From The Heart

Firm heart of a cauliflower....

I don't put the lights on tonight when I walk into the kitchen which smells of our haddock, garlicky aubergine and tomato supper. I hear a sound at the back door and jump, letting out a scream when I see my husband through the glass, coming in from the garden with a torch. I thought he was upstairs. I know it's him but my body's adrenaline imagines something else.

 He's been in the shed spraying his newly painted ceramic models with a strong smelling polyurethane varnish. He's racing against the clock to get them finished by tomorrow when we are going to take them into the studio to set up his exhibition for next week - thirty five of them. He's not racing actually -  that's what I'd be doing. He's calm and methodical.

When the nice Community Psychiatric Nurse comes this afternoon my husband doesn't recognise him or understand most of what he says.  He brings a form to fill in called ABOUT ME which is to help someone understand his condition and what he needs if he has to go into hospital. He say's it'll make us look very switched on. It feels far away in a distant future and unreal to me. I'd be with him if he had to go to hospital.

The CPN also says that the fact my husband is walking, and engaging with creative pursuits, and inter-acting socially will protect him from depression. Although my husband does say that he often feels very negative when he wakes up  - about himself and about the day.....and sometimes he can get himself out of it by remembering

to have a day of joy by living out of my heart.

And sometimes he can't. Like the rest of us.

Diamond Day

Tonight in our Deeksha Meditation circle we are invited to think of all the things to be grateful for in our lives....

Just thinking back through my diamond day, and remembering each dearly beloved one who has touched and held and nourished me, made me laugh and cry, I feel like a big soft ball of dough enriched with currants and custard and cinnamon, bubbling with yeast, rising to the top of the tin - waiting to be baked...

And discovering that gratitude only needs to last a moment but if you gather up all those moments you could have a lifetime of thanks, a lifetime of love to share....

Rumi says it like this - 

You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck!

Circles of Love & Winter Dread

This morning I clear melting ice from the car windscreen and drive into the sun along muddy Devon lanes, spattered with fallen beech leaves, oak leaves....bronze and gold towers lining the road...... filtering heather blue sky. I'm taking with me the parcel of my fear - to unwrap it, to uncover its roots in the gentle loving space of a Family Constellation session.

It's there that I encounter the tangle of my mother, her mother and her mother's mother - the diamond necklace of my female tribe....and the men they loved...

By the end I feel lighter and stronger, less grief stricken....released from the pull of their stories....unhooked from mine. I don't know if I'm less fearful now but I like having this access to the network of my ancestors......completing, enriching  the circles of love I already have in place in my life...

My husband  has someone to help him with the allotment today - he comes back with knobbly bags full of mud-caked carrots and beetroots and creamy white Jerusalem artichokes.....lighter bags of spinach and chard and the last of the slug nibbled cabbages. We share the washing and scrubbing and leave the roots to drain in the sink.  I roast some artichokes for supper but not too many because of their windy properties......

With the dark closing in so early now I feel a pressure to get everything done in the daylight.....and of course I don't....rain is hitting the window now..... the air in the room is cooling rapidly.....feel the dread of winter stroking my skin.....

Still Shining Behind The Clouds

I wake early and start cleaning -  the taps, the kettle, the loo. I chop tomatoes and cucumber, wash the lettuce for lunch. Would be better if I sat and meditated.... or prayed..... to quiet my churning head, but my moving hands seem to know what's best. My husband sleeps on till the sun creeps through the blinds.

My sister arrives with her big warm smile and I feel immediately soothed, stronger. She drives us to the court. At the security check-in they confiscate my husband's Swiss Army pen knife - the blade is too long for safety - but they let us take it back to the car.

Our lovely lawyer sits with us in an interview room and explains what will happen. He says we have a listening, courteous and fair judge on the bench today.  When I ask if I can sit with my husband in the court to explain anything he may not understand, he says no. He says the judge will want to know why and he doesn't want to bring up my husband's medical condition as it isn't relevant to the speeding charge. I trust him completely -  to me this court world is like an ocean of dangerous and harmless fishes but he knows how to navigate between them, how to sweeten them, how to use them. We wait nearly an hour.

The hardest part is when my husband goes through one door and down the steps into the court room and my sister and I go through another door into the public gallery and I look down and see the back of his head behind the glass panel and he looks small and young and alone.

The judge asks him to say his name and address and if he's pleading guilty or not guilty. My husband says it so quietly he has to repeat it. Then lovely lawyer says his piece and shows the photograph from the police camera of my husband in his red car overtaking a white van in the nearside lane of the dual carriageway. He says he can't explain why his client was going that fast -  73mph in a 40mph limit -  but he's very sorry and he has a clean licence and he's early retired...... and some other stuff we can't hear.

Then it's over. The judge says Disqualified from driving for one week, £200 pound fine, £85 court costs and £20 for something else. I can hardly believe it. Smiles break out like a rash of sunshine.

Celebrating with our habitual Carluccios' hot chocolate and lemon tarts is off the cards (now that I'm watching my weight) so we go home and tuck into hot smoked salmon fillets and the salad I prepared this morning when the world felt like a much harsher, scarier place. 

Much later I celebrate again - crack open five fresh walnuts -  and think a lot about how I could avoid all this stress, this wild imagining, which eats into my bones, greys my hair and freezes my love. How can I dilute my fear with trust... how can I  remember to breathe one breath at a time when it feels as if the sun has been killed instead of just waiting, still shining behind the clouds?

Tomorrow

Moments ......

Today I sink..... into the depths of a cold darkness.......my candle peters out when my eyes are closed this morning, trying to meditate....my mind takes flight......and the tears keep running.....

Lovely stretches and hugs in my yoga class......but my eyes are wobbly....

A bowl of hot left-overs from last night's supper - store cupboard rice and leeks and sweetcorn.  We are supposed to take my husband's aunty to hospital but her bed is cancelled. He says, 

I'm going for a drive - it's the last time I'll be able to.

We are going to court tomorrow. We know he'll be banned from driving  - just not how long for. Probably why I'm so watery....

The loo is smelling -  however much I clean it. I email our lovely plumber but he has gone to Lesotho  to lay water pipes.

I keep the heating down low till my fingers are blue, even with a wooly coat on and I can't bear it any more. I turn it up - don't know why I'm trying to save money on the fuel bills but not on food. 

I'm shocked when I stand on the scales and see how much weight I've gained. I drink vegetable bouillion instead of tea and freeze the flapjacks.

Notice how the fear knotting my stomach about tomorrow makes me mean and punishing.

 Tonight I watch the TV news and see the horror, the wasteland, the loss on the islands in the Phillipines after the typhoon...the three brothers , young men deranged with grief whose mother lies dead under the coconut trees, their father says, I'm hopeless, everything is gone.

Then  I feel the smallness of my complaints......and a sudden gratitude for tomorrow -  whatever it brings.

                                    

Whistling Here Now

Getting ready to go away on holiday for a week - washing tee shirts, buying toothpaste, checking out library DVDs, clearing out the wrinkled carrots at the bottom of the fridge, peeling and cooking a mountain of apples....and not actually packing.....wanting to be there without going through the process of getting there.

I suppose that's like wishing my life away....missing the gifts along the journey while my eyes are fixed on the view up ahead......I've never been a very relaxed traveller though. Being here now sounds so easy but I find it the hardest thing. My husband seems to manage it .....something I could learn from him. 

I wonder if whistling helps him to stay present. It's a cheerful thing to do.....except when it's the same tune (an Abba song - Money Money Money - it's a rich man's world) and it's all the time.....not sure how to be here now when I think I'm going mad with it drilling into my head....

But a phrase comes back to me from somewhere - 

Include it.

It's me imagining my life would be better without it that causes me all this angst...

I'll be back in ten days or so - hopefully with sand in my shoes and light in my soul.

How Can I Serve You?

Frangipani

Sharon fruit....custard apple.....pear

 All orange reflection..

A dear friend is treating me to a late birthday lunch in a high arched, light filled restaurant.

The pumpkin soup is  frothy, creamy, salty.

The tiny bread roll is warm, the butter-pat smoothly spreadable.

The tart tatin is a  mound of appley sweetness - although a bit fridge chilly.

 When the the snake-hipped French waiter comes to clear our table I hand him my plate before he has time to pick it up.

Oh no, he says. I don't want you to do any work  - this is my job.

I want to swoon at his feet. It's not the absurdity of considering the lifting a plate as work but his total commitment to the concept of service, of looking after us so considerately, that stuns me. As if he knows that we do plate lifting and its equivalent a million times a day and just for this moment he is saying,

 Allow me, let me do it, let me take care of you.....you don't have to do it all, all the time.....

Words he's not saying of course but I've put them in his mouth because I want to hear them...the kindness of them.

 I do want someone to take it all away - the pain of it. But sometimes there is another voice in my head which says,

I can do it - but I don't have to do it on my own.

 There is always help ....if I only remember to ask - and trust.

Sometimes there is a different voice which says,

 It's not always about me and what I need. What if I make it about you instead?

How can I serve you?