Meeting Myself

I bumped into myself today

I am looking well

A little bit of extra weight perhaps

I noticed I’d had a recent haircut

It is very neat

Was I not going to go for something

More uncontrolled?

I am a creature of habit.

Wasn’t it my birthday last week?

I don’t ask myself for numbers

I told myself about the coffee meetup with friends

I surprise myself sometimes at

How sociable I can be.

Carrot cake? It’s always carrot cake

And a pot of tea

I asked myself how my university course was going

Creative Writing, yes?

I confessed to myself that it was getting tough

Have I read the Illad, I asked myself

No, I replied.

We did not talk about school and what

I learned and didn’t learn

Because of the class I was in.

It is on Spotify, if I want to listen to it.

And the knitting? I asked

I told myself about the Tunisian crocheting hooks

I am keen to start playing with them

But there are other project to finish first

Ah, I said

I never was one for completing things, was I?

I laughed with myself about the half-knitted baby cardigan.

I glanced at my watch

The number 5 bus was due

I hugged myself and said I must dash

Don’t be a stranger, I said

As I turned away

I met myself a few weeks back. Up until then I had been busy. There was no conversation at mealtimes. Breakfast was spooned into the mouth by one hand while the other was thumb-scrolling down Facebook posts. The iron was spitting steam and hissing heat as I watched the another puzzle piece fall into place in a who-done-it. My husband’s theory on these things is it always turns out to be the famous actor in an understated role. Not this time though.

I met myself somewhere between 11 o’clock and midday on a Tuesday. You could call it new age if you like. An elemental relaxation class on zoom with an intriguing envelope of art materials. There was a compass in the pack and north for me points to the corner of the kitchen where the pantry meets the fridge. South is a bookcase. West is the cooker and east is a vegetable rack in the corner hijacked by bird seed and suet balls.

I met myself playing with a blue plastic prickly massage ball. My left foot has always been a wee bit bigger than my right. It turned out to be much more sensitive too. I missed much of what was said and done after because I was tying the laces on my shoes. The ball did a once over most body parts and woke up the sluggish stuff on the outside.

Yes, I met myself. I blew a feather. I breathed in slowly.

And somewhere in it all, I met myself and said, ‘Hello.’

It is all to easy in the flurry and the hurry, the scurry and the worry of the day-in day-out routine to lose touch with ourselves. We become strangers to ourselves and we suddenly we spot ourselves in a mirror and come face to face with someone who looks a little bit like us, but probably isn’t us.

A feather and a blue plastic massage ball might help in the meeting of yourself. A stroll along a path. Watching birds chitter and chatter as they bathe one another in a puddle. It is when you slow down you meet yourself.

Find yourself your way and say, ‘Hello.’

Bull's Balls and Man's Relectance to Change

I should say that any step toward turning into my mother should be a good one, but I seem to have caught her unwillingness to travel by bus. For her it was all about the size of the windows and whether, should the bus turn upside down in an accident, she is of a size that does not pass through small windows. For me, it’s all about toilets and the not-really-need-to-go-but-what-if? My husband has instructions to keep talking to distract me. It is not so much about what he says but the fact that he is saying it.

Yesterday’s topic was falsely labelled food. Bombay duck for example isn’t duck at all but a fish. Apologies for the spoiler if you did not know that. Rocky Mountain oysters, the husband said, are not oysters. I had to google them when I got home. Without my hearing aids there’s much about a conversation that I don’t pick up.

‘Buffalo, boar or bulls' testicles known as criadillas are breaded and fried.’ The article went on to explain that they are hard to come by in supermarkets, as hotels and various eateries tend to hog them. They might have been popular food way back in the dark ages, being cheap and widely available, but not so much these days, not in my neck of the woods. If I had lived back then with my list of won’t eats, I would have starved.

I was reading an article about experiments to change people’s attitudes to certain things. It was to do with , not  eating bull’s balls but, a test of true and false. The ones that scored highly on the test were praised to the hilt. The ones that did not do so well got a sad pat on the back and a pitying look. Then the people running the test confessed that they had made up their high score/low score lists. Not everyone given a high score had achieved one. Not all low scorers got a low score. The participants knew the lists were fabricated. Yet, over a cup of coffee, when asked how they had done, the high score list said they had done well and the low scorers? Yes, you’ve guessed it. They said they had done badly. Nothing owned up to had changed their view about their scores.

I think I could look at the whole list of nutritional elements attached to bull’s balls, but still not want to eat one. I could have them costed out and proven as a cheap meal in these days of cost of living price rises, but I still would not eat one. I could be faced with a plate where it all looks delicious and smells delicious, but still would not want to eat one. My mind is already made up and I am unwilling to change.

It makes me wonder where I have drawn my lines concerning what I will eat, or won’t, or the other lines that come to mind – what I will wear and what I won’t, where I will go and where I won’t (this comes with an interesting tale of a search for a toilet in Luxor, but I’ll save it for another time).Or who I will like and who I won’t.

I have been reading a book on my phone, ‘The Path of Change’ by Pope Francis. He talks of visiting somewhere, South Africa perhaps, where he met young people with T-shirts with the logo printed on front, ‘I am not the danger. I am in danger.’ We presume things, or have been fed things through various channels that refugees are dangerous, or Muslims are dangerous, or Jehovah Witnesses are dangerous. The truth is very different but the mind is made up and we are reluctant to change.

A local hotel where my sister lives has been hijacked by the government to house refugees. It is on the edge of the village, close to a motorway. Language, even when you speak the same one, is not understood. There is nothing there to relieve the boredom, and no opportunities to work without a permit. It might be a good idea t hand out the t-shirt, ‘I am not a danger. I am in danger.’ There have been meetings between the village people (not the pop group) and the refugees. There have been culture exchanges with different food and different music between the two groups. Maybe there are English lessons happening now. But ask a villager if they have changed their mind about the refugees? I think not. They are like the high scorer, that might actually be a low scorer but because they were on the high scorer list insist they scored highly.

Would it help if someone sat on me, forced my mouth open and pushed a Rocky Mountain oysters down my throat? Would I smile, eyes wide open, and declare it to be the best food ever? Possibly not.

Education has always been thought to be the way to change people and their opinions. But the scientific evidence is not there.

I think it must start with me, where I am, giving the right balance to the information I have, choosing to steer clear of long held prejudices, to make a change. And, when I’m proved wrong, accepting the wrongness and making the next change.

 

Earthquake at the Back Door

 

It happened on a Friday. Not last Friday but a few Fridays ago. Around about tea-time. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I was standing beside the back door at the time. Could I have been about to check the washing on the line? It had been out there for a while, waiting for a warmer day, a drier day, a day when there was a snapping breeze.

I had a panic attack.

Now, you might have had too many to count. Goodness knows there are plenty of things out lurking behind corners waiting to ambush you. Or maybe not out there at all. Maybe they drop on the hall carpet wrapped in brown paper, stamped and falling just below the letterbox.

I have had ripples of panic before. The low impact ones that can be waved away by drinking tea and reading a book. Or, in my case, picking up my knitting and completing a row of yarn over, sl1, knit1 and pass slipped stitch over.

This was not a ripple. It was earthquake size and although nothing on the outside was falling over, inside worries and anxieties were slamming down everywhere like mental boulders. Yes, the unfixed toilet seat was there, and the ironing pile which inhales and exhales on the chair in the front room. The felting on the shed roof was slapping in the hurricane wind and that Zoom meeting I was leading later, the one I wasn’t looking forward to, you know, the one where I might have to challenge unkind behaviour from a previous week, was drawing near. Switching off lights to save electricity meant I was living in the dark. And I was perpetually cold from fear of wasting heat.

It was just too much.

I stood beside the backdoor, a rabbit caught in the headlamps of life. Rooted, not running, feeling some kind of end hurtling towards me.

‘Go and do the washing up.’ Some might think it was a random thought. As a person of faith, I don’t think that way. It might me my voice, in my head, but the uniqueness of the thought makes me think it is possibly not my thoughts.

There are so many times where we are not in control. Re-reading my list, I admit that most, if not all, of those things are actually within my control. I have an iron and an ironing board so that pile that inhales and exhales on the chair in the front room doesn’t have to be there. Maybe it is the accumulation of things that I could have dealt with, but didn’t, that caused the overload. It felt like things were spiralling out of control.

I went and did the washing up. It was one thing, one small thing, that I could control. I could fill up the bowl, add a dash washing up liquid, and restore order somewhere.

The earthquake subsided.

Sometimes what is needed in those moments when the earthquake within begins is to find the one small thing that can be done. One little corner of control. And just focus on that.

 

 

The Journey Stick

An interesting envelope was delivered last week. It was white and light. Very light. There was a sender’s name on it, which I won’t share with you. Inside the envelope was a stick. Yes, just a stick with no covering letter. Just the stick.

A couple of weeks ago I enrolled on a meditation and relaxation online course. It was something to do with the elements and a compass and finding out compass directions, facing them as we drifted into a meditation. Earth, air, fire, water, little bit of new-agism and directing healing energy to someone who wasn’t well. New-agism aside, it was space to reconnect with me. If my whole body, and not just my tongue, was talking it would have been saying, ‘Hello there. Gosh, it is nice to spend time with you.’ Yes, I am one of the few on this planet that says, ‘Gosh’. I don’t stretch is to, ‘Golly gosh. So often I am busy and when I am not so busy, I am knitting. I am not generally rolling my feet over a massage ball.

This morning it was constructing a ribbon stick. The ribbons and the twine were in last week’s envelope. It was not a hard thing to do. I am still battling to make my pompom from a different project I’m signed up to. I had a mixture of elastic bands, wool and tapestry thread to secure my ribbons to the stick. I was humming Ian Drury’s ‘Hit me with your rhythm stick’ as I was working, replacing ‘rhythm’ with ‘ribbon’.

I pictured myself younger, slimmer and more athletic as I moved about the kitchen with my stick, pretending I was a gymnast doing a rhythm routine. I twirled. I span around. I waved. All with ribbons rippling beside and above me. I got dizzy and I had to sit down.

I am reading my way through ‘365 Days Wild.’ It is about finding ways each day to connect with nature. Yesterday I was supposed to be eating rainbow coloured fruit and veg. I think the curry vaguely qualified for the orange day.  I haven’t plucked up the courage yet to make today’s suggestion of nettle soup. A few days back I was asked to make a journey stick.

I was sharing with the ladies at the relaxation class what a journey stick was. It was all about getting outside and taking a walk. Armed with a stick and a dozen pieces of string, I was supposed to be tying interesting things to my stick. A feather perhaps, a leaf, a curl of lichen. You get the picture. The bits of string are still in the pocket. It is still on the to-do list. You were supposed to arrive back home with a fully covered journey stick. Noticing things. The little details the eyes wash over.

This afternoon, speaking with friends I was thinking about the journey stick. A walking through life journey stick and what we end up tying to it. There are a lot of ‘can’t do’ and ‘it just wouldn’t work’ and ‘nothing will change’. Lots of negatives. I had a conversation with a friend on the phone the other day about all the things that will never change. It is too easy to hold an inner dialogue of the impossibilities of life. It there had been a journey stick, I could have seen myself untying some of those things. There has to be a better conversation going on inside.

Every so often, mostly when my phone battery needs recharging and I don’t have access to my Bible study app, I read instead ‘A Shorter Morning and Evening Prayer’. What can I say? I am a bit of a liturgy girl. The font is very small but nothing a magnifying glass can’t cope with. This is one of the morning songs. I don’t know the tune so I don’t sing it, but when it comes around it speaks to my heart.

‘I bind unto myself today

The strong Name of the Trinity,

By invocation of the same

The Three in One and One in Three…

 

‘I bind unto myself today

The power of God to hold and lead,

His eye to watch, His might to stay,

His ear to hearken to my need.

The wisdom of my God to teach,

His hand to guide, His shield to ward;

The word of God to give me speech,

His heav’nly host to be my guard…

 

There are a lot more verses than my little book contains, about wielding the power God gives to stand up against the enemy and his hellish plans. It is all part of St. Patrick’s Breastplate.

It is just the binding to myself that concerns me. That and my journey stick. The walking through life journey stick. I don’t know that I could handle the whole tying a leaf or bit of lichen bit to a real stick. But what do I tie to my life metaphorically? What am I holding on to that hinders me? What am I tying to my life that is positive and encouraging?

At the weekend I untied a particular church from my life. I had been looking for a new church family and was determined to give things time to see if I fitted there, or if they fitted into my way of doing church. Someone had posted a Facebook word that we don’t just go to a church we like bit need to go to a church that we can build with. The church I had been trying out turned out to be not one that I could build with. So I untied it. It wasn’t arrogance, or presumption on my part but just listening to my heart that told me I wasn’t home – not yet.

When something you tied to yourself a long time ago, and perhaps needs to be untied and cast away, it’s not so easy. The Holy Spirit is the one to talk to about it.

I am a person that actually enjoys untying knots. Just watch my patience when it comes to a tangled ball of knitting wool.

The Ripped-to-Shreds List

I stood at the bus stop, my mind engaged in a mental conversation with God. Technically it doesn’t qualify as a conversation as I was not looking for His views on what I had decided to do. There was no exchange happening, so that made it a monologue, didn’t it? I was telling Him. Not asking Him. I didn’t want to be talked out of what I planned to do. It was a good plan I fooled myself into thinking. Reasonable, thought out, pros and cons listed.

I’m church hunting. Much as a house hunter might carry a list of requirements that their new home must measure up to, I have my own list. Determined not to make any instant decisions I have decided to commit myself to a month or two to see what comes or not. I am into week six, although weeks three and four I didn’t do to church as I had a really bad cold. Four weeks of going.

There is a voice in my head that tells me that this isn’t the way to do things, the list. It’s a very detailed list and I’d rather not have to compromise on any item. The voice also tells me that it is not what I get out of going, but what I can contribute.  It should be God directing my path, rather than me marching off in a certain direction, armed with a list.

I crossed through much of the list and just two things remained. If, I said, to God at the bus stop, these two requirements were not met, this would be my final visit. I’d try another church.

Just two things.

The first was worship songs. The church has a very young band who bounce around at the front. I’d not yet met a song I knew. To be honest, the lyrics were ‘me’ and ‘I’ and ‘we’ and ‘us’ and very people focused. I know that God has done a lot and I wouldn’t be where I am without His help. I wanted to praise God without me getting in the way. That condition was not met. Not really. I have to admit that it did not stop me worshipping. There was a line about God rescuing us in one of the songs and I turned my thoughts toward someone who I had long thought impossible to rescue and God did it. I was thankful. It added to my list – that opportunity to testify to God’s goodness. I didn’t know the working of the church to know if I could just go forward and say something, so I kept quiet.

The second thing was about the preacher. I wanted it to be someone else, not because this man is not a great preacher, but because he always preached. I sometimes feel that when a church leader doesn’t invite others to take the pulpit, it can be down to a lack of trust. If you are a church leader and you have grown up and matured people in your flock, why wouldn’t you trust them to speak a godly message? Part of this is down to a church I once went to in South Africa. It was in the years immediately following the end of apartheid. Churches were in the process of integrating people. There were Indian and black members of the church that knew their bibles and had a solid faith walk, but they were not given the chance to speak. No one but the church minister spoke there. It seemed the wrong way to grow gifts in people if they did not have a chance to exercise their gifts. I like variety. I like being a potential part of that variety of preachers.

That requirement wasn’t met. It was the man. There was no different a preacher. However, he began speaking and my list was really torn to shreds.

The word was about Gideon in Judges 6. God had called him a mighty warrior even though Gideon was threshing wheat in a wine press hiding from the enemy. Gideon did not see himself as a mighty warrior and needed some encouragement. The story moves into the fleece prayers.

My own personal fleeces about the worship songs and preacher had not been met. I hadn’t thought of them as being fleeces but they were. The preacher went on to say that Gideon’s actions with putting out the fleeces fitted into the way people did things in those days. They did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. They didn’t have an abiding Holy Spirit within. Fleeces are all a part of chance and randomness and the very fact that Gideon did it twice shows that it did not always give you an answer you could step out in faith on.

Today, he said, we don’t put out fleeces. We pray. We search scripture. We ask wise friends. But we don’t look to chance or random stuff like a red lorry passing by in the next five minutes. Please don’t assume I am not praying, searching the scriptures or asking advice. I am, and others are praying too. And giving me advice.

If there are things from my list not there in the church it does not mean that this is not the church God has ear-marked for me. I have often done things in churches that perhaps were technically not allowed, or not usual or common, but I have had such a burning inside that I have to say something, and I have stepped over or around these things to do them. There’s nothing to stop me asking the music group to sing a familiar song once in a while. If there is no outreach group, it doesn’t mean I can’t start one. It no one shares a poem, it doesn’t mean I can’t. If I want to share a story about the un-rescueable man that God rescued, then I should – or at least find out what the rules are.

Church meetings are not just about worship songs and sermons. My list was defunct. It was after all the worship and the speaking and well into teas and coffees that I discovered there was something important I had not put on my list – fellowship and friendliness. I could have been a psychopath with an axe in my rucksack but someone, knowing nothing about me, offered me a lift home so I didn’t need to dash off to catch a bus. Someone else said to me, ‘I hear you write poetry…’ How did she know I wrote poetry? I’d like to say it was a word of knowledge but another lady in the church had been at the Sunset café way back when I read it out over the noise of a coffee-maker-hiss and the echoes of wooden floor boards.

So list demolished, permission not granted to go elsewhere, I will be there next week. Armed with a poem? Perhaps. Ready with a testimony? Maybe. Talking to a member of the worship team about golden oldies? A possibility. Taking my tambourine? Absolutely yes.

Splashing in Puddles

I am a visual kind of person. I make connections between things that are seemingly unconnected. A tree flattened by a hurricane wind, the three crows working out how to dismantle my bird feeder or a snail on the path. It says in Romans that nature itself speaks a clear message of who God is and what He does.

I’d walked along to the shop to buy newspapers and lunchtime pies to warm up in the oven. It was damp, but not raining. My mother’s wisdom said that if the paving stones in her back garden were not dry there was no use in hanging out washing. The paths were not dry so I figured it wasn’t a day for hanging out washing.

On the journey back, which was a little wetter, I noticed a deep puddle next to part of the pavement. It’s the same stretch of pavement that seems to be a gathering place for snails on wet days, but not this day. There were birds, small brown birds, maybe three or four. It had all the elements of a swimming pool with youngsters splashing around. They were dipping and slapping water everywhere as they washed themselves. It did not seem to be a solitary bath. It was too small a puddle and there were too many birds to fit comfortably. They heard the sound of my approach and lifted off in a small wet cloud.

My Thursday afternoons are spent with a small group of Roman Catholic ladies. I am not a Roman Catholic myself but I had been invited along. In those early days, they were not shy about bringing out their rosary beads. I was given a set to hold. Sadly, I know people that would be very uncomfortable dealing with rosary beads. I just held them. Nowadays, they don’t do that, not because they think I might be offended but, they just don’t do it. It is a gentle hour and a half of touching base with the quiet space inside.

I thought about the birds in the puddle and the splashing about. The word ‘refreshing’ came to mind. It had been morning. The birds had done their singing much earlier on. It was time for a wash and breakfast and meeting the challenges of the day – refreshed.

I thought about the meeting that afternoon and how much we played with prayer and singing and shared life with one another. The word ‘refreshing’ came to mind.

I introduced them to twenty-second hugs, somewhere I had read somewhere. The quick embraces do nothing to ground a person. Twenty seconds allows for something deep inside a person to be touched. There is probably a name to a specific hormone that is released. People melt somehow. Bodies that have held it together for so long, relax.

There is a special something that occurs in a communal event that doesn’t happen when a person is alone. It all depends on the kind of community whether it’s a good thing or not. The birds could have cleaned themselves up just as well on their own – the dust and dullness washing away in a pool of water, but doing it together with other birds added something. The dust and the dullness of something more than feather happened.

Something deeper.

Something like the bird equivalent to a twenty second hug.