August Moon: day 3

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What do you love?

I love my new house. And, since Kat’s prompt for today asks me to think about collections and bookshelves and other things that one might find in a house, I am going to show it to you.

I will hustle you through the front door and the narrow corridor, through to the back of the house, to the kitchen, where it suddenly all opens out. I am enjoying this kitchen. I’ve got room to put things away and room to put things down, and the tap runs hot within a few seconds.

My piano. I love my piano. I swapped a car for it – I can’t drive and I can’t play the piano so it was really a neutral decision. Both were inherited from my godmother Heloise. I love it because it was hers and I love it because it is utterly beautiful, such warm brown wood, such gorgeous art nouveau gilt letters, such a pure clear tone. It stands at the entrance to the sitting room, and visitors come in, and see it, and ask, Can I play your piano? The answer is always yes.

I would show you my current pride and joy, my newly framed pictures. Seven of them: five up on the wall, one propped against a box, one on top of the piano. They’re symbolic, in a way, of everything that I’ve been meaning to do for years and am now doing. The watercolour of lovely watery Annecy and the Montmartre drawing of me and Tony from our honeymoon; the three of my own photographs that say actually, yes, I can take a damn good picture when I put my mind to it; the photograph of Heloise, very beautiful in the late 1970s, smoking on the back of a Paris bus (3380, I think); my mermaid poster, screen-print in mauve and grey, for an exhibition I didn’t go to by an artist I’d never heard of, which none the less was the thing I needed to buy at the time.

The other pictures, yes. Two montages, one of wedding photos and associated ephemera, the other, likewise, of the honeymoon. Photos in cardboard mounts and clip frames, friends and family. Collages, made to set intentions or to lay foundations for castles in the air. A nude by Andrew, the first real piece of art I bought. An odd little trio: the Maxwell equations, done by Anne in blackwork for Tony, a little crucifix, and my compostela. I walked five hundred miles to Santiago de Compostela and all I got was a certificate in Latin… Three yachts in the Old Gaffers race – a nod to the Isle of Wight, that. My year 9 Textiles project, marbled cotton with appliqué and beads: Atlantis with treasure chest and mermaid.

Yes, you would probably notice the mermaids. The mermaids and the ships and the shells. Ignore the photo in the bathroom; that was there when we got here. The shells are cockles, scallops, for pilgrimage. Many paths, leading to the same city. The mermaids are for transition, for breaking the surface. The ships are for trust, and for imperceptible progress.

Bookshelves: just about enough, now, at long last. The ones in the sitting room are ordered. Marching rows of series: Susan Howatch, Sadler’s Wells, Jasper Fforde, Narnia, Hilary McKay, John Buchan, Dorothy L. Sayers. Viragos. Poetry. Theology and LGBT and LGBT theology all skulking on the bottom shelf. Sheet music – mostly Tony’s, but, since we’re both altos, we share it. Tall, wide, hard-backed cookery and craft books, full of colour pictures of beautiful things that I might make, one day, and enjoy looking at in the mean time. In the study, the everything else shelf, to be reordered once I’ve cleared the two boxes that are blocking it.

Collections. Hats! If you look behind the door in my study you will find my greenhouse full of hats: winter hats and summer hats, formal hats and silly hats. Red felt and green, black straw, floppy magenta beret, wide-brimmed and brimless. I love them all. They are magnificent; they are my favourite way of saying, why, no, I don’t give a damn what you think about what I look like or what I’m wearing. In any case, they make me look fantastic. Dozens of packs of cards, each with a different, bright-coloured back: testimony to my huge, loose-knit family and its racing demon parties. Spices, jostling for space, some (cinnamon and ginger and paprika) always running out and needing renewing, but most of them nearly full, a pinch or a teaspoonful gone into some interesting new recipe. Things for making into things: beads, fabric, pens, rubber stamps. This idea about using up what you’ve got before accepting anything else is not helpful. Things have to fester for a bit so that you know what to do with them, and using all-new stuff is too slick and chilly. In the shed: the bikes. At the moment, n=2, a bike and a trike.

On my iTunes: opera grand and petty, the folk song army, rousing hymns, magnificently purple Victorian oratorio and sentimental songs. Things to sing along to. DVDs? Most of mine are Doctor Who: stories of infinite horizons, and basic human, or alien, decency.

What do I love? I love colour and flamboyance and adventure; journey and integrity; beauty and truth; love and joy.

August Moon: day 2

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What is it that you do now?

What do I do now?

I have always felt the French expression metro-boulot-dodo sums up a lot, but not all, of my weekday life.

‘Metro’ in my case means a twenty-minute cycle and a fifty-minute train ride each way. Cycling is brilliant. It has to be a very horrible day indeed, knee-deep puddles and obnoxious drivers, for cycling not to cheer me up. I also enjoy the train: it’s very fast and, so long as I get a seat, it’s time to get on with stuff with very few distractions. Metaphorically speaking, I breathe in on the way out and breathe out on the way back. That is, I spend the journey to work reading, or listening to music, and the journey back writing.

My ‘boulot’ is administration for a major trade union. Nine months ago I moved from a regional office to the national office. These days I get to eat in the staff canteen. I also get time to think – largely about how much I like being busy at work. This morning I looked up some email addresses and continued rearranging the electronic filing system: more of a challenge than it sounds, particularly given that I will need to explain what I’ve done and why. I do wonder what on earth I’m going to do with myself when I’ve finished; hence the wish for Another New Opportunity to manifest itself.

I work from 8.20am to 4pm, meaning that I miss most of the crowding on the roads and the trains, and that I get home at about half past five, and so get a decent chunk of evening. If it’s my day to cook, I pick up sundries at the Tesco on the way home. How enthusiastically I go about cooking depends on my mood, my energy, and how much stuff we have to use up. It might take me two hours to make a stir fry. Or I might rustle up two courses and lunch for the next three days. Either way, the mental effort involved has to be deducted from a limited sum available.

Apart from that, my evenings tend to be occupied in writing up whatever I wrote on the train, writing a bit more, making beautiful things (usually with beads, but sometimes sewing) – those still count as boulot – and messing around on the internet (definitely dodo). About twenty minutes of internet time is catching up with friends and reading stuff I genuinely find interesting; the rest is distraction and procrastination.

I would like to reduce my internet time, and exclude mindless meandering around long-dead comments pages that I’m not actually interested in. I’d like to notice when the switch flicks from ‘awake and productive’ to ‘sleepy and unable to disconnect’. And I would like to replace that with actual rest. Lying on the sofa listening to music. Getting an early night. Reading.

Dodo – and so to bed. I feel that any more time I could devote to bed would not be wasted.

August Moon: day 1

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Set an intention

Starting at the beginning, and in the middle, and at the end. Spiralling around and around, soothing the hurts and remembering the dreams of the me-that-was, looking ahead, asking advice of the me-who-will-be, who already knows how to do everything I want to. And, more than anything, being here, now.

As luck would have it, I’ve just got to the end of The Artist’s Way and (is this a normal reaction?) been sorely tempted to go straight back to the beginning and work through all the exercises I missed the first time round. I’m going to lay off that for the duration of this fortnight, though, and concentrate on August Moon.

I walked out just now to look at the moon rising over across the river, huge and low and buttery-yellow. I had thought I might not be able to; we have had so much rain today, and great dark clouds to race against. But the rain had stopped and the clouds cleared, and, although the river was high, it was no longer lapping at the grass, and the wind had fallen to a breeze. And the moon was worth looking at.

Here are the four and a half things I am working on at the moment:

– my novel (!) Speak Its Name is, after seven years, as finished as I can get it, and currently out knocking at agents’ doors. Admitting to its existence in so many words, in public, is a new adventure as of this very minute. This is the project I’ve been referring to for ages by oblique references to mermaids. I will probably continue to do this. My intention is to keep faith in this thing, in my work and in the world’s need for it; to refine and direct it so that it breaks the surface and gets out there. Relatedly, poetry. To keep writing and posting it.

– something rather unexpected that’s developed over the past couple of months is a renewed interest in beading and general jewellery making. I’ve signed up for a silversmithing course, beginning in late September, and am considering how I can get this hobby to become self-sustaining. I don’t want this to become a career or an obligation, but I am making more things than I can wear, and spending more money than I can afford (so say the monsters), and I am fairly sure there are people out there who would wear beads depicting clusters of galaxies in polymer clay. This is Operation Silver Ship Strelsau, and my intention is to come up with an actual plan for launching it, however many sails it turns out to have.

– piano lessons! I’ve been promising myself piano lessons since before we moved house. The piano has now been tuned, and I have the contact details for a piano teacher. I need to send an email. My intention here is to remember that I don’t have to be good at everything immediately – which I fear I’ll need to.

– Operation Parisienne en ligne. Long story. My father has a bus – well, three buses. The buses need a website. I have no mechanical skill, but I can write, and my partner is happy to help me get this online. Intention: get this put together and public.

– Operation Another New Opportunity – which is a half-thing, really, as I’ve no control over whether the opportunity opens or not, only whether I jump into it if it does. This is my day job, and the feeling that I have now done absolutely everything that is open to me at my current grade. My intention is to jump, if it opens.

My intention with regard to all of these is perhaps best summed up in the phrase ‘forward! in all directions!’ I do not expect to get everything done in two weeks, particularly since I’ll be on holiday for one of them. However, I do wish to get my head into the space where they seem like things that I will do. Wish me luck!

The Advance Party

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We woke to the sound of nothing,
the lack of that forty-day thrum:
the rain had stopped, wind stilled; we rocked
so gently in our coffin-cradle
you might have thought
our parent slept.

I threw the hatch back; saw a square
of clear grey sky; smelt damp air
– and, frightened, shut it out,
needing (I said) to think.
It was warm inside.
Safe there, enclosed in darkness,
accustomed to the swaying floor,
the solid walls and roof,
I’d chosen to forget we had
to touch the ground again.

That night we feasted, sang,
laughed and gave thanks,
snug in our floating box. I crept away,
up to the deck where the birds roosted.
Most slept, but one raven, dark
in the dark shadows, blinked at me
with gold-rimmed eye. I chose her.
Tough claws gripping my fingers, we climbed
up, up to the hatch and that
empty square of sky.

She knew better than I did;
she flew before I was ready
to let her go.
My hand was light without her.
I watched the sky as long as I could bear it;
then, dizzy, I shut the hatch again,
and tried to forget her.

On how life is not like books

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It is not given to most of us to know
the instant’s fiery trial, the two-forked path
from which, once chosen, we cannot turn back.
Life is too messy-incomplete for that,
crammed with uncertainty and second chances.
Integrity comes piecemeal, a dripped succession
of tiny moments where, grudging, agonised,
we choose to act for good,
from love or shame, some half-built value,
a memory, the decent thing. It all adds up.
Then we look back, perhaps, and find
we made the hardest choice by hardly choosing,
and grace is granted us to laugh,
wiser, grateful, and walk on, nearer, now,
the people we were born to be.

Valediction for May

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Hush. The dawn is breaking on the hills.
The air is chill. My love is calling:
Awake. Arise. Come with me. Time to go.
It is time to go, and you must leave
with the daisies closed against the dew,
with the young green shoots piercing the earth,
the pigeons burbling and blackbird’s song,
and the candles on the chestnut trees
to light you on your way.

You dug the ground; you sowed the seed,
watered the shoot, and saw
the growth all but imperceptible:
a bud, a leaf – furled – opening – open –
Come away.
Leave the fruit. It is not yours to pick.

Follow me now beyond the garden.
Come and see.
I have a lovely place to show you.
Though here the flowers bloom and fruit trees
scatter blossom,
walk this path with me:
come away.

April Moon: Day 14

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Yes, I know it’s May. Shh.

Comfort

What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?

Having spent Lent getting my head around Paul, comfort is throwing me into John and the farewell discourses. Tallis, of course: if ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will give you another comforter, that he may bide with you for ever; even the sprit of truth. Comforter is the word that is translated elsewhere as advocate. And I remember being told that comfort in this sense is more like encourage.

And, thinking about that, I begin to see comfort as a spectrum. There is, of course, the duvet-and-blanket, warm-heavy-cat-on-the-knee comfort: an encouragement to relax, to sleep, to let go of things. Then, in Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo has killed Tybalt and Juliet has no idea what to do next, she asks for some comfort, Nurse. And then the dancing, flaming wind of the Spirit, distinctly uncomfortable, you would think. And yet.

Comfort is the thing that pushes or pulls me towards whatever it is I need to do next. Very often resting is exactly what I need to do next. I remember last year, when circumstances had me staying nearly a month with my housemates’ parents, and how warm and comfortable and supporting was that spare bed of theirs, and how white the sheets, and how that month of being looked after was exactly what I needed then.

And what I need now? Well, my bedroom is dusted and vacuumed. My possessions are piled on the bed, waiting for a rucksack to put them in. I move on tomorrow, and it is time and past time. Comfort is only comfort for so long; one’s foot goes to sleep after a while.

April Moon: Day 13

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Curious

What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?

This word forks, and at first I am more drawn to the more active sense. One can be curious about a thing that is curious. I am immediately reminded of Alex in Leeds, who has a tattoo that reads Curiosity > Enthusiasm > Action – a fantastic motto. Curiosity gets a bad press – it famously killed the cat, and ‘satiable curtiosity is the reason for the trunk on the Elephant’s Child. This seems unfair. To know things for the sheer pleasure of knowing, not out of malice, but because there is a space in one’s mind where a fact ought to go, that seems very wholesome to me.

In fact, this seems to be a very literary word. Down the other fork, where it is things that are curious, there is the Old Curiosity Shop (I have never read it) and Alice again. Curiouser and curiouser. Oddness, interestingness, something-not-quite-right-about-thisness. Something that is curious makes one curious even if one isn’t naturally curious.

Are curious people curious? They are usually good fun to talk to; they don’t mind admitting what they don’t know, and they share what they do.

Curious.

April Moon: Day 12

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Flow

What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?

Rivers. Idyllic Revelation rivers, the sort that are metaphors for grace and love. Water flowing from the city. Mostly hymns, actually. Flow, river, flow, flood the land with the Father’s glory… – where golden fields spread far and broad/where flows the crystal river.

Which reminds me of a mondegreen in another hymn: through gates of pearl streams in the countless host. I always took streams to be a noun, and pearl to describe the streams rather than the gates. I was probably extrapolating from ocean’s farthest coast in the previous line. Even now, there is a sense of clear light and clear water, in this and in all the new-heaven-and-new-earth hymns that I love. Flow is, somehow, part of that.

Flow is first cousin to current, which is a lovely fizzy word, but more scary and unpredictable. Flow feels steady; not necessarily strong or overwhelming, but reliably going that way. Flow belongs at the mature stage of a river, out towards the floodplain (oh, I remember building dams at the beach; there was an outlet of water from a bird park a little way inland, and we used to divert the flow and dig long trenches out towards the sea). Flow is calm progress.