Connection

So so long since I took a walk on my own. So peaceful. Such solitude. Apart from the odd dog walker in the distance I am just enveloped in nature and her beauty.

Deer grunting amongst the trees, the sounds of antlers being rubbed against branches. Wood pigeons and their coos that instantaneously bring Phyllis to my mind. I picture her by me. Sitting in silence. Listening. Soaking it all in as she used to. This too, a favourite past time. As the sun breaks through the dog walkers increase and I am so, so grateful for the 40 minutes I have spent, perched on a dead tree that still teemed with life, energy not lost just muted.

All I can see are trees, I hear the wind as it rustles the leaves and the birds as they call to each other, as they sing their song. Were it not that this was a blessing but the normal. That buildings and towns and cities were few and far between and that the beauty of the seasons and their purity could be felt, seen, breathed in by all.

Gratitude over flowing, of how fucking lucky I am to be able to be here. As painful as these months have been and still are. As I sit with small Chloë and we discuss how good we are for each other but we just need to make a few little tweaks here and there. And how teenage Chloë, who is currently still asleep (it’s Sunday morning after all) needs to rein it in a bit.

I dreamt the night before last that I was trying to drive a car from the passenger side. It reminds me of dreams where I am trying to drive from the rear seat too.. how funny that I didn’t realise just how poignant these dreams were. How symbolic. I have gently prised teenage Chloë’s hands off of the steering while and told her firmly that I now do all the driving.

And so I shall, from Petworth to Worthing, where I shall dig out some paints and get the kids and I to do some art. Mostly for my benefit 😂🍁🍂🐦‍⬛🌳🌲🍂🍁🙏

And I realise as I continue to soul search (and this soul has been searched, think full body internal, external, pat down secret service style of searched) I realised yesterday as I pounded the beach front – pushing this aging body to its limits – that my constant search for external validation and lack of self belief, self esteem, self validation past a certain point is perhaps, just perhaps, because I don’t fully trust myself to meet the requirements that I search for in others. Just maybe I am frightened of being ghosted. By myself. When I need me most, will I turn away? And that my friends, has been one hell of a humdinger of a realisation.

So I’m writing up contracts to Chloë, the Child, the Teenager, the Adult… we all need to sign (yes I realise I sound slightly psychopathic with my multiple personalities).. from now on……

No letting myself down.

No closing off love for myself.

No standing myself up.

Big love to all x

Mother Nature

It comes to me as I sit in front of the log burner. The metal encasing pops as it expands from the heat, flames licking the additional log I have placed in there. I am sitting on a cushion, meditating. The opposite of clearing my mind, the process instead just waves a flag and screams at any passing-by, any malingering thought to ‘step on in’… aboard the meditation train. I acknowledge and bat them out with the skill of a professional tennis player only they just circle around and re-enter under the guise of another subject, quickly re-emerging in their original form.

In Buddhism, I have read, you do not close your eyes fully but in order to keep aware (and awake), you semi-close your eyes, letting the eyelashes gently flutter and hoping that your contact lenses don’t dry out and stick because you aren’t blinking. Every other meditation has always encouraged the closing of the eyes and it is during this internal debate that it comes to me; as the synthetic fibres in my cardigan threaten to melt with the heat, I think about Buddhism and religions and why I can’t fully subscribe to any of these belief systems. The reason why is because I choose to only worship Mother Nature. She is tangible. I can see her. I look out of my window, or go for a walk and I breathe her in. Birth, growth, life, death. The seasons are her sermons. We watch the world falling apart and her sermons get louder. Angrier. She rages in wild-fires, she wails in mass flooding. We are hurting her, dismissing her, raping her and shunning her. Different species are fading, as if being devoured by the Nothing in The Never-ending Story, our own apathy as a collective society is sucking away the nature that sustains us.

By choosing to believe in a deity, it appears to me that we hand over all responsibility of our beautiful planet. ‘It is God’s will’, I hear repeatedly. Is it? Is it really? I don’t think it is. I think if there was a deity who was running the show they would have probably decided to scrap this project and start again. Shaking their head(s) in disbelief as we merrily blow each other up, murder and torture each other, wipe entire animal and plant species off of the earth. I hardly think they are sitting there smugly, hands wrapped around a mug of hot cocoa, nodding sagely and saying ‘ah yes… this is how I foresaw my little Kingdom, go you… you rowdy little tyrants!’

Is it not time we take responsibility? We have an amazing planet to worship. Instead of praying in a church or mosque (or at least in addition to) why don’t we get outside and pray to Mother Earth? Why don’t we learn to listen to her calls? Ask her what she needs for us all to survive? To be fair Greta Thunberg has been pretty astute at translating her needs along with all the scientists and ecologists and many, many others who have been warning us for decades of what will happen if we don’t buck our ideas up. I practically beheaded my son recently for calling her weird. I raged at him that he would do better to follow her footsteps as someone to aspire to rather than stoop to ridicule. And as my youngest son and I discussed how leaves live on carbon-dioxide, I watched at his face wonder at how we and plants and trees need each other. My primary school explanation of our symbiotic relationship being propped up by the Science and Nature magazines I have been buying for him (and which he pretty much hates because it involves… reading).

So the next time I sit on my meditation cushion, once I have acknowledged the ‘should I/shouldn’t I’ close-my-eyes conundrum, I shall send out as much love as I can to the planet and hope, just hope that my choice of wrapping up in jumpers and having a Defra approved woodburner burning the right type of fuel, is better than having my central heating on all day. I will also continue to try and impart some of the better, planet-caring philosophies onto my children when I can tear them away from their screens and maybe start saving some money to go and stay in a technology deprived, wifi free, log-cabin next Xmas.. I mean they’d LOVE that.. wouldn’t they..???

More Fairies and Dolphins Please.

Freedom

So at the end my last post I alluded to a more sincere post about how I communicate with my higher power(s). I’m feeling (a little) less silly tonight so shall endeavour to explain.

I have always believed in some sort of higher power, I flirted with Christianity for about a month when I was 8 or something and was given a little book of prayers for children. It never called to me. I liked the idea of the angels but there didn’t appear to be room for fairies. Or ghosts. And I liked them more than sitting in church on the odd occasion I was taken. My church I suppose was my grandmother’s garden. I would spend hours playing there, it was quite magical with a rose garden and apple trees I could climb. A swing that could give me splinters and a hammock with spiders. Or if I were in Wales for a holiday, staying with family, I would wake hours before everyone else and just go for a walk in the lanes and across fields, sometimes accompanied by one of their cats, Bramble. I would moo at the cows and baa at the sheep (something I still do regularly) and talk away to the horses that I came across. Collecting the odd leaf, stick or stone along the way. I loved the country and I still do. I yearn for the trees and hedgerow, for the sounds of the animals and the telling of the seasons. Maybe having been in my mother’s womb as she tended to her farm’s livestock has left the imprint or maybe, like all animals, it is just simply in my blood.

Equally I adore the sea. The rise and fall of the waves as the tide flows in and out. The promise of dolphins not too far away, the shells that adorn the beach and the reminder that we are so very, very small in relation to the rest of the Earth.

So when I think of my higher power. I think of the magic in the trees, the fairies that reside with the dragonflies over the streams, the changing of seasons reflecting where we are in the year. I think of Mother Nature. I think of life and death. Birth and rebirth. I think of the moon and the sun.

For me, science and magic are entwined. There are enough happenings in the universe that we simply cannot explain (yet) and for that I am thankful. When I am feeling lost (which can be quite often), I find solace in knowing that I am just part of a matrix of energy. And now I am finding I have the time to dedicate to re-establising a connection with my higher power, with the Mother Goddess.

This post may seem clumsy, I feel like a toddler taking her first steps. In some ways I already know the path but I can’t quite seem to find my balance yet.

Alanis Morrisette as God.

“Let’s have a girlie night Mum. I can wax your face”.

Sorry what? Wax my face? I look at the ridiculously gorgeous non-hairy-faced 16 year old who stands before me all pretty and young, and glare. Wax my face? What do you mean? Wax my face?

Is this what lockdown has resorted us to? I’ll admit if a fine fuzzy look is the worst of my problems then perhaps I am not doing too badly, but still. I harrumphed, threatened imminent death and stomped off incredulously.

To be honest, lockdown for us in a house with a garden in a town with a beach and the Sussex Downs a short drive away is luxury in comparison to those without. Lockdown in early recovery? Not so sweet. I attend Zoom meetings to connect with other recovery fellows and I speak to friends daily but the reality of not being able to physically connect or have cups of tea in their houses is difficult when having an illness that thrives on isolation.

However one’s addiction manifests itself, it really is only symptomatic of a void that has lost its plug. You know the paddling pools with the plug in the bottom? The ones we buy year after year, that only last for a month before a cat punctures it or it gets left on its side until you can’t see past the slugs that have taken residence within it? One of them. It’s like trying to refill a slug-ridden, plug-less void with *insert addiction of choice* and constantly wondering why the gnawing never stops.

I remember sitting in a flat I shared with my EO (Eldest One) who was about 1 or 2 at the time time and wondering why it was I could never feel sated. I always felt like something was missing and here I am 16 years later slowly piecing the puzzle together and a warm glow is starting to build.

These last three weeks since leaving the treatment centre have been a rollercoaster. However, the good news is that this rollercoaster would have been out of place in somewhere like Thorpe Park and more suited to a toddler’s version at Lego World or whatever it’s called. The ups and downs have been more muted and less vomit inducing which for someone who can’t even watch someone else playing racing games without wanting to hurl, is a good thing. (Of note, I have never ever, and never ever will, go on a rollercoaster).

To help with mentally riding my toddler’s rollercoaster, I have been asked by my – let’s call her my ‘human’ guide – to pray and talk to my higher power. Now I have an issue with organised religion personally but completely get that it is a wonderful thing for lots of other people. For me, I believe in the power of energy, Earth, Mother Nature and Spirit. I have my own guides in the ether whom I talk to but I don’t have a particular God. So this makes praying a bit cumbersome. It takes quite a while to go through “Dear higher power, Mother Nature, mother goddess, spirit guides, animal guides, ancestors etc” each time I want to communicate so I decided that I needed a name. I immediately though of Alanis Morrisette who plays god in Dogma and I decided to name my multitude of higher powers the one name, ‘Alanis’. I was very excited about this and proceeded to tell all those who were remotely interested that I was talking to my goddess ‘Alanis’. Even my counsellor took it on board and managed not to laugh during our sessions when referring to Alanis (he did smirk but looked very chuffed at his lack of laughter). The problem I had was that every time I did my morning and evening chats with Alanis, it felt like I was addressing the Alanis Morrisette. And then it all felt wrong. I mean she may well have heard me telepathically, who knows how spiritual she is? She might have been buttering her toast in Canada or wherever she is from and suddenly out of the blue heard me waffling on about how I need to remain sober and could she possibly sort out the leaking overflow pipe…

In case you wondered, no, she didn’t answer.

So with that I have gone back to naming each of my zillion higher powers and just mix up the order so that none of them get jealous of who gets named first.

There are benefits to talking with an entity that you believe hold a larger power than yourself. I will write this more eloquently in another post, for now I am far too glib to describe with any justice. And I need a pee.