seventeentimes

I’m giving up sugar - because of the way it makes me obsess about needing something sweet, and makes me feel sick, and makes holes in my teeth, and because it might eventually stop my body from fighting disease.
I’m taking up the clarinet - because I love the idea of being able to play exciting music myself, and it sounds beautiful.

I’m giving up palm oil - because orangutans are losing their homes and dying as a result of of the production process.
I’m taking up eating mostly unprocessed fruits and vegetables and grains and beans - because eating this way makes me feel so happy and alive.

I’m giving up feeling stressed for not being able to live up to standards I set for myself that are too high - because stress suffocates my joy and I’m scared it will cause me damage to keep living with it.
I’m taking up going on dates with my husband (usually accompanied by the dog) - because it reminds me to enjoy the most important things in my life on a daily basis.

I dream of quiet places, of vast places.

I dream of mud clinging to my boots, of frost on my breath.
I dream of looking out over miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.
I dream of so many trees, of rocks and cliffs, of lakes.
I dream of skies above bigger than everything else, so big I might fall through them.

I love the face of my dog, the eyes of my cat, the words of my family, the arms of my husband, the laughter of my friends.

I love stories and music and paintings and films and good television and good wine.

Nothing else seems real or important.

I smell of Green Tea body lotion, my room smells of Amber incense. Both are gifts. My stomach is empty, my tea is cold, the washing is drying on the line. I am alone and it is quiet and these things are just what I need.

I was talking to somebody recently about my struggle with the emotions which come up for me during Aikido training - in particular the intense jealousy I feel towards keith when I’m not in a grounded state of mind. She asked me whether my marriage or my “hobby” was more important to me, and insinuated that I should consider giving up Aikido. It really annoyed me that she was unable to appreciate the value of spending my time on an activity that can build such strength of character and peace of mind (to twist a phrase). In addition it saddened me that she considered it an option to give up in the face of a challenge. In Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk writes,

You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.
It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

I don’t for for a second think that drugs and death are the only options left to us, but the essence of what he’s saying dings a little bell deep inside me - the one that chimes when you speak a previously untold truth, when you name a pain that you have born silently. How many of us know the sensation, often described as ‘emptiness’, of leading a life in which there is a scarcity of “real personal adventure”? What that means to any us is of a very individual nature, but there are clues all around that can help us find our own adventure.

To me, being on an adventure makes any of us a hero within our own story. Within our psyches exist many roles, but in the case of an adventure, it is the hero that takes the helm. I’m developing a theatre project about heroes that I used with two groups of kids in the last couple of years, based on Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology and hero stories. Campbell found that the same underlying structure of motifs, relationships, trials and transformations lay at the heart of hero stories from cultures spanning the whole globe, and ranging across thousands of years of human history. To me that just sparkles with the most magical, awe-some, “zhwaooum-zhwaooum” [sound effect] fairy dust (apologies to Evan). I pared down the structure Campbell outlined in detail and the kids came up with all the details of the stories and dramatised them to make FABULOUS, fantastical, hero stories. The goal is to create a theatrical process that echoes the adventure the characters face in the story, and to be honest, I really hope that just the involvement in this ancient, epic, universal type of story will be transformational in a way I wouldn’t hope to control. Of course, I get plenty out of this experience myself, not in small part because it’s nerve-racking to attempt this original feat of creation in a small space of time - in fact the ‘nerve-racking’ part is central to the whole experience. It makes the adventure.

And so back to my original point. For me, Aikido is beautiful and terrible; fun and painful; exciting and devastating. I broke my collar bone last November doing Aikido. Aikido is changing my life all the time. It’s my personal adventure. And I’m not giving that up.

Okay, so why I’m here, why I’m back, is because I love words, and playing with words, and particularly the magical feeling of creating beautiful, funny and peculiar things with them - places and objects and people and ideas that don’t exist until I’ve described them. Surely words - and whatever ideas and images and feelings they transform into when we experience them - can be seen to be as full of life as you or I, or the closest tree to either of us, or any jellyfish in any sea. I am alive, as far as I’m concerned my imagination is alive, and a great deal of my imagination is made of words. They’re the protein. What’s of interest to many of us of course is what precedes the words in the process of creation. Whatever the indefinable soupy stuff is from which those words are born is a mysteriously beautiful collaboration between myself and the world I have lived in so far. One can detect something of the awe-some-ness of the soup in the marvelous experience of ‘having an idea’. One moment you’re not thinking it, and the next moment you are. And it happens fast, in a flash! If I try right now….

I see an orange fish hanging from a silhouetted, dark tree against a crimson sky, and the whole thing is on a card, like a tarot card.

It’s quite possible I have seen this particular card before somewhere, but if not, how did this image come to exist in my mind? Like I said - it’s partly me, and partly ‘other than me’. At this point I’m left feeling that the boundary implied really starts to break down - when something as fundamentally personal as an original thought, cooked up by my own little grey cells, is constructed from materials ‘beyond me’, haven’t those things become part of who I am?

It seems parallel with the vague thoughts I am able to muster (with little grasp of physics) regarding the fact that between me an the end of the sofa there is no empty space, it’s all full of oxygen; but that the atoms that make up the oxygen are made up of electrons and protons and maybe neutrons - none of which I faintly understand, but which I have been told exist in relation to one another in terms of size and distance like distant stars; so after all there is a lot of empty space between me and the other end of the sofa, not to mention all the empty space inside me; and to cap it all off, I have been reliably informed, lying on this end of the sofa as I am, my body doesn’t ’stop’ where the sofa ’starts’, right at the edge of each of us, our teeny-tiny components actually overlap a bit. Curr-azy stuff*.

To my fumbling mind, these points collect around a central idea of the connectedness of all things. I don’t begin and end… anywhere, exactly. My words spring forth from soup that doesn’t begin and end anywhere either. So that soup, just what is in there? Is it finite? These questions do not so much compel me to attempt to answer them, as to want to dip my spoon into the soup and see what those little pasta letters spell out!

Put another way, I feel as if there is an infinite playground inside my head, and I want very much to play in it. Left to my own devices I don’t play in it even a smidgeon as much as I’d like.

My goal is to use this space to write in, a little bit, and often.

*If my attempts to describe these facts are so bastardized as to render them uselessly unscientific and damaging to any of the points I was trying to illustrate with them, I hope you will forgive me.

It is one year and five days since my last confession… I mean… well, what do I mean? Blog is a brilliant but unwieldy term - and thank goodness my computer can spell better than I can (unweildy not good is). It used to be that it could only spell better than me when I was working on a word document, but as of late it pipes up here, there and everywhere. I am grateful, and yet sometimes I feel patronised, or nagged at. Perhaps it is because the words are underlined with those tense wiggly red lines. I’ve heard that students perform better when teachers use colours other than red to mark with, due to the association of red with failure (presumably the study was carried out in particular region) and the fact that fear of failure/feeling a failure is ultimately not a very productive state. I knew a woman who used a purple pen to mark her student’s work. I would like my computer to make ’suggestions’ about spelling in green. I like the way I spell some words better anyway.