Just watched this as I was looking for some material for use with some groups of staff. It is simply beautiful, full of images words and music that say more about the real lived experience of mental illness than a thousand text books.
Settle down and watch…
By any measurement, Helen was a beautiful woman.
She had the sort of frame that never crumpled clothes- all willowy and slender like the girl she had never quite stopped being, despite the beckoning of middle age. Her light brown hair was shoulder length and perfectly behaved, swaying around an oval, symmetrical face. Her eyes were a startling shade of green and her skin smooth-brown and lightly freckled like a perfect beach pebble.
Hers was an effortless beauty, undefeatable by fashion mistakes or bad hair days. It was built around a kind of elfin simplicity that could render her enticingly vulnerable in jeans and old sweaters yet was also stunningly sophisticated in a silk dress. She even woke unruffled like some character from a toothpaste commercial,
Men stared, following the arc of her limbs in the corner of their eyes, thrilling to the inching up of the hem of her skirt or the brushing back of wind-wisped hair behind a perfectly formed ear- and Helen hated it. She loathed the way they flattered her and competed for her attention. She hated it too when despite her best efforts they turned to jelly as if she was some kind of Kryptonite to their not-so-Super man.
Women, however, tended watch in envy- in the same way that they might stare at glossy magazine pictures of models wearing clothes they could never afford. Some wanted to be near her, as if to bask in her reflected beauty, whilst all the time probing for cracks in the lovely façade through which they could find her gloriously wanting.
Helen had discovered early in life that hers was a kind of beauty that did not seem to draw people in- rather it had an exclusive quality like an invisible force-field. People would stare at her, then step back deferentially. This had become the unconscious defining characteristic of Helen’s relating and communing with others; she lived at the centre of a curated space, like a roped-off podium in an art gallery, a rare and expensive exhibit that should be appreciated only from hushed distance. Helen herself was insightful enough to be aware of the phenomenon, but not to understand the cause of it. In most social situations she found it impossible to fully close the gap.
As a surprising late and only child, she had never needed to compete for attention, it was given to her as if by divine right. Neither did she have to work hard to please her care givers as they seemed satisfied just to polish her exterior, to dress her, display her and reverence her.
This might suggest the ideal circumstance for creation of a self-centred spoiled child, but Helen had never really become selfish. She loved her doting parents and wanted to make them happy so she attended the ballet classes and competed in the gymkhanas. She learned to play piano competently and to provide entertainment at her parents’ dinner parties. It had been easy and undemanding to fulfil her mother’s mostly benign longings for genteel accomplishment and ornament her father’s advancing years with soft, if tedious, Sunday afternoons of companionship.
Despite growing up in this comfortable suburban idyll, Helen was always aware that something was missing, although she was never quite sure what it was. She felt it like a kind of emptiness – like finest food never tasted, or some vital person she had yet to meet. Like the violet edge of a rainbow it fringed everything she did. It was most noticeable in her unconscious yearning for more, despite guilty conviction that she already had far too much.
Over time she learnt to suppress this longing; to dismiss it as middle class cliché and the faux-ennui of privilege, but it was rather like the ache of sensitive teeth that could be triggered anew by small changes in the weather. It could often surprise her.
Helen knew that being the object of adoration also brought also great responsibility. She was the source of some kind of divine blessing on this kind and generous couple into whose life she had been inserted unexpectedly. She learnt her part well, but still the distance was there – that roped-off and poorly understood space across which she watched the others watching her.
Sun lights upon shy green things
And we cheer
For all these things are new again
But darkness is not banished
There it remains, cloaked up in the crowd
Waiting to strike down hope
Like the late frost
Lay down your coats
For the world is warming
Wave branches cut from
Contour planted conifers
Hashtag hosanna to all those
Holy celebrities
Let blossom bloom before it falls
For they crucify tomorrow.
We are still in the middle of season of Lent. For those of us who still seek to travel within the ancient and generous Christian traditions, Lent is all about appreciation of journey, particularly through wilderness, through temptation and through encounter with our own weaknesses.
In the depths of this encounter, Easter is so far away as to be almost irrelevant. There are no miracles here, just grit in the shoe and hard miles to travel.
This year, I decided to do without sugar- as far as this is possible in a culture that even puts sugar in baked beans. In practice it has meant avoiding anything sweet, any fizzy drinks or chocolate. It has mostly not been a difficult thing to do and has clear health benefits. It is a small thing to signify sacrifice.
But the middle of the Lenten wilderness has little to do with food choices- this I feel keenly at present. I do not long for oasis, I long to live without the need of oasis. To live not longing for weekends and expensive holidays, but rather to simply walk in the way that I am made to be. To stop searching the horizon for something to aim at, to look forward to. To stop sugar coating life and just to live for something wholesome and true.
Perhaps you understand this- your walk is also hard, maybe an awful lot harder than mine.
In the middle of our Life-Lent, I offer you a poem/prayer I wrote a few years ago. I dared to imagine God speaking to me, sharing a moment with one of his more troubled and wayward sons.
Holy Spirit mojo
Put down those things you carry
Sit with me a while
Stop making things so complicated
It is much simpler than that
Start from where you are
Not where you would like to be
Not where others say you should be
There may come a time when
I will warm your heart towards new things
But right now
I just want to warm your heart
All around you is beauty
See it
All around you are people I love
And I rejoice as you learn to love them too
Look for softness in your heart
There I am
Look for tenderness
And it will be my Spirit
Calling you to community
It is not for you to cut a way into the undergrowth
Or make a road into the rocky places
Rather let us just walk
And see were this path will lead us
You and I
For my yolk rests easy
If you will wear it
And my burdens lie soft on the shoulders
If you will lift them
I was watching this advert the other day…
It made me think…
An off-grid spoon whittler.
Sounds good to me. Why would I want to be on grid when I can sit in a wood whittling spoons?
I was pretty sure that the slightly maniacal look rocked by the woman in the clip above was far less likely whilst carving spoons than it might be sitting in front of a bloody screen.
So I sliced a branch from the yew tree in our garden and set to with the knife Emily bought me for Christmas, an axe and a hook knife I bought from e bay.
Several blisters later, I made this.
I am proud of my spoon, so I went on-grid to display it to the world. Now back to the woods…
It has been a tough week- there are lots of conflict and tensions in my day job at the moment. Part of this is to do with change, and the instability and stress it introduces into the lives of groups of people involved (myself included, despite being the instigator of this change.) Some of is has been about long established tribalism that can sometimes dominate health systems; one group of staff takes a negative view of another group and this is refreshed and reinforced by selective critical observation to the point where it becomes self perpetuating.
There has been another tension too, which is never far away in mental health circles, to do with how we understand the nature of the very thing we are trying to assist people with and how this understanding should shape the methods and practices that we employ. Tribalism is part of this understanding as well- traditionally perspectives are divided along two main lines; those who favour a biological deterministic model, and those who favour a social/psychological model. The reality of course, as outlined in my previous post, is that BOTH have to be part of our thinking, but more recently we have arguably been dominated by the former (biological) model. The whole point of establishing multi-disciplinary teams was to ensure that the different perspectives brought by different training, professional backgrounds and training might be able to work together. Let us not pretend this is always easy however.
Anyway, at the end of a long hard week wading through this kind of thing, I am left, beached like a whale on the soft shores of the weekend, waking early with it all in my head. And as with many similar challenges, I feel the need to write, to connect the whirling internal thoughts to some words. To allow them to shape me as I shape them. To be deliberate and as honest as I can about the emotion, the hopes and failings, the tiredness and the determination to keep on, keep on.
So may your weekend be full of good things. Here is a little more of the novel- the prologue…
Prologue
Night fell like revelation. He sucked at it like a brown bottle in a paper bag.
Each emerging star was speaking. Quite what language they were using was less clear however.
But it was all so beautiful.
So beautiful that it slowly lifted him from the grassy knoll he was perched upon and floated him upwards, out into the indigo air, laced as it was with slow tendrils of wood smoke from down below. The last cry of an oystercatcher echoed out over the estuary far below him as it combed out the town beyond into long lines of light.
He blinked back an unforced tear as he drank in the fast-disappearing day slipping below the distant mountains. A whole vault of holy sky opened wide above him, shaming the Sistine ceiling for gaudy imitation.
Transcendence, they what they call this the man whispered as he reached down to take hold of a can of strong lager.
I am bloody Shamen minus the bloody happy-chants.
Who needs all that religious shite? Just give me a Scottish loch at dusk and a six cans of export…
He cackled, then caught himself short.
It occurred to him anew that there are some people whom, despite all sorts of provocation and excuse just never got to go crazy.
They would never feel the glorious loosening of the suffocating blanket of convention and social obligation.
They never know what it is like to simply let go.
What terrible lives they must lead.
He cackled again, then made a spontaneous noise that sounded like the barking of a dog.
Madness is marvellous.
I hate those blog posts in which people apologise for NOT blogging, as if they owe it to the world. As if all of you out there are waiting agog for the next deep insights from the highest of keyboard gurus. The posts usually go on to offer excuses of great busyness on the part of the blogger, who has been off saving babies from starvation or preventing the extinction of blue wales.
I have been doing none of those things, I just have not been writing much of late. Some of this is because my heart has been heavy. Also, my day job has been emptying me like a big boot on a toothpaste tube.
However. I have been trying to invest in some other writing- something that requires a longer term plan. It is that thing that we writing types regard as El Dorado. The ultimate ego object for the scribbling type; a novel.
The problem is having something to say, and a story to carry it. Characters that are believable and both interesting and flawed. And we have to write for a long time in the almost certain belief that the novel will never be published, because they almost never are (note the word ‘almost’.)
Novels are secret, solitary affairs, but I have decided to publish a few excerpts on this blog. I think it might make things a tiny bit more real, but I also feel the need to get things ‘out there’ as well as just ‘in here’.
If you find the words engaging, meaningful, thanks. If not, well don’t read them!
The town had only one row of street lights, 17 in all; the boy often thought that they served only to make the dark seem darker. The last lamp in line along the sea front always held a bowl of rain water in its lens that lapped at the light as it fell towards the pavement. When the wind blew the effect was strangely amplified, acting as a kind of sulphur-orange iris, bending the light into evil swirls and edges that he always tried to avoid stepping on.
Today he shrugged his shoulders deeper into his coat as another flurry of rain rattled down the road and splattered onto the roof of the empty bus stop. Despite the dark, the slick surface of the tarmac wore a kind of oily sheen like a whales back rolling through the surface of the sea. He was already soaked right through the thin layers of clothes he wore, but this new shower found the collar of his jacket and injected trickle of cold water between his hunched shoulder blades.
He did not mind the rain- it rained most days on the West Coast where the air blows in still full of grey ocean. He always felt comfortable in the rain, safer even. It keeps most people indoors. Even those who adventure out into it keep their heads down inside expensive waterproof coats. It was possible for him to become almost invisible. He could dissolve into the water and allow it to carry him like a burn might take hold of a falling leaf.
He felt rather than heard the approach of a car driving up from the shore and fought the urge to duck into a hedge.
Its OK boy he whispered, reaching a hand to meet the muzzle of a medium-sized black and white dog.
The shadows startled, leaping to hide from the harsh glare of panning headlights, but the car did not stop; its driver was on a mission, moving too fast for the road conditions, the noise of its engine almost inaudible above the hiss of water thrown out by the tyre treads.
Let’s go. He turned again towards the dark houses up ahead with the dog close to his feet, tail tucked close against the rain.
The small town thinned out, houses dispersing into the fold and curl of ground. Pavement soon gave way to rough cut grass verge, indented with drainage channels that might have tripped the unfamiliar.
After about half a mile the boy and his dog reached imposing gateposts that marked the driveway of a big house set tall above the road. Light from some of the windows spilled over the steep grass bank as they climbed and the boy instinctively darted between the rhododendron bushes that lined the gravelled approach to the front door.
He hardly ever used this door. If asked, he would not have been able to say why. It just did not feel right somehow; like wearing shoes belonging to someone else even if they were the same size as your own. He was also more likely to meet his Aunt and Uncle and would have to have conversations about where he had been, what the weather was like and what food he wanted for dinner. It would be polite conversation, and he liked his Aunt and Uncle, but it would still be better to avoid it if at all possible.
So he left the drive at the corner half way up the hill, and took a less well defined path, shabby with weeds even in the darkness, that climbed up steps then crossed a small burn that was chattering from the rainfall, and found its way to the weak pool of light from the porch at the back of the house. He found the key under the cracked plant pot, and quietly slipped inside.
Wait there boy. He took off his dripping jacket and placed it onto the hooks that already carried a bulging strata of assorted coats, then reached for an old towel to dry down the dog. The dog made a noise half way between a whine and a wobble as the towel proved inadequate to the task of drying wet fur. Douglas paused, holding his breath, wondering if their arrival had now been revealed. He strained and heard a conversation between his aunt and uncle drifting in from the kitchen. There was something about the tone of the conversation that seemed unusual, suggestive of animated urgency.
He took a few careful steps along the corridor towards where light spilled in from the big kitchen, and strained to catch the words, masked as they were by the hum of an old chest freezer and the noise of rain pecking the window pane.
“…..what am I supposed to do? I have not already done my best to find him; if he does not want to be found what the hell can I do about it?”
“What right has that old bastard to make any demands on you anyway after everything he has done?”
“But he is dying Helen. He is asking about James and I need to tell him something.”
“You can tell him that he is reaping what he has sown, and that he should count himself lucky that even one of his sons is at his deathbed.”
“It is easy for you to hold that position- he is not your father. He is my bloody flesh and blood and he wants to see us both before he goes to meet his maker. No one, least of all me, expects any kind of death bed reconciliation… but it just might have done some good you know… It might have moved something on…. It might have allowed some kind of reconnection… if only for the lads sake.”
Douglas realised he had stopped breathing and it was an act of shuddering effort to remind his body that it needed oxygen. He found himself edging back towards the door, panic rising. As he turned however, he saw a black and white tail disappearing round a corner heading for the warmth of the kitchen.
Come here boy he whispered urgently, but it was too late.
“Shhhhh….Douglas- is that you? Please will you stop this dog trailing wet muddy prints all over the floor! Just look at this mess!”
He felt his face going red and there was a lurch in his stomach. He froze for a moment, but then willed himself to follow the dog along a corridor into the kitchen. The black and white floor tiles were punctuated with the marks of wet muddy paw-prints all the way to the front of the vanilla coloured Aga stove, where the dog was already curled up, steaming off a fug-cloud of doggy contentedness.
“I’m sorry Aunty Helen, I tried to stop him” mumbled the boy. “I’ll clean it up…”
He stood in the corner of the room, suddenly not sure what to do with his hands. A tall slim woman with flour on one cheek looked towards him with a deep frown.
“No thank you, you can just leave it to me…as if I did not have enough to do…” then her face softened-“Dougie- just look at you! Wet through to the skin! Look at him Clive!”
There was a movement of newspaper in the corner of the room
“Hmmm? Oh, hello Dougie. What have you been up to old chap?”
“Hi Uncle Clive. Not much really….”
There was a moment’s awkwardness, during which he continued to examine a particularly muddy paw print as if to will it away before Clive cleared his throat.
“Well you had better get upstairs and find some dry clothes old lad. Supper will be ready soon I think…” His Uncle lifted his newspaper up to half mast, as if he was not quite sure as if the conversation was over.
“Yes, yes, away you go Dougie. It’ll be ready in 15 minutes. Have a good wash please as well…” Aunt Helen was already busy with a mop and bucket.
The boy took his cue and headed for the narrow back stairs, grateful to escape. As he climbed over the threadbare old carpet, he heard Aunt Helen’s voice-
“What are we going to do with that boy Clive? It is almost as if he lives in another world!” then in whisper “Do you think he heard what we were talking about…”
He closed his ears and hurried up the last few stairs and headed along the corridor, his blood rushing again and his heart was as heavy as the wet clinging jeans.
If you were in a stressful job situation, and managed to carve out a day off in the winter sunshine, and you happened to live in a beautiful area ringed with mountains and lochs, what would you do? Easy choice, I know- except that the ability to make time for such things remains a rarity. So when my friend Simon asked if I wanted to go up into the hills I decided it was not an opportunity I could miss.
Up we went through Benmore Gardens, out through the gate at the top and into the high forest, eventually breaking through out onto the open mountainside, still rimed with snow and ice, and onwards up to the summit of Creachan Beag (547M). It was close enough to be back home for lunch, and high enough to feel manly and virtuous. Perhaps it was the heat we generated by middle-aged effort, but the air felt warm and the skies were deep blue.
The company was good too- Simon always has a story to tell. Eventually however in order to find some peace I had to murder him.
The knees held up OK on the descent and as far as days off go, it does not get much better than this.
Shame about Simon though.
Whoever would have believed it? My lovely wife has started blogging. Those that know her well will feel a rising sense of disbelief.
Until they realise that her blog is part of the work she has been doing to develop Seatree, our small effort to dominate the international art and craft market. Thanks to the help and support of our mate Andy, whose business Enterprize Web Design and Print helped us towards a functioning website, we can supply all your online retail needs (as long as they are in relation to ceramics and wooden stuff.)
Anyway, well done Michaela for the bloggage- you can take a look at her first post and encourage her to keep going here.
this fragile tent 