Crystal Vision

I’ve been out on a wind-blown walk on the forest. That word will, for many, conjure up an image of trees but the forest here is made up of open heathland as well as woodland. I am lucky to live here, on the edge of England’s seemingly well-kept secret; on any day of the week, I could find beautiful places to walk and ramble (if I had the strength for it) for miles without coming across more than a handful of people. As they are almost on my doorstep, the forest and the heath, each spring finds me ready to make resolutions to walk every day. I can’t of course, but still I find it necessary to keep making resolutions – to state my intentions and wishes, as it were, to make a space for the possibility of some of them coming true. I have always believed in magic. A defence against unacceptable realities, perhaps, a survival strategy. Keeping a dream journal does after a while give me the sense of being on the edge of extraordinary possibilities – not that my dreams in themselves are particularly extraordinary (in fact it irritates me just a little that so much of them have - quelle surprise - endless sequences to do with food and the preparing of it. Last night it was cakes, I think). But the recording of them, the bringing of night-vision into day, has a way of changing the way you look at and remember things. The day’s events, mundane as they might be, become lit and pregnant with meaning. I think it was the Jungian analyst, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who said that dreams are like coded messages. You don't read them in the ordinary way. I think too that the messages are like Matryoshka dolls - you open them and find another, and then another.

Of course it may be that I really am losing the last of my marbles. But anyone who says so is a mashed potato. Talking of which, I am not eating them right now; nor bread, rice and pasta or sugar and coffee. It does (I say this in a whisper) seem to have the effect of giving me just a little more strength. I know in any case, from experience, that separating starch and proteins is always better for me, less tiring. But still – in case it seems that I’m off into the blue with the sail set fair, well I’m not – just yet. But a friend with a definite tendency toward sign-reading said she looked at the ball of crystal (that one up there she photographed) and it told her things concerning me: much writing, on white paper, and laughter, and a lightness... and in believing this will all come true, I have nothing to lose but a few marbles that were never much use to me anyway. So I do.

Easter Juice

Yesterday, as on Good Friday last year and the one before, there was a party in my neighbour’s house (the cottage adjoining ours) with food consisting entirely of hot cross buns which she gets up early in the morning to bake. Last year I had thought we would be gone from here by now, having sold the house, but it didn’t turn out that way and perhaps Saint Joseph, patron saint of house-vendors, who is still buried at the front of the house, knew that the time was not right, or that I couldn’t do without the buns. We take in so much more than food at these festivals. Who was it that said, “man does not live by bread alone?” Well you know who, and this is the time of the festival of his death and resurrection, and I could talk about more than buns and the fact that on Sunday we will be eating lamb tagine with couscous and roasted peppers, followed by passion fruit pavlova. But why would I? Except to tell you this terrible, terrible joke about these men who went into a Chinese restaurant and began to have a dispute about whether there were any Jews in China, so when the waiter came to take their order one of them asked if there were any such thing as Chinese Jews and the waiter said, sorry – only orange, apple and pineapple jews. I thank you.

Gawd. Sorry about that, but I do rather like the joke and can picture it quite clearly as happening in a Chinese restaurant in Camden Town where my Dad took me a long time ago on one of our weekend ‘access’ days out. It was the kind of place (and the kind of decade) where people would go in and order spare ribs, which were listed in brackets as “chop” in case people didn’t know what it was, with a side dish of chips. It was so popular that it became known as ‘chip-chop’ (or was it 'chop-chip'?). And I can, as I said, picture the men talking about the various kinds of Jews, the waiter coming, then me bursting in like a completely inappropriate afterthought, holding up my hand and blurting something about Christian Jews. Because people always seem surprised that you can be one as well as the other. Or as badly. The definition of practising? That one is a bit crap at it, I suppose. Happy Easter.

To Boldly Go

I am not yet able to divulge the signs for Signs because I haven’t got round to doing the new year I-Ching. I sense, however, that they will be auspicious. Intuition tells me so and this, it seems, is down to my having a predominantly “feminine” brain. Him Outdoors has got a book called something like “why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps”and the multiple-choice quiz thing has revealed this piece of wisdom. What it can’t tell me, thank goodness, is why I feel as I do at new year – that I can pick up in the ether, as it were, something about what might be coming to me in the year ahead. It isn’t so much about good or bad; more a kind of flavour that I can (imaginatively) taste. So I say that the year ahead is auspicious, but quietly so. A vanilla custard rather than a spiced beef in red wine followed by death- by- chocolate. Please do not have issues about the word vanilla, it is a taste I like very much and a vanilla year will be quite acceptable. It is wonderful, this faculty – an inner alethiometer that reveals the truth about things. You will have to see The Golden Compass to know what an alethiometer is. Better still, read Philip Pullman's Northern Lights (the film was predictably an edited highlights version of the story). Even so, I have begun the year with a fast-developing head-cold, but nothing bad enough to dampen the vanilla-scented flame of optimism that burns exquisite mellow in my sentient soul. If I sound a little unhinged, put it down to that, I won’t mind.

I began this blog a year ago exactly. One of the reasons for beginning it was for regular writing practice and another was because there were blogs I was enjoying and I felt like joining in. On reflection, I think that blogging is good for blogging rather than anything else and I did ask myself at one point whether it might be better to stop. But I like it so I won’t. Most people I meet (unless they are bloggers) are very sniffy about this activity of ours, and it seems, dear blogfriends, that we have been getting rather a lot of bad press. But we don’t care, do we? I should coco!

On we go, best feet forward. Our Mission: to boldly go where no sniffy blogsnob has been or is likely to venture. Be seeing you.

Remembering Bethlehem

Some mothers didn’t talk about sex. Some mothers didn’t mention money, death or private parts. Mine didn’t talk about god. When I was twenty one I asked her why we never talked about god. I can’t remember what she said but I felt an embarrassment in her. It was the last thing she would have wanted to talk about. When deep questions arose in her as a child her grandmother would say,
“Mein kind, dass ist die Natur,” and that satisfied her.

I was born with god in the wings. Though genderless, god looked first like my paternal grandmother who died when I was six and later like the revolutionary Marxist cricket writer, C.L.R. James. I knew, though, that he was mercurial, a shape-changer, or no shape at all, and lived in the pines, in the forest that bordered the German village where I lived as a young child. Bethlehem was also in the forest. A star tagged to the top of a tree I could see from my bedroom window pointed to the stable and the wax candles on our christmas tree came from there.

Back in London, there was no more Bethlehem. In assembly, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the hall, which served also as gym and dining room, the moustachioed headmaster sang holy, holy, holy, and said thy will be done. Everyone knew about the thing that will be done. It was called Thy. Forever, amen. No-one there had been close to Bethlehem, under the same sky.

Today my son headed back to university, mathematics and logic. Last night, out of a conversation about homoeopathy, alternative medicine and a Devon-based shaman who uses earth elementals (gnomes, fairies etc.) to heal sick people, the talk came around to belief. I have a sense that my son may have inherited the god thing, but these days anything that can’t be properly argued and validated smacks of lazy thinking and quite right too, I suppose. But there’s not much I can say to support my belief that god is out there and in here (still looking like C.L.R. James), other than that it would require a degree of faith I do not possess for me to unbelieve. Also, I live near a forest. It isn’t the Bethlehem one, but sometimes I catch the drift of something that reminds me and I remember it, just as it was.