my mind is too full. It's awash with thoughts and feelings and I can't make enough order out of them to write something coherent or positive. I keep trying and then rejecting what I've written. Inspired however by the new posts that have appeared on some of the blogs I follow (see right) and because the weather is so filthy and I'm putting off taking the dog out, here goes again.

Yesterday, Ellie's day at the dogminder and my day to myself, I took myself into Exeter. I had only a short list of errands and the city centre was almost deserted so I could wander at will without feeling harried.
I took my lunch to the ruined medieval almshouses as I did in October, and again as with that visit I experienced a sudden onset of calm. (And again I so wanted to take pictures but didn't have my camera with me.) Last time a blackbird emerged from a tangle of clematis. This time a pied wagtail joined me, bouncing from flagstone to flagstone in a hunt for food. I could almost see him smiling.
My last errand of the day was the library and as I walked away from it, along the red-stoned medieval city wall, I had a small revelation. I admitted that, yes, my parents did treat Frog and me atrociously, and with that a weight lifted. I felt free. I felt like me.
That admission comes and goes, but I realised that it's the foundation of my wellbeing. What it says is that I have a right to be. It's not that I want to diss anyone, least of all my parents who did so much for me, but I do want to be a person in my own right, and I don't think I ever have been before.

Roselle Angwin in her blog Qualia and other wildlife ('Zen and the human condition' 23.1.18) mentions the five 'hindrances': craving, aversion, apathy, anxiety, doubt. Yup, I have them all, but most of all at the moment - doubt. I've battled with craving in the past (eg not eating and then not being able to stop eating), apathy and anxiety come upon me from time to time, and although it doesn't immediately spring to mind I'm sure I could find aversion if I looked closely enough.
She talks about Zen meditation as a way to be free of the hindrances. That, of course is horrendously difficult. Sometimes simply getting away and breaking the rhythm of one's normal routine can have the same effect.

Frog and Dog just before Christmas - neither of whom have the slightest problem with their right to be

Around this time of year

As usual around this time of year I’ve run out things to say, so here instead is a selection of my recent photographs.

Hailstorms moving across the landscape, with the sun behind

Silver birch trees brightening a dark wood

A normally placid stream turned into a raging muddy torrent

How do I keep it alive?

In the previous post I described how I dreamt of becoming a fully functioning human being. On Friday night, for reasons I might go into later, I got back in touch with the missing part of me, and understood which part of me that is.

    For the whole of Saturday, even though the weather was as dreary as it can be – cold, windy, heavy with grey clouds, muddy – I was happy. The part I had uncovered on Friday evening was still with me. I was firing on all cylinders. I was a complete person.

A happy walk on a dreary day: along the canal with Frog and Dog yesterday.

 
Today, even though the sky is blue and the sun is out, I’m miserable. I’ve lost touch with my missing part. I’ve closed off again. I’m back to the dark dreary depressed me.

    So the question I’m asking myself is, how do I keep that part with me? How do I keep it alive?

   

Some people call it God

As you may know from previous posts, I’m a great one for seeing the universe in symbolic terms, by which I mean that what happens outside us reflects what’s going on inside us. And, as you may also know if you’ve been paying attention, a couple of months before Christmas I acquired a new computer.

    As soon as it was plugged in, and while the computer man was showing me how to use it, it started to misbehave in dramatic fashion. The screen would flash and then break up into something resembling an Escher painting (see below) and then the whole machine would die. Sometimes it restarted itself and sometimes it didn’t.

    The computer man was aghast - the machine had behaved perfectly while he’d tested it in his workshop – and blamed us. Eventually, after we’d swapped all the peripherals (plugs, leads, screen etc) and the machine still misbehaved, he agreed to swap it for another new one, but suggested we use it with something called an ‘uninterruptible power supply’ which is a small box that evens out fluctuations in electricity and keeps the computer going if the electricity drops out. This we did and the new new computer has behaved much better than the old new one, only failing twice (so far).

The other night I had a dream over which I’ve been puzzling ever since. Someone was offering to ‘sort me out’ - unravel my problems and turn me into a fully functioning human being. I was so happy. I felt that wholeness was only a short step away. The only trouble was we kept being interrupted  - two old friends turned up, someone came to ‘do the flowers’ – and eventually I woke up.

    I was so disappointed. Why did dreams keep doing that to you? Why did they lead you on and then desert you just as something really interesting was about to happen?

   

This morning, twenty-four hours later, I decided to write out the dream and try and work out what it was trying to tell me.

    ‘It’s the interruptions that are important,’ Frog had said.

    Ye-es, I thought. But what about them?

    But then, as I wrote the final line of my account of the dream, the answer came to me.

    I was like my computer. I too needed an ‘uninterruptible power supply’.

    I think some people call it God.

And here, because a picture of a small black box isn’t very interesting, is a picture of Exmoor between Christmas and New Year where we went for a walk – along with most of the rest of the population of Devon and Somerset (but I’ve managed not to reveal that in the photograph).

Exmoor at the end of December