Author: kathleenjowitt

Reverb, Day 3

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#reverb13Day 3: Listen to your heart

Each day for 31 days, I sat quietly for a few moments with my eyes closed and my hand on my heart and asked, “Heart: what do you need?”

And then I listened. Sometimes the answer came in the form of a word. Sometimes an image. Sometimes a sensation.

Try this today. What does your heart have to tell you?

This is a very short answer. Usually I would keep this sort of exercise to my own paper journal, for fear of the entire internet showing up to laugh at me.

But I have been out drinking wine and eating chocolate with the church yuppies (well, we’re not yoof) and am feeling pleasantly melancholy and uninhibited, and here it is:

free

Apparently my heart didn’t think the answer needed to be a noun. Or to have capital letters. Nor am I really sure what it’s referring to. But there it is.

Possibilities include: the feeling I have of having been backed into a corner with regard to moving, career, etc; a long-running crush; attempting to do this exercise on the 1730 off London Waterloo.

Or it could be it’s none of those. I will find out. Or I won’t. We’ll see.

Reverb, Day 2

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#reverb13Day 2: Nourishment

The way we nourish ourselves determines our ability to shine our light in the world. And nourishment doesn’t just come in the form of food and drink and sunshine; it’s equally important to nourish your spirit.

What made your soul feel most nourished this year?

If I said, the sacrament, my parents would probably disown me, and I can’t help feeling it’s a bit of a smart-arse answer, and I am still not quite High enough to be entirely comfortable saying that. And yet it is true.

I have become particularly aware this year of the way my faith has changed over the past few years, the way it has become less about what I believe and more about just being there. And how by ‘just being there’ I mean both the actual physical turning up, and the intense conscious mindfulness that I attain for maybe ten seconds. How it requires less effort and more heart. How it is less defensive and more loving. And a lot of that is about there being something that is real and true even when my brain is not working or my heart feels dead. How, while everything is real, this is the most real thing of all.

Just being there. Sitting with myself. Getting to know myself. Unravelling the snarls and the tangles in my history and my present. Pulling the stones out before digging the manure in. Or something like that. I have explored a lot of The Fluent Self this year, and that’s helped a lot with all this. Being kinder to myself.

(And then of course I will always say: music. Specifically, singing, which helps me get inside things like nothing else. And interesting things have happened there, recently, but I think I’ll save them for the moment.)

Reverb, Day 1

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#reverb13Day 1: On your first day

It is the first day of December. It is the first day of Summer here in the Southern Hemisphere, but it may the first day of Winter where you are.

It is the first day of Reverb13.

How do you feel, on this first day, in your mind? In your body? In your heart? In your soul?

It is the first day of Advent. It is the first day of the year, and it is the first time that I have begun my year here.

This is how things look on the first day:

I am nervous. I have left the safe and familiar and am starting something new. I am tolerably confident that I can make a good job of this, but it is intimidating. At the same time, my mind is singing at an immense compliment that was paid me this morning. I’m also nervous about my solo this evening, or, rather, conscious of the fact that I will be nervous, when I get there.

I am tired. Sleepy. If I were to get into bed, I would fall asleep. My feet, too: I’m aware of having walked, yesterday. I’m pleasantly full, of Spanish cabbage soup, and sour cream and onion flavour Pringles. There is a blister on my left little toe, which is a little bit sore when I wiggle it. I’ve had my hair cut, and the back of my neck feels very exposed. It’s a bit chilly generally, actually, but I will be going out in half an hour. The sun is going down behind the houses opposite, and there is a streak of flame running between two layer of thick purple clouds. But I’m feeling well: at the moment, my body is working pretty well and I’m pleased with it.

My heart is a little apprehensive, too. It takes me (or so I believe) a long time to make friends. I know that I am going to miss my old colleagues. I fear that I will lose touch with them, and also that it will take me as long to get to make friends with the new ones as it did with the old. Both of these fears are unfounded, I think. I am not the same person I was when I joined the organisation; also, half the office seems to be trying to meet up with me for lunch. I am missing my husband, who is nearly a hundred miles away. My heart is trying to love everybody, which is wonderful, but sometimes tiring and sometimes painful.

And in the middle of all of this, my soul is remarkably calm. Ready. Expectant. Aware of progress having happened, and being about to happen, and at the same time accepting itself as is. We had this hymn this morning. The last verse still makes me cry.

I start here: Advent

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I have been looking forward to Advent. This feels vaguely heretical, given that Advent itself is meant to be about looking forward. Looking forward to looking forward. Oh well, why not?

Advent starts tomorrow – tidily, this year, on the first of December, so everyone’s Advent calendar is right, for once. I find this pleasing, because this Advent is a particularly important one. For me, at least.

I moved to Surrey in the late autumn of 2007. The first service I ever attended at Holy Trinity, Guildford, was the Advent Carol Service: the beginning of six years growing in love, faith, confidence and vocal skill. This was the church, and Church, I needed, and I found it on Advent Sunday because I’d lost my sense of direction and couldn’t work out how to get to the cathedral. In fact, I count my time in Guildford from that Advent Sunday; I can’t remember now what the date was that I actually moved, but Advent Sunday is where it began.

My last 101 in 1001 list (now abandoned, but helpful in various ways beyond the scope of the project) began on Advent Sunday 2010. To be fair, this was deliberate, but I think it’s interesting that even back then I was already thinking in terms of Advent being a beginning.

On Monday I begin a new job in a new office. This is a huge step: after nearly four years finding my confidence, my motivation, my feet, I’m moving on, and – well, I’ll almost certainly address this at some point over the next few weeks, but I seem to have a career now. And so, by pure chance, the first working day of Advent sees me starting a whole new adventure.

An entirely frivolous reason to like Advent: purple is my favourite colour (except for when I prefer red). Also, I’m an alto, and for an alto things don’t get much better than This is the Record of John.

And so I’ve come to the conclusion that my year runs Advent to – well, the Saturday after Stir Up Sunday, or Christ the King, or whatever you like to call this. I have decided to go with this. New Year’s Eve is always a write-off in my family, because of our devotion to the cult of historical public transport meaning that we all go to bed early. New Year’s Day is spent riding around Winchester on a succession of incredibly chilly buses. Advent Sunday, by contrast, is candles and purple and Gibbons and Mendelssohn and expecting. Advent means more to me than changing the year on the calendar ever has.

This does not really make any difference to anything outside my own head. I’m not going to start wishing people a Happy New Year tomorrow, or anything like that, but I want to say this, now: my new year starts tomorrow.

I’m not ready for it to be the new year. I have three things that terrify me: the Record solo, the new job, and turning right off the AA roundabout when I cycle back from the station on Monday night. I’m not sure I’m ready for any of this.

That is rather the point. I am never ready for anything until I start doing it. Starting my year in December (or, next year, November) gives me a whole extra month to get ready.

My first month of the year is also the last month of the year and I am going to use it as a time of very gentle transition.

In previous years (mostly last year, but to a certain extent before that) I have devoted the week between Christmas and New Year to fairly serious introspection, reflecting on the year gone, and looking forward to the year ahead. Last year I also took part in the Reverb project through most of December. This has worked very well. This year has been unnumbered blessings and I have made enormous progress in all sorts of things. Some of this is no doubt due to other factors, but having set the compass eleven months ago, being able to look back at what I wrote last year, has been very helpful.

This year I’m going to do it again, but I’m going to move the timescale a bit. I will devote the first four weeks of December (in other words, Advent) to this reflection. Reverb 13 prompts have already started appearing. I’m not going to beat myself up if I start slipping: I know already that this is going to be a peculiarly hectic Advent, because: new job, longer commute, long-distance relationship, three works Christmas parties (two of mine, one of his) and all sorts.

On the other hand, this does leave the week after Christmas completely free. At the moment I’m not sure what to do with it. I might use it to catch up with things I fall behind on. I might not. I don’t know. At the moment, that’s as it should be.

Other things for Advent: Haphazard by Starlight. Advent candle. As of yesterday, chocolate Advent calendar from one of my lovely colleagues. The O Antiphons (one of my plans for an unspecified date in the future, When I Have Time, is to make a sort of wall-hanging that will have the O Antiphons unfold over the week before Christmas to gradually spell out ERO CRAS). Freedom for this all to crash and burn and for me not to do any of it if it doesn’t seem right.

But at the moment, I am looking forward to all of it. Alleluia.

 

Balance

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I have resolved that when I move to Cambridge, as I will at some point as yet undetermined, I shall make my bicycle my primary mode of transportation, rather than my tricycle. I love my trike, but it is impossible to get on a train, and occasionally a pain to lock up, and if I can’t ride a bike in Cambridge, the English Amsterdam, I’ll never do it.

To this end, and also because I felt like it, I took my bike to the park when I got back from Farnborough this morning. I got CTony to raise the saddle to something approaching the correct height, walked the bike down to the park, and spent a happy half-hour riding around in circles.

It’s been very interesting, re-learning how to ride a bike as an adult. It is still new enough that I marvel every time that first kick of the pedals sends me forwards, gracefully, not sideways, violently. That’s what it is, ‘learning to ride a bike’, finding that split second of trust and courage that gets you moving fast enough to take both feet off the floor and find you don’t need to put them down again.

I have been thinking today, though, about signalling. Signalling was what stopped me riding a bike ‘properly’. You know: on the road, to get to places. A cyclist who can’t signal is a menace, and I just couldn’t do it. I could manage to get my left hand off the handlebar, but if I tried to lift my right hand, I just went straight over sideways.

I always thought that this was because I am strongly right-handed, and am generally clumsy and unbalanced. All this is true: I am forever walking into things and dropping stuff. It turns out, however, not to be the reason that I can’t signal.

Because I can signal. If a year on the trike has done one thing for me, it has persuaded my brain that I will not fall off if I take a hand off the handlebars. Because whoever fell off a trike? (Me, as it happens, but only once, and it was a stupid bit of path that I should have got off for, really.) On the trike, it is second nature to steer with one hand, and use the other to grab the water bottle, or scratch my nose, or feel my pocket for the umpteenth time to make sure my keys are really in there – or to signal.

On the bike instead of the trike, I forget that if I signal I will fall off. And so I don’t fall off. Silly, but true, and very difficult to teach. It isn’t about balance at all; it’s about confidence, just like being able to ride the damn thing in the first place.

Angels with Umbrellas

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‘You meet angels, of course,’ someone said. Was it Marie-Noëlle at the Emaús house in Burgos? If so, we had met one only that day.

Even if not, we knew what she meant. We had met angels; ours carried umbrellas.

At Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, two days into the pilgrimage, and with the forbidding snowy bulk of the Pyrenees looming ahead of us, the hospitalero came out, umbrella in hand, into the drizzle to point us the right way to cross them – away from the Route Napoleon, towards the gentler, safer way.

At Roncesvalles, a lifetime later and somehow still the same day, with night sweeping in along with the snow, we were frozen, soaked, lonely, exhausted; we had abandoned the waymarked Camino on the grounds that the road was a lot easier to follow – and as we struggled down the last few metres into the village, a monk emerged from the restaurant, his habit brushing the fallen snow and his umbrella raised aloft against what was still coming down. ‘Peregrinos? Vamos!‘ he said, and swept us into the monastery, to shelter, warmth, and a bed for the night.

At Logroño, leaving before daybreak, and already uncomfortably conscious of our propensity to get lost in cities, we missed our way. Grey sky, grey pavements gleaming under the street lights, and rain, and a man with an umbrella to point us back in the right direction.

At Burgos, a glorious, sun-soaked Easter Day, and another city to get lost in. And another angel with an umbrella to put us back on the right path, or, rather, since we had already planned on stopping, and knew where we wanted to spend the night, an angel to read our guidebook, ask the directions for which we were too tired to think up the Spanish, and walk with us until we were in the right quarter.

We met angels.

This is what I have learned about angels, and about their habit of carrying umbrellas:

They are, as is generally rumoured, messengers and guardians (sometimes this is the same thing, if the message is what keeps you safe).

They are quite obviously distinct from you, and your needs are different from theirs. (Even in everyday life I find using an umbrella irritating beyond belief, and it would be an impossible encumbrance for a walking pilgrim; but an angel might well use one, and so might any other normal person on the street.)

They provide you with what you need (and it is not something that they lose by sharing it with you).

They do not neglect their own needs in caring for others (and this, more than anything, is where I am still learning from them).

#justaboutclingingon

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The hashtag is cribbed from @davewalker. My reaction to that was, ‘oh, thank goodness, it’s not just me!’

It’s been a long Lent. A cold Lent, a hard Lent, a Lent that didn’t stop for Sundays, that ground me down, that wore on and on.

The first two weeks were OK and I had good intentions. Things like doing a lectio divina – not every day, because I am realistic, but twice a week at least, let’s say, and not buying things in supermarkets, and not buying things I didn’t need at all, and I was doing reasonably well…

Then there were all the people: two weeks where I had to see people every day, to be interesting and polite and to talk, and then have to do it all over again in the evening, because it was a PCC meeting, or my mother was staying the night, or there was something else that meant I had to talk to people, and I never had an evening, let alone a day, to just crash; and then my brain broke and I cried at work and I know I shouldn’t have gone in in the first place.

Then I caught a cold, which put me in bed for two days (not consecutive) and has put me on limited spoons (to the extent that my reasoning goes like this: “I would like to go out for a cycle. But my front tyre needs pumping up. But pumping my tyre up will be so much effort that by the time I’ve done it I will be too tired to go out cycling. Also I have evensong tonight oh God oh God there is so much stuff to do I just can’t…”)

And they put the clocks forward an hour and I’m not sure I’m ready for Easter. Because it’s already here and I’m still tired and cold and grumpy and coughing like a blocked drain, and not feeling spiritual in the least. #everythingchanges, says the Church of England, and I am here going, really?

But new life doesn’t always come with a boom as the stone crashes down. Mostly it creeps out in tender little green shoots, or tiny sticky leaves. It is not spectacular, but it is hope, of a sort.

I went to church this morning. The last hymn was Thine be the glory and our organist played little twiddly bits between the verses, because it’s Easter. The one between the second and last verses was particularly reminiscent of another famous Handel piece. Hallelujah! it went. Hallelujah!. Then, diddly diddly diddly pom pom pom NO MORE WE DOUBT THEE…

It would not have had me on my feet (had I not been already, I mean…) But I did feel a tear prickling at the corner of an eye, and thought, oh.

I am alive, after all. Hallelujah.

“Ignore him and he’ll just go away…”

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I feel that I need hardly repeat to my followers and friends list that no, Lord Carey does not speak for me and that in a country where I am free both to practise my religious faith and to make flippant remarks about it on Twitter (with obscure TV references for good measure) I do not feel marginalised.

I really cannot be bothered to go through all this again, but Bishop Alan has done a pretty good job of summing up what are, I suspect, the feelings of a lot of us. Vicky Beeching is also good.

Adventures on Two Wheels

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Today I took my bike to the park.

This was something of an achievement. I am a reasonably keen cyclist – but the cycle in question is a tricycle. I learned to ride a bike when I was eleven or so, but I have never had very good balance, and always had problems with the whole ‘signalling right’ issue when on a bicycle – which meant that bicycling on roads was contraindicated. When we moved to the Isle of Wight, that was about the only place to ride a bike – so I stopped.

Last year I bought a tricycle and got reasonably good at cycling. At the beginning of this year I asked my brother to bring my bike (actually one I’d inherited from my aunt, and had never ridden myself) up from the Island. He and Tony have had a whale of a time taking it to bits, cleaning it, and going, ‘ooh, we have a sandblaster at work…’

Today I took my bike to the park.

It is not true that one never forgets how to ride a bicycle. One does remember fairly quickly, but one has to endure a certain period of blind terror, wild flailing, and falling off into puddles and leylandii hedges first. Then one finds that one foot follows the other, and one is half way across the park and hasn’t yet fallen off and OH HELP THERE IS A LADY WITH A DOG, so one brakes, and slithers forward, and discovers with extreme gratitude that one’s foot is on the ground and the bike hasn’t fallen over, and the lady is still fifty yards away, and the dog has disappeared completely.

So then one turns around to go back the other way and OH HELP THERE IS A CHILD ON A SCOOTER. But one is feeling quite brave (at least compared to when one started) and gingerly wades forward and starts pedalling, and is fine, and so is the child on a scooter. And then THERE IS A TREE AND THERE IS ALSO A LAMPPOST and one has to go between them oh my goodness (let us wuss out and stop and walk this bit) and then one decides to go between the public lavatories and the cricket pavilion and there are PUDDLES AND A HEAD WIND.

And after about half an hour of this one’s nerves are in shreds and one’s thighs are feeling likely to come up in magnificent bruises – and that’s quite enough for one day.

I am really quite proud of myself.

But I don’t think it’s going to space today, or even to Billingshurst in July.

Posters

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There is a church near me (there’s probably one near you, too) that reliably displays some sort of ‘inspirational’ poster. These range from the mildly amusing (e.g. a few Advents ago: picture of TARDIS; caption: WHO IS COMING TO SAVE THE WORLD?) to the bemusing (really, what was the point of that Alpha one with the wheelie bin?) to the irritating to today’s teeth-gnashingly infuriating one:

God is dead – Nietzsche

God is Dad – Jesus

P. S. Nietzsche is dead – God

Argh. The top two lines would fit into the amusing-to-irritating range, depending on temperament, but that P. S. is just horrible. If I thought God were so smug, vindictive, mean-spirited, rejoicing in the demise of one of God’s own creatures, as to write something like that – well, I would not have been on my way to church.