psycho-bubble

writing

My advice to myself: sit down with a blank page.

Write whatever comes:

write about the swallows swooping and clicking around the barn

write about the first joyful Spring that we have spent here

write of the meadow that we have planted, and of the first bold, pink flower that shot up shouting ‘hey!’ in the midst of tentative green-fuzz growth

write about the peaceful desert and the beach of souls

write of the way spaces change as you walk into them, and about how you came home

write about how you grew up and how you will be a child again, and  of ageing and the pain of pathological forgetfulness

write about babies and smiles and birthdays and of undivided attention

write of presence and being, of silence and deep journeys, and a world that can be saved with a story

write of I and us and connectedness…

An endless storm

“There’s a storm coming, when the bird you are becoming is eventually weightless and the earth no longer holds you.”

This is the storm. This is the love. This is the end that everyone comes to. This is the flight that everyone makes. We all come back home, eventually.

Where is home? Where does the storm return to? I am the wind within me. Is this an answer that will satisfy the curiosity of disruption?

When there is a lull, we imagine that the worst is over. The truth is that the worst is to come - but it will not finish us off just yet.

Each of us has our own ending worthy of a scratched mark on the stone, a simple acknowledgement of the passing of time. A small celebration. None of us deserve anything less or more.

One day our gentle spirit will diminish and the breeze will die. There will be a stillness before the winds begin their furious work again. 

This is the endless storm. Everyone dies. Everyone lives. There is joy in the passing. There is a smiling silence and a flood of love.

Meditation based on: There’s a storm coming, Steve Thorp, in The Fixing of Things,creative thorp, 2012.

Perfect love

When did I realise that love was overrated? Probably at the times when I was loving most cleanly; seeing most clearly how wonderful this intensely human, emotional connectivity can be.

Yet it is precisely at these moments that I realise that it is not nearly enough. The one thing that we yearn for, cry over, hope for, reminisce about - love, attachment, relationship - is only ONE strand of life. Sometimes our lover, or grandchild or soul friend makes our life very special indeed (and this has come to me recently with the arrival of Freya, who, for the past ten and half months has forced me to change the way I experience love and commitment) but even then there are other energies bubbling up that I cannot ignore. Not all of these are positive and ‘good’; certainly not all will lead to happiness, but I must follow them nonetheless.

The other day, someone asked the age-old rhetorical question: if your life was over what would you have like to have spent more time doing. The answer for me was instant: writing poetry. And what do you wish you had spent less time doing? Well that’s a harder one, no instant answer, but a deceptively tricky little one: I’d like to spend less time worrying about when I am going to spend more time writing!

So I’d actually like to BE in the moment more (whether that is being with Freya, being on the water - surfing, or being with a poem I am creating). This BEING is really nothing to do with LOVE - it’s not even about ‘loving myself’, that mythical magic injunction of self-help. What it is about is being open to whatever is in my life right now - whether that be an impulse, a person, an environment; and this is a more challenging thing to be than it might seem.

Sometimes being open means being vulnerable to currents and storms of cruelty and indifference. Sometimes being open means being with a sense of flatness and ennui. Sometimes being open means understanding that the important connection, right now, is with something deep in the world and not just the person lying next to me. Sometime being open means allowing what is emerging to emerge without any commentary or judgement.

And all this is so hard. No wonder we sometimes stick to yearning for perfect love! Life can seem so much simpler that way!     

Brine and burn

I became sick at this new consciousness as it bled into me - flu sick, proper sick, like with a high temperature and tight, pounding head and everything! It wasn’t until days later when this red storm subsided that my body told me a new story, and the sickness became more like regret or yearning or that deep hollowed out feeling that comes with the ultimate realisation of the irreversible.

Calm, I told myself, be calm. It is not too late, you have miles on the clock – you have time enough to figure it out before the chugging engine coughs its last. My optimism was misplaced, as it often is, and the acceleration of decay set in: my skin greyed and my hair thinned and my limbs wasted in alarming fashion. Before long, I was not the body I had thought I was.

I crumbled slowly into the air, which took me into its molecular embrace and held me there. I could feel the boundary of my skin and air vibrate and coalesce; I felt more, I felt less, I felt carried, first on a faint breeze, then on a gale. Then, another accelaration, and here I am travelling at the speed of fright on a vortex of myself. And landing, soft landing, into the belly of the earth at the precise spot where one day I will be buried or scattered.

For now, I am reconnected with my fevered self; the red and orange flame that burns me down too quickly for my soul and leaves me pyred in the cold ashes of canting ambition and intent. If only I had known, if only I had seen - I sigh as I prepare to sign off. Then there is tinkling laughter, almost too faint to be heard, and I understand that this ludicrous reawakening of a child was completed on the day I bled brine and burned.

21soul - it begins here

As a therapist and coach I often find myself working with people whose deep awareness of the damage that human beings are doing to ourselves and to the planet makes them deeply unhappy. It is a rational and appropriate response; but sometimes we haven’t been able to develop the resources and responses to deal with this as well as we would like.

 21soul is a new coaching and teaching practice aimed at helping people live and work authentically, deeply, ecologically and creatively in the context of these challenging times. It is for those who carry great sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, creativity and anger at the state of things.

 21soul is an exploration of practice based on the 21st century soul that we all have to live with and through! It is for poets, artists, thinkers, practitioners; artisans, builders, writers; therapists, teachers, gardeners; musicians, naturalists, designers and visionaries; craftspeople, leaders and entrepeneurs; activists, greens, socialists, progressives, conservatives, integrationists; humanists, agnostics, believers and atheists. It is for anyone who wants to survive, thrive and be part of the change to come!

I’m looking to trial some of the ideas and structures and I’d like to offer you two freebies in return for two favours:

The freebies:

a free lesson and worksheet that will introduce the ideas of 21soul

a free 45 minute coaching session that will start you applying these ideas to your life and work

In return, all I’m asking is a couple of favours:

Some feedback on what value these ideas and practices might have for you and how you think these could be taken further

If you like what you see, then I’d be grateful if you could let anyone you know about the 21soul programme – you could tweet it, forward this email or just have a conversation with them and encourage them to join my mailing list!

Please contact me NOW to set up your free session, and you’ll be sent your free lesson by email in a week or so.Contact info@lifescape.org.uk or by phone on (0044) 7949553029

*Note: there’s no obligation to take these any further – although I’d love it if you decided to join me on one of these deep, integral 21soul programmes in the future!

The cottage garden - collected poems #17

Three selves and an ecology of mind

Let’s say for the sake of simplicity that human beings - all of us throughout our history - are born to operate in the realms and constellations of three different selves - the soul self or essence, the social self and the ecological self that is sometimes not a self at all, but a constellation of ever-changing experience of a shape-shifting earth.

Each human culture has had its own dynamic balance between these three, and while some might see human development as an onward and upward civilising process, something is inevitably lost if a culture becomes blind to any of these dimensions. Our own civilisation - and the psychology that has developed to explain its mind - is fixated with the social self to the extent that the other two  - the soul self and ecology of mind - hardly get a look in.  

This might explain why we got into the mess we are in, and why we still find it so hard to create the solutions that may, even at this late stage, be possible. We have a one-track mindset, so to speak,  that is obsessed with the social aspects of  human being, and that finds it almost impossible to locate and access these other two dimensions in meaningful or sustainable ways.

Read the full version of this piece at http://www.lifescape.me.uk/blog/

Ghosts - collected poems #16