Tag: personal

Snow

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It started snowing at about nine o’clock on Monday evening. It started settling. I love watching snow. I like most forms of weather, really; I will peer out of the window like a dog or a small child watching whatever falls from the sky. But snow is particularly good: the way it tumbles so gracefully, and sparkles in the light from the window, and reflects the streetlights back to the sky and turns everything orange. I put my arm outside the French window to catch a flake on the sleeve of my dressing gown; it melted before I could get a proper look at it. I kept putting my head behind the curtain to see if it was still coming down.

And then I started feeling guilty about enjoying it. Because probably the snow was going to inconvenience some people. Possibly it was going to hurt some people.

And then I realised that my feelings about snow, whichever way I tried to push them, would make no difference whatsoever to the fact of the snow, and that my enjoying it doesn’t hurt anybody. I can’t melt it by disapproving of it. I can’t make it fall thicker by watching it. I’m allowed to enjoy it. I am.

Winter Days: postscript

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There is one thing missing, and that is my word for the year.

Nobody asked – it didn’t come up in Reverb – and so I was going to do without a particular word-for-the-year this year. However, there is one particular word that has been jumping up and down screaming at me to notice it. I have come across it in all sorts of contexts, and every time I do it leaps off the page, or the screen, or whatever it is.

It’s kind.

This is terrifying me in much the same way as generosity did earlier in this series, on account of being knackered. Compassion fatigue. And yet I know it’s not actually about that at all. Kindness costs nothing, indeed, particularly if I make it important to be kind to myself as well. And I remember 2013, when my word was love, how it all came in, how I found that I had already been swimming in the stuff. If kindness works the same way… yes.

I note that they seem to appear as adjectives rather than the associated nouns. Last year it was free, not freedom; this year it’s kind, more than kindness.

This year, then, is to be kind in, to be kind to others and to be kind to myself, to let kindness happen to me. Bring it on.

Winter Days: Silversmithing Class

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In August, I signed up on a whim for a class at a local arts centre – 10 Wednesday evenings learning how to work with silver.

Annoyingly, I lost about five of those Wednesdays to work, illness or sheer bloody exhaustion. The autumn drew in and it got dark and I found it harder and harder to leave the house once I’d got home.

The other five were great fun. I got to: use a saw, use a blowtorch, hit bits of silver with a hammer, solder bits of silver to other bits of solder, use a polishing machine, use a pendant drill. The tutor was great: he showed us how to use things and then let us get on with them, and encouraged us strongly to come up with our own designs. This is pretty much exactly how I learn and work, so I thought it was great.

I made a ring, a bangle and a sort of torc (the last I need to polish up). I was reasonably pleased with all of them – largely on the level of ‘I made a thing!’; they were not perfect by any means, but still, making a thing is pleasing enough in itself. I would need quite a lot of practice to get good, that’s the trouble, and one evening a week – often an evening that doesn’t actually happen – isn’t enough. And of course one’s restricted in terms of tools: I have neither the money nor the space for my own workshop, and can do very little without one.

I enjoyed such of the course as I was able to get to, but I think that at the moment I need to stick to things I can do on the dining table. In the end, perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was how much I can reasonably expect of myself on a work evening.

Winter Days number goodness knows what: things ending, things beginning

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When a door closes, a window opens. Or, when the door closes, we can finally see the light from the window that was open all the time. May it be so. Even so, I think all my doors are still on the latch at the moment.

Things ending: this month in which I begin the new year at my own speed, getting a head start. Things beginning: this new year.

Things ending, run to the end of the reel and wound up, flapping a little as the momentum runs itself out.

Things ending: my twenties. A decade of transition, of exploration, of losing my confidence and finding it again. A decade of trying things on for size, of ridiculous impulses and paralysing fears.

Things beginning, ever so slowly. My life as a writer who gets paid for writing. ($3: a token amount, token perhaps in more senses than one. A notification arriving 31st December: how’s that for a cosmic message? Except of course 31st December doesn’t mean much to me in terms of endings…)

Things beginning, and having to choose between all the bright wonderful things that might begin, in favour of the one or two that will.

December Days 24: Remembered

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An anonymous friend asks:

What would you like to be remembered for? If someone were writing an obituary, what you want them to include? Which achievements are you proud of?

I would like to be remembered as –

– the author of Speak Its Name, which I would like to have made a difference to somebody
– more generally, as somebody who could write, and did
– a person who was not afraid to admit how difficult it can be, whatever ‘it’ might be
– a committed trade unionist
– a singer who was prepared to sing
– someone who tried very hard to see things as they really are
– more than anything, a person of integrity

Advent

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Today is the first day of Advent, and, for me, the first day of the new year. I observe both this new year and the one where the calendar flips over to 2015, and spend the intervening month reflecting on the year past, and looking forward to the next one.

My Advent practice for 2014 includes the following:

– The Meaning is in the Waiting (Paula Gooder) – a section a day
– A Feast for Advent (Delia Smith, yes, that Delia Smith) – a section a day
– Advent candle (starts, irritatingly, at 1; I have burned the tip of it today, for 30)
– responding to Reverb prompts
– making an O Antiphons calendar (at the moment this consists of 21 purple-painted cardboard circles)
– as much rest as possible
– limiting personal purchases and instead making a daily donation to The Children’s Society
– bringing out one Christmas decoration every day

December is, inevitably, busy, and I’m still not entirely well, so some of these may fall by the wayside as I go through this. That’s normal. I hope, however, to be here almost every day, and deliberately, consciously, with myself every day, too.

August Moon: day 16

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Fast forward a year…

Dear Kathleen,

Good work noticing you’re ill and taking the day off work. ‘Better than this time last week’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘better’. And don’t worry about the butterfly attention span. Nobody is expecting you to focus on anything. You don’t have to do everything today, and working on getting better is still work. Don’t worry. You do get better at letting things sit and work on themselves.

Looking at you from here, I want to give you a map. I want to tell you, on the twenty-fifth of October, everything will suddenly become all right. Which is sort of true. You’ll see. This is the least glamorous part of the whole journey. You don’t know how far you’re going because every day looks the same and you don’t know yet how far you have to go. I promise you it’s not as far as you think. And nothing needs quite so much work as you think it’s going to.

Have a look back at how far you’ve come. Keep listening to Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engleszungen redete. It is the most important letter in the world, and the music makes it more so.

Now. About being thirty. I’ve had a month to get used to the idea. It’s pretty good. You want to know about the ‘if not X, then Y’ question, of course you do, and of course you know that I can’t tell you which way that particular cat will jump. There are parts that I don’t know myself, particularly about Y. What I can tell you is that, as with all your cat-on-a-fence situations, you will go forward bravely whichever side it jumps, always remembering that there was, and still is, the other side. You don’t lose anyone you were, or might have been.

Keep loving. Keep trusting. It’s worth getting your heart broken. You are going to meet the most fantastic people this year, and the ones you’ve already met are going to turn out to be even more fantastic than you thought. You are going to reclaim every part of your life, rewrite all the stories that scare you. The people and things who reappear from your past are not as scary as you thought them.

You are brave. You always have been. Remember that it is all right not to be brave sometimes, that you are allowed to say how difficult it is. Ask for help when you need it.

Much love, and see you here in a year,

Kathleen xx

P.S. No, I’m not completely grey. Try Thirty-five 😉

August Moon: day 15

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What if there was no need to wait until you’re “perfectly formed”?

It’s almost exactly a month until my silversmithing course begins. This will be the first formal tuition I’ve ever received in any form of jewellery. And I’ve just finished the first piece of jewellery I ever made with intent to sell. Everything I know so far is self-taught: I know it from books and from copying existing work, and from working it out for myself. I’m doing it all backwards.

And there is a voice in the back of my mind asking me what the hell I think I’m doing, who am I to put myself there with all the skilled jewellers of the internet and have the audacity to charge money for this junk. There is a voice telling me that I’m treading on people’s toes, that I’m being presumptuous, that I’ll be laughed off the internet.

To which I reply patiently that it’s not a zero-sum game; that if somebody wants to spend money on something I’ve made the chances are they’ll spend money on something someone else has made, too; that my stuff is not at all bad, really; that I at least have a decent eye for colour.

I’m not ready to go yet. I have a whole host of practical things to put in place: stock to make, regulations to puzzle out, pictures to draw, photos to take, cards to print, all that sort of thing. And I still have a cold.

And I’m a little bit afraid that the moment I’ve got it all up and running I’ll get fed up with the whole affair and chuck it. This is the thing. Once it’s up and running I want to be spending about an hour a week keeping it ticking over, and more if and only if I feel like it. I want to be ready to go already. I also don’t want to spend every spare minute between now and the go-live date, whenever that might be, frantically working through that list above and ending up hating it. I have no intention that this will ever become my full-time job. I have to trust it to not take over my life.

As for the other projects… well, I played the ‘what if it’s already good enough to go?’ game a bit earlier in the year. I sent the mermaids out to break the surface at the end of June, and we’re in the middle of the training montage – except it’s a door-knocking montage here (the bit which in a movie would be the speeded-up shots of calendars flicking by and me knocking on all the doors in town until someone lets us in). I remind myself that the film The Way cut out pretty much all of the meseta, and that’s a hundred kilometres that you have to walk through if you want to get to Santiago de Compostela. Piano lessons. That’s going to be an interesting one. I have to give myself permission to not be very good, like I did with Pilates. And as for Parisienne en Ligne, it’s done almost all of it itself. I just need to kick it into the right order and hand it over to the web host.

August Moon: day 14

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How will you start the journey?

I’ve just got home from my grand tour of England. I went almost as far west as you can go without hitting Wales, I went south and stood in the English Channel, I went far into East Anglia. I caught up with school friends, work friends and family. I went back to 1996, 2013, 1994. I talked to my future self, and I saw my nine year old self on video. I spent all of one day, and most of two others, ill in bed.

And now I’m home, and I’m exhausted. I want to start everything, and I don’t know where to start. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I feel that I ought to be starting everything – and ‘ought to’ is the oldest and most dangerous of all the monster phrases. It’s not what I want at all. And there’s no particular reason why starting should happen right now. So I shall give myself permission to begin exactly when I need to, and not before.

I want everything to happen, and I want everyone to leave me alone. I’m panicking a little bit, because I was too ill last week to do certain things I’d meant to (organise my thirtieth birthday party, for example) and it’s nearly September.

I’m reminding myself that no reasonable person would expect me to come home from what has actually been quite a stressful, people-full, week and start working on the next thing. I’m reminding myself that I have left tomorrow (a bank holiday here in England) clear for a reason.

How will I start the journey? I don’t know, yet. I’ll go to bed tonight and sleep, trusting and believing that tomorrow morning the fog will have lifted and the path will be clear. Maybe I’ll want to start everything tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have the courage to phone my new doctor and get the sickness certificate I would need to reclaim the days of leave I lost to illness. Maybe some completely new and surprising solution will have emerged.

I’ll start the journey rested, happy and confident. I’ll start the journey when I’m ready, and I will trust that this will coincide with the journey being ready to start itself.

August Moon: day 13

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What are the stories that limit you?

Stories? I could fill a book with them:

– Doing What You Love is all very well, but one can’t expect to make a living that way.
– Doing anything other than What You Love is a betrayal of your artistic integrity
– expecting to make a living from any form of art is irresponsible and your family will starve
– of course it’s impossible to write without drinking/smoking/coffee
– we are the weird ones and nobody understands us
– it doesn’t matter how brilliant I am, nobody actually likes me
– if it doesn’t get eaten, it’s wasted
– it’s my responsibility to compensate for other people’s shortcomings and omissions

Some of these aren’t even mine. I’ve never smoked, for example. In fact, most of these are now neutralised. Naming them allows me to analyse them, take them to pieces, see how far they are true and where they are not. I’ve got into the habit now of picking up any such sweeping statements I hear myself making, stopping myself, and thinking: what? why?

So much for the verbalised stories. What stories are lurking in my head that I don’t even know are stories, that’s another question. What convictions do I have that I haven’t even thought to question? What could I do without those stories I don’t even know about? Now, that could be fun.