Shedding

Feel

These weeks of almost unremitting cloud and frequent heavy rain have been a bit depressing, but they make for lush and subtle greenery, of course - a continuing glory of this grumpy, confused old country and its near neighbours. When the clouds thin and briefly part, the pale sunshine glancing off all this green is a timeless gossamer dream. A deep collective memory sighs and reaches out to the passing moment. Well, it could. Sometimes it does. But all too often an obsessive awareness of one's own - my own - individual inner climate stands between.

The way I feel is... well, since deciding six months ago to leave my job there hasn't been a conscious moment when I haven't felt sick with fear. This is probably not literally true: my attention must often have been taken elsewhere. But it feels true. It's rational fear to some extent since leaving the job at this difficult, crazy time is clearly a big risk and, although there are some positive indications, there's no knowing how things will turn out. It's also desperately unhelpful. I'm not dying and not powerless (and if I was dying what a waste of life such fear would be). Fear changes nothing and consumes vast amounts of needed energy and confidence.

So why so much fear? I think it stems from guilt, from the suspicion that I made a self-indulgent choice and and so deserve the worst. I felt a lot of other things before, some of them horrible, but mostly not fear, or only short-term fear: afraid I can't get out of bed, can't cope today; oh, now I have: ok, fear over - that kind of thing. Now it's endless, an ever-present aspect of the new reality. And it's nuts, for this is my one life, too precious to spend it being afraid, especially when nothing frightening has happened yet. I suppose I could resort to anti-anxiety medication, and I don't rule that out. Meanwhile, breathe into it and slowly, deliberately try to act as if I didn't feel this way.

The fear is in my throat and belly, and recently in my back. I've never had backache, or any of the aches and pains in bones and joints and muscles to which my age-group may be prey. I get severe and frequent headaches and migraine and it's been as if the body's need to express pain was focused in my head and therefore had no need to manifest elsewhere. These past few weeks, the headaches have slowly started to abate for the first time in many years. Pain, meanwhile, seized my lumbar vertebrae. On the retreat, sitting fulltime with a crazy, fearful mind, there was none of the familiar stiff shoulders and sore knees from sitting still, but this new pain flowered lushly and shockingly half way down my spine, then faded a few days later. As I wrote this blogpost, a week after returning from retreat, it came back suddenly and violently (and, yes, when the words had been set down it left again).

There's no escape from fear, it seems. I used to escape briefly, gratefully, totally, after work into novels, films and radio programmes, and (excessively) into food. Well, these - or I - have changed. While still pleasures, they no longer make the rest disappear. Paradoxically, when life is mostly a relentless discipline, is it easier to fully embrace the moments which are not? I suppose the lack of wider choices, the clear limitation of such moments, while removing hope, also removes responsibility and uncertainty. If the moment's all there is, you have to grasp it. (But it's always all there is, stupid!).

Perhaps I shouldn't blog this. The haiku poets counsel us to find an image, not indulge in drear, abstract description of emotions. Writing has been very difficult, and of course it's one of the main things I'd longed to do more of. Perhaps I need to give words, any words, to this stuff before I can give words to anything else. When I first started blogging - not here - I wrote something very personal and emotional about my past and family. It was chosen as some kind of 'post of the week'. To write it down and have it read was helpful in some concrete way and I never needed to do so again. So, in that spirit...

Clarence

Lousy photos, but he's sooo beautiful!

Look

The big photo exhibition I went to see was too big and its contents too disparate for much enjoyment. But the great thing about looking is the way you come out still looking - every object, every person becomes a picture.



Greening

Monday morning dawned with limpid sunshine after many days of rain and with many more days of rain forecast. So, inspired by these lovely photos of my local woods and by Parmanu's exquisite shots of woods elsewhere in Europe, and feeling as guilty as a small, truanting schoolgirl, I walked in the woods - on Monday morning!

Leaving my job: wow, it nearly killed me, I think. I say this not to be self-dramatising, but in the spirit in which many thinkers I consider wise tell us the way a lot of us live, in privileged as well as poorer countries, is killing us - emotionally, physically, individually, collectively, ecologically. So near the brink I was there, so exhausted and conflicted, this little, flickering consciousness could have flickered out. It happens all the time: the heart attacks and strokes and distracted souls under buses. It didn't happen to me, and coming so near the brink doesn't make me unusual. So now, emerging from a few weeks of much needed physical recuperation (and, oh god, I wish I could take six months off, but I know I'm very lucky to have had six weeks), it's time to think about how to live a bit better in future, about ways to live and work, both attitudinal and tangible, that better reflect my own concerns, beliefs and priorities.

This is not retirement. I kind of wish it was. Not that I'd want to stop working, but it would be nice of course to have a basic income and not have to work to survive. But the days of 'early retirement' - quite widespread for British folk in their fifties during much of my life - are over. So, how to make a living, whether to leave London: these are the big challenges. How to begin climbing out of a long downward spiral? Slowly. Realistically. And starting deep inside myself, while not residing there all the time. Well, Spring is a good time for this.

First up will be some choices re upgrading the home office, deciding on computer, printer, internet, broadband, phone and energy suppliers that I hope (whilst all too well aware that there are no virtuous options here) may be less supportive than some of the most egregiously unethical industries, less wasteful than some of my own and the planet's resources. I have some websites to check out, and all information and suggestions will be very gratefully received.

Coming back up

Just back from a retreat at Gaia House with Ken Jones, who proved a scarily appropriate teacher for me right now, I hope this is a slow start of recovery from what seems to be much deeper 'burnout' even than I knew. For years and years, all my resources, including meditation practice, have gone into a necessary holding on. Now I think they need to go into letting go, so that energy may arise for what comes next.

A few more photos of Gaia House and surroundings are here.

Ching Court, Covent Garden

Tulips never seem quite real

Rather strange days

The sock analogy

" Take, for instance, your favourite pair of wool socks. You get a hole in the big toe - and you darn it. Soon the darned holes are more of the sock than the original wool. Eventually the whole darned sock is made of different wool. Yet it's the same sock. In relation to its looks and in relation to its partner on your other foot, it is still the same sock. They go together and lie together in the drawer, and even in relation to itself, its identity, it is the same sock, though it is different.

Here philosophers can apply Plato's archetypal ideas of Sameness and Difference. The sock is entirely different from the original as far as the wool goes, but its shape has remained the same. It never becomes a different sock, despite the radical material alteration. Its material is different; its form is the same.

By "form", philosophers mean the look of the sock, for which you recognize it as a sock (tube socks raise conceptual problems!) When can a sock not look like a sock and still be a sock? Philosophers also mean by "form" the socks's function as a match to its partner and to your foot (form following function). A third meaning interests us most: form as the active principle governing the way the new wool integrates into the old sock. Form is thus visible shape, and the shaping force of the visible. Do you see that we are getting closer to the notion of character? "

James Hillman in The Force of Character and the Lasting Life