Pod.

To close this spate of grumps on an up note, I saw a pod of dolphins yesterday. Not playing, so not jumping, the sea too cold and grey and wild for fun pehaps, they just humped up above the waves briefly, then were down again, all business, moving from one part of the coast to the next.

The Volunteer.

A young man of my acquaintance (he’s only 40) determined to pull his life around;, quit drinking and so forth, decided the best remedy was to do some volunteer work and experience another part of the globe.  After consulting on skills (he has many handy skills, carpentry, plumbing, car maintenance, ) he was sent to Honduras, to a ‘conservation project.’ Sounded good.  An Iguana Rescue Centre. Quaint, but promising. Two weeks after he achieved the long trek out he was texting back about lack of occupation and the bar culture of the workers already there.   Cr@p.

Winter wearing.

It’s difficult staying cheerful when I’ve just had to drag out my huge black charity shop coat again for the fourth winter. Each year as I put it away I swear I’ll never wear it again, have it cleaned, take it back to the Red Cross,  but fail to find the cash for a replacement so out it has to come. 

Winter clothes - same story.  Dreary sludgy colours and fabrics that, (luckily for me) don’t fall apart. But, oh for some new adventures!

Shoes and boots - don’t get me started..... well, I am so on I go. I cannot understand people who have a things for shoes. I hate them. Ugly, sensible, clump-along-like-that shoes are all I can safely wear, given as I am to turning ankles and vertigo. I don’t like the look of the come-f*ck-me alternatives anyhow.

What else? 

Nightwear.  The options? Wincyette with pink roses. T-shirts. Pyjamas - I don’t like pyjamas. They get all twisted up and smelly. For years I swanned around in Indian cotton but the sources for that have either dried up or become expensive. The garment I wear now, washing and wearing the same day, has holes in. I pray for no hospitalisation to occur.

Emotional times.

I’m missing summer. The first cold/virus of the season struck a couple of weeks back, didn’t go away, was gaining ground even after generous applications of Glenfiddich nightly, and yesterday I was forced to go to the ‘Health Centre‘  (please imagine agitated fingers doing sarcastic quotation marks here) to have my annual battle with a new-to-the-practice doctor about the state of my lungs and their need for assistance in the form of antibiotics which once wasn’t a problem (‘here, take a bucketful’) but now the party line is to say ‘no’ unless the patient kicks up a fuss, or cries, or looks as if they might need an ambulance to get them away from the place. This year it was a female doctor. SO much worse. I had to employ the first two techniques and then was almost outdone, and undone, by her own reddening eyes and heaving bosom. 

‘I feel you don’t TRUST me.We become doctors to HELP people you know. People don’t realise how HARD it is for us. We work really HARD for our patients. We don’t do it for the money.’ (Excuse me? I believe that is your new 4x4 out there next to my 12 year old VW Polo.) 

We parted sworn enemies, but I was clutching my prescription so I don’t really care. I’ll just avoid her in future.

In Our Own Image

In Our Own Image.

The old gods

were the lifeblood of our land,

the arteries.

The synapses that fired first consciousness.

They hunted, gathered, and turned the soil, 

walked with us through life,

received us into death.

They had their moods,

their jealousies,

needed understanding,

needed wisdom, wiles, and sympathetic magic.

Then they needed to be thanked. 

Like us.

We heard their voices in the waves 

ululating

from cavern to deep cavern 

reverberant.

Symphonies of wind and rain and silence. 

Bird song.

Our gods spoke to us 

as the world breathed 

© carol argyris 2013  

Published in Dawntreader 023 Indigo Dreams Publishing.

       

Bag Lady

Bag Lady

Belief is all that separates me from the old bag lady

As together we rake through rubbish bins,

Shuffle,

Stockings crumpled,

To a shelter for the homeless

Peeing in our pants.

I think I am better than her. 

I am educated and live in a house.

I have sat at the foot of a rimpoche

And read lots of books about God.

Belief

Is all that separates us from knowing

Because -

Now listen -

Belief that we Know is death of knowledge.

The bag lady has the advantage here.

She knows she knows nothing

And is thus wise

But I....

 Sometimes I believe I might know something.

And it gets in the way of me.

© carol argyris 2013

Published: Weyfarers 113  Guildford Poets Press

Vampire.

The internet is a terrible sucker of souls.

I open it to briefly do a bit of research and three hours later stagger away from it because the lap-top needs energy and I've forgotten to drink my coffee.

Sexing the Cherry.

Sexing the Cherry. Jeanette Winterson.

A friend lent me this last week. I had it so often on the shelves in the shop that I thought I had read it. That happened a lot. Maybe I started it but wasn’t in the mood. that happened too. Yesterday I was in the mood and loved it. practical worshipped it. Wished I had written it or could write like her. Her flights of fancy are exhilarating, and the apparent ease with which she writes them down (no fancy words, no fancy style) make their impact immediate and hefty. I laughed aloud with pleasure at her sequels to the marriages of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, the ones that turned into geese every evening and flew away to party until ‘rescued’ by an elderly prince. In Jeanette's version he has eleven brothers and each sister is forced to marry one of them. These marriages do not go happily ever after.

The action skips merrily from century to century, carried mostly by the central character, an enormous woman, born out of a bottle from which she escapes, ballooning like a genie as she does so. She finds a baby half drowned in the filthy C17th Thames, rescues him and calls him Jordan (in memory of Moses.)

It’s like reading a long prose poem. There were sentences that jumped off the page and popped me one in the eye, and although I allow that the sentences to jump at me will probably not be those that jump at other readers, I’m putting them here:

‘Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poets say otherwise. My own heart, like this wild place, has never been visited and I do not know whether it could sustain life. ‘

‘Time has no meaning; space and place have no meaning on this journey. All time can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans.’

‘The self is not contained in any moment or any place but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.’

‘Is knowledge increasing or is detail accumulating?’

And now I’ve written them down they don’t look so sparkly, which intrigues me and leaves me wondering if that means they needed their settings. A diamond, however beautiful, is enhanced by a fine setting. There’s a thought - which when I come on it another day will have lost its gloss.

Exhausted words.

Words I have erased from my vocabulary to give them a chance to rest: 

Amazing. 

Incredible. 
Wonderful.

Basically. 
Literally.

Awesome
Robust.             (Thanks to Jillian for the last two!)

I  am leaving space for more as I notice them.

Healing

Those who know me even a little bit will have noticed that I am very anti-religion. I see organised religion as the root of most evil - worse by far than money. In this pick’n mix age, and in our culture, I have the freedom to express that view and I have also been able to arrive at belief in an afterlife that has nothing to do with a god. Probably there are more evolved beings available to us if we reach for them, but I wouldn’t call them angels, just more developed aspects of ourselves. In many countries I wouldn’t have been permitted to reach these conclusions; my thoughts would be censored by limitations to my reading and life experience, and that would be down to religion. Even in America, the so called Land of the Free, this could happen. 

With all that out front it might seem inappropriate that on Friday I dialed the number of a Catholic priest who is part of a Healing Ministry. A friend (also not religious in any way) told me about him and a little about her experience on the end of a telephone, transfixed for nearly an hour that passed in a moment. His aim is for soul retrieval, or soul healing (I can’t remember his term), in fact I’m not sure I remember much of what he said during my almost-hour but I do know I sat silent with tears pouring down my face. There have been moments of revelation since when things in my life that were mostly forgotten have become clear and I can see them in a different way. The words Forgiveness and Grace come to mind, but mostly it’s a bit beyond words.

Years ago I read Susan Howatch novels with enjoyment. Not her long family sagas that stretched over generations, but her ecclesiastical novels that took characters from the rarefied upper echelons of the Church of England. Each novel, as far as I can remember, viewed more or less the same sequence of events through the eyes of a different character. The one that captured me the most was ‘Glamorous Powers’. In that the main character, a young priest, discovers he has healing powers and wants to set up a healing ministry. He is waylaid by his ego and gets far out of his depth into very muddy waters. It fascinated me that the Churches, Catholic and Protestant, fail to acknowledge - avoid acknowledging - the existence of the supernatural whilst preaching daily about supernatural happenings 2000 years ago and promising a world beyond our own.

Somewhere amidst my rantings against religion I seem to have a core of respect for their roots. The blurring of lines between atheist and theist, agnostic and gnostic, give me hope that one day the churches will return to their roots, sloughing off all the garbage they have accrued along the way.  

Spooky stories and extra clothes.

So, the dashboard is still available. I wonder how long that will last!

As it’s here I might as well keep going. Can’t break the habit of what feels like a lifetime.

Hallowe’en passed safely. No goblins at my door. Tonight Dizzy and I will hide indoors holding paws whilst the town has its bonfire and fireworks. Daughter and grandson will be shaking buckets for the Rotary who put on the display each year. It’s usually a good one and the bonfire is enormous.

The clocks have changed, the leaves have canged and my daily outfits have had an extra layer added to them. Now I’m at home more I’m wondering how to keep warm whilst economising on fuel. As I hate wearing thick woolies about the house this probably means spending more time in bed, which I can cope with. 

Recently I discovered the pleasures of writing short stories and knocked off four with a spooky theme. A short story falls somewhere between poetry and the Novel (which I do most earnestly intend to get down to properly..) It demands discipline, especially if writing for competitions that require 500 or 1000 words. No bad thing. I haven’t actually sent any off (laziness) but found the exercise interesting and useful for ensuring tight plots. The free iversity course https://iversity.org/courses/the-future-of-storytelling (set up by the uni of Potsdam) has given me grist. I’m enjoying it. It’s nice to sit taking notes and pretending to be a real student again. 

The readathon petered out. I gave up on Sebastien Faulks ‘A Possible Life’ after the first two novella (what’s the plural of novella?) Maybe I’ll go back to it but I wasn’t convinced by the format. I’d put money on him having written them at different times then strung them together, banked on the critics finding a theme, and pushed them out as a pot-boiler. Bit unfair Carol. He is undoubtedly a good writer. Perhaps I should stick with saying it didn’t grab me.

I’ve got Sophie Hannah’s ‘the orphan choir’ and Susan Hill’s ‘Dolly’ from Tesco to prolong the hallowe'en shudders and delay the return to rereading.