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Trusting the Flow: The Art of Turning Up

A week and a half ago, between the opening and closing curtains of a wedding and a funeral, I did my very first podcast; another leap into trusting the flow.

And I notice, as I begin to let go of the old, the new and unseen doors that start to shimmer and glow, subtly lifting out of two-dimensionality like magic-eye art. By softening our gaze on the very same page, reality shifts and coalesces into a new and breathtakingly multidimensional stage.

Magic, and yet nothing of the sort…   just possibilities and pathways that were there all along, obscured by the shutters of mind and its fearful fastenings and locks. And so it was with this, as Julia Chi Taylor – the extraordinary soul I’ve been voyaging with through my internal seas – invited me to take part in her new Podcast series, ‘Conversations with a Bodhisattva’.

But how fascinating to watch the inner protesters rally so fast – a surging horde of banners and shouts, all chaining themselves to the shutters with unequivocal handcuffs of doubt!

‘Danger!’ they shriek, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t risk! You’ll be vulnerable before strangers, self-manacled in the village stocks!’

If the only way I can speak now is from the epicentre of my truth – from the tenderest spots still healing from their loosening thorns – then to trust to the free-flow of an interview feels like launching my leaky vessel into the torrents of Niagara falls.

I’ve already leapt with my blog, so why does this dive feel even higher? Because speech is such an instant and irretrievable creature, so different to the small woodland mammal of the written word that forages so quietly beneath life’s delicate leaf-litter. While writing can curl up and hibernate for as long as it needs, nesting unseen in the roots and thickets of daily success and strife, the spoken word shrieks with immediacy – a discharged bullet whose trajectory can’t be changed.

Am I ready to fledge, to learn on the wing, without the time to perfect and to tweak? To be a mayfly of expression, a momentary flutter in life’s skies, preserved in amber though so briefly conceived?

Of course the cinema of my mind screens me bumbling haphazardly, a clumsily-blundering daddy-long-legs of orality! Prattling hither-and-thither, shedding legs along the way, tangled in endless webs of ghastly ‘what if’s’…

What if I can’t express what I mean? What if my fluency startles and falters? What if it dries-up like roadkill under the truck-lights of immediacy?

What if I say it all wrong?

There is, of course, no such thing. Nothing to be done but release the comfort-blanket of ‘right’, and surrender instead to the simplicity of is. To turn up as I am, as raw and unadorned as a Christmas tree in February; no baubles, no lights. And trust, as Jonny once wrote, ‘Ah… but you’re decked with fairy lights all year round lady, don’t you see? How lucky I am that you let your needles drop for me’.

Something that applies to us all if we can only trust our inner lights to guide the way, instead of grasping at those B&Q aisles of decoration and display. To be who we are, bare branches and all, and trust the anchor of our roots as the winds shift and sway.

And so I watched those inner protesters march the streets of my psyche, and thanked them politely for their loudspeakers of doubt. Then took the inner projectionist aside to suggest we change the music, brighten the lights…

Time to banish this dis-empowering delusion that to be worthy of being heard we must be finished and complete, reclining in our armchair of success and basking in achievement’s firelight;

To tie a bandana on my true-self, don the 80’s crop-top of spirituality, and thrill at the speedball while shouting ‘bring it on!’ to the Rocky theme-tune!

Sylvester Stallone knew what’s what, all those years ago.

It’s not about ‘winning’; it’s the art of showing up.

And so I did.

The beginning…

Photo by Jared Erondu on Unsplash

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You can listen to my podcast with Julia Chi Taylor by clicking on the green play button below:

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The Unsaid Goodbye

We were enjoying morning coffee on the veranda when the phone rang, tautening the string in me that already knew who it would be.

‘Oh Clare’ Mum began gently, ‘I’m afraid it’s not great news.’

Over the last few weeks my stepfather had been drifting on the ebbing tides of his life, a listing vessel buffeted against the rocks of this coronavirus sea, dwindling in a hospital no boat could reach while the storm still ran free.

If he broke through the surf again and held fast to the buoy, then he made it back to the ward but all visitors were forbidden. Yet if he wavered once more on the ledge of life, they moved him into a private room and Mum was allowed to see him temporarily.

Six-hours drive across the country, I span the roulette wheel of whether or not to make the trip. I could set off and be there in half a day, but if he stepped back from the precipice and moved back to the ward then I’d reach that far-flung door only to be turned away. But if I chose to wait, he could rapidly decline – pulling that brief, ephemeral opening of a last goodbye forever tightly closed.

And so came the call that Sunday, telling me he’d deteriorated overnight. ‘But I was there with him the whole time’ Mum reassured me, ‘right up until his very last breath’.

The gavel landed with unexpected force, ‘You mean he’s already gone?’ I cried, in a strangled sob.

But how can this inevitability still come as such a shock? A man of hearty age, at the end of a life well-lived, whose only alternative from here was the slow grind of brakes in the crepuscular semi-colon of a nursing home. He’d rallied so many times before I just assumed he would again; that I’d see him once more beyond the curtains of this strange covid scene and its face-masked stage.

Like a rupture in a plane mid-flight, death’s fierce vacuum defies the grapple-hooks of our minds; a tear in the everyday fascia of life, and a sudden disparity of air pressure through which so much of ourselves and our own pains rush powerfully in. And in that moment of truth – that suspended full-stop when we first hear the news – we’re right there at the metaphysical operating table, glove-deep in life’s seeping, blood-swamped abdominal cavity.

Death hits us with such sudden, sharp-edged clarity, with such punctured arterial force, that even a ‘good’ death feels like unfathomable news. And there is something so poignant about those last exhalations of life, a softly extinguishing chorus heralding the vast opera-singer of loss onto her quietly hushed stage.

Why is it so shocking, this earthly abandonment of our borrowed flesh? The return of a life force to its unknowable seas and skies? Because, I think, of the reckoning it brings. Not just of how we, too, will die, but of how we choose to live. And that whispered inner question…

“Did I do enough?”

Lester married into our family over twenty years ago, a man you couldn’t help but love. A gentlemanly bedrock of integrity, rich in the deep ores of honesty, goodness and modest joy. A man who lost his first wife to a heart attack in her sleep, and whose daughters drifted away in grief, but who embraced our patchwork family in all its frayed, chaotically-darned disarray.

Back when I was engaged to be married, and we hadn’t the means to buy a ring, Lester wrote with touching humility to offer me the one he’d given his first wife. I loved it on first sight; a beautifully unusual band of gold and emerald green. And though the marriage never happened, the ring stayed with me. So as Jonny and I were chatting incidentally about jewelry before the phone rang that morning, I just happened to tell him the story and dug it out for him to see. And so, at the very time Lester was taking his final breaths, I was holding his gift – a ring he’d given a wife so many years before and then, so many years later, passed on to me.

And so despite the grief of a goodbye never said – of a soul reaching the finish line without my particular loving wave – I’d still, in my own way, been there with him when he died.

A ring. A circle. A cycle lived. And at 9pm that very same night, my best friend’s sister gave birth to a little boy.

Souls passing in the ether, through unseen tributaries of life.

Travel well dearest Lester.

And may you find peace again beside your first wife.

Photo by Anthony from Pexels.

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Jewels in the Turd

As I walked barefoot across the lawn this morning, delighting in the nodding pestemons and bee-deep lavender, my pleasure was interrupted by an abrupt encounter with a small turd.

Fear not, I didn’t step in it. But oh, what a rude little serpent of distaste! Like the discovery of an overripe spot on your nose after a languid Sunday lie-in with a bright new lover, its presence spat me fatly out of my romantic reverie.

The young turd stared boldly back, throwing down the gauntlet of bad decorum and willing this old fogey to make a fuss.

 ‘Bloody cats!’ spluttered my mind, self-righteous with dirty-disdain.

A pause. A recognition. A chuckle. What codswallop, I adore my feline friends! So why this knee-jerk indignity at nature’s ways? 

I looked again. Noticed the sheen of bluebottles clustered on its crust in earnest industry.

And realised: Life is teeming with such moments of choice, the majority made unconsciously. I could choose to see a turd covered in flies and play the tired old record of disgust.

Or…

I could choose to see a banquet of living jewels, dazzling in iridescent dinner jackets at their giant ochre feast! To wonder at the crusade of little winged recycling-champions going about their permacultured day.

I took a moment to admire the beady sequins of their bodies with their taut metallic glaze; marvel at the little mascara-brushed eyelashes of their legs and the maroon globes either side of bomber-pilot helmets, the stunning complexity of their minutely pixelated eyes.

I’ve always been tickled by the saying, ‘You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter’.

I’m even more delighted to realise there’s no need. Nature sends them their very own living sequins – with miniature delivery-wings no less! Oh tiny fecal fairies, if we consciously clean our minds of prejudices, judgments and beliefs we can see how miraculous you are, and the parable of truth you represent.

Just like the Universe, flies lay their eggs in life’s excrement because it’s such rich nutrition for growth.  So no matter how unpleasant things seem, there’s always a hot steam of transformation in every cowpat and a glitter of jewels on every turd.

The trick is to take off our smeary mind goggles.

And learn to truly see.

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Motherhood and Otherhood

It began when I fell in love for the first time; heavily, painfully and inelegantly. He was much older; I still had braces on my teeth. We were together for a year in Edinburgh before I had to leave for Oxford and start the betwixt and between of long-distance longing. But however willfully I battled in academia’s arena, maternal yearnings would lure me from my student lens and I’d find myself ogling pregnant women and their growing orbs of life, feeling the hot piercings of envy and the dull ache of grief.

I felt the urge to have children in the same way I felt hunger, thirst or tiredness; an unyielding compulsion of body and mind that couldn’t be soothed by distraction.

Looking back, it wasn’t the reality of parenthood that I craved. I pined for pregnancy itself; the bloom of promise and renewal within its expansive maternal bulb. I wanted the fierce metamorphosis of childbirth – all the pain, glory and gore of it – and I hungered for those early days holding raw, unblemished new life to my chest. The heart-swelling treasure of a tiny, helpless fledgling in all its feeble-bleated vulnerability. 

I wanted a baby so much I could already feel the unbearable softness of its hair against my cheek and inhale its milky aroma. And I experienced that lack as a palpable grief: the absence of something I had already felt and known, and somehow lost. 

Even a year as an Au-Pair for two little ones couldn’t cure me of my malaise. And a malaise was how it felt, wedged into a generation of emancipated career women astride ambitious chariots of sharp-edged CV’s. I was a sentimental bumbler among glittering gladiators and seemed somehow to have lost my way.

Hormones certainly played their part. But so, too, did an unwitting dodge of my inner cellar. I didn’t know myself; hadn’t even begun to scratch the lottery card of who I truly was. Instead, my authentic self lay gagged and hog-tied under the shadowy floor of my subconscious, bound with the invisible rope that childhood and society had so discreetly tied. What I was craving, I suppose, was my own rebirth, not that of another. But without the skills or awareness to go about it, I ached instead to be a vessel of fresh hope.

And there is something so primal, so irresistibly consoling, about leaping onto the hopeful hamster-wheel of reproduction. When you’re grasping at existential saplings, it promises a gratifyingly sturdy trunk – the most basic, elemental solution to our restless metaphysical angst. What better way to find purpose in life than to grow it afresh in all its beautiful, unblemished glory?

It was only in my early thirties that I began to realise how little of early parenthood is about finding your self, and how much about temporarily surrendering it instead – to the all-consuming helplessness of a child too young to understand you exist separately from its needs. The rewards are rich and endless, but it’s a voyage best embarked on from shores of love and trust in ourselves rather than a groping search for meaning.

Airlines tell us again and again that in the event of loss of cabin pressure we must don our own oxygen masks before trying to assist any children with theirs. We can be no help to others without a firm anchor to ourselves. And yet there I was in my twenties, desperate to grapple an oxygen mask onto a child who didn’t even exist yet, while I myself was gasping, flailing and suffocating. Did I really think a baby would save me? Yes, I think I did.

I still dissolve a little when I see them; some inner pendulum stops mid-swing and gazes in breathless wonder. Their simple joys shed the scales of our mind and reconnect us to the enchanted fascination of a world seen through untainted eyes. The marvel of a door handle, the slippy hilarity of a bar of soap…

Yet I know, too, that I’m only just getting to grips with my own oxygen mask.

For better or worse my time hasn’t come yet, and likely never will.

But on this particular journey, I’ve found my peace.

Photo by Egor Kamelev from Pexels

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Braving the Blogosphere – Field Notes from a Wobbly Novice

For anyone climbing anxiously aboard the blogging-bus for the first time – wondering how to make sense of the bewildering array of route maps, unintelligible fare systems and suspiciously-stained seats on offer – please know that you’re not alone. And since it’s a process of travel rather than arrival, no direction can ever be wrong.

Whatever the route, every bus has ‘learning’ as its final destination, so it’s simply the commitment to keep boarding that counts. And like backpacking adventures in Asia, it’s those where we’re cheek-deep in chickens – balanced unsteadily on a plastic micro-stool in the aisle and dry-heaving at the puppetry of roasted frogs touted through the windows at every stop – that we remember most fondly afterwards.

As Crocodile Dundees of a virtual New York, it’s perfectly normal that so little makes any sense at first. From the giant skyscrapers to the vast shanty-towns around the edge, the bustling metropolis of Blogosphere is an endless Escher-like labyrinth, an illusory winding confusion of streets and suburbs without any full-stops. Investing in property there is a peculiarly bewildering brand of real estate, one where ‘entire world’ is the narrowest search term available and estate agents don’t even speak in recognisable sounds. And then there are the touts and insurance brokers, prophesying certain death unless you pay more than your monthly rent for protection.

It’s easy to feel like Alice in Blunderland, crumpled at the bottom of the online rabbit hole and blindly groping about in the dark.

And while every new realm has its oracle – its Wizard of Oz – a google search of ‘How to Start a Blog’ brings up such a bewilderment of co-ordinates that it seems far easier just to scupper the ship and be done. Information, advice, must-do’s, deadly warnings and Endless-Acronyms-You Don’t-Have-the-Faintest-Clue-About all jostle noisily for your attention, blinding you in a paparazzi burst of flashbulbs while demanding you strike some savvy, lip-glossed pose to boot (I tried to smile for them, I really did, but I only managed a grimace of crusted cold sores and my darn dress was caught in my knickers).

How can anyone master their first sailboat in this melee of jet-skis and fog-horning steamers? How have so many gone so easily before?

The truth is they haven’t. Like anything worth doing in life, the key lies in the humility to be a beginner, and the willingness to do it badly first. It’s a practice in prising away each suction cap of perfectionism and doing the serious work of lightheartedness, calling upon our inner toddler in the bathtub.

We learn by doing, and so the only choice worth making is to take the next small step. Make a decision – any decision – and jostle free the log-jam of overwhelm. Otherwise the sinkhole of never-ending research becomes a safety belt that’s too tight to reach the ignition key.

Failure isn’t at the opposite end of the train line to success; it’s every small, tumbledown station along the way.

And the aim isn’t to board exactly where you want to disembark.

It’s to ride through new landscapes and welcome each and every barbecued frog, come what may.

Photo by Nubia Navarro (nubikini) from Pexels

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Dear Cinema of the Mind

Dearest Clare Who Doubts,

I know, with all my heart, how very hard this is right now; how tempted you are to give up, and how loud the voices of doubt. I know how very real the imagined corpse of your future seems – pale and bloated with inadequacy in the gully below – and the agony of fears multiplying through the deep fissures of every handhold.

Please don’t despair darling – hold on, hold on! These thoughts aren’t the truth of you, just passing scavengers of your consciousness whose appetites are inflamed by your fright. It’s the carrion of your confidence that draws them in, wings and claws all blocking out the light.   

Try not to swipe at them, however sharp their beaks. Panic only increases the flow of water into this cramped little breathing space of life. I do so understand the terror, but you cannot be saved from drowning if you continue to fight.

So take a deep breath my dear; stop thrashing, and gently press pause! Let the tides of your attention retreat from the rocky shorelines of your mind, exhaling deep into the ocean of your inner sight.

Just for now, I want you to see those despairing thoughts as a film – harmless ribbons of negatives magnified onto the giant underground cinema of your mind. You’re sitting in a luxurious leather loveseat, a tub of popcorn to one side. Now see the projectionist, a kindly, diligent soul who only wants what’s best for you, crinkle-eyed with care. Ask him why he’s only screened disaster movies your whole life and he’ll tell you about your early days together, how fear was the only way to keep you safe. He’s been dedicated to your survival ever since, rushing the worst horrors up on screen before you risk endangering yourself with change.

But do you see the endless aisles of films available to choose from? Infinite Disney-channels of bright hope, all dusty with neglect? He’s left them untouched ever since they got you into so much trouble growing up. But it’s time to thank him for his concern and let him know you’ll choose the films from now on. Or hit pause anytime he forgets.

The new stuff might be a little temperamental at first – a few glitches here and there – but they’ll run perfectly smooth again once they’ve been played enough.

So settle back into your armchair, slide an arm over the shoulders of your fearful self.

‘How to Tame Your Dragon’ is playing at last!

With all my love and confidence,

Clare Who Knows

Photo by Donald Tong from Pexels

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Thresholds – Fear of Beginnings

I’ve spent the majority of my life writing in various air-raid shelters of protection – furtively, secretly, shyly – while harbouring a deep longing to emerge into the light. I’ve never known the courage to claim each illegitimate child of creativity or the confidence to celebrate our relationship without fear. But it is the act of sharing that releases us from our own prisons, and I have dithered in mine long enough.

And so I’ve begun to massage away this creative arthritis, to slowly unclench the fearful fist of self-expression and loosen each contracted finger with gentle, consistent action.

As part of this, I resolved to start a blog as a training ground for my wobbly inner foal: somewhere to stretch its hermetic limbs, practice jumping small hurdles and begin exploring the paddocks of possibility outside.

But there is something pathologically terrifying about this public unclothing of the inner self. Like dreams where we find ourselves unspeakably naked in a job interview, it’s a horror of visceral wrongness; of baring the wobbly cellulite of the soul, the saddlebags of angst, the scary and hairy bits that are too awkward to shave. And of believing them to be unacceptable. This is the hot lava of shame that flows beneath the pavements of our lives, a blistering annihilation we might inadvertently plunge into without endless vigilance over where we step. The simple act of letting my words roam free feels like a free fall into this scalding abyss.

No wonder my fearful foal kicked in resistance and frothed endlessly at the mouth! Days passed, and the fences of procrastination grew taller. The weather of discomfort ebbed and flowed but the blog stayed firmly in the shell of its seed coat, reluctant to risk the perils of germination and grow up towards the light.

It was so easy to condemn myself for this, to declare myself a failure. And yet, much can be happening in an apparently dormant seed.  I recently read Rhik Sammader’s book ‘I Never Said I Loved You’, a powerful flash-bulb of reprieve in the shadows of self-despair. He describes meeting up with an old teacher at a time when he’s struggling to feel a sense of agency in his life, asking her,

 “How is movement even possible? There’s so much inertia”.

“The thing about inertia”, she replied, “is it’s what happens when the forces acting on an object are exactly equal. It doesn’t mean nothing’s happening”.  She drew more squiggles, indicating that taking away one side was as powerful as adding to another. ‘Is it acceleration you want, or to change direction?’”

Reading this, I felt a shifting of my tectonic plates. Procrastination isn’t a character flaw, or a manifestation of lack or laziness. It’s a temporary stalemate of strengths; the evenly matched power of two lightsabers and their bright polarities of will.

So much kinder to ask, ‘What is the equal and opposite force acting against my intention to do a thing?’ than to lash away at the soft animal flesh of ourselves, barely braved and quick to retreat.

Of course mine was Fear; huge, debilitating and bristling with state-of-the-art special effects.

And like its compatriot – Belief – it was just doing its best to look out for me. Fear was pulling me back from the precipice, tense and alert for danger, while Belief tugged impatiently forwards, excited and eager to explore.

How to loosen the muscle-cramp of this contraction? Not by pushing against it, which only cranks up its counter-strength and so tightens the spasm of resistance. We cannot punish the fear out of ourselves anymore than we can beat away pain – it’s a spiritual oxymoron.

Sometimes gentleness is the only way to soften strength; a surrendering of the desire to control, and an invitation for another type of energy to fill the space. My inner foal is convinced it can’t step into the arena unless it’s perfectly schooled in dressage, head held aloft in an impenetrable fortress of pride and faultless precision. To appear as its trembly, knock-kneed and neophyte self seems like self-crucifixion at an everlasting altar of shame, and so it kicks and bucks at any attempt to coerce it.

To coax it out requires acceptance, understanding, patience and friendship. It needs a playmate, not an authoritarian; someone to rough-and-tumble over these prickly thistles of perfectionism until they’re flattened by fun.  Someone to chuckle affectionately when it face-plants, and cheer it back up to its feet; someone to whoop with pleasure as they circle back together, take another run up and try that first jump once more.

And so I open the gate. Take the first tentative step in.

And have a jolly good roll in the horseshit.

I never liked that bloody dressage nonsense anyway.

Photo by Fabien Maurin on Unsplash

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