Drip Drip of my Conscience

The boiler drips in time to my heart,
Each drop a hammer on my conscience.
The water splashes and ripples outwards
Mirrored by the bile in my stomach.

Waiting for someone to fix it,
To remove the worry from my shoulders.
To fix me.
Wanting. Waiting.  Worrying.

I move from room to room,
Fleeing the guilty noise.
But nothing can drown out,
The beating heart under the floorboards.

Sand Dunes and Soul Food

I sit propped against a sand dune on the beach, the sand moulded to my body, cradling me.  It's night time and a small fire flickers at my feet, keeping me warm and lighting the small area around me.  I can hear the popping noise of the wood as it burns, hear the sea lapping gently at the shore and smell the salty, bonfire air.  Usually I'm the only one, but occasionally a person will emerge from the shadows and we'll talk.

This is my safe place.  The internal world I went to when I needed to escape.

I'd forgotten about it until I read a friends blog fernenland: When I am feeling bruised So why don't I go there any more?  Is my life so much better that I don't need to hide inside myself?

Then I realised the difference is my writing.  When I have a problem, a worry, something niggling away at the back of my mind, I write about it.  Sometimes it's obvious (see White Van Man),  sometimes it gets worked into a story, my characters working through the issue, saying what I'd like to say and what I'd like to hear.  Plus I put my muse through far worse things then I ever have to deal with in real life.

When Fernenland goes out with her camera, she finds herself in a different space, seeing things she wouldn't normally have noticed and that's how I feel about my writing.  When walking down the road, I'm looking at everyday things and searching for the beauty in them.  Or catching snippets of conversation and letting my imagination fill in the missing parts.  A man walking down the road...he's actually just  murdered his wife and is now off to plant the evidence in her lovers house.  Or that strange looking knot on the tree trunk is really the door to a fairies house, you might just catch her peeping out from the corner of your eye.  It does lift your spirits and energise you.

People find this space through different mediums such as meditation, exercise, photography, art, music, words. So go out and explore, feed your soul.

(Thank you Fernenland for letting me link to your blog and inspiring me again.)

Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me...

Many years ago, I used to work in a wine shop.  Late one night, a regular customer came in to tell us that he'd just seen a man nick one of our blackboards.  These were big, heavy boards that we propped up outside the shop, advertising the latest deals. 

Now I've seen all kinds of things shoplifted in my time, by the hopeless off-their-face druggies taking a can of strong beer to the highly professional gangs taking champagne and the expensive wine, but no-one had every stolen a blackboard before.  I mean they are big, bulky and of no practical use (even as advertising they were highly suspect).  As the only girl in the team, it was my job to chase after the shoplifters.  OK, it wasn't my job, but the six foot plus boys I worked with were big scaredy cats, so I walked out of the shop to have a look.  Sure enough, just heading round the corner, were two men, slightly weaving, one of which had a board tucked under his arm.

Wanting to catch them before they got too far, I jogged down the road to catch up, shouting "Please may I have my board back?" as I rounded the corner.  The two guys swung round and to my horror I realised that one of them was Cider Man. 

Cider Man a totally unhinged, off-his-face man who would come into the shop and demand to know why we didn't keep cider in the fridge (any guesses as to why we didn't). The conversation would always end up with him shouting at us, then he'd stagger off across the road to the other shop that did keep their cider in the fridge and harass the staff in there.  One night, I'd had a bad run in with him and he ended up hanging around outside the shop waiting for closing time having made thinly veiled threats to kill me.  Even when the I'd stood up to a gang of six, big, guys who'd come in to nick champagne (the boys cowered behind the counter) or had a shoplifter grab my arm when I was taking down the number plate of his get-away car, I hadn't been worried.  They were sober and predictable.  This guy was totally psychopathic and it's the only time I had been scared.

By now I was mentally kicking myself and praying that he didn't remember who I was, as we stood in a dark, quiet, side street.  This is the mad thing about London.  Behind me was a busy, wealthy, Fulham road.  Down this side street, the road was quiet, badly lit and lead to really rough council estate.

"What board?"  He asked, turning to look innocently round him, the large board almost bashing his friend as he turned.

"Umm, that board.." I pointed.

"I don't see a board."

Just as I thought this was going to go on all night, and did I really want the board back that much.....Cider Man's friend had obviously had come to a similar conclusion.

"Oh for god sake, just give the girl back her board!"

Cider Man looked down and did the perfect comedy double-take.  "Well how did that get there?!"

Striking while the going was good, I grabbed the board, politely said thank you and lugged the board back to the shop and my waiting regulars and useless colleagues.

An aside

Normally I take a tiny spark of inspiration, mull it around in my mind (usually while out doing the school run in the rain), then sit down and write something.  A writer I follow on twitter described the process as being on a par of making a stew, the pot is constantly simmering away in the background and bits are added until the finished food is ready to eat, complex layers of flavour and aroma having been allowed to organically build up.

Every time I see a spark, a glimpse of something I want, it slips though my fingers.  Or if I manage to catch it and try to massage it into something more, it goes flat and limp.  So instead I read; I read everything I can get my hands on, in the hope that it will help. 

So I've pulled myself together and decided that maybe I should sidle up to it, not look it directly in the eye and just start.  It's the starting that's important and it's the starting I haven't been doing.  A synopsis looks forlornly at me and I'm still on the fifth chapter of a story.  My poor protagonists have been sitting around in a desert waiting for me to get my act together since last month.  I just hope they haven't got sunstroke.

Then there is my muse, the person who inspires me, fills me fire, whose magic no longer works.  Shouldn't I be able to do this alone?  I did before I met them.  It's been like having a lover whose left me.  I was perfectly fine and capable before they came into my life, even happy, but when they left, they left a large and gaping hole.  I know what I'm missing.

But look.  I'm writing and it feels good. 

What It Feels Like To Be Me

Jenny Manson is asking people to write about 'what it feels like to be me' and send it to her.  She's put their stories onto her website. http://www.whatitfeelsliketobeme.com as a follow-up to a book she's published.  So this is the essay I sent in (and is now on there).

This Is What it Feels Like To Be Me

Sugar and spice and all things nice, that's what I'm made of....well not really, but there are days when the three children have driven me mad, everything has gone wrong and I wish I was made of these things. That is, instead of the screaming harpy that I'm really seem to be made of.

So what is it like to be me? Confusing most of the time, as I have many names, mother, wife and far too often, way down the list, Dandelion Girl. Each of these 'me' are kept boxed and stacked inside each other in ascending size order.

Starting from the bottom, the smallest box is dark and dusty. This is the 'me' that could have been. Look inside and you can see a dancer, an Olympic gymnast, a swimmer, a wine buyer, a recruitment expert. She is one dimensional and so faded that I don't bother to look at her often. Luckily it gets swallowed up in the next box up.

This one holds all the things I've seen and done in my life. The cover is a rainbow, shimmering in the full spectrum of light, fading in places as it gets older. If you look inside, it's full of books, stories, magic, animals, fairies, photos, mementos, words from friends, music and different languages from all the places I have lived and visited. Strangely there seems to be a lot of sand and sea in here as well. This is one of my favourite boxes where I get to shut myself off from the outside world and dive into the swirling vortex of memories and thoughts, swimming through them, trying to catch some of the more elusive ones. Sometimes these leak through to the world around me, then I'm a Lost Boy in the woods, a femme fatale in the pub or an explorer in the jungle. Or it can superimpose itself onto the people around me. An annoying person's head turns into a donkey as they lecture me, the dewdrops caught in the spiders web, bright in the low morning sun, are the lights the fairies left out from last nights party. Life with this box of 'me', is never dull although not everyone understands it, so I have learnt to guard it, showing only a select few.

Red jagged lines, stretched elastic sides and the patches on the next box should give you a clue. This is the 'me' box of love. Every expanding and contracting, the stretch lets it give until you think you are going to burst or tightens until you can't breathe. The stretch-marks on the sides is where the love was explosive and fast, like the first time I felt my baby move, or the first time they looked into my eyes with love. Over the years this box has been shattered, pierced or scratched, but my tears have mended the holes and I wear the patches and scars with pride. This is the core of me, beating and alive beneath the outer layers.

It's covered with a paper-thin, vibrant red box. This layer is a flirty, passionate box of the 'me' who loves life, the kind of box that acts first, then thinks later. The two are very close, sometimes making it hard to see where one starts and the other ends. This is the one that will make me flirt with strangers, dance on the table, drive to the beach in the middle on the night in my pj's just to look at the stars and hear the waves lapping on the beach. It's also the one that makes no-one believe me when I say I'm really very insecure and shy. It's a very cheeky box!

Then we are on to the penultimate one and my least favourite. This one has a broken padlock on it. Sometimes it locks, and sometimes it doesn't. In here is the 'me' that gets scared to walk into a place where I don't know anyone, that hates confrontation, where the voices whisper that I'm stupid and useless, that I shouldn't even attempt to try it because I'm bound to fail. Faceless people hide in the shadows telling me that no-one likes me, that I'm old and ugly. I try not to open this one, trying to focus on the 'me' directly below it. Maybe one day I'll be able to shrink this one and put it in the bottom along with the 'could have been' box, because that's where it belongs.

So then we get to the outside box. The one that all the others sit inside (which are tucked away for people to find as they get to know me). The outside of this changes and grows over the years as the others fill and grow too. It's appearance is updated as it gets worn round the edges by all the lives of the people who touch mine. Anyone who enters my world, no matter how brief, leaves a tiny part of themselves behind. I used to think that this box had to be beautiful and flawless to attract the attention, admiration and love of others. The wiser me, now understands that what is really important is that the packaging reflects the real me, even if that changes from day to day, hour to hour. If the lines aren't quite straight, or the colours don't quite go together, it doesn't really matter, what matters is what's in the other boxes down through the layers.

So this is what it's like to be me, sugar and spice and all things nice, with an occasional harpy hiding in the gloom. A mother to three small graces, a wife, a woman and an aspiring writer. Me!

A muse

Medium height, long dark hair,  she is curvy and very attractive.  Her dark brown eyes stare deep into mine as we stand almost toe to toe, eyes on the same level.  "Go on!" I give her a little shove.  "You can't make me." comes the growled response.  Hmmm, I try some music, skipping through using shuffle, trying to provoke a response in her.  In the corner of my eye, sand is slowly, relentlessly trickling through an egg timer.

Then something sparks in her eyes.  There is a smile that slowly reaches down to her pouting mouth.  Her two friends appear by her side and somewhere in the back, half hidden in the shadows is the only male of the group.  He's the hardest to see, intensively secretive, but I smile encouragingly at him, trying out my best 'come hither' look.

It's like an artists brush has touched blotting paper, colour and life starts to appear, spreading out from her.  We stand more relaxed, smiling and looking around ourselves.  Her friends are whispering in her ears, egging her on to tell me what they've been up to.  Her mouth opens but just before the words come out, the last grain of sand falls to the bottom and everything freezes.  "Sorry!" I mouth as I turn to leave.

My muse stands there looking really, really annoyed and frustrated, her face a reflection of mine.  She's not amused...

Baby's got Blue Eyes

Blue eyes. 

Long lashes. 

I'm captivated by them. 

The world around them fades, insignificant as I gaze into them, my body stills and I pause to try and drink in every detail.  The only thing that matters is the blue and the emotion that lies deep within them.  They say eyes are the windows of your soul and it is definitely hard for someone to hide their true feelings if you look carefully enough. 

A line of poetry comes to mind..."My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears."  

I have a bad habit of staring deep into peoples eyes as I talk to them.  It can come across as intense to people who don't know me, but it helps me read them, to have an understanding of what they are thinking and saying.  It's why I hate talking to people on the phone, I need to see the face to be able to gauge their response, to feel a connection.

I blink and focus back on the face before me.  The eyes so familiar, yet they never cease to amaze me.  They have total trust and love in them and I wish that I can capture this moment forever, because before long these eyes will grow older, harder and the innocence will fade.  I will no longer be the universe to orbit round, but the gravity pulling them down and getting in the way.

I scoop up my youngest child and bring her face to mine.  Her blue eyes so different to my green, wise in so many ways, stare back into mine and for that moment, nothing matters, everything fades as I absorb the love and happiness that projects out at me and I'm lost in the blue.


Here is the "The Good-Morrow" by John Donne,

                        I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

Did, till we lov'd? Were we not wean'd till then?

But suck'd on countrey pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?

T'was so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desir'd, and got, 'twas but a dreame of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking soules,

Which watch not one another out of feare;

For love, all love of other sights controules,

And makes one little roome, an every where.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne,

Let us possesse one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,

And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,

Where can we finde two better hemispheares

Without sharpe North, without declining West?

What ever dyes, was not mixed equally;

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

                        Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.