Edging towards the new year i am reflecting on the year past and setting intentions for the year to come. The year past has been some journey. I've come a long way from where i was on January 1st a year ago but the year has passed at a speed that has made it hard to assimilate. I have no achievements to proclaim. My growth has mostly been internal.
This time last year I decided to play/work with twelve fairy tales/fables/stories. It turned out to be thirteen as i miswrote the title of one which gave me two which is how things happen sometimes, a mistake creates a happy chance. These stories kept me moving and exploring through days that were dark and days that were less dark. 
Life is like a river, it keeps on going. I/we might cry "stop" but no, the river stops for no-one. It is unperturbed by our cries. When something momentous happens, a birth, a death, or a major change -good or bad - there's a before and after. The before is sort of known, but the after is all strange. Say that the momentous event is a good one, the change may outrun the capacity to absorb the experience but because it is lovely it's not too important, too much wonderful is rarely a cause for complaint, but say the momentous event is hard, then the immensity of it can be overwhelming and exhausting. 
I remember when i broke up with my older two children's father way back in the late 1980's. My son was three months old and my daughter just three. It broke my understanding. He was an oaf in the last months i lived with him. If i spoke to him he'd lift a buttock and fart at me or burp. His going was a relief. But it rained on my roses-round-the-door notion of happy ever after. My dream of  domestic bliss and a nice happy family was smashed. In truth we weren't and would never have been a nice happy family, he and i were cut from quite different cloth, but at 23 it was a shock, it wasn't meant to be like that, I had to change to accommodate the break up.  
As it's christmas time i'll throw in my thoughts on families as a by-the-by because it's a time when families gather. I think families are like strings of fairy lights, no matter how neatly you thought you had put them away the year before they always come out in a tangle. Families are unruly, and most of them seem to be a mix of mess and love and so long as the love outweighs the mess you are doing ok.
My break up from my older children's dad is a long time in my past, ancient history, but this year has been interesting in that it has thrown up a mass of memories. It's as if a switch was flicked when Jon died. Memories of him and our time together came flooding back, and with them memories of time before i knew him, time before i had children - a child, a teenager - and after when i was a young adult negotiating my pathway through the world. Houses i lived in, places i stayed in, people i knew, streaming through my conscious mind in glorious technicolur. I spent one month - August - jotting my memories down, for myself not anyone else, one day i'll pick up that notebook and re-read them. It was an attempt to recall as much of Jon as possible to stop myself forgetting, but with him and his garden came other gardens. With our roaming, our walks and small travelling came other journeys, other walking companions. And so on. 
Writing is slower than remembering and more difficult. Writing my memories made me cry. It was hard reliving the beautiful times i spent with Jon, and reliving the bad times, tho' they are part of his whole, and act as counterweight and keep his being real not romanticised, feels mean and sad and unhelpful when what i want to remember is the best of him and our time spent together not the worst. Maybe the bad is better buried with his bones, known but let go. Also my writing is too solid, committing thought to paper, to words, is frustrating, writing is a skill i have yet to feel free with. 
And all the time the river of life, "old man river", keeps on rolling, and whatever before and after you are living, the river throws up junk and obstacles, pushes aside yesterday to make way for today and tomorrow and tomorrow until tomorrow is yesterday. Day becomes night becomes day becomes night and so on, birthdays and anniversaries happen and yearly markers, Valentine's day, April Fools, Easter, Halloween and Christmas, days that have memories attached to them, April Fools day was our anniversary. Seasons pass.
Coming up, of course, is new years day. The new year inviting in the new. An open door, what now ? what next ? where to ? The need to set intentions and resolutions is strong in me if for no other reason than to have something to hold on to should the road be rocky, the waters choppy, the mountain steep. 
The past is done. I can wish things other than they are but my wishes don't make them so. My task is to live with what is and to make the best of it. I think most of us are doing that most of the time. Sometimes it can feel unfair. Some people seem to have all the luck, and others hardly any. I don't know how those inequalities can be amended because the luck of it is what it is. 
I think it's the Dalai Lama who says that it's how we respond to our fortune - good or bad - that gives us our way forward. I like that but responding well to falls and fails isn't easy and some people are awful when fortune favours them and they win. 
I end this blog with a nod to the past two months fairy tales. In November I was faced with the company of the obnoxious little brute that is Goldilocks. December gave me Little Red Riding Hood. How could it be that two little girls setting out on woodland paths might be so different and meet such different fates. And who did they become after their oft-told stories closed. This is what i am pondering in the last couple of days of 2018. I wonder if they met in future life who they would be. I guess that any one of us could be that little girl wandering and that it's what we carry forward that affects the rest of our lives. We know little of Goldilock's origins. In some stories she is an old vagrant woman does that change the way we see/meet her. Little Red Riding Hood steps out wrapped in her mother's love, the little red cloak/hood has to act as some kind of protection, and she carries with her food and tonic wine for her grandmother and a warning not to step off the path. She is also rescued. Perhaps in the light of her good fortune it's possible to see her journey-fellow Goldilocks with kinder eyes. Goldilocks seems so much of a taker but if you have little, we don't know if she does or she doesn't, then her need to satisfy herself, to eat, to rest, albeit at someone else's expense, is maybe born out of desolation and deprivation, her unloveliness is perhaps a reflection of a life lived as an unloved unlovable. 
Food for thought perhaps. Happy New Year.  

We have slipped into November and my fairy tale this month is Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I have a horrible feeling i will put some horrible adult spin on this story that makes Goldilocks more morally deviant than necessary and the bears more wild. But hey, maybe i won't, maybe this time i'll keep it simple. 
In the mean time I want to make some blog notes about The Tinder Box because i have really enjoyed inhabiting this world. 
Once upon a time a poor soldier was returning home from war. He was foot-sore and world weary and the soles on his boots were gone, so to gather strength, before heading to town, he took a little rest under the branches of a great oak that stood by the edge of the road. As he sat eating the last of his rations an old woman came by. She stood for a while quite quietly then asked what his plans were for the future, all the time admiring his mighty sword.
"Why to raise some money old mother" said he "for as you can see I'm down to stone broke"
"Well" says she "I'll give you some help if you will do one small favour for me"
"Fire away" says he "what is the help ? And what is the favour ?"
"Well" says she "you see this big tree that you are sat with your back to. If you climb up into it's branches you will see that it is hollow inside. Climb down into the hollow and you will find three caves with three dogs guarding all the gold, silver and copper your heart desires. If you take my apron and put it on the floor the dogs will lay upon it and you will able to help yourself to all the gold, silver and copper you want. All that i ask is that you bring me the tinder box that you will find in the cave. What say you soldier will you do as i say and ask ?"
"This" thinks he "is a no brainer" so he responds with a casual "sure, no problem old woman and thank you" 
She unties her apron and gives it to him and he climbs up to the top of the bole of the tree and sure enough there is a hollow that goes all the way down the centre of the trunk as is quite common in very old oaks. There's a rope tied fast to a branch hanging down, and so carefully he climbs down until he reaches solid ground. From there he can see that within the roots are three vast caves. He goes into one and there is a dog with eyes as big as saucers sat upon a great chest filled to over flowing with copper coins. He lays down the apron upon the floor and the dog sits itself on it while the soldier fills all his pockets with coins and his knapsack too. Then the soldier bids farewell and the dog gets up off the apron which the soldier picks up and takes into the second cave. What's in the second cave ? A dog with eyes as big as dinner plates sat upon a great chest filled to over flowing with silver. It's pretty scary but the soldier lays down the apron. And just as before the dog sits itself down while the soldiers empties his pockets and knapsack of copper coins and refills them with silver. Then as before he bids farewell, the dog gets up and he picks up the old woman's apron and goes into the last cave. In the last cave is a dog with eyes as big as wagon wheels sitting on a great chest overflowing with gold coins. And so the soldier repeats what he did in the second cave. Now with his pockets and knapsack filled with gold he goes to climb out, remembering just in time to look for the tinder box which he finds quite easily and slips into his top left pocket which is only one left with any room. Then with some effort he climbs up the hanging rope and down to where the old woman is waiting. 
With a smile he thanks her and goes to take her leave. 
"But wait" she says "where is my tinderbox ?" 
Whereupon he takes his sword and chops off her head. Leaving her there he walks on into town. When he reaches the town he goes into an inn and asks for the best rooms the innkeeper has. He looks a bit shabby and rough but the colour of his money speaks for him and so the innkeeper gives him the finest suite and from there the soldier heads out to buy himself new boots and beautiful clothes and proceeds to become quite the most popular man about town. 
All's well for a while, until his money runs out. Then when it does he finds himself forced to take residence in less salubrious lodgings and his new found friends drift away. 
One night as he is sitting in the dark and cold he picks up the old tinderbox that he found in the tree. Just for something to do he strikes it and as the spark catches the wick of the candle stub sat on his bare table, the dog with eyes as big as saucers appears and asks what his master wishes for.
Now, for a long time, the soldier has been thinking about the beautiful princess who lives locked behind dark walls in the centre of town. Her beauty is legend and he would like to see the princess so he asks the dog to bring her to him so that he may look upon her. And thus it happens. The dog goes to the palace and brings the sleeping princess on his back to the soldiers lowly garret. And yes she is as beautiful as legend has it. The soldier plants a tender kiss upon her lips, she stirs but doesn't wake and the dog takes her back to bed safe and unharmed. 
In the morning at breakfast the princess sleepily relates a dream she had in the night to her royal parents. 
"I dreamed i was atop a great dog and the dog took me to a room where a man was waiting. He kissed me but he did not speak and then the dog brought me home" 
The queen was suspicious. She spoke to the princess' nurse. 
"Tonight please keep awake and watch the princess while she sleeps i think something is afoot"
And so the nurse stays awake. And the next night the soldier inflamed by the thought of the princess strikes the tinderbox again and the dog with eyes as big as dinner plates appears and asks what his master wishes for. And the soldier asks that the dog bring him the princess so he might look on her again. And so it happens. But this time the nurse follows the dog and marks the door of the house in which the soldier lives with a red cross. Then she goes home to sleep. The soldier once again kisses the princess and this time she opens her eyes just for a moment before the dog returns her to her chambers. After which he marks each door in every street across the town with a red cross. So it is that when the next day the queen sends out her soldiers to arrest the young man the soldiers are unable to find him because all of the doors are marked. 
The queen's lips purse. The soldier dreams of one more glimpse of the beautiful princess. And the princess wonders who the handsome man she has dreamed of for two nights in a row is. 
And so it goes that on the third night when the soldier strikes the tinderbox and the dog with eyes as big as wagon wheels turns up and asks him his wish the queen has filled the princess' pockets with flour, which gently trickles out of the holes that the queen has made and so a trail is left and the dog doesn't notice and so the soldier is found even tho' the princess is returned safe and unharmed just as before. 
Safe and unharmed but not unaware for this time she had woken and they had spoken for some time and gazed into each other's eyes and fallen in love. 
But that's as it goes for the soldier is in gaol and sentenced to hang. But still he has hope for his prison is just below street level and as a young butcher boy passes he calls him to come and for a coin to get the tinderbox from his lodgings which the butcher boy does. And so it happens that as he stands at the gallows with a great crowd watching the king asks him if he has any one last request. And the soldier ask for a pipe and a smoke and as he lights the tobacco with one, two, three, sparks from the tinder box the three dogs appear and tear down the gallows and gobble up the king and queen and all the high and mighty which means that the princess and soldier who love each other madly can live happily ever after together without interference or judgement. 
And that is the story of The Tinder Box. Or my rough re-telling. The Tinder Box is a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Every time a story is retold it changes a little. A story is a living thing. It meets the teller and listener and belongs to them in a way that is particular to them. When I read a story i can inhabit every body and every thing within the story. So in this, I am the soldier, the old woman, the dogs, the princess. I am the innkeeper, the friends, the royal parents, the nurse, the butcher boy, the crowd. I am the walls of the town, the bark of the tree, I am the wind that shakes the branches of the tree, and the stars that look down on land and sea and bear witness to the goings on from before they were visible to human eye, and i am the soldiers boots, the old woman's apron, i am the tinderbox and i am the spark. 
I am the spark. And you are the spark. And each one of us will be our own version of whatever we imagine ourselves to be. And whilst we are what we imagine we are also ourselves, flesh and blood, our concrete being, real, substantial, not-imaginary. But that's the way it goes with stories we slip into them, swim naked into thoughts and feelings borrowed from another mind, another's once upon a time. And our own story, our own life, is that too, a river flowing, a story being told.
Here with The Tinder Box it seems to me, from research combined with my own being, that it is a coming of age story. It's a shock when the soldier cuts off the old woman's head. But one source i found suggested that the old woman represents the mother. Her decapitation is a decisive move towards adult independence and freedom from a parental tie. If the old woman is the mother then my reading is that he has been to war, come home to rest and recoup, goes down into the family tree, is given resources that allow him to make a life of his own. The layers of connecting tissue that flesh out the bones of a story are subject to individual interpretation. To me it figures that, if the old woman is his mother, the apron she lends him might be good manners and grace, that the dogs, who feel to me like untamed drives and power, need to be offered courtesy and respect if we want them to serve us and give us what we need. 
And there is so much more. The fair-weather friends, the princess, even bit parts like the butcher's boy and the innkeeper, each character offers a new insight because each one would tell the tale differently. Each one meets the soldier from their own unique perspective and so it is in life.
My fairy tale a month project that i began as way to keep myself upright at the beginning of this year has been a great gift because fairy tales have been one of my go-to sources since i was a child and investing time, thought and activity in knowing a single story means that those i have chosen are now a part of me, the colour of them is embroidered onto my skin and  the tone and timbre is set now in the beat of my heart. 
I am using waft-y language. I feel a bit waft-y today. Giving myself a fairy tale is, i guess, a light form of escapism. There are more harmful ways to escape. On saturday I was drawing with my granddaughter. We were talking about drawing unicorns and i asked her what kind of tail she thought unicorns have, this is a question that vexes me very slightly. We also talked about what colour unicorns are, i thought they were white, but she said "oh no, lots of colours". Then i said something and she gave me a stern look and said that our drawings wouldn't look realistic. We were quiet for a moment. And then she looked at me and i looked at her and we smiled because we knew that however we saw unicorns was going to be imaginary because neither of us had actually seen a unicorn that wasn't out of someone's imagination. It was a special moment. 
The border between real and imaginary is pretty clear but it isn't solid and one person's real can be another's madness. When I say I am the wind in the trees or the stars in the sky i know that I am in reality, just me, Becca, but as it happens just-me-Becca can also stretch out of my solid self to imagine how it is to be a star or the wind or another person or a bird or creature or whatever. My imagination is the starting point for empathy. The word empathy stems from the greek em - in, and pathos - feeling. When we empathise with another it means we are allowing ourselves to meet their feelings, to momentarily merge so as to know what is happening for them, in them. 
The merging thing is disconcerting. It happens in crowds. It happens often between lovers and good friends. It happens in friendship groups and families too. And when we pick up a book or watch a film or play a video game. It is why we might bond over iconic figures they represent a part of ourselves and when we meet someone who also relates to that figure we meet ourselves in them. Which Harry Potter character are you for instance, see how you instantly like the people who choose the same body to inhabit or who are friends with our chosen form ? Is this what binds Trump's supporters ? Is his obvious isolation and grand deflection of pain something that his followers recognise and feel fellowship with ? My imagination veers away from trying to understand, or empathise with, him and the greater body of his fan-base. 
Aversion is an alternative form of empathy perhaps. Something in another body (singular or plural) is unattractive. Generally unless the thing or being is in your face the response is to not see, not know, to refuse to witness. It is perhaps why being born witness to is such powerful medicine. And perhaps why, as a species that has done spectacularly well, we have become more and more narcissistic and needy, see me, hear me, know me, I am important, I am worthy of attention, it is hard in a crowd to attract attention perhaps it is enough to be part of the crowd. But crowds are dangerous, they demand a conformity sticking out in a crowd is not safe, it invites rejection. As someone who has misfitted since forever i have learned to err away from crowds and cliques now. My belonging is more often met in solitude than company. And loneliness is harder to bear in a crowd than alone. 
None of this really has anything to do with The Tinder Box story. But then again maybe it does. The Tinder Box is a very ordinary human journey in many ways. And it is that human journey that i pondered on during October. My journey, and the journeys of others both known and loved, and not known, or not loved. All of us are travelling from one fixed point, birth, to another, death. And how we get to our end point is not always going to be easy. The gift of empathy from others will make it easier, will smooth our path.    
What am I getting at ? I don't know. I suppose i am extolling the virtues of imagination and wishing  for imagination to be given more love and respect, because my experience is that it is those with the greatest imaginations who are often most kind, most likely to show compassion. And hell knows we could do with a little more kindness and compassion in this world at the moment. 

October 1st and i don't think i have blogged for a month but the first of the month is a doorway. And in my life, this year, i have also given myself a new story as a source to draw from on the first of the month. This month's fairy tale is The Tinder Box. It's the story that got chosen because it jumped out of the box and i decided to go with fate and choose the one that had chosen itself. 

Last month's fairy tale was The Frog Prince. This story was picked for me by my younger son, my youngest child, because he happened to be stopping over with me on the evening of the last of the month and asked if he could choose it for me. I had thought to ask him myself anyway so it was clearly meant to be. 

After August's tears I'd been a bit worried about how my fairy tale musings were going. I guess that fairy tales are open to interpretation and reflect back to us that which we need to see, not necessarily want to see. My son and I talked about how I had turned The Hare and The Tortoise into a rather dark story, where he being more upbeat and lighter took it as more obviously a horrible braggart, the hare, showing off and rightfully getting his come uppance. And the moral being don't be that horrible braggart. 

But how many of us really pay attention to that need to be humble. When our lives are going well, we are inclined to want to shout it from the rooftops, or at best are complacent about our good fortune, if our lives have taken a turn for the worse we may ask for support but it's harder, and so much of everyday life is just walking forward, not more or less than another day. If everyday was amazing and brilliant would our need for amazing and brilliant mean that we needed every day to be more amazing and brilliant, higher and higher pitched and never soft and low. 

But enough of The Hare and The Tortoise, and before I move onto The Tinder Box i want to make some notes on my journey through The Frog Prince. 

For those who don't know the story, it goes something like this. 

Once upon a time a beautiful pampered child princess was walking in the woods close by to her palace. As usual she was playing with her golden ball, which of all her toys was her favourite. She threw the ball up and caught it on it's fall, over and over again, up and down, up and down. But then once she threw it up and failed to catch it and the ball fell to the ground and rolled into a deep  deep well. The princess was grief struck and sat by the well weeping her eyes out for the loss of her precious toy. As she sat weeping she heard a voice "princess" "princess" .. she opened her eyes a little and saw a frog sat on a rock close beside her. "Princess" he said "why do you weep so" and she replied saying that her ball, which she loved, had fallen into the well and her heart was broken for the loss of it. The frog said "what will you give me if i go into the well and retrieve your ball ?" .. "oh frog" she answered "I will give you anything you ask, my father is a king and you shall have jewels and money and all the finest things" .. "these are of no use to me" said the frog " what i want is to live by your side, to eat from your bowl, to sleep in your bed, and be your constant companion" ... "ah" thought the princess "silly frog, how can he be that for he is a frog and i am a princess" and so she agreed to his terms and down into the well dove the frog and not so long after came up with the golden ball which he gave with grace to the princess. The princess was thrilled but she had already forgotten her promise. She ran back to the palace with barely a backwards glance to the frog, a mere thank you and goodbye. But the frog had not forgotten the promise, "princess, princess" he called after her "I cannot run so fast as you, pick me up and carry me with you as you are troth to do" .. but the princess ran faster, her promise had been empty she did not want to live with a frog, to eat and sleep with a frog. 

And so the frog went back to the well. But the next evening when the princess and her father and all the royal family were seated to dine there was slip-slop, flip-flop on the stairs and a voice called out "princess, princess have you forgotten your promise". The princess paled, said nothing and looked down at the plate before her. But the king asked what promise she had made and she had to retell the story of losing her ball and the frog and what she had agreed to in her distress. The father, the king, insisted that she abide by her promise and so the frog was brought into the dining room and sat by the princess' plate and ate with relish all the dainty morsels that were offered. The princess however had lost her appetite and only picked at the food and was glad when the meal was over. 

But worse was to come for when she rose to go to bed, the frog insisted that she take him with her, and her father too as point of honour. So with distaste she picked up the frog and took him into her bedroom and shut the door. She thought this would be enough but when she got into bed the frog asked "princess will you not pick me up and put me in your bed that i may sleep beside you ?". At this the princess lost her temper, enough, she had had enough and threw the frog at the wall. At which point the frog turned into a handsome prince who knelt before her saying "princess, you have broken the spell that was put upon me. I was turned into a frog and only if I could persuade a princess to take me as a frog to live with her would that spell be broken. I ask you now to please marry me". And of course the princess said yes and so it was that the princess and her frog-prince were married straight off and a carriage arrived with Hans the prince's faithful servant riding at the back as the footman to drive them back to the prince's lands. And as the carriage drove forth, a cracking could be heard. And what was the cracking ? The cracking was the sound of the three iron bands that Hans had wrapped around his heart when his master had been turned into a frog breaking. 

Hmm, so not such a brief retelling but once a story is started it's hard to stop. There have been a few things about this story that have piqued my interest this month. The golden ball obviously, but I have always wondered how it is that her throwing the frog against the wall worked. In later versions I think that she kisses the frog and that feeds into our current culture where women are supposed to be gentle and compliant. I had taken those versions as more acceptable but the darker story is more fascinating. So I did a bit of research because if something causes me to question it raises my curiosity and feels like an interesting path to follow. In my research i re-discovered Hans, or Iron Hans.  Iron Hans is sometimes the name of this story which changes the story's drift. Modern versions I have read often leave him out but he is an important character. So too the king, the father, I think. 

So how did I start out with this story, before my research I was fiddling about with paints and pencils, doodling, and scribbling and I thought about the golden ball being thrown up, up, up, into the air and then falling deep into well. Like the beginning of an idea when it first manifests and breaks into the light until it reaches it's peak moment before falling back down to be caught and thrown up again or else to fall into the unconscious. 

Now here is this ball that has fallen and the humble frog who offers to help the princess by bringing it back up to the surface, but the frog (with apologies to frogs, all animals are beautiful), but the frog is not who the lovely princess wants to hang out with and so she runs away. Only to find that her commitment catches up on her and she is forced to abide by it. I'm back to the day to day living, who would not rather be throwing a golden ball up in the air in a beautiful sunlit woodland glade rather than sharing an uncomfortable family meal with an unappealing and demanding guest. But there it goes the guest is there and asks more and more and more until the princesses patience with the situation breaks. Hellfire i imagine most of us have been there with commitments we unwittingly took on but are forced to endure. I think endurance, the capacity to endure, is a part of living, not every day is sunny and bright and those who are felled by a drop of rain are likely to have harder lives than those who take it and keep going. That's an observation rather than judgement because often we meet life as we have been taught to meet life by those who surround us, our families, our village. 

So when the princess loses it with the frog and after I'd done a bit of research I thought about how you could see it as a positive, she had taken the frogs demands up to a point but actually no, he needed to be better than a frog to get into her bed, that is a very reasonable ask. 

If you google The Frog Prince one of the questions that comes up is "how many frogs do i have to kiss before i get my prince ?" and there we are holding out for a prince and kissing the ones who will never be princes in the hopes that they will change if we kiss them. But here in the story the princess is allowed to say "no" and when she does that is when the prince emerges because any man with a heart will know that women too have breaking points that it's ok for us to say no, that no means no, and respecting the other person's "no" is not a big ask from any man, frog or woman. 

And here is where Iron Hans comes in, he is the faithful servant, but maybe we could also allow him to be the prince's better side. Maybe the prince has been forced to take the form of a frog because he has allowed his uglier parts to dominate. But there beside him was always Iron Hans, the man who bound his heart with iron to stop it from breaking when his master became someone un-servable. 

It has taken the princess' grace, albeit given unwillingly, to break the spell, but also the grace of the prince to know when he had pushed too far and to be at last the man she needs him to be if he wants her to be his wife. 

And what of the ball, well my quest is for consciousness so for me the ball is my consciousness and it's fall into the well is my journey into the unknown and unknowable. For others it will be different. 

Lastly, the king, who is an interesting male figure. As the father he has strong influence and forces his daughter to honour her promise. Is he right to do this or not ? He has power over her, is his power used well or badly ? Answers on a postcard please. 

Maybe it is time for me to reclaim my blog as a somewhere a little less exposed. In the days and months after hearing about Jon's death i needed it as a space to air the feelings in me that were too powerful to be held in. I guess if i'd been surrounded by close connections who knew us as two together i might not have needed to howl so publicly but i wasn't; and in those first months of grief my self was so completely obliterated it has taken me this long to come to any kind of self composure. Now i am writing my grief in notebooks, old-fashioned pencil and paper have become my sanctuary; and sometimes i write him emails, which is mad because he won't get them, but writing the emails is different from writing in my notebook, and very different from writing in my blog, the emails are i guess the things i wish i could say to him, things i wish i could share, questions that will never be answered and also sometimes gripes (i would not have got away with those when he was living).
So that's the story of how i am continuing my grief journey as the shock waves spread and i find that i am still standing, still living and breathing and that the world has not stopped. There is pain and various difficult feelings to process but other matters press in and take my attention. Matters that concern me and/or other people. Matters that make clear that the river of life is still flowing, and time and tide stop for no man. 
At the beginning of the year i decided to take on the study of twelve fairy-tales/myths over the course of 2018 in part to distract me from the grief that then consumed me and in part to get myself back to my working practice. The fairy-tales are chosen at random out of a "hat" (actually a pin box filled with folded up titles) and so far i have worked on The Billy Goats Gruff, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves - these two i accidentally combined when i wrote Aladdin and the Forty Thieves on the spill of paper so February was split between them, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots and the Seal Bride. I am currently deep in thought, researching and making notes, written and drawn and mental, for The Handless Maiden. 
Because of my slip up in February i now have thirteen stories to work with, five of which are still unknown. My journey with each one has been very different. The first few months worth of notes are sketchy but I have a more connected body of work to be going on with for The Seal Bride, and managed to make ten linked images to illustrate and narrate the story of Puss In Boots from beginning to end. This taught me something about story telling, about beginnings and endings, and the bit in the middle.
I'm not saying any of the work i'm making is much to write home about but i am allowing ideas to flow, to pause, to flow again, to go backwards, forwards, upwards, downwards, sideways, letting the story seep into my bones, my being, my belonging. And because i choose a new story on the 1st of the month or more actually just before i go to bed on the last day of the month, i have a self imposed deadline which pushes me to work harder and to take the work i'm making to an end point even if that end is just a full stop. 
I tend to begin with a quick google search which throws up illustrations and blogs and to look at what Wikipedia says because it gives the background and the names of those who gave the story written form, and the when and where it stemmed from, often multiple locations. I also leaf through my own private collection of fairy tales for different versions. The Seal Bride and The Handless Maiden are both stories i have given head space and worked with before but all the others tho' known were less familiar. I was interested to read that during the period in which Perrault set down Puss in Boots the women in stories were notably dim and pretty and malleable because that was what was considered desirable then and there. I am not sure much has changed. The women in Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves - the princess and the slave girl - are notably more sussed and sassy. 
At first using these "children's" stories gave me something to hold on to. A structure to lean into, a stable source of inspiration, stable but not inflexible, it is the nature of fairy tales that they bend to meet the reader, a story that has survived retelling over centuries will take on the quality of the story-teller and listener because to give a story body you have to inhabit it. 
This month is the month of The Handless Maiden and it has felt very uncomfortable. The handless maiden is a serious victim, she is betrayed by those who might be expected to care for her. The first betrayal leaves her quite disabled. As part of my connecting to this story i have tried to imagine a life without hands. As a shiatsu practitioner and artist my hands are my life, my being, my doing. Who would i be without them ? How would i live without them ? The vulnerability of that position is painful. Even eating is difficult. In one version of the story there is a moment when the maiden having lost her hands discovers an orchard and eats a hanging pear from a tree and thus is discovered. 
If you have a moment i recommend allowing yourself to imagine a life without hands. How would you live ? It's an other world, an other kind of being. Using the physical disability here allows me also to connect with the broken child, cast out, alone, betrayed by the father who pushed by sometimes the devil and sometimes the stepmother, was the villain who cut off her hands. The weak father is  common motif in fairy tales, see Hansel and Gretal or Cinderella for instance. The wicked stepmother too features often. Who are these people ? 
A motif is a figure that is easily identifiable either in ourselves or others. Likely we carry a box of scraps of many motifs. Some we love, some we love less. Looking at fairy stories is giving me insight into the stories i tell myself about myself and others. In my previous blogs, particularly in the months after Jon's death I spoke of his family. Called them out as monsters. Now this monster image is not one that they accept. I imagine that if i am given any place in their world it is as a monster too. So many monsters where do they come from ? Monsters are common, and some monsters are more monstrous than others.
The monster does exist; it is rage, it is fire, it is fight, it is flood, it is pestilence, it is denial, it is jealousy, it is greed, it is ugly and mean and violent, it is all that you do not want to be unless you are a monster. It is the devil. It is Donald Trump, or not Donald Trump if you are a Donald Trump supporter. For those who support Donald Trump he is a hero, a man who gives voice and license to feelings they have felt unable to express. Those feelings may be abhorrent to others but their existence is certain, and the strength of their existence seems to be growing. A thing which to me is alarming but to others is great .. "lets make America great again". What is great ? Is it strength or force or wealth or what ? Great could be humility, tenderness, care.
So i've been thinking about narratives and counter narratives and how the stories i/we create create the world in which i/we inhabit. And how there are times when a story no longer fits, like a garment that once was perfect but now is a little bit of a squeeze to get into. Or maybe a garment that never felt right. My mum used to make me wear red polo neck jumpers when i was a child and had my hair cut bowl shape, this was the identity she gave me, i don't know why, but it wasn't me and to this day i hate anything tight around my neck even necklaces and heavy scarves and i still don't love having my haircut tho i have a fantastic hairdresser and i like it once it's done. 
I am not knocking my mother for putting me in red polo necks, she didn't know i hated them, and probably most parents have dressed up their children in clothes they don't like. My middle one hated a pair of red trousers that i thought were great. And the waistcoat and cravat that he had to wear as a page-boy for his dad's wedding made him cry. This is part of life. And parents can be dumb when it comes to their kids because it is easy to forget that your children are not you and that their journey is their journey and not yours to dictate. 
In relationships that require long connection like parenting, partnering and child-ing we are inclined to create deeper and maybe more compromising narratives as a way of feeling safe. In this way the narratives can become entrenched to the detriment of all parties. I think that these relationships are surely the most difficult to break from. You may be good or you may be bad but if you have been given this role you can be sure that the stability of the social unit relies upon you being that. It can happen too in friendship circles but these are generally lighter and more fluid than family units. 
I am returning in this blog to the theme of identity which i addressed last year in my blog when i  presented myself as a piece of sculpture in the Waveney Sculpture Trail, i was told by a visitor then that what i was doing was dialogical art, art that inspires dialogue. It is interesting for me to go back there in my head, to what i was talking about. Jon's death knocked my world into another universe and my thinking before his death seems vain and vacuous. I don't know that it is less vain and vacuous now but it is met with new knowledge. The new knowledge is grief, the feeling that comes unbidden when someone you love wholeheartedly, the good and the bad of them, becomes a definite physical absence, when they can no longer reflect back at you the image they have of you, or you have of them, when your shared narrative becomes something you carry alone, when your living connection ceases.
Self-identity often carries with it a need to fix down other people.  Maybe this is something i am having to come up against as i recall my relationship with Jon and work out what it is that i want to keep and what i do not want to keep. Self-identity may be conscious or unconscious, how conscious or unconscious is up to each of us to decide now and with every breath we draw and who amongst us us is really conscious. 
Going back to the Trump supporters, or the Trump detractors for that matter. Those who identify with Trump may take some of what he says with a big dollop of "yes, that's me" but with that dollop of "yes, that's me" they may also have to swallow some "i'm not sure" or even some "i don't think this is right but for the yes that's me i'll take it". So it is that we take on compromises and every time we accept those compromises we bury a little bit more of our true selves. The Trump detractors are making similar decisions "no, not me" but maybe by demonising and externalising we, i include myself in this group, refuse to see that which is Trump-ish inside ourselves. My waste, my greed, my selfishness is not prettier than Trumps but if i put it all on him i do not have to deal with it. I am less bad and that makes me "good-er". 
See every time i eat cheap cheese or cream from the supermarket i know that my purchase has fed an industry that does not fit the self i want to be. And all the time i/we are taking similar decisions day in, day out. Mostly those decisions are hidden in a crowd, i buy cheese, you buy cheese, we all buy cheese (or palm oil, or food wrapped in plastic, or factory farmed meat or take flights or "need" the new phone or i-pad or whatever), we all buy cheese and there is safety in numbers. In fact those who stray from the crowd are often looked at askance, sometimes mocked and derided. However deviation can be a reclamation of personal power. 
One of the themes that runs through The Handless Maiden is her victimhood, more than once she is treated brutally and the subject of lies and malicious talk that force her into vulnerable exile. It is however not until she acts to save herself (her self in the form of one or sometimes two children) that she is able to make a life that is not so dependent on the goodwill of others. This act happens after she has been thrown out of the sanctuary she briefly found when she was rescued. Exiled and still handless the child that she carries on her back falls into a pool of water and without thinking she reaches for the child and miraculously her hands grow back. After this she is able to meet life as a whole person, the child who was brutalised and cast out and the rescued and then exiled maiden are behind her. Her circumstances may still be impoverished but she now meets them as a whole person able to make decisions of her own and not only the subject of other's will.   
It's no good looking at fairy tales too literally. Hands do not grow back. And for that matter the father's brutality and betrayal may not be so obvious or specific. And stepmothers can be lovely. What i am picking up on within this story is the need to take ownership of our lives and in doing so we meet in ourselves a capacity to grow and be something other than the role we may have had forced upon us previously, in childhood or later. 
I have meandered through this blog and i am trying to find an end point to draw the threads together so that i can tie a knot. I am still working with The Handless Maiden and my grief for Jon is ongoing and Donald Trump seems to be here to stay at least for a while so how do these three strands connect. And what of the story, the possibility of story, which i think is what i really wanted to blog about. 
I think it is story that is the connecting point. The Handless Maiden, Jon, Donald Trump are all stories. Donald Trump is part of a vast collective story and that story varies hugely according to who is telling it. Jon is part of my story, he is also part of a collective story, his family's story, our stories do cross but our crossing points lack grace and are not generous or gentle. Sadly that's how it sometimes goes, there are times when stories conflict. The story of The Handless Maiden, having come through centuries of story-telling and travelled far - from France to Italy to Japan in just my collection - has been distilled, there is variation but the essence of the story is pretty much as is. So it goes perhaps with stories that stand the test of time. 
Perhaps it will be ok for me to come back to a little note of sadness in me for a moment, tho maybe i am being self indulgent.  To come back to my own fairy story. One of the things that is painful to me is that when i die, all that i shared with Jon will die with me, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the awful ... i don't know what i can do about this, i feel a little helpless, maybe this is my handless maiden story, maybe i have to learn now how to reach out to save that which was born out of our union and in so doing regrow my hands and find my new independent self.  

More dreams. A dream about whales and water, and a dream about being late for a maths exam and an adopted baby. My unconscious is clearly asserting itself. In the first dream i was looking out to sea over a cold harbour wall, somewhere close to the arctic circle, in the distance a head popped up, a seal, all eyes and whiskers, then, closer to, a young orca came into the harbour and was swimming, playing, suddenly a great tail emerges and I am nearly caught in it's down thrust as a sperm whale rises up into the air and then plummets back into the water and swims back out to the ocean beyond. A hunter, a man, wants to kill the whale, he kills the orca and hides in it's skin with a gun waiting to kill the bigger whale, he craves the meat of the whale. I only want ice-cream, but the ices the vendor sells are strange, just blocks of flavoured ice with things floating in the ice. I settle for one with pecans in it. Lord only knows what this dream means. 
And then later in the night, after a dream i remember having but of which i can recall no details, i am in another dream, at school as a teenager/young person, i have an exam to sit but i go home first and my neighbours have just adopted a baby just born, we are thinking about the baby and i am late for my exam. Again the meaning is unclear. 
Dreams are a visual pleasure, a living cinema. I have been thinking much about fairy tales since the beginning of the year. A personal project that has allowed me to focus on something other than Jon's death. Before studying my long held desire was to illustrate fairy tales which are a passion of mine. And after Jon's death i had an image of a book in my head, my head was so lodged in the wilderness at that time i do not know if the image came to me when i was awake or asleep but it has stuck. Recently my calling has been to return to the realm of faerie to take that journey and to see where it leads. My frustration is that i am fairly awful at drawing, that the pictures i have in my head when i try to put them to paper come out weak and loose. 
I know that this is often how things start, that first steps can be discouraging and it is at this point that I am wont to give up, to go back to safer territory, places that i know, where i feel more secure. But what is security if it holds me back from where/who i want to be ? A tether. A prison. A known. But is the known really more fixed than the unknown ? And stepping into the unknown creates a chance to know more. And what, if not knowing more, am i here for ?
So here it is. If, over the next few months i post lame scribbles as i try to illustrate the fairy tales i grew up with and have collected for the whole of my life, please be kind, please know that i am trying, please know that if my footsteps meander, are tentative, or leave negative imprint they are no more than any other "hero/heroine" stepping out from their safe space. 
Since January I have read and researched and doodled work on The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Aladdin's Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Theives, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. There are five because for February i accidentally wrote down Aladdin and the Forty Theives which meant i had two stories in that month. 
Today I begin with Puss in Boots. Thus far my exploration into these stories has been both art play and meditative. The meditations are paths into the deep that afford me access to my own relationship to the characters, the places, the happenings. By building a relationship with the tale within i am finding out how i meet the beast in me, or the beauty, what i am feeling when i sell my voice to the sea witch in return for legs and the chance to love and be loved by the prince I have given my heart to, I have met with the clever slave-girl who saves Ali Baba, and the princess in Aladdin who also by using her wit saves both herself and Aladdin, and considered the troll and the goats in The Billy Goats Gruff, and the bridge that parts the goats from the field of their dreams. 
Having just spent two months with fairy tales in which the main protagonist is female it will be interesting to take to the road with a male character and his side kick. Is the side kick the male character or is it the cat ? After a day spent yesterday with my good friend, artist and illustrator  Janet Cranness, looking at her work I am setting out on this month's story filled with inspiration and ideas about how to make work that is more finished. I don't know if i will accomplish that but i will try, and i will keep trying because trying is one step forward and one step forward leads to the next step forward and who knows where those steps will lead.      

This is my seventh attempt at writing a blog this past couple of days. I feel like my words are stopped, that my voice is broken. I do not know how long I am allowed to grieve a man who left me. I wonder if his other lovers, before and after, are grieving as i am. 
This week my sleep has been dream filled. This morning I dreamed that a man of cruel character had sewn up the eyes of a dog. The dog was not mine but I was looking after it. 
The night before, Jon and i were walking along a beach, maybe Southwold - tho' not exactly Southwold as is the way in dreams, the sun was shining, and we bought pencils but they turned into pipe cleaners, we went to put them back but the place had disappeared, we just carried on walking until we passed a big house which we hadn't seen before so we knew that we were lost, i woke when we were at the bottom of a narrow up-hill road leading into a great dark wood.
I think my dreams are telling me to go into my wild. My wild isn't so very wild, i'm not physically brave, it's more likely to be a kind of quiet insanity, i will fall in to fairy tale country, there the light always eventually breaks through. If I am deep in my mind no one can reach me and I can untangle the mess of threads  running through my head.  
Because I can't write or speak well at the moment I am playing in my studio, hoping that what I need to say will come out of my finger tips. This is how I work when I need to exorcise something that really hurts. Generally the doing leads me to where I need to go tho' sometimes it takes a while. At the moment I am printing, and scribbling with wire, and making paper, and looking at shadows, and thinking about mazes and labyrinths.

And here is my crone, my witch, my old woman. I see her in a rather more sympathetic light than the classic fairy tale. Old age bears with it a vulnerability that has kinship to childhood, I think, except that children generally grow stronger and firmer in body and more independent as time passes and the old grow more frail and less able to care for themselves. So there, my witch is not a hate figure she has just lived a long time and is what she is because of the life she has lived.

 

And I am continuing to play with my Hansel and Gretal characters. This is such a pet project, years ago when I was studying on my access course our teacher gave us the theme - collections. She asked us to choose one of our own collections as the starting point. I have collected fairy tales for as long as I can remember and was excited to begin to work with something that belonged to me. It was then a shock, though maybe it should not have come as a surprise when she put down my proposed subject. "What will you do ? Make a gingerbread house?" she mocked. I was so taken aback that I let go of that theme and chose maps in which ironically I got completely lost. 
Now there are a few lessons I learned from this. For instance, if I have decided on a creative direction it is better to continue along that line until I hit my own stop points because however good a teacher is they are not me and they do not know me more than I know myself. Another one is that teachers are human, they may think I am a pain (this one even told me as we set up our final show that she never liked me) and nothing I do is going to please someone who has firmly decided they don't like me. Given that I am not obliged to like or respect people who don't like or respect me. - that information is very releasing. Oh and if I should find myself on the wrong path for whatever reason I can stop and go back or go sideways or up, catch my drift, it's all learning. And, often a mistake can be the beginning of something I love. And whatever I do the world is pretty surely not turning on my success or failure. But it can be very hard to remember this when work is being judged and found wanting especially if you have, as I do, a fairly heavy inner critic as an unloved but faithful companion.
Anyway, grumbling aside. A couple more doodles of H and G

Yesterday I made some very rough little Hansel and Gretal pipe cleaner figures. These are first doodles. A chance for me to get to know the characters, to connect to who Hansel and Gretal are to me.    
And today I have started making a gingerbread house. Knowing when to stop is always a bit of a quandary, tissue paper no tissue paper, paint no paint. Often there's a moment when it becomes clear that something is finished tho' it's easy to overstep, and I can be a bit over-cautious which means lots of projects spend some time waiting to find their end. 

  

So, what will happen now ? My portfolio is handed in, my show stuff mounted, but, I have two projects that I am hoping to pull together for the end of year show. The first relates to the little metal boats that I've been making. And to stories from Japan about making a thousand paper cranes. I hope, between now and the end of June, to fold the best part of a thousand paper boats. I hope that people seeing the paper boats at the show will take one or two and set them to sail in the river that floats by the art school or anywhere they like. And maybe, just maybe to make a wish while they are doing it. The boats represent me, and my fellow students, and anyone who has helped me along the way in my life, or smiled because of something that I or someone I love has done. I hope that in setting them to sail a little bit of joy will be released into the world. 
I did road test this a week or so back with my little grandchildren, and we really did have a lovely time floating our prototype boats.

I guess that as we disperse http://nua-textiles-surfacedesign.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/what-our-students-have-to-say.html into the world outside of NUA they could be new vessels for our dreams.

Another step towards the end of my degree course. The dissertation is handed in. All I can do now is cross my fingers, and hope it is good enough.

To celebrate I bought myself a new book of fairy tales, The Red King and the Witch by Ruth Manning-Sanders, she is one of my favourite story tellers. I shall also be dipping into the copy of Duncan Williamson's The Broonie, Silkies and Fairies, that I picked up from a charity shop last week. I'm a sucker for a well told fairy tale.