Things That Slip in Under the Radar

Ages ago I bought a book on my kindle, “The Sound of Paper” by Julia Cameron. Julia and I had parted company not very far into the book when she asked me to make a doll of myself. I worried that someone might pinch the doll and start poking pins in it. I’d made a lot of enemies. Earlier this week there was an opportunity to join Julia at an online writing course about her morning pages - three pages of writing, stream of consciousness stuff that doesn’t need to make sense but usually has a gem or two when you look over what you’ve written. I didn’t sign up, but I did dig out the book and started back at the beginning doing the exercises.

For this particular excerise I was asked to write about myself as if I was a character in a book. Rather than say “I am sixty-two”, it was “She is sixty-two” and then go on to describe myself. It wasn’t about being creative and describing the me I would like to be. It was me as I am. I was supposed to allocate an hour to this task. It was not that I would run out of things to write about, but I had other things on the to-do list so I didn't write do the whole time.

I coped with all the physical stuff. “She wears glasses, but there’s no lens in the left side as she is waiting for a cataract operation for the right eye.” I mentioned the poor hearing and her not wearing her hearing aids as she ought to. I wrote about her diminishing height. She never quite made it to five feet, but now seems to be nowhere near.

I was supposed to include something about my character. If you really want to know yourself, just try writing yourself as a character in a book. Things slip in under the radar. They are the things that you don’t normally acknowledge. It’s not like the secret life of Walter Mitty. It’s just stuff.

“She’s lonely” I wrote. “She’s not particularly friendly. It may be that she thinks if people come too close and looked into her heart, they would see nothing because she is empty at her core.”

Where did that come from? It’s not a new thought. It just slipped under the radar. I’m not unfriendly by any means but I don’t make friends easily and I place too much of the work of maintaining that friendship on other person’s shoulders. I am hard work.

The “empty at her core” is an echo from a conversation I had with a church pastor many years ago. I was a recent importee from a strict church that did not pursue the gifts of the Spirit. The church I moved into was charismatic by nature. Much of the strictness was still in place. I hadn’t melted sufficiently to be at home.

I wasn’t unfriendly at the time, but I was locked-up-shy. Stick me on a stage with an audience and a party piece and I was pure extrovert and exhibitionist. Throw me into a room of school children and I could busk my way through just about any topic. Crowds did not faze me. Close conversations were a different order al together.

Normal conversations just didn’t happen. My brother once described me as “disturbingly quiet”. I don’t know why I was so quiet. On my first day at school some boy pinged an elastic band at me and it hit my glasses. Maybe at such a fragile age I learned that the world was a hostile place, so I kept a distance.

The church pastor suggested the worry stemmed from worrying that if people didn’t like me when they got to know me I had nowhere to go after that. I feared rejection. It was a self-protection strategy but one that did not fit into God’s Kingdom. It took me a long time to dismantle my shyness. Maybe it’s not dismantled at all and I just live with it and push it to the side.

“…she thinks if people come too close and look into her heart, they will see nothing because she is empty at her core.” You know when you are reading something that touches deeply – the tears flow.

“It’s not true,” God was swift to interrupt the writing exercise. “There is no empty core, not from where I’m looking. I see a reservoir of truth, knowledge and experience. I see a well-trodden path towards it. There has been a sharing of heart, time and time again and it never runs dry.”

I am glad that I have a God who interrupts, who will not allow me to hold in my heart something that is so not true.

("The Sound of Paper" by Julia Cameron)

The After Lock-down New

Praise to the brave ones

ready to embrace the

after lock-down new.

old caterpillar habits abandoned

in dried chrysalis husks as

fresh butterfly answers emerge.

the thinking hats are pulled

from dusty shelves as experts

work out how to navigate a

pioneering route through

football and

shopping,

office romances and

politics by the printer,

coffee shop gossip and

the pint in the pub

fine dining and

fish and chip suppers

wearing a face-mask and

keeping a two-metre distance.

Me? I’m not there yet.

When God Sings

I’m in the middle of a mop-up. The previous couple of months have been poetry writing days. My usual Lent challenge is to write a poem a day following the devotionals from a book I picked up from Tear Fund. I also joined in an April poem a day challenge set by the UHI Creative Writers’ group. Some years, I fall near the start and nothing gets written. Other years it’s at the end where I run out of steam. The following few weeks I try to fill in some of the blanks.

One of the missing poems is about singing. Singing is only mentioned in the title and the last line of the devotional. The subject matter is about calling and being in the place where God has put you. It is not supposed to be a stressful thing working where that is. What makes your heart sing is where you should be. I had been thinking about the heart singing and perhaps lamenting that just lately I’m not really singing. I’m not stressed out about the lock-down, but neither am I flourishing. I know many of my church family are using the time to dive deep into their Bibles.

Last night I caught the tail end of one of the sections from Countryfile on BBC1. There was a man, an expert on bird song. At the back of my mind lies Percy Edwards, a contestant on Opportunity Knocks who kept people entertained for weeks with his repertoire of imitating wild birds’ songs. The man on Countryfile identified different birds including a robin and a wren and explained what the song sounded like. He had planted a meadow wilderness of a garden with flowers and trees and a pond, creating the ideal habitat for birds to make their home. He went on to talk about why birds sing. I already knew this. I’d woken up late at night to hear a bird singing just outside the window and went on a google hunt to pinpoint the bird and why it was singing at night.

Birds sing in the morning to tell other birds to keep clear of their territory, or the stay away from their Mrs-bird, or the nest. The words the man used really struck me, enough for me to find a bit of paper and scribble it down. The dawn chorus and the clear bird song were about a bird “claiming ownership” of what belonged to it. That isn’t the only time birds sing. Sometimes they sing because it’s a sunny day and all is right with the world. That probably tells you a lot about why I don’t sing so much.

Because I had been thinking about singing, on another bit of paper earlier in the day I had scrawled a reference down – Zephaniah 3:17

“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you but will rejoice over you with singing.”

My heart, my soul, my spirit made a connection between the bird song and God singing. It doesn’t qualify as doctrine so don’t start up a new church based on it. I thought that just as the birds in the dawn chorus were claiming ownership over their territory in their melodies, God in His singing over me was also claiming ownership over His territory – my life. It thrilled me to think of it. If I could supply words to His song it would have been to tell the enemy to back off, that he no longer had ownership over me, that I belonged to God now. In singing over me, He was also reminding me that I belonged.

Every day the birds wake up to sing, to re-claim ownership, to remind other birds what belongs to them. They don’t just sing the once. It happens every morning and it’s the same song.

God did not sing over me just the once to claim ownership of my heart and life. He didn’t sing on the day, that last Thursday in August 1976 when I asked Him to take ownership over me. Every day He sings. Every day He sings to me to remind me that I am His. He doesn’t cease singing when I have a day of going my own way and not listening. He still sings.

What a wonderful way to begin each day quiet and still, listening to the refrain of God’s song.

May Day Musing

The days seem to merge one into the other with the stay-at-home lock down. I admit that I woke this morning not eager to leap out of bed and greet the day. I wasn’t sure just how clearly the cracks were showing. Everyone has them by now so I’m not alone.

A poet friend reminded me that it’s May. May Day is celebrated this year on the 8^th May but many countries around the world stick to the 1^st of May. It is an ancient Spring festival celebrated with dances, singing and cake. I like the idea of cake!

I have very vivid memories of May Days. At school in the weeks leading up to May Day someone dragged out the maypole from somewhere, polished it up and restrung all the ribbons. We spend afternoons, ribbons In hand, girls and boys partnered up, dancing in and out and around creating coloured patterns on the pole. We never thought about any pagan traditions that are associated with maypoles and our only concerns on the fertility front was the other girls looking at who they were dancing with and dealing with the girly-giggles of “we all know who you are going to marry now”. There was always one dance that knotted the ribbons and an eagle-eyed teacher scrutinising the pole told us which way to walk, and who to circle round to untangle the mess.

I remember, on a May Day morning, listening to the peel of a bell and the bellow of a town crier, dressed up in May Day garb, calling us out to welcome the May Queen and to be there to see her crowned and to celebrate. I was never going to be a May Queen. I was never pretty enough. The only bit of it I envied was that she got to plant a tree. There are three of them planted along a patch of grass near to the path that leads to an alley on the way from the shop to my sister’s house. It’s opposite the church. Some of these trees are well over fifty years. I wonder how many people remember the girl who planted it.

The festivities were held on the village green. There was a smattering of stalls. The village green was, I think, reclaimed marshland. Rainy days did not suit maypole dancing and celebrations. No one enjoys squelching in wet grass in sandals, ankle socks and summer dresses. The venue moved to the Manor House with its formal gardens. It was a place to spark the imagination.

Those days seemed always to be sunny but seeing as we moved off the village green to the manor house they couldn’t have been. I simply look back on them as good days.

My poet friend has been writing and posting poems, Quarantine Quatrains, (four verses of four lines where lines one, two and four rhyme but the third one doesn’t) throughout the lockdown. He posted one about May Day focussed on bird song. Listening to the birds’ chittering brought out a longing for different things. Here’s his third verse

Long for the joys that I have yet to sing

Long for the sudden flight, the lifting wing,

Long for the songs of summers yet to come

Long for the freedom future days may bring.

(https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2020/05/01/the-quarantine-quatrains-birdsong-for-may-day/)

(For a brief moment there I thought I would use the proper citing and referencing technique I have learned over the year for my degree course, but it stresses me out this getting the right order, the right punctuation marks in the right places.)

My longings during the lockdown have tended to be backward looking. I can’t see how we can ever get back to normal life. Covid 19 is not going anywhere for a while. It’s part of the fabric of life now. I see maypole dancing in my childhood and wonder if the maypole will now stay in the shed and ribbons left to decay.

When the Jews left Babylon to return to Jerusalem under Nehemiah’s watchful eye, they rebuilt the walls and started on the temple. In the back of their minds they thought the temple could never be as glorious as the one that once stood there. They got disheartened and focussed on building their own homes first. God spoke to Haggai and stirred up the people to get on with the temple. For those that were thinking what they built could never measure up to what had been before, God made a promise.

“The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts. And in this place I will give peace, declares the Lord of hosts.” (Haggai 2:9)

We have an opportunity to leave behind what was not so great about how we lived life before the lockdown. We have an opportunity to keep doing some of the good thing we have been doing – looking after one another and celebrating the work of people who used to be taken for granted.

There are songs yet to sing and for songs not to be laments of what we think we have lost.

I’m done with dirges. The songs I intend to sing are going to be songs that pull you to your feet and get you dancing.

And I’m not waiting for the lockdown before I sing my first refrain.

Connection

she turns a corner on the path.

The giant warrior lies dead,

broken into a thousand pieces,

severed trunk, root wound still fresh,

sweet scented, bitter orange

bark grey, branches long barren

the storm proves the stronger foe,

roots too bruised to hold tall.

this was no swift heart attack

but a dragging death over decades.

nature’s cycle of cruel beauty.

unexpected sorrow fills her heart.

she kneels beside him,

warm hand on cold bark.

a blessing falls from her lips

fallen warrior, rest now

let the earth embrace you

let the wind whisper a last lullaby

let the sun kiss a gentle goodbye

let the rain rinse away all regret

in your passing let new life begin

hers is a moment of connection in

a world disconnected from nature

seeing and knowing too little

The Full Fat Word of God

It seems with the lock-down and the stay-at-home instructions that people are finding new ways to do business. This is true of the Loch Ness Country House Hotel on the outskirts of Inverness. Without any visitors to cater for they have turned their hand to producing food hampers.

I appreciate that the key workers are putting in long hours to keep the shelves stocked, but I have trailed around supermarkets, keeping my social distance, struggling to find the things I am looking for. I have to confess that some of these places give off an air of panic buying. The last time I was in one of them, I had this end-of-the-world-zombie-apocalypse feeling. I was piling things into a trolley that I didn’t want and didn’t need before getting a grip on myself and putting most of them back. I hung on the biscuits. This is not the end of the world, just a long pause in what is normal.

I decided to let the Loch Ness Country House Hotel do it for me. We were not up to the usual hamper size, but they started to put out half-size ones. I see, they have added cakes to their hampers now, but last week it was the essential supplies – fruit and vegetables, a selection of meat, bread, milk, fifteen eggs and a pack of four toilet rolls among other things. Being a hotel, and a luxury one at that, they had their suppliers, local produce and very fresh. I didn’t quibble on price. Yes, I could have got things cheaper on my own, but the quality of the goods is exceptional. My husband recommends the black pudding!

Emptying the box and packing things away in the cupboards, the fridge and the freezer, I noticed that nothing was low fat. The milk was whole milk. The bread was thick sliced. There were no any labels on the meat to tell me the fat percentages. Nothing looked particularly “low fat”. It was not my normal fare with all the labels carefully scrutinised and compared with similar products.

I once read an article in a magazine suggesting that we no longer enjoy our food. Everything comes with calories and calories come with guilt. We don’t eat for the love of eating. We eat because we have to eat, but we shave off as much fat and calories as we can. What we have on the plate, it’s not tasteless by any means, but it’s not rich either. There is just something missing.

This week, so far, with our hamper goodies, we really have been smacking lips. Everything we have cooked has been delicious. Lock down gives us time to cook proper meals and not phone out for a takeaway or fill the freezer with convenience meals. My husband has been working from home, so he’s not bringing home fish and chips or eating late at night.  I’m not joining him on the sofa for a small bowl of chips and curry sauce. I’d like to think that this will be mealtimes after everything returns to something more normal.

Physically, I’m eating well. I wonder, though, whether the low-fat, scraped-of-all-unnecessary-calories has made the jump to what I eat spiritually. Am I flourishing on the full fat word of God? I remember my Cyprus days with the Gospel Hall. They planted in me a love of the word of God, and a passion for digging deep for myself. I loved my quiet time notes, and my Sunday sermons, but I knew how to mine for treasure.

There is no doubting that with the stay-at-home rules currently in place, there a need to fill the time with something other than Netfix originals. We have the opportunity to be in the word, seeking the treasure. We shouldn’t have that blank expression when we are asked what God is saying to us. We are like those baby birds in the nest that the parent birds cannot always be there with a variety of bugs and worms. It’s time to fend, in the word of God arena, for ourselves. We are not abandoned but God’s teacher steps up to the mark, the Holy Spirit. Everything we need to know, He tells us. Now is that time to learn to listen. He knows what we need to flourish and, like the Son, that Good Shepherd leads us to be best pasture.

He dishes up the full fat word of God.