Another troubling dream…

Just recording this, whilst the details are fresh in my mind, and I mull it over looking for “meaning”…

I was sitting on the wooden floorboards, legs stretched out in front of me, back against the wall, quite relaxed & talking to someone, probably my elder daughter. I could see a cricket pitch and a line of willows, probably a riverbank, through the open door. Suddenly a fairly large snake glided through the door. I wasn’t much alarmed; somehow I knew it wasn’t poisonous. But then another snake, larger, faster and more agressive, slithered in after it, clearly in hot pursuit. It attacked the first snake; I watched in horrified fascination as they lashed about. I knew the bigger snake was venomous as well as vicious…

The smaller snake dived up my trouser leg, trying to escape, but the venomous snake followed it up there. I was now frozen in horror, but the other people in the room seemed quite unaware that there was anything untoward going on, and were chattering away quite normally behind me. I could feel the snakes slithering over my skin, the smaller snake trying frantcially to escape the larger’s deadly coils & strikes. I knew I mustn’t move a muscle; I tried to scream, but nothing would come out; I’m not sure I could even open my mouth. I felt one of the snakes strike, and felt burning fangs sink into my thigh; I didn’t know which snake… at last the scream came, and I woke up screaming, “Help!” bolt upright, heart pounding.

*** Edited to add: Oh my goodness, I’ve just re-read the last few words of the last post I made here. That wasn’t quite what I meant… ***

Looking into the future…

…isn’t something I thought I’d ever be able to do. True, I’ve always been quite good at picking up the signals for what’s really going on, and how things might develop, but really seeing into the future? That was the stuff of fiction and idle fancy, not worth expending any brain cells on considering seriously.

But I’m beginning to think differently. Partly because I don’t have to bend my perception of reality to what my church considers acceptable any longer, and partly because the “evidence” is stacking up, in very unexpected ways…

When we first moved here, I knew that the house was built on the site of a medieval monastery. So I dismissed the tall, dark-robed figure that I occasionally saw out of the corner of my eye, whisking away round corners, as a total figment of my overheated historical imagination, or possibly some kind of visual disturbance caused by a twin pregnancy with very low blood pressure. I never quite forgot it, though, and when we had the foundations of our new conservatory dug out, I looked very carefully for any signs of medieval life – or death. Nothing… But one day not long ago, I was standing chopping vegetables in my kitchen, when the curtains that lead into the conservatory twitched aside, and a tall, dark-robed figure slithered silently into the room, then whisked away round the corner into the hallway. My heart stood still… I knew exactly  what (or rather who) it was; it was my third son, the younger of my twins, dressed up as a medieval monk to scare his sisters and their friend. But it was also exactly  what I’d seen, 16 years before, more than once; before he was even born, in fact.

A couple of weeks ago, his twin sister recounted a dream, also taking place in our kitchen, where I was facing her, talking about not being inclined to let something lie, as she reached up into the cupboard for some chocolate. One of those clear details in a jumbled, portentious dream, it seemed. But this evening, it happened, word for word and action for action as she’d described it. Not in any important context, I hasten to add; I was just saying that I needed to go & hunt for the source of the obnoxious feline pong emanating from the conservatory!

These are only two instances; there’ve been many more. I’m no psychic, and have always rather sneered at gullible people who want to believe in fortunetellers, but I am beginning to think that there may really be information from our future accessible to us somehow, if I only knew how to sense what’s genuine, despite being deprived of its context, and what’s just wishful or fearful thinking…

Perhaps I need a Python!

Matthew 11:28…

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

He probably didn’t aim it specifically at mothers of twins sitting GCSEs, but it felt like that last night. Or to put it another way, before I went to Meeting I felt a bit like a mug of scummy, lukewarm, oversweet coffee. After an hour of waiting in the Silence and the Light, I had mysteriously transformed into a cool, clear glass of fresh water. As I walked home I felt the little gnats of busyness start to swarm around my head again, but now I had the strength of spirit just to wave them away, and I slept much better and arose with my ability to get things done restored.

I think I’ll have to give up my job, so that I can start to go to Meeting weekly and “feel the good” in me “raised up!”

All that glisters…

So many things – and people, and situations - are not what they seem. Yet we cling onto our first impressions, reluctant to call our judgement into question…

For some reason, I was thinking about a few of the defining moments of my life earlier today. One stood out as a classic. Aged 16 and completely innocent, I was at a Christian youth camp and had been swimming in the sea. I stopped on the way back up to camp to wash the salt out of my hair under the waterfall, where a cold North Devon stream plunged over a low cliff. Suddenly strong arms encircled my waist from behind, and warm lips caressed my neck… time stopped, just for a second. Then he released me. I knew who it was, and whirled round, eyes wide with shock. He winked, and grinned at me, every inch the Alpha male, and sauntered off down to the beach where his beautiful Norwegian fiancee awaited him…

For many years I carried that moment with me, knowing that one theology student, a camp leader, a potential pastor, was not what he seemed, or that others believed him to be, and that maybe I wasn’t all that I’d wanted to be, either. He was, without doubt, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and he had seen something in me that responded to him; I did not scream and try to get away, as virtually every other girl there would have… Not long ago, I saw his face and name again, grinning up from the newspaper. He had just been sentenced to something like 12 consecutive life sentences for drug dealing and worse. And for years I’d thought of him, if at all, with a wistful, “I wonder what would have happened, if things had been different?” I’ve had my answer…

I also thought of a highly-respectable elderly lady I know, a veritable pillar of polite society, who casually let slip the astonishing fact that for nearly 30 years, until very recently, she’d been conducting a passionate affair with someone I know to be 25 years her junior. I do not doubt her for one minute; she’s as sharp & bright as a new pin to this day, not given to fantasy or exaggeration. And I rather think that her erstwhile lover is desperately missing her kindness, wit and sparkling humour. And whose business is it anyway? Neither of them was married to anyone else, and she steadfastly refused to marry him in case he met someone his own age. But I wonder what her whiter-than-white colleagues and constituents would have said if they’d known?! Sadly I suspect they would have torn her limb from limb, but she has been – still is – a huge force for good in our community.

And when people congratulate me on my well-behaved offspring – well, enough said! None of us know what’s going on behind closed doors, or behind other people’s eyes…

Peace matters to me, now…

Of all the Quaker testimonies, the one I struggle with the most is the Peace testimony. And I know I’m not alone, because that is how my mother’s family came to drift away from the Ffriends, when my grandmother married her Army Officer. But the proverbial road to Damascus has just leapt up and hit me in the face…

During the course of my work, I found myself alone with a somewhat befuddled elderly gentleman, who was stuck on the floor of his flat, unable to summon up the co-ordination to haul himself back into the chair where he spends his lonely days, gently pickling himself to death. He looked up at me and gasped, “Mummy! Mummy! That’s what they cried, you know. They all cried for Mummy, no-one ever asked for Daddy…” As we struggled to give him enough purchase on the slippery carpet to get himself up again, he told me, ” I was just a sub-lieutenant – no, a snotty-nosed midshipman – we hit a mine. I was on the bridge; the Captain told me to get below and help the Sawbones. I’d never seen so much blood; I was only 16. And the Sawbones was going up and down the men who were crying and bleeding, with bones & bits sticking out, and giving them all a jab, and they died; there was nothing else he could do for them. Or that I could do, but hold them down. Mummy, Mummy, they cried; but she never came…”

He got back up eventually, and carried on down his bottle. There’s no-one to stop him and no-one to care; the terrified, horrified boy who looked at me out of his drunken eyes never, ever let anyone get close to him again. And who’s going to believe that an elderly gentleman, who until recently coped admirably for himself, is suffering from shellshock, all these years after those dreadful events? And who has had the worst of it; those boys who died in agony so long ago, or the one who lived and carried their cries inside his head all this time, alongside his survivor’s guilt?

So anything I can do, however little, I must do, to try to build a world in which this does not, cannot happen to anyone, ever again…

Contemplating an inconsistency…

I have removed most of this post, as the situation that led to my making it has now been resolved. I will leave the last bit in, however, as it’s more personal and less identifiable… For many years I have excused someone’s bad behaviour, knowing that it is beyond their control, but I’ve just haven’t recognised the impact on the other people who also have to live with it. And it has had a huge negative impact, which I need to acknowledge and try to redress, if it isn’t too late. This isn’t going to be easy, because I shall be swimming against the tides of mainstream society; luckily this will not be for the first time, so I have some idea what to expect and how to go about it! I will have to brave the disapproval of my family & friends, who have very little idea of what’s really been going on. I am afraid; I have been afraid of doing this for a very long time, but I’ve faced a growing certainty that I must do this for several years now. I’m in that awful moment where I have to place my trust in something/someone I can’t be sure of, and step over that abyss, because things are piling up behind me and there is no way but forwards…

It’s not that I’m unsure of God, just that I’m unsure of what I’m supposed to be doing and how. I’ve tried all the obvious things, and everything else I can think of too, and got absolutely nowhere. Ah well, He never promised us an easy ride…

Random dreams…

What’s brought me here again is a series of intense and threatening dreams, and a real-life conversation which left me reeling, suddenly realising that the “Doomers” might be not be quite so over-the-top as I’d previously assumed.

Oddly, the dreams seem almost more real than the conversation. In one, I was a teacher trying to save her class from a massacre, but in vain; they would not disobey the headteacher’s orders to wait calmly for help to come & run & hide with me. But the “helpers” were actually the assassins… I got away, by the skin of my teeth, and the kindness of a stranger, but most of my pupils didn’t. In another, I was walking along a cliff path, looking at some pretty cottages on the other side of the bay, when suddenly they faded and became a pastel drawing, before vanishing altogether. Instead, we saw a furious & deadly storm racing towards us across the sea, and realised we stood no chance if we were caught without shelter. There was nowhere to hide behind us so we had to go on up the path, not knowing what lay beyond, and my companions were stumbling, questioning and faltering all the way. Attempts to hurry them up just made them slower… But we did reach shelter, in a long, low building in an unexpected quarry, just as the storm broke over the hilltop and howled down the slope.

Anxiety dreams, without a doubt. And it’s probably unwise to read anything else into them at all, but they do accurately reflect my worries that our everyday world is spinning out of control in ways we’ve barely even started to notice.

The conversation – well, the less said, the better, in some ways. Suffice to say that I now know, from the best possible sources, that the “blip” in our financial systems a week or so ago was far from that… not that I have to worry, not having any investments! But only a fool would fail to see some of the wider implications… Time to make sure my cupboards are well-stocked, methinks.

What matters most to me, and what doesn’t…

 Last year I spent some time trying to explain to a lovely American why I was happy not to have more money; this was clearly a very baffling concept for him to grapple with. Why on Earth would I not want more of what he considered to be a supreme blessing? I don’t suppose he’ll ever see excess money as a potential burden and a responsibility; “enough” is a bit of a nonconcept in a consumer economy and I will happily admit that most of the time I would like a little bit more money - but I suspect I don’t actually need it. What I do need is more time, to concentrate on the things that really matter, and the only way I can achieve that is by stripping out the umpteen unimportant claims on my time that modern life tries to impose.

What do I want to have time free for? Caring properly for my family, my friends, the animals under my care, my garden and the wider world. For helping my children grow strong & sound in spirit, body, mind, knowledge & wisdom. For finding, making & mending things that are both beautiful & useful; for growing & making good wholesome food, for becoming informed about the issues that make all this harder than it should be, and passing that information on to others who may need it. 

I didn’t make a conscious decision to give up watching TV. We still have them in the house – only little ones, though; I was never willing to give up half my living space to a machine for conveying other people’s ideas directly into my children’s minds! – but I haven’t sat down to watch a programme for months, and when I did rarely managed to watch a programme all the way through without having to deal with some minor domestic emergency. But when people ask me enviously how I ever manage to make things, and claim they don’t have any free time, I sometimes have to bite my lip not to remind them that they’ve just told me they spent all last evening slumped in front of the TV… 

Shopping? It’s a chore, not a recreational experience! Best done at our local market, chatting to traders who know me & mine, whose goods I trust. I have to make the best of the resources at my disposal, so I do spend time planning & researching, but given a spare afternoon, I’d far rather be in my garden, on an empty beach, or trotting through the woods than queueing up to park at a soulless mall and spending money I haven’t got on things I don’t need.

Horror of all horrors, I don’t do a lot of housework. It’s entirely possible that one reason I am seeking to “simplify” my household is sheer unadulterated laziness! I do try to do the minimum for hygiene, and keep parts of my home presentable and welcoming for visitors, but making my home looking like something from a glossy magazine simply isn’t important to me. I don’t much care if my furniture doesn’t match as long as I can sit on it and as far as I’m concerned, curtains are for keeping us warm in winter and providing a modicum of privacy, not for making a statement about the kind of person I am, how much I’m worth, or how much time I’m willing to spend cleaning the dratted things.

I took the decision many years ago that my children were far more important to me than my career, and have only worked part-time, in jobs that didn’t demand too much of my mental energy, since. I know I’ve been lucky that that was possible for me financially, but believe me, it has not been a particularly easy row to hoe for some of the time. I’m also well aware that there are people who believe that I have “wasted” my talents and my training, and “let the side down” but I had good reasons for taking the decision I did and I don’t regret it for one moment.

For many years, I’ve known that we were making a total pig’s ear of the world we live in. There didn’t seem to be much I personally could do about that; I joined a couple of environmental organisations for a while, but they only ever seemed to be interested in  persuading me to part with money that I hadn’t got. And let’s face it, most greens have trouble even talking to someone who is responsible for their own private population explosion… So I just quietly got on with doing the things I could do in my own backyard. But that doesn’t seem to be enough any more; I need to do in my own life & say more to change the hearts & lives of anyone who will listen to me. How I can do that when I don’t have a shred of environmental street-cred, I don’t know, but let’s face it, it’s obvious - if I can do it, anyone can!

First things first…

I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have faith. Even if it’s only because I can’t wrap my head around a physical universe without meaning, I need God; to me the Creator of the underlying order and origin of joy in the universe. It would be nice to think that God needs me, too, but one of the ideas ingrained in my Christian upbringing is humility; I am just a tiny speck in the infinite vastness of creation and if I have a small part to play in it, it’s a part that could be done by any one of umpteen others too. But hand-in-hand with that goes the idea that I am precious to God, and that in some unknowable way, I do matter and that I always have a choice; I can choose to do what’s right & what’s necessary, or I can turn my back & say, “That’s too hard. Or I’m too busy just now; I’ll think about that later.” Which I’ve done far too many times in my life; haven’t we all?

So the idea of God, and “that of God” in everyone, is central to the way I think. And Jesus is very real to me, too; not just a historical figure who spoke a lot of sense & challenged the establishment, but someone real, and supernaturally human, and there for me in both the good times and the darkest moments. Not always a comforting presence; sometimes confronting and demanding, but always better than the best that I would find within myself, by myself.

 The Holy Spirit? I need it like a plant needs water. I haven’t a clue what it is or does, but sometimes in a Meeting, or listening to beautiful music (of any genre!) or watching the sun go down from the top of a hill, I feel as if I am bathing in the River of Life. I am connected to the universe and can feel the pulse of the world and all that is, or who are, in it. It’s both a presence and a process beyond rational thought and scientific investigation, and it’s in all the things that make life worth living.

So that’s where I’m starting out from.

Complicated thing, simplicity…

For many years, I have felt an urge to try to simplify my life. It would be very easy to point out that it never had to get this complicated in the first place, but the person who could have kept it simpler just isn’t me. So now I feel I am reaching a turning point; my 5 kids are growing up fast, I have recognised that my marriage will never be like other marriages, I have drifted away from my old church and found safe haven elsewhere, and my worries about the state & future of the world around me have reached the point where inaction is no longer an option. At the same time, however, I’ve re-entered the workaday world & lost my allotment, both of which have cost me dear in terms of serenity. In order to regain that serenity, & have the time & energy to make a difference in the world, I need to restore some simplicity to my manic life.

 It seems to me that simplicity means working out what really matters to me, concentrating on those things and “letting go” of as many of the other drains on my time & energy as I reasonably can. There is any amount of advice out there about how to achieve physical simplicity; books & websites on decluttering abound. But empty, easily-cleaned rooms & wardrobes (which I’m still very far from achieving!) would mean nothing to me without spiritual simplicity, which is not quite so easily attained.

So I’ve been attending the local meeting of the Quakers, properly known as the Religious Society of Friends of the Truth, for a year now. Although I have some Quaker ancestry, I was born and raised a CofE Christian, and found my own way into the Good Shepherd’s sheltering arms after years of teenage & twenty-something rebellion & spiritual blundering in the dark. But after years of unquestioning Church membership, increasingly I’ve found myself wincing through services & sermons, wondering how people could think, sing & say some of the things they did in the name of the Prince of Peace & the God of Love. So the simple silence of Friends’ meetings, where we become still and “wait upon the Lord” seemed like a refreshing homecoming, and has given me the internal space & tranquility, away from the noise & bustle of the world, to start to let the Light shine inside me and cast my chaotic life & thoughts into stark relief. This has not been a comfortable process! This is a part of it; the way my mind works, I need to write out my thoughts, which forces me to put them into some kind of logical order, and possibly have some feedback on them, if anyone can be bothered. So I shall post this, then follow up with posts on the individual topics that seem important for me to think through properly, living my life where & how I do.

 Angie