Category Archives: bombu

How to slow down and fall in love with life (and anti-pollyanna-ing)

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After recent posts I felt the need to redress the balance a bit. I don’t usually make banana pancakes for breakfast. I’m confused about many things both today and every day. I usually write when I’ve come to some clarity about something, so there are many messy and hideous things that you don’t know about. I’m really pretty awful in parts, just like the rest of the human race. I hope that helps.

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I didn’t win the author blog awards, but Jackie Morris was a runner-up – she should have won. Congratulations Jackie! And I’m very happy to be in such good company with the rest of the non-winners. (OK, losers…) Thank you if you voted for me, it wasn’t in vain because I know you did.

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I got an email from Lulu today saying that if you wanted to buy my book ‘A Year of Questions’ you can get free postage by using the code FREEMAILUK305 when you buy the book. Don’t tell Lulu I told you, but you can also get it on Amazon UK, Amazon US, or cheapest of all on The Book Depository (with free worldwide delivery).

Or, as my dad discovered yesterday, you can snap up a copy for a bargain £22.74 on Abe Books (shipped from Australia). I don’t think they’ll be selling that copy anytime soon. Here’s an extract from the book… happy Wednesday. I’m off back out to my sunny bench to study.

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WEEK 4 – Giving from a place of plenty

I sat down to write this musing yesterday morning but I felt reluctant, resentful, I wanted to be out walking in the September sun. I could have forced myself to sit down and plough through it, but I would have been giving from an empty place.

Giving from an empty place can often pay off in the short term. A friend asks to borrow some money, and we don’t really have much spare but we say yes. Our partner asks us for a lift somewhere – we’ve just settled down on the sofa with a book but we put it aside and put on a smile. Everyone’s happy.

But over time giving from a place of empty costs us and those around us. Giving from this place can use up a lot more of our energy than giving when we want to give. And all the little resentments that we think we’re covering up can slip out in unexpected ways.

Often we just need to grit our teeth and get on with it – saying ‘I don’t really feel like feeding you tonight’ to a hungry three year old isn’t an option. But maybe it is possible to look after our ‘giving reserves’ a little more carefully – by saying no when we need to, by giving more to ourselves. In the long run we’ll probably end up giving more, and what we give will be given gladly and with love.

Things you might be curious about

How often do you give from an empty place? From a place of plenty? How does it feel different? How can you start to fill up your giving reserves?

Suggestions for this week

Give yourself something every day this week – a cup of cocoa with cream on top, half an hour longer in a lavender bath, a ride on your motorbike, a bunch of tulips. At the end of the week, choose something to give to someone else – a hand-made card, a shoulder massage, breakfast in bed. Choose something that you genuinely want to give.

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. William Shakespeare

Blessed are the generous who keep enough for themselves so we can live with them without guilt. Blessed, too, are those who receive well, so the generous get their reward. Stephen Dunn

On being foolish and full of human passions (and a moist poem)

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I attend a group regularly – I can’t tell you what kind, because that bit needs to be anonymous. But it is a group of regular people (I’m going all American – ‘regular’!) and we meet to share our experiences and listen to each other and learn and love each other.

When it was my turn to speak, my theme was how truly messed up we all are. There’s a saying – ‘we are all very sick people – it’s just lucky that we’re sick on different days’. It felt somehow glorious that we were all bumbling along, NO idea most of the time what we are doing. There’s a Buddhist term – bombu nature – we are all bombu, we are all foolish beings. We are ordinary and full of passions. Well, I am anyway.

Last night it was a joy to be in the same boat with all the other bombu members of my group. Last night there was so much love in the room that I thought I might go pop.

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Here’s a very appropriate (and moist) poem. Love you all too, readers – you’re in the boat too.

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My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.

by William Kloefkorn (from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser)
Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac – do support them, they’re fab.