Manipura One

The art of stopping
Choosing a response
To this moment exactly
Harnessing energy
To create a city
Of repose
In my soul

For One Shot Wednesday at the One Stop Poetry site

Mea Culpa In A Hair Shirt

I've been hesitant to say it in case I crash again but I've been feeling better for two whole weeks now. And I haven't felt this consistently well since the end of August last year.

A trip back to the doctors last week saw him pleased with my progress and he doesn't want to see me unless I get poorly again. He has advised me to 'grade my activity' i.e. slowly build back up to my normal level of activity.

Ha ha- Dad goes to India at the weekend, my cast comes off on Monday, the same day I start back at university, and I have nothing else in place to give me any extra help with Sam...so it looks like I will be hurling myself back in the deep end...or will I?

The silver lining of this extreme fatigue and constant bouts of flu-type illness-yes, really, there is a silver lining- is that I have had a chance to stop and consider my priorities and also realise that I am very lucky to have all the support and opportunities that I do.

I lifted the lid on some more baggage that I have been hefting around and regularly bashing myself over the head with (think smashing your brain in regularly with a bag containing a bowling ball). I have now started to forgive myself for some stuff which I have not been able to even really think about until now. But it's taken years to understand that what left my world in tatters and my heart completely broken was not all my fault, and I am not a failure because of it.

The past is always a bad bet for dwelling in and on...it leads to a brick wall...I have blamed myself entirely. I've lived "Mea Culpa" in a hair shirt and it's time to give myself a break.

So I have and I am. And life is much better and moving on as a result.

Now I am in a strange limbo where I am hoping that I am one of the lucky people that are diagnosed with post viral fatigue syndrome and get well quickly. Only time will tell.

I have been writing my own personal "New rules for living manual" and making some changes. Less than a week til the plaster cast comes off and I can get going again but slow and steady wins the race...

Love, Love, Love xxx

In The International Year Of The Forest - Help Save OURS

In the International Year of The Forest -tagline: "Celebrating Forests For People", the coalition government wants to sell off ALL of our publicly owned forest to the highest bidder.

In October last year I pledged to join the campaign against this proposed wholesale sell-off of OUR forests in England, currently run by The Forestry Commission.

Until now I have been unable to make good on my pledge due to being poorly. Unlike the Liberal Democrats and their travesty over university fees, I don't intend to break it, so now I am feeling better I have spent a couple of hours this morning getting up to speed with what has been happening.

The campaign is to save our forests is hotting up now as the consutation process begins in February. The 38degrees petition is now at a whopping 172,000 signatures and on Twitter people are trying to see how fast they can get it to 180,000 signatures. If you have yet to sign it you can do so here.


There are now a few excellent campaign web sites where you can see where your nearest forest is up for sale, not IF as they are ALL going to be sold. You can also see which MP to write to, and you can do that here.

The Sunday Telegraph's front page leads with a letter from leading figures and celebrities backing the campaign to save our forests.

You can also write to your MP and ask them to support Caroline Lucas’ Early Day Motion to amend the Public Bodies Bill removing the threat of sale to forests.

The nearest forest to me is about an hour's drive away, Alice Holt Forest in Hampshire. I went there on a rainy sunday, way back in November last year, when I knew the forests were under threat.


I took my 18-year-old niece and my 3-year-old son and despite the cold, wet day we had a great time, tramping through the woods. It is not completely free now because unless you were to cycle, impossible in my case, you have to use the pay and display car park. However it was worth it- great play areas, a cycle-hire and lots of activity packs and information. The forest is used for all kinds of activities from mums and babies groups to education for kids and is a great asset to the local and wider community for theses reasons as well as the obvious.

I will be going back in the spring with Sam, who ran around shouting "this is a magic place" and before if campaigning for its survival deems it necessary which I am sure it will.

I have found myself tweeting and retweeting and sharing endless links about the cutbacks on Facebook, feeling politically impotent. But we are not- now is the time to get active- and fight back constructively and creatively.

From Roger Deakin's book Wildwood:

" When Auden wrote, 'A culture is no better than its woods', he knew that, having carelessly lost more of their woods than any other country in Europe, the British generally take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left."

Damned right we do....

18th Birthday Present

I’m past trying to remember where
In Petticoat Lane I found you
I wonder if people go there still
To buy leather jackets as we did
When it was a rite of passage
Like buying your first pair of DMs
Back then I rode pillion
And needed protective clothing
Not just for posing at gigs in
Although I painted your back
With arcane symbols
So cool and mysterious in 1988
And forgot about that fact
Even when I wore you recently
After breaking my wrist and required
Something waterproof that would fit
Over the green cast on my right arm
For a mystical tour of South London
Where the forgotten chaosphere
Was noted and commented upon

This is my first poem for One Shot Wednesday at the One Stop Poetry site

Past Bye

Gave
Up
Stopped
Stood
Still
Took
Stock

Weighed
Anchor
Pastures
New
Greener
Over
Here

Stephen Fry's Moab Is My Washpot

Moab is My Washpot lives up to the many superlative review quotes that grace its cover because it is scintillatingly written, grips you by the lapels in its need to be read, and charms and confounds- in other words it is an honest reflection of its polymath and quintessentially English author.

I’ve been meaning to read this book since it came out in 1997 and thought of it again recently, whilst studying a module at university on forms of biography and autobiography.

If you don’t know who Stephen Fry is which cliché have you been living on? Go here and find out more. I was going to attempt to briefly sum up his career but have now thought better of it. When it comes to Fry’s writing how can a review possibly begin to do justice to the way he writes?

The book is warm, witty, entertaining, honest, playful etc ad infinitum- you simply have to go and read it. Fry tosses off more clever and breathtakingly beautiful metaphors, analogies, and generally wondrous, lyrical writing in the course of 400-odd pages than, I am sure, some successful writers manage to squeeze out in an entire career:
“Sex without smiling is as sickly and base as vodka and tonic without ice.”

A few pages in I put the book down and took a moment over one such fine device and thought: “It’s not fair”, but as the story he so brutally and honestly tells of his early years, even when you seemingly have it all, it does not necessarily make for a happy existence:
“After one of those squealing, juddering, stomach-dropping false starts with which trains so tactlessly articulate human emotion...”

There were passages, where he resorts to quoting greek or some greek tragedy or other arcane intellectual thinking where he lost me but never for long and never completely. I feel slightly more knowedgable, healthily challenged and therefore was able to indulge such opaqueness- after all, who can know everything- apart from seemingly Mr Fry himself?

It’s a lovely, shocking, touching and at times heartrending, as well as laugh-out-loud funny book. And at the end of it I ordered Fry’s new autobiography, The Fry Chronicles.

Read it and weep with joy, sadness, laughter and wonder.

Grounding

Finally with a sigh of relief
Body connects with the earth
Roots shoot into the soil
Looking for sustenance
And providing stability
Limitation necessary
For growth and creation
Bearing fruit is only possible
When you stand still
“Grow where you are planted”
Someone said
I remember my feet
And hold on to my head