Monthly Archives: September 2009

Blue Handbag Tuesday

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Every Tuesday I am copying out a randomly chosen paragraph from my novel The Blue Handbag, so you can get to know Leonard and all the others. This week we join Leonard reading a bed time story to his grandchildren, Buddy and Rory, at his daughter Raine’s house.

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The story is about a great big raggedy ginger tom called Chester. Leonard’s only read it once or twice, but it’s a firm current favourite with the boys. Raine has told him that Chester often caterwauls through the streets of her dreams. Tonight the twins are fidgeting like jumping beans when he starts reading, so he rolls right through to the end and starts again at the beginning, making his voice softer and softer as he goes. This seems to do the trick, and by three quarters of the way through they’re both making little snuffling noises and Rory’s thumb is drooping away from his mouth. He sits quietly for a while and enjoys the peace of watching them sleep – their juicy looking cheeks, their mussed up thistle-down hair, the trains on their identical pyjamas. Their little fingers smell of candy-floss – he could eat them up.

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(To read on: Amazon UK or The Book Depository with free worldwide delivery or Snowbooks)

Dead Mouse

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Just outside our front door is a dead mouse.

He’s been there for a couple of weeks now. One of the cats (I suspect Silver, chief mouse-catcher) discarded him there – he didn’t have a mark on him.

Every time I walk in or out of the house, I look at him.

Last week, all of a sudden his hair came out and lay around him and covered him like a pile of autumn leaves. Puffs of it blew away in the wind.

Now you can see the skin, which is dark grey and leathery. His eyes are gone.

It reminds me of the Tibetan buddhist practice of meditating on death. It reminds me of Stephen Levine’s spiritual experiment, where he lived a year of his life as if it were his last.

When my friend Charlie came to stay this weekend, I pointed out the mouse as we carried in her bags, in the same way I pointed out the new plants in the garden. It tickled her. I mused that it was something a four year old might point out, and she agreed.

Maybe we lose our natural curiosity about death, because it becomes too painful to look. We wince, we predict of our own deaths, we think of everyone (and everything) we love.

What would it be like to remember it, as we lived our day today? Would we love our lives less, or more?

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The Happy Buddha picture isn’t even really a particularly Tibetan Buddha, but he made me smile this morning, sitting on his cloud. And I thought you’d prefer it to a photo of Dead Mouse. He is beautiful in his own way, but maybe it’s harder to see it before breakfast.

Shhhhhhh……….

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In explanation of my post today, here’s a quote from the Daily Dharma:

Improving Upon Silence
The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking (or writing). This is called mindfulness of speech. Few things can improve the nature of our relationships as much as the development of skillful speech. Silence offers us, and those around us, the spaciousness we need to speak more skillfully. When we speak with greater skill, our true self—our compassionate, loving self—emerges with gentle ease. So before you speak, stop, breathe, and consider if what you are about to say will improve upon the silence.

- Allan Lokos, from “Skillful Speech,” Tricycle, Winter 2008
(Read the complete article here).

And the photo of Fatty is because this morning by gently patted my hand with his paw when I’d pawsed (ha ha) from stroking him to type this post. He knows how to make good use of silence.

Happy weekends x

My babies have arrived…..

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The books are here!

And they look rather lovely. Thank you Snowbooks.

The hardback of Thaw isn’t officially out until the 1st of November, but if you have a sneaky look here (or here if you’re not in the UK) you can read it before everyone else…

Yay! yay! yay!

I don’t want to jinx anything, but I have a good feeling about this one…

Time for cake! Cake all round.

PS I know two blog posts in one day is a little excessive but I couldn’t wait to let you know…

How to travel a long long road

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Part of my reasons for embarking upon the Amida Buddhist Psychology training is that I’d like to earn my ‘psychotherapist’ badge.

I’m already accredited as a counsellor, and have a private practice that meets my financial needs, and I love my work. I don’t want different clients or to do different work, but it just feels like the word ‘psychotherapy’ describes what I do (longer term work) better than ‘counselling’. Words, eh?

At first I thought the 2 years training course would give me the extra hours I needed. Then I realised it would need to be 3 years. Then I discovered I needed at least 3 years with a humanistic therapist – my current therapist (who I’ve been seeing for 2 years already) isn’t humanistic, and so I’ll need to start with someone new. Then I discovered that my client hours won’t count until AFTER I finish my training, which adds on another 2 years minimum…

I texted my lovely boyfriend in a bit of a panic last week. I’ll never get there. Why am I bothering? Is it worth it? He texted back ‘one word…. patience’.

Clever lovely boyfriend. What patience does is help me to slow down. Then I can look around me. I can enjoy the training course, the learning, the challenge. I can continue enjoying my (mostly) lovely life. I can keep my eye on one of my destinations, ‘psychotherapist’, but when I get there I might be having so much fun that I forget to pick up my badge.

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Another reader of The Blue Handbag is up at 100 Readers – meet Lynne Williams and her orange cat. My publishers tell me that brand new copies of Thaw will be on their way to me soon… can’t wait. We have 21 blogs involved in the Blogsplash now – if you have a blog will you join us?

Scrumptious words

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I love the taste of words.

Every day I link together a short string of words to post on my other blog, a small stone. (Don’t tell Planting Words that I post there too, she might get jealous).

If my life (or my head) is full, I snatch them wherever I can find them and scribble them down before rushing off to ‘the next thing’.

This week I’ve managed to find a little more space. On Tuesday evening I wrote my small stone in my head, and then had time to play with it.

A workman spits: the long glob flies. The sky is striped with pink and aubergine.

Long glob. They contain almost the same letters. Feel what the two words do to your tongue. That final ‘ob‘. The rhymes – flies, sky, striped. Spit and pink. The rhythm, like a stately dance. And then that last word, that seems separate from the rest of the sentence – alien, with strange vowel sounds. The slight echo of ‘work‘ in ‘ber‘, and the silky-soft g. Gggg.

Never mind what it means – there is enough in the sound of these 15 words to keep me happy until the cows come home.

PS I thought you’d prefer a photo of the clouds to one of spit.

Blue Handbag Tuesday

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Every Tuesday I am copying out a randomly chosen paragraph from my novel The Blue Handbag, so you can get to know Leonard, his dog Pickles and all the others. This week’s little snippet is taken from a scene where Leonard visits his mate Charlie in his greenhouse after some particularly disturbing news…
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Charlie finishes the pricking out and clears away the left-over pots and compost. Leonard sips his tea gratefully. He lets the liquid warm him from the inside, and the concentrated sunlight warm him from the outside. He looks at the hairs on his bare shins and wonders what his legs would look like if he shaved it all off. They sit for ten minutes or more, the silence broken only by the sound of Charlie seeing to his tomatoes. He carefully measures out the tomato feed into a battered-looking metal watering can and fills it to the brim with water. He tips it onto the soil around the base of the plants, the rose of the can dividing the water into thin sparkling threads. When he’s finished watering, he starts removing any yellowed leaves he finds and pinching out the tips.

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(To read on: Amazon UK or The Book Depository with free worldwide delivery or Snowbooks)

Update on Rosie, and a bit more praise and blame

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If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know about Rosie, my beloved, brand new (well a few months old now), bright red Fiat 500.

I still love her very much. I’m waiting for the feelings to wear off, but I still feel warm and fuzzy inside whenever I return to her. I still wave to other drivers of red Fiat 500s (sometimes they ignore me, and sometimes they grin madly and wave back).

I even forgive her her inconvenient headlight dimmer switch, and her hard headrest which hurts your head when you bang into it. Nobody’s perfect. I won’t hear a word said against her. I’ve even been WASHING her, inside and out! (never before known to happen).

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Sarah sent me some quotes from the Tao after reading the last piece on praise/blame. They fit very nicely and so I’ve copied them below. Thanks Sarah.

I’ve been thinking more about praise. I wonder if there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the TASTE of it, like relishing a crisp salad or a nice slice of carrot cake, but the problems come when we start to seek it/expect it/cling to it/need it?

Happy Sunday. Mine was a stripey mini-pumpkin from the garden, sliced and hollowed out and filled with creamy gruyere mushroomy sauce by lovely boyfriend. Firm, buttery flesh, and such a sunshiney orange colour. Lucky me.

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“the Master does his job
and then stops….

Because he believes in himself,
he doesn’t try to convince others.
Because he is content with himself,
he doesn’t need others approval,
Because he accepts himself,
the whole world accepts him.”

and

“do your work and step back,
the only path to serenity”

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PS 21 blogs in the Blogsplash… come on in, the water’s lovely!

Praise and Blame and Nights Drawing In

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If we really stop to think about praise and criticism, we will see they do not have the least importance. Whether we receive praise or criticism is of no account. The only important thing is that we have a pure motivation, and let the law of cause and effect be our witness. If we are really honest, we can see that it makes no difference whether we receive praise and acclaim. The whole world might sing our praises, but if we have done something wrong, then we will still have to suffer the consequences for ourselves, and we cannot escape them. If we act only out of a pure motivation, all the beings of the three realms can criticize and rebuke us, but none of them will be able to cause us to suffer. According to the law of karma, each and every one of us must answer individually for our actions.

This is how we can put a stop to these kinds of thoughts altogether, by seeing how they are completely insubstantial, like dreams or magical illusions. When people praise us and we glow with delight, it is because we think that being praised is beneficial. But that is like thinking that there is some substance to a rainbow or a dream. However much benefit appears to accrue from praise and acclaim, actually there’s none at all. —The Dalai Lama (read the rest of the article here)

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I wish that wasn’t true – I like a bit of praise. But that DL knows what he’s talking about.

Friday already. September already. The nights are drawing in. We’ve been on the verge of turning the heating on for days, and I think we’ll fold this weekend. There’s no going back…

I’m looking forward to autumn colours and fires in our logburner, and new jumpers and cats on laps. And Christmas, and even January, when it’s cold and the grass goes crunchy, and the year starts again.

But before any of that, I’ll look forward to today first. It’s back to this mouthful of cereal, this sip of tea. It’s always back to that.

Happy weekends x

More about perseverence – hanging on by a thread

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You MAY have noticed that this is a bit of a running theme at the moment ; )

I’m looking forward to reading Zen Heart by Ezra Bayda, which just arrived, but in emergencies it’s OK to cheat and open new books at random and see what you can find.

Here’s what I found – Bayda talking about perseverence:

At one point, when I was very involved at a Zen center in Northern California, I was hit, seemingly out of the blue, with a wall of resistance, and I didn’t want to sit any more, nor did I want to go to the center. But even though I couldn’t stand being there, something in me knew not to bolt. I forced myself to go to just one sitting a week, basically hanging by a thread. Then, after a few months, the resistance began to fade, and I reentered the practice wiht a deeper involvement than before, not only internally but also in the external activities at the center. The point is, sometimes simply persevering will allow us to move through even the worse resistance. Even when our practice efforts seem to produce very little in terms of tangible results, with the little mind seeing “failure” at every step, a part of us knows that we have no choice but to keep starting over. This is the only way we will ever go deeper into our life.

I was speaking to my artist friend on the phone yesterday. We were wondering if sometimes, when resistance really hits, what we should really do is allow ourselves to take a proper break, and to enjoy it, and to return to the work with more hunger.

Personally speaking, I’m not so sure. I think my current wall of resistance would still be there if I took a break for a fortnight (or a year) and it might even get a bit bigger in my absence.

Instead, I’ll open my manuscript this morning (right now) and type a single sentence. Better to hang by a thread than to let go.

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PS I found this very beautiful painting, called ‘Hanging By A Thread’, on Gail Bourgeois’ site. I hope she’ll forgive me putting it up here if you promise to go and have a look around at her stunning work. I like this one and lots of others.

PPS Another interview is up at 100 Readers – meet Caroline. There are now 47 blogs with the widget and counting… got yours yet? And we have 14 Blogsplashers – do you want to play? Enough links yet?