Welcome to my blog which really ought to be about rain
because yet again it has rained every day and in every way for a week. The
other night I drove back from London on the M3 at one in the morning. Large puddles
sat on the lanes and the rain continued to pelt. I was reminded of a couple of
years ago, on a similar night, aquaplaning off one of the side roads and
landing in field. By time I got to Stonehenge, the road was empty; at least I
think it was because in the few miles without rain there was instead a sudden
and drifting fog which removed any chance of actually seeing the stones in the
distance.
It is now five years since we had a whole week of warm sun. Two
days ago, it was colder than on christmas day. For the first time ever I’ve had
to put the heating on in June and July. Only once this year have I left the
house without a jumper. I guarantee,
however, that if we do have five days of heat over 25 degrees, by the fourth I’ll
hear people complaining about the heatwave and, that regardless of the weather
for the rest of the summer, these people will remember the summer as having
been good. It is too late to be good.
Not that I mind the rain when it is falling because I like
the sound and the sight. This morning I watched a blue tit by my window, sitting
bedraggled on a twig in a bush, its wings waterlogged and too heavy to move. It
looked weary and bemused. Another bird landed in the bush, causing a shower of
water to fall on the blue tit which fell, rather than flew, to the ground where
it sat forlornly for a couple minutes more before, with evident reluctance,
flying off somewhere else.
It continues to rain. I live on a housing estate on the top
of a hill. In the gaps between the houses one can see out over the Somerset
levels which are now fifty per cent covered with water.
So beautiful.
----
Over the next few days (weeks and months), I have to focus on
the day of the dead creation. I find
this considerably harder than allowing a story to unfold. Each time I sit at
the puter to write an email, or a begging later or to apply my mind to the
website or whatever, I discover some two hours, six teas and four smokes later that
I’ve made a few notes about a children’s novel, started thinking about the next
blog, pondered forgetting chris wafe and making the ebook myself, reminded
myself I’ve six tv plays and three filmscripts that I’ll probably never finish
and written pointless emails to people that I don’t know in far away countries
either to vicariously go where they are or because they attract me. This is how
I ended up (briefly) funding a Ugandan single mother, correcting the English of
a devilishly pretty Russian girl and randomly communicating with people in
Iran, Pakistan and Libya to explain that while I considered them to hold fundamentally
deranged beliefs, in this they are no exception, being human after all, and
despite their manifest flaws I personally had no wish to bomb them into the
next world, even if that’s where they want to be. I’d then explain that the
british people are almost as stupid as them and that’s why they voted for
people like david Cameron to demonstrate our own devotion to mediocrity and
self-defeating behaviour.
The replies I get to these emails generally seem quite
mystified.
So it goes.
Meanwhile, not a lot gets done.
----
Once or twice day I’m sitting here and I hear a car draw up,
a car door slam and the sound of a brass gate being unlocked. I stop and
momentarily wait for the knock on the door and then my mind says, oh no, it can’t
be yours, your lock broke off ten years ago. I guess that’s what my granny
meant about my being a slow learner.
---
Between the ages of 13 and 16, I wrote poetry when I was particularly
moody – which was most of the time. Somehow, over the years these poems have
mostly evaded my chucking out processes. Diaries, novels, and short stories
have all found their way to the rubbish while those first emotive outpourings have
slipped past the time censor and hidden in a file. This week I found them yet
again and once more begun to read through them, still liking the lines I’ve always
liked and still grimacing at the ones that don’t quite do it. Then, to my
surprise and subsequent regret, I scrumpled them up and threw them away. Now I
really wish I hadn’t done it. Why go to the bother of having them for 45 years
and then do that?
----
Probably one of the most dog-eared looked-at books I have is
Rebirthing, the science of enjoying all your life, by Jim Leonard and Phil
Laut. In fact, most of the pages have now become loose. It is a great book both
for definitions and primaries/affirmations. Here are some random definitions.
Blame: Holding someone
or something in a negative context because of the thought that the person or
thing is the creator of something in one’s reality that one is making wrong.
Boredom: A pattern of energy that occurs in one’s body when one is
avoiding the further activation of an emotion that is already partially
activated, usually anger.
Drama: Acting out one’s emotions rather than taking responsibility for
them.
Responsibility: A context in which one both acknowledges oneself as the
source of the content and acknowledges the perfection of the content.
I sometimes turn to this book when I become
aware of how limited my thinking is being. For example, when I sat down to
meditate this morning, I couldn’t help noticing that when my thoughts turned to
the day of the Dead creation, I felt dread, inadequacy and that horrible (!)
feeling of vulnerability akin to being caught with your trousers down. Failure,
mortification, self-hate, the lot; all packed into a nano moment. What to do?
Planning and following my plans are two of my favourite pleasures.
I am completely willing to obey the orders I give myself.
My strong sense of purpose attracts those people and situations necessary
to accomplish my desired result.
Everything works out more exquisitely than I plan it.
People often misunderstand
affirmations. It isn’t a matter of repeating the words continuously in self-hypnosis
(although this does work in the very long run, as our everyday experience
proves) Their first function
is to reveal what you actually presently think and feel, i.e. your prior
creation. The more you wince at the unlikeliness of the affirmation, the more
opportunity to reveal, challenge and change the prior creations.
So, maybe this week this is what I
will do. I’ll take ten or so affirmations/primaries that would help me create
this day of the dead more enthusiastically and see what happens. Walk the talk
as they say. (Sarcastic voice at back of mind says, yeah right.)
I’ve only just remembered that my
topic of the day was going to be ‘how not to depress the young’. I suppose the
answer is, be happy.
Enthusiasm: Grateful acceptance of ALL of the following: one’s purpose,
one’s present reality, one’s goals, one’s plans, one’s structures, one present
activity, and oneself.
Time for a lie down.
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