Auras Actually

‘Could you do us three thousand words on “wellness”?’ said the voice on the phone.

    In an attempt to cure my migraines, I’d tried just about every therapy you could think of. I was becoming something of an expert and made a living writing about complementary health for encyclopaedias and part-works (books issued in magazine-like instalments).

    I thought I knew it all. I ate properly and exercised. I relaxed with yoga. I didn’t smoke. I drank alcohol in moderation. I’d spent three years with a counsellor and hypnotherapist sorting out emotions from the past and learning to deal with uncomfortable emotions (like anger) in the present – something no one had ever taught me before. Frog and I were aware that we still had lots to learn about living together but at least we didn’t get stuck in those terrible arguments when all we wanted to do was grab the other one by the throat and strangle them – not quite so often anyway.

    It was six months since we’d lost our baby. I’d spent several months crying and then another few months where I’d been taken over by fantasies and veered off in strange directions (another story) but now I was OK again.

    I was slightly daunted however by the assignment. The subject was vaguer than I was used to. I decided to start thinking about it by dividing wellness into four categories – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. I then listed under each category what you could do for yourself and what therapies you could use. All well and good until I got to the last category: the spiritual. I realised, to my horror, that while I knew lots about spiritual paths and practices I used absolutely none of them in my daily life. My life appeared to be devoid of a spiritual dimension.

    I did nothing about the insight of course and carried on as normal.

    Six months later, as I have described in ‘The Fool’ (February), a friend introduced me to Cheryl. Cheryl was sketching aura-portraits and, rather nervously, I agreed to let her do one for me.

    The aura, I knew, was the energy field around the body, visible to some people. Some scientific research had been done into the phenomenon but on the whole it was lumped in with telepathy, mediumship, fortune-telling, and all the rest of that psychic nonsense. Not that that was what I thought about auras. I’d seen, heard and felt some strange things myself - but I didn’t know what to make of them.

    ‘You get headaches,’ said Cheryl, picking up a black crayon and smudging it over one side of the head of the human-figure outline on her paper.

    I nodded. I wasn’t that impressed. Most people got headaches.

    Then she began smudging black all over the figure’s solar plexus.

    ‘You’ve got a serious blockage here,’ she said. ‘You must do something about it or you’ll be ill.’

    I gulped. ‘What can I do?’

    ‘Do you meditate?’ she asked.

    I shook my head.

    Around the top half of the figure she coloured a purple hoop, but around the bottom she did a brown one.

   

    She pointed to the brown.

    ‘See this,’ she said. ‘This is not good. Your spirituality is not connected to the rest of your life.’   

    By now I was riveted. She spoke with total certainty. I just knew that she could help me.

    ‘How do I connect it?’ I asked.

    Cheryl thought for a while.

    ‘Giving,’ she said.

    As I have described, that was the beginning of my crash-course in spiritual practice.

    A year later Cheryl did me another aura-portrait. It was beautiful. Instead of being restricted to a small area around the body, the colours stretched to the edge of the page. All my favourites were there – pink, purple, emerald green, turquoise. There were still black patches but they had moved. The brown had vanished.

    A year after that I wasn’t seeing Cheryl quite so often any more but she agreed to take part in a ‘Day of Healing’ - therapy taster sessions – that a group of us was organising in the village and where I was doing my tarot-reading.

    I was meditating every day now and in my meditations I had the sensation that two angels were standing behind me with their hands on my shoulders. They gave me a lot of comfort, and strength.

    ‘Can I do you an aura-portrait as a warm-up,’ Cheryl asked me, ‘while we wait for people to arrive?’

    This time, there were no blockages. Golden-yellow ringed the aura and flared from the figure's back like wings.

    ‘There’s an angel behind you,’ said Cheryl.

Cheryl unfortunately burnt out (so there's no point ringing the telephone numbers on the aura-portraits). She became very successful very quickly. Everyone wanted her to sort their lives out. People were ringing her day and night. She married, moved away and found a job with the Post Office.


And, yes, I found the aura file eventually, not where I had expected it but under 'C' for Cheryl in the box of material I used when I wrote an autobiography a few years ago.

A room of one's own

Continuing with the narcissistic theme (and because I still can’t find my blinking aura file), I thought I’d show you a couple of pictures of the house.

    When Frog went self-employed eighteen years ago, his tools and equipment already filled a garage, a shed, the driveway, a bedroom and half the sitting-room. Now we had the contents of his workshop at the university to accommodate as well. I meanwhile was also self-employed and used one of the bedrooms in our two-and-a-half-bedroomed bungalow as my study. The dog’s bed took up most of our tiny galley kitchen. Things were becoming a tad cramped.

    We didn’t want to move as we had good neighbours and were well dug into the village so instead we turned to our friend Miles, a designer and builder (www.housedesigndevon.co.uk ).

    ‘I’d like a tower to work in and a big kitchen,’ I said.

    ‘I’d like a cave,’ said Frog, ‘to use as a music studio.’

    Well, thanks to Miles and his wild (sometimes too wild) imagination, that’s just about what we got.

    Our bungalow now has four levels.

    Frog has a semi-underground room with sound-proofing in the ceiling and non-right-angled corners (better for sound-recording). He keeps the blinds closed and the window shut. Here it is.

    And I have a room carved out of the loft:

Here is my sewing corner in the room, and the glass walls looking into the conservatory that connects the old and the new parts of the house:

and here are my lovely Velux windows:

Because I'm not very clever with photographs, I've managed to make the room look dark, but that's just what it isn't.
    (And, as you can see, I'm not so minimalist after all, in a space that's all mine. . .)

   

A week in the life

Wednesday

I am exhausted. Nikki the dogminder has gone to a Brandon Flowers concert at the Eden Project so I don’t get my day off. I nearly step on a fat brown grass snake on the path through the field. What does this mean? I should have connections with snakes - I am born in a Chinese year of the snake and my name may mean snake – but I haven’t found them yet. As I write this, I think ‘a snake in the grass’. ‘A lurking danger’ says the dictionary.

Thursday

Migraine. I wake in the night with delirious thoughts pumping through my brain like blood. I don’t have any control over them and they don’t feel like mine. The words ‘the Devil’s heart’ arrive and then ‘the Dragon’s heart’. I roll over and write them down on the scrap-paper I keep on my bedside table.

Friday

Feel less yukky but still weak. Nikki picks up Ellie. I plant out the last of my parsnips and cover them with chicken wire to protect them from the rabbits. Felicity the cat used to keep their numbers down, leaving a headless baby rabbit on my bedside rug most days through the summer. What will happen now she’s gone?

Saturday

I yield to temptation and stop off at Long Tall Sally on my way to the library in Exeter. I find a black and white African-print top that I think I can adapt to fit. It’s in the sale (and an extra 30 per cent off the sale price) so worth a try. Frog and I spend all evening unpicking it.

Sunday

Ellie disappears while we’re out walking. I hear distant barking so guess where she’s gone. As expected, she’s licking noses through a neighbours’ gate with their five-month-old Rhodesian ridgeback. I feel mean dragging her away but they did have a long play together on Wednesday while I drank tea with Claire.

Monday

I feel crushed as usual at the start of the week by the reality of life. But is it really reality or just someone else’s idea of what reality really is? Does it matter that I don’t have a job, don’t earn money, don’t know what to say when people ask me what I ‘do’?

Tuesday

I want to write a blog post about auras but I’ve been looking for my file of aura portraits for several months. Where has it gone?  I decide to write this one instead as it’s been brewing since the weekend. I censored it because I thought, are people really interested in the minutiae of my life? Wouldn’t it be better to write something serious and informative? I want to include my first attempt at a photographic self-portrait as well. But is that narcissistic?

Where are my feet? Where is the dog? I need more practice.
(The black bag in my hand contains dog-treats, not what you're thinking it does.)

I like Eggheads

Here is a silly poem I wrote a few years ago after Frog and I had been disagreeing about what to watch on television. (In case you don't watch television, 'Eggheads' and 'The Simpsons' are television programmes, one a quiz and the other a cartoon.)

I like Eggheads

And you like The Simpsons

I like chilli

And you like custard

I like Tolkien

And you like Pratchett

I like silence

And you like noise

I like giving things away

And you like collecting them

I like lists

And you like chasing a whim

I like taking my time

And you like pressure

I like mornings

And you like night

I like walks

And you like shopping

I like polo necks

And you like scarves

I like Handel

And you like Hendrix

I like water

And you like tea

And that is why, you see,

That I like you

And you like me.

Ellie and mayweed

A proper gardener

 

I had a migraine yesterday so was lying outside under a sun umbrella. When I turned over I saw this corner of the house.

    ‘That looks like something created by a proper gardener,’ I thought.

    At the back are tomato and cucumber plants donated by gardening friends. (Thank you, Alan. Thank you, Pat.)
    The ‘trellis’ is what Frog calls racking. He rescued it from the university (where he works) when they were refurbishing a lab and chucking it out.
    In the front are my new parsley plants and an olive tree bought by Frog.
    Also my brand new watering can which I actually bought myself - with a voucher that came in a free local paper. It sprinkles, unlike my old one which has had its spout nibbled by Dog. (The old one was given to me by my sister Emma many years ago. I still use it – just not for sprinkling.)

    This south-westerly wall is baking hot after a day of sunshine, with the bricks acting like a giant storage heater and keeping the plants warm all night. It works better than the southerly wall round the corner (where I have some chilli plants, also donated).