Christmas Eve 2022

And here we are back to Christmas. Christmas on the calendar is a definite mark, an unmissable pass  and whatever you are going through at Christmas, in my experience, is amplified, so happy is super happy, sad is super sad, and so on. This evening i'm feeling pensive, a little lost & maybe a little sad. Christmas comes & what is it for ? 

I thought i would blog as a way to run my feelings out, but difficult feelings aren't allowed at Christmas they must me pushed down, sat upon, stifled, because Christmas is HAPPY and merry and if you aren't HAPPY and merry you are Scrooge or the Grinch or Captain Comedown, and so my feelings this evening feel wrong for this evening. 

So what is going on ? I think i may be lonely. I am someone who needs time alone more than most i think. I am someone who needs solitude and for whom solitude is generally a source of comfort, so to admit to loneliness is quite hard. My loneliness stems from a longing to connect i think. It is a long time since i have felt this but as i tap tap on my keyboard that is what is coming up. 

That is enough to write for now. I acknowledge my awkwardness on this Christmas eve but i think i don't need to wallow in it. 

...

Christmas Morning 2022

5am. In years past my home would have just been awaking to the sounds of children, then teenagers, excited about their stockings. I used to lay their stockings out on the rug in the living/telly room.  They were not socks but great big acrylic christmas fake socks, vulgar i suppose, but there is something about the things that come out each year, they harbour memories. I wonder how they feel now after years of not being filled, like un-cuddled Teddy bears or unread books or rooms in houses waiting for entrance. I must throw off this melancholy mood. Or at least assimilate it to try to understand it. 

In years further past I was the child. Mum would put our stockings on our beds. They were proper long socks always with a tangerine in the toe end. Tangerines were christmas treats in the 1970's. Going to bed on Christmas eve i would fall asleep listening to the rustle of her wrapping & filling the socks with carefully stashed little gifts, embroidered animals from the Chinese shop on Elm Hill and paper parasols amongst other things. Once when i was very young i woke in the night and saw Father Christmas, yes really, i remember it clearly, a glowing figure coming into the dark of my bedroom, i shut my eyes so he wouldn't know i'd seen him but i did. 

After breakfast our gifts from family and friends would have been laid out on chairs in the sitting room. My dad's were usually wrapped in a paper bag, that was his trade mark wrapping. And the woman from from up the road who showed me a softer way of being used to give me Devon Violets scent, i think this is where my love of violet perfumes stems from. One year i had asked my dad for a bottle of mead because our teacher at school had been reading The Hobbit to us and mead had been talked about and he bought it for me. In other years i'd asked him for records, Swan Lake, Abba's Greatest Hits, David Bowie's Scary Monsters. 

In the youth, long ago, Christmas day's opened with a glass of champagne and a spliff but today i wake alone except for my cat who as she does every morning came for a cuddle before we went downstairs. I have baked a cake for Christmas day at Amis' house. It is too big for three to eat but i enjoyed baking it, living alone i don't have much reason to bake cakes anymore unless i particularly fancy cake and i'd not trouble to ice a cake for myself. But it is odd after decades of being the provider of the feast to be a guest, a luxury and treat in the first year, but it feels like water running thin in some ways now, a trickling stream joining the body of a stronger river, briefly, before slipping back onto it's own pathway. I am no longer the river or even a great part of the river. 

Oops slipped back into winter-y thoughts. I guess it is natural. It is Winter. And tho this feast, Christmas, is a festival of light, it comes within the bleak of Winter and after the recent cold snap when my fuels bills (research politics and cost of living crisis 2022 if you are reading this years from now) were un-payably expensive i feel a little bleak. I guess the politics of the moment are part of what makes me feel a bit to the side of celebrations this year. National, international, social and personal-social politics are beastly (to a greater or lesser degree) at the moment, the future looks like it may be hard to navigate. The future cannot be held back, life cannot be held in arrest for long, a pause can be held briefly but life goes on, or doesn't, the dead may know pause and but maybe even they are shuffled along as other bodies bury them deeper and the grief of those left behind becomes a ragged cloak and not the heavy mantle it once was.  

So today is Christmas Day. It is 6am now and i just went downstairs and the advent candle in the kitchen fills the room and beyond with light. Today will be a good day i will be with people i love, Archie and Amis and if my stream meets only briefly with others it is perhaps the way i have chosen, at this time, for it to be. To be alone and of small consequence is not a terrible thing, there is a freedom in that journey. Happy Christmas.

...

Boxing Day morning 7am

And so Christmas Day was lovely. Gentle. Made gentle by my son Amis who carried the day as host with warmth & generosity. We watched TV, a charming animation that he had recorded so i could see it "The Boy, The Fox, The Mole and The Horse" and Alexa, the weird character who occupies space in so many people's houses, gave us christmas tunes and told us how to cook with the truffle that Richard had sent us as our joint Christmas present. We gave & received gifts mostly books & consumables. We had cake and champagne at lunchtime and ate dinner as the light was fading. Archie & Amis made me watch the King's speech. They are quite ardent royalists. I am not. I came home, not late, exhausted but quietly happy. My walk home at about 6pm had been fine, lots of cars and people about. A couple of years ago when we had Christmas under Covid restrictions i'd walked home at 9pm and quite frankly it was scary.  

And now it is Boxing Day. I'm snuggled up in my bed with the cat asleep by my side. It's a relief to have got through Christmas day. I think it feels like the year's last hurdle. I was conscious this year of my mum in her care home and feeling guilty about that tho i think she will have had a good time as she seems quite happy in the home and the staff and manager are kind. I know i am not the only person facing that scenario. And other friends were facing Christmas with parents recently died, i was thinking about them too, i have yet to go through that i can only imagine how it feels.

But now, having got over the last jump and on the run to the finish, the new year, there is time to regroup my senses in readiness for 2023. God knows how next year will unfold. I will make resolutions, i always make resolutions and some of them i keep, sometimes for a little while and sometimes they become part of me, but more of that maybe on a New Years Day post. Today i will be mostly eating cake and reading and maybe out in my garden.   

 So here i begin ... but where to begin, where & when does a history start ? Is this a family history, an autobiography, a vengeful hit back, a cry from my heart, a whine ? i don't know, maybe all of those things & more. As i write i guess i will find out. And who will care ? Only me i think, I'm writing for me, as therapy as much as anything i think.  

At the moment I am making work for an exhibition in June for the Lonely Arts Club, an artists community group that i became a member of last year. The exhibition is called Resonance and will be in a local semi derelict space often used for art exhibitions because it is free & also rather beautiful in the way that semi derelict buildings are. The group has had a couple of week long residencies to explore the space organised by Jacqui Jones, one last autumn & one a few weeks ago. I had been to exhibitions there before but not connected to the place as an empty building so these residency weeks have been helpful. 

The Shoe Factory was built about 100 years ago & the front is Art Deco by design & lovely. Inside it is dark & cold downstairs tho there is good light from the windows in the morning & upstairs is cold & light (it may be hot in the summer). There are patches of damp, in the middle of the room upstairs there was a large puddle where the rain had got in in the Spring & one corner is green with algae and there is also water. Some parts are blocked off because they represent a health & safety risk & through some windows you can see inaccessible parts of the building. There are holes stopped with boards held in place with bricks. And nature in the form of budleia & other weed type plants is gaining a foothold on flat roofs and window sills. In a slight breeze the boards stopping the holes bang rhythmically against the wall as part of the sound scape. Some windows are graffitied on, some are broken. Electric wiring is exposed showing the coloured cables routes & there are metal bars criss crossing the ceiling. All this is i guess is part now of the buildings & my history. The anecdotal evidence of a living witness. Once upon a time i imagine it was full of people making shoes & their bosses. Each person a contained unit of experience, their ghosts inhabiting the places they lived their lives including the factory, their bloodline still flowing, or not, depending on whether they had children or not.          

The work i am making for this exhibition began with the thought of the Green Man because of the way nature is creeping into this man made structure, pulling it back to earth. I meet the Green Man in churches, bosses & carvings & paintings, sometimes but also in woods & fields & wild places, inside & outside of me. He is part of my process. My work is always built on process, i'm not the best at any creative art, not a gifted painter, printer, ceramicist or even textile artist which is what my BA was in but i am good at following intuition led process & sometimes i make work that is good enough. 

What i have been exploring this past few weeks is work on paper & on that paper i'm drawing up thoughts, feelings, & memories but then i've cut them out to leave blanks, keeping back to treasure what i love & moving on & covering over the holes, the absences & the mistakes. Perhaps this is the nature of life lived. Here is a part that i loved, cut it out & keep it, here is a bit i wish i could erase, can it be erased or painted over, maybe, but is the mark left, or only partially covered, partially lost but still living within the body of paper or my self ? 

One of the awful things that happens when a person dies is that their death is the end of vessel that contained their life. With my mother ill i feel that sharply, i have stories about her that feel quite solid - the duel that was fought over her when she was at art school in Oxford in her late teens, a shopping list in her young girl's hand that included Cyclax lipstick, the picture of her that my granny (her mother) painted wearing green, a beauty. And more recently my god mother telling me how she looked like a model when she'd arrived at Brandiston Common in her late twenties, where we lived till my parents divorced in the 1980s, long legs & fur. I remember how there were extraordinary clothes in her wardrobe, a ball gown with red roses on white with black leaves. And when my middle sister crashed & wrote off my mother's car in her late teens, whilst, so i've been told she was high on drugs & playing slalom with the cats eyes in the road, there was a black Dior dress that got destroyed. I know it is more important that everyone escaped that crash alive but i've always been saddened by the loss of that dress. My mum was glamorous before i was born. I think by the time i was born her glamour was fading although she is still someone who dresses with a certain flair and always has been really. She & I talk now about how a person is so many ages when they are old. As someone thirty years younger than she is i can only guess at what is to come & i don't think any other ever really knows what is going on for another person, the secret palace inside their mind, the doors that open on to times & places particular & personal to them, but in my mum i see her youth, her childhood, times that were good & times that were sad. She is an embodied family history, she is, we all are. Some get their histories written, some write their own, & others get lost over time, sometimes even while they are still alive.

  

Ok ... keep going. Its been a week of grief and tears but like walking in the rain its no good stopping. The pain of losing someone you love doesn't seem to get easier. Sorrow this week has manifested as a great dark weight in the centre of my chest that hurts with an insistence that cannot be denied. One step in front of another. I can hear voices saying stop making a fuss, what a fuss, silly fuss, stupid woman, let go. But also kinder voices including Jon's. I think it was him nagging me to ask for the letters. He knew what they were of course, that it was important that they came back to me. That sounds a bit mad but the dead do seem to hang about. I used to sometimes appeal to my granny for counsel, my mother's mother, who was fierce and not to be crossed but fair. And i feel my great aunt Leska as a benign presence in the background. I have one of her rosaries, red plastic beads and a metal cross made of some cheap light metal. I also have a little painting of a nun that came to me after she died. They are not things of value to anyone but me. Its how it is with things that belong to people who take up heart space. The pecuniary worth is of less matter than the moment or person that an object represents. Objects carry secrets. A thing picked up by two on a walk may be of no consequence to anyone else but could well be a port-key to another time and place for either of those two. It is how the letters i received have been this week. I haven't looked at them all but some of them take me back to his living room seeing them on the mantelpiece below which stood the two chinese figures that had come from his parents' house when his mother died. Some i can remember being attached to his fridge with magnets along with other things. Of course it means i've been occupying his house in my mind. Remembering the feel of how it was when we were together there. The stairs, the porch, the living room and kitchen, the bedrooms and bathroom and the views from all the windows and his beautiful garden, the smell of fennel on my hands, bees on the flowers and dragon flies and tadpoles, gold finches on teasels, the plants we bought together.
Enough. Enough already. Nostalgia is an addictive drug. Its a trip. It is but it isn't. I can return to a place, feel what i felt there, but it is out of body material. One of the things that Jon's death made me very aware of is that that which physically touches me has a worth that is different to that which is distant, historical or geographical. I can go back to my grandparents houses or my childhood home or any number of other places in my mind and they are real places but it is not real in the way that my body returning is real. My grandparents house was knocked down and rebuilt when they died. And Jon's house is just a 1980's end terrace housing estate house now. The place it was when it was his house and my home from home is in me. I wonder if the walls remember me and him but houses have so many occupants, our ghosts may be there, but they are also here and elsewhere. It's strange how even the living have ghosts. 
And ghosts reside within our bodies too. Ghosts of our past selves and those whose lives have touched us for better or worse. The mediocre tend to not be remembered so well only the very good and very bad. This blog is surely not reflective journal writing but it will be handed in with all the others when hand in comes. Because my work is always born out of felt experience. It is where it stems from. 
This week past we were asked to make a Pecha Kucha presentation, 20 slides 20 seconds talk per slide. I can't say i was looking forward to it, but i could see the point. I was less prepared than i would have liked but time just skids past and so it felt like an achievement just turning up and having a crack at it. And tho' i was dreading it, good things about being asked to do it, were seeing other people's presentations and being inspired, going back over the term's work and realising how much i had done and putting it together as a story, and being given feedback. My class mates seemed to like it more than my tutor who wanted more information about my process. 20 seconds isn't really long enough to explain the difference between a two part mould and a three part mould or why i needed to make both or any of the other things i learned from making those moulds and filling them with wax and setting the cast objects on cups with sprue and risers and if i'd gone into detail about that i'd have had to miss out other stuff so i went with my heart and made the story the process that i spoke about. 
I am not sure if it was this week or last week that we had a lecture in which it was suggested we go back to our manifestos and remember why we started out MA. It's good sometimes to go back to why. I've been disaffected this term. I did have a hiccup a month or so back but the disaffection has hung about for too long. I need to remember how lucky i am to be studying what a gift it is that i'm giving myself. I am too uptight at the moment, irritable and not nice to be with. It could be my projects' subject matter both of which have been problematic. I am currently being nailed to the cross for my ASU 2 Stations of the Cross project which clearly is not great. And having spent the past couple of weeks focusing on my teenage self i seem to have picked up some of her post punk "fuck you" attitude. Not very helpful when trying to conform to learning outcomes. It could also be a desperate need to play make, to make for pure pleasure and it may be that i have to let go a little of trying and just let what needs to come come. It's been inspiring to be in the print workshops with the first year BA students working on etching plates. Being with so many people working on one project producing such different work reminds me that there are many ways to get to a place, be that place a finished etching plate, the top of a mountain or the end of a long rainy walk with a heavy pack or heavy heart. 

Why do people do what they do ? What is it that makes an artist pick up a pen and begin to draft an idea ? What is it that makes any man or woman do what they do, do what they do when they do, do what they do as they do it ? I am looking at motive. If living is an art, and i think it is, then we are all artists. 
I have had a couple of weeks at university i would rather not had happened. I was struggling to assimilate conversations i'd had earlier this month with my GP and the surgeon who would perform the operation they advise. I was feeling drained, my body was giving me issues, run down and exhausted i asked my tutor if i could be excused from a taught session that week because i did not feel strong enough to hold my fledgling ideas intact if i gave them to a group of other students i hardly know. I also felt too debilitated to engage with their ideas without damaging my wellbeing. I have been told since i should have emailed admin to say i was unwell and therefore unable to attend but i didn't i spoke face to face because it felt more honest and respectful and adult to explain why i felt unable to attend. I thought as a fellow artist he would understand. I was wrong. He did not understand. It has been implied that he thought i was being high and mighty and picking and choosing what i wanted to do. Anyone who knows me well will know that i have chronic & destructive low self-esteem and an inner critic that loves to take me down. I think because i smile it makes people think i am more confident than i am. Should i smile less ? 
As a result of trying to explain myself I received what felt like an aggressive email from the person above my tutor to whom i am given understand he had complained. The email seemed to accuse me of poor attendance and not engaging with other students. It felt like slap in the face, a denial of my need to self-care at that moment. I was hurt and bewildered. I asked others if they had received emails when they missed class. It seems i am the only one. It felt wrong and has made feel wary of certain people and my trust in the university is no longer as it was. I do not know how I will move forward. I hope i will re-find my flow. I feel less open and less free.
Trust is a gift given. If trust is given, be careful with that trust. Trust is like a rope. If trust is broken the cuntline within the rope is irretrievably divided and the feeling will never be the same. Trust comes into all our relationships. If we cease to trust our sense of safety is compromised. It is hard to regain trust. It is hard to trust again someone or a body that has broken trust. It is political.
How can errors be made good ? It has to be ok to fail. But what lies behind a fail is important. The intention behind an action or word makes all the difference. In shiatsu, as i have come to understand, it is the triple heater meridian that paired with the heart protector regulates and holds us to appropriate social boundaries.  I have been studying and practising shiatsu for over twenty years now. Intention is key element to my practise. How do i come into another's sphere what is my intention when i address another. My intention when i spoke to my tutor was to let him know that my absence was born out of my needs and was not a rejection of his teaching or the other students. I am sad i was misunderstood. I think it may be better not to speak if i can stop my mouth.
As an artist ... ugh, what is an artist ? As an artist, i want to give presence to ideas that i can't express in words, to make thought tangible, that i guess is my intention. Other artists will have other driving forces. Maybe one of the good things that has come out of a bad week is that it has forced me hard up against why i am doing my MA because when i considered leaving i had to think about what i would be leaving. What i would be leaving is the chance to explore further with people who i like and respect ways and means of doing the above, making thought tangible, giving ideas presence. And there now i feel like i've blogged the best of me and want the world to go away, not look, not see. 
I came to my MA with a desire to learn about printmaking, specifically etching, drypoint, mono print, collagraph and screen printmaking. Last term i occupied space in the print studios and this term i have too. I have been working with photographs exploring what makes an image worth a second glance or a longer look, how images connect, how to tell a story using my own story, and also how to print, how to print CMYK, seeing how coloured layers change a picture, how to print the same image unaltered, what is the difference. What is it that draws the viewer in. I love sampling it is a serious part of my creative practice. I sample and compare and by sampling and comparing i learn how i need to make what i need to make.
Currently i am making plates of an image of myself as a nineteen year old. It is a strange thing to look at oneself, to look at oneself over and over again. It feels peculiar and narcissistic at first and then the self becomes an object, a thing that could be a teapot or a flower or somebody else. A few weeks ago i screen printed a picture of my five year old self. I think it would have been around about the time my grandpa died and i need to look into that because this week while all the horrible-ness has been going on, as well as finding myself in the thick of Jon-grief, i also discovered i have a child's grief. 
My grandpa was the only adult i remember as playful from my childhood. He would swing us under his legs. When he got ill i remember being told off for showing him a book i'd been given and was proud of. It was a big book, he was in hospital and i lumped it onto his chest as a child would and was told off and he said no it was alright. He was dying but i didn't know it. Even dying he was kind. I remember the phone call we received when he died, "grandpa is dead" i was told. I was in my bedroom with red curtains reading "The Cow Who Fell into the Canal". And i remember going to see him at the morgue and thinking if i cried on him he might come back to life but of course i wasn't allowed close enough to cry on him and it wouldn't have worked even if i had would it. And now i remember his absence. Absence i think is a huge part of grief.
Photographs trigger memories. My nineteen year old self has flicked switches on the lack of self worth i had then. I have put in a proposal for one of the Curation MA students exhibitions, the brief is Self Love and my working with this image, whether she accepts my proposal or not, is an act of love back passed to the girl-woman i was then. I have over time learned to love myself a little more, i cannot change my past and my innate lack of self confidence is a demon i think i will always struggle with but i can give my self of then kindness and understanding i couldn't give myself then. 
For me understanding is the bedrock of my practice. Understanding on lots of levels. My SNU project is a lot about sampling, i am exploring the emotionality behind the images but also those images are giving me the opportunity to learn about the materials i am using and this for me is how i build my practice. If i know my materials i am better able to use them. I often say that thought is my medium it is true even if it sounds a bit pose-y, but university gives me the chance to explore the physical process under the guidance of experts. NUA has some fantastic technicians.
So what else have i been up to this week. Well last term i and others met with some Business school students from the UEA and we were given a brief and asked to give a presentation based on that brief which we delivered last Friday. That has taken up the best part of three days this week. Although we are in the same city our campuses are about an hour apart and collaboration has not been easy as we are all studying at MA/MSc level and have ongoing commitments to our courses. Still my group managed three further meet ups, a brainstorming session, a brainstorming for the presentation session, and then a presentation run-through, before presenting last friday. 
I learned from this presentation, i was a relatively silent party but I nudged to get things going when there was silence from the other side. My four partners were hard working and committed and we all made all the meetings and we all had a voice in brainstorming sessions. They made the questionnaire and slides but i gave ideas and i think created emotional connection to the subject matter. I was impressed by how cool they were and unafraid. I suppose if you have travelled from far away to study for a year in a strange country you have to be a bit plucky and able to handle yourself. I learned from their courage and self confidence as well as their skills and it was good to be in company with their self assurance. It was hard to speak in front of people especially as i was having a difficult week but i did speak albeit for just a few minutes. 
Also I finished making and made some new silicon moulds of things. I am learning and brushing up on mould making in case i should need to know how to do this for my masters project and also with a view to making things for my ASU 2 and SNU tho time is always a factor. Everything takes longer than i think it will which adds to the stress as the weeks and days tick down towards deadlines and finally leaving. 
And i had a meeting with Maria Paveledis who is a printmaker who works in Norwich. I have seen her work in exhibition and like it a lot. She asked on facebook if anyone was free to help her with running a print workshop for the XR pilgrimage of the animals this Easter and i said i would love to and so i am, it feels like a privilege.
Maybe on that note i have to give myself credit for holding it together through a rough week enough to make four extra-curricular meetings (3 x St Martin's Project & Maria), to have made six new copper plates almost finished and prepared one more to also finish next monday, I have made some new moulds and a two part mould and have begun exploring how epoxy resin behaves in a mould. And I have made new marks on my drypoint and hard ground test plates which has also led me thinking more about Judas' kiss. And yesterday i went to Holt Church to see the representations they have there of the Stations of the Cross. And by chance met and spoke to a retired Cannon about the Stations which was very interesting and he gave me the name of an artist to look up. Life goes on. Life always go on. 
My SNU began with grief as its seed and a need to look back and look forward. All the time this balance is something that i feel. Perhaps this is my cross. Maybe this is how i carry forward my ASU 2 work. And there again i say more than i want to about my creative process. Reveal too much. let myself fall and be vulnerable. But how can i make work if the work i am making asks that i be that and i refuse. It can't be done. If i must feel the scourge of whips, of nails in my hands and feet then so it has to be. But i must remember that imperfection is ok, for me and for others. And if i fall its ok too.  

And breathe. It has felt like a long week. I already had that "could it be Friday please" feeling on Tuesday morning and got little done that day although i did have a meeting with one of the MA student-curators and discovered inking and wiping my plate blind, i think i blogged about this just after but its worth a second mention as i've been doing this more and it makes a lot of sense to meet the plate like that. Sight is just one of the senses by which we know the world but is perhaps the one people rely on most heavily and would be most conscious of losing. One of the students in my SNU group is basing her MA work on this and listening to her talk about her project development is fascinating. It is coincidence that Jess suggested inking and wiping blind but its nice to meet someone else's enquiry with my own body knowing. 

Today is Saturday, i plan to go over my this weeks work in this blog, and to fill in my bibliography page so i can take DVDs and books back to the libraries they come from, and to try to scrape my home into a shape that allows me to move forward next week. Tomorrow i have a meeting with the women from the UEA business school with whom i am giving a presentation next week on how people feel about  homeless people and homelessness. This collaboration was set up last term and i think we all went in cold and not really understanding what we were letting ourselves in for, but maybe that is normal and how one learns is by doing, and having done it, next time i find myself in a position similar, i'll have more to give because i have this as some experience. 

Back to creative work, noting down doings tho' they may be no more than crumbs on the table. Monday began with a doctor's appointment following up the one i had last Monday at the hospital. I think these have probably thrown me a little. I'm putting off an operation and conversations about the need for it slightly knock me. In the afternoon i finished the plate that is called the Spain Years but some of it is not wiping properly which means i really need to give it some focus to work out why and i've not had the head for it this week. Is it the plate or how i am wiping it that is the error. Jess gave me some easy wipe to add to the ink and it has a nice feel as it comes out of the tube so i think that has helped and the blind inking/wiping too will hopefully allow me to build into my body a sense of how a plate feels when it is ready to print, there are so many variables, paper, temperature, press, my own energy levels, the more i learn the more i realise that printmaking is not easy street art even if it made from a plate that is made from a photograph, hell even there there are variables i had not considered. There is no way i am going to learn all the variables in the six months i have left of my course, its a life's work. I wish i'd begun this earlier in my life. 

On Wednesday i was in the 3d studio to fill the moulds i'd made a week or so ago with epoxy resin. I am learning about surfaces because i had expected the resin to be see through but Jim and James explained that if the surface of the thing i have made a mould of is not smooth the silicon mould will pick up the objects skin and therefore the resin will not be glass smooth as i had expected. I was disappointed for a moment but now its something to work with and also something to test. I think my nerd self has been released this term  and i am getting very excited about sampling which is part of my textiles practice so its natural for it to become part of my fine art process too i guess. Is my fine art practice separate from my textiles practice ? I don't think so. 
I also made some new moulds on Wednesday morning to repeat the learning from before and because having done it once there were other things i wanted to try. One of the things i am making a mould of is a doll's shoe that is needing a two part mould and walls of clay not circular walls. Everyday i am learning new things and i think its easy to forget how exhausting it is to be constantly learning, trying to take in and assimilate what is going on, and simultaneously exploring like an octopus the ideas that are arising from the new learning and the ideas that are feeding the new learning. 

I think this is why i had to excuse myself from one of the taught sessions this week. Instead that day i scratched into the back and front of a small copper plate Jess gave me and an aluminium one too making crappy prints and not minding. And in the afternoon finishing my metal things from last term and unleashing my new moulds from their walls. And going home a little earlier which meant walking home in light instead of darkness, not much earlier but it is Spring and the days are lengthening. Eyes meeting light makes a difference. 

On Friday after Thursday's drypoint tryout and having also made ready a hard ground plate. I made a couple of awful prints using drypoint and hard ground to see the difference. I haven't had a chance to look at the results properly i know they are awful work but sometimes i have to make awful work to get to better work and tho it may take me months before i make something i'm pleased with at least i am now beginning to explore these two new ways of making marks. 

It is making marks that i have come to uni to explore and so tho' i know i will growl at the prints i've made because they are ugly on Monday morning i will also be pleased with myself for starting out and hopefully be able to see the marks i like within the mass of the print and remember how i made them and will try to remember how i made them and to repeat them as soon as possible before i forget.

This blog may be very boring but i needed to get it written so i can let go of the week past and give my next week a new page.  

NB.. i also want to note that this week on the night between Monday and Tuesday i dreamed that a snake came out from under the skin of my left forearm, reared up to look at me as it was emerging before disappearing. It was dark and disturbing dream. I think that maybe one of the reasons I am immersing myself in process is because the stations of the cross is a dark story and allowing myself to imagine how it felt to be the man who was Jesus Christ and how it felt to be those who cared about him, both lovers and haters, is not comfortable. Process is my shield. In much the same way my SNU module is allowing me to meet my feelings and memories, some of these lovely but some are less good and working with these is not so easy. I don't know why i have chosen to hold these two balls of dark matter in my hands this term but i have and so i am very conscious of giving myself room to back off if i need to in order to maintain my mental stability.  

Well there now, the new term has started. I got my grades for last term's modules on Tuesday evening, they feel fair to generous and put me in a mid bracket. The need was only to pass and i was worried that i wasn't good enough to have passed and so a pass feels nice, but then there's disappointment in myself that i do better, no question in me about my grades, they were as good as i deserved, but can i be better ? is this where i rest ? or is there another ounce or so that i can give ?
On Thursday we had tutorials with our main subject teachers and they were helpful and positive. I will continue to explore printmaking and trying to make "pictures" out of stories. In one of my last term's tutorials my teacher questioned me wanting to back off from my own story. I wanted then to see if i could make work that was not related to me, to take more universal themes and give them my mark but it seems that the way i give them my mark is to take them inside of myself and then re-release them as i have found them within me. 
I failed to get to grips with the RIPU project until almost too late. Thankfully just in time i broke in, breaking in has shown me new ways to enquire but i was not quite forward enough to really make the most of this module. It has made me aware that i need to dig deeper, to read other people's thoughts and go further with my own. 
Last term i gave myself a hard task, i set out to explore a story i was only slightly familiar with, from a culture that was not mine, and which i had only indirect experience and no real physical reference points. I think i took on too much. Maybe i needed to take on too much. But it meant that i was unable to go as deeply into the story as i would have liked and that researching the story distracted me from other research and meant that the MA modules barely linked. 
This term i'm exploring for my ASU 2 unit the stations of the cross, christ's journey to his crucifixion. Not a cheery subject but it calls to me so i'm going with it. I begin with an easier in because christianity and the Church of England church are part of my formative years. I have no religion now, i am perhaps polytheistic, interested in religion but not committed to one, i err most towards nature as my source, but a light christianity forms the bedrock of my being. And the bible as a storybook is no worse than any other book of stories as an aid to understanding. 
I am not sure how i will move with the Stations. At the moment i am looking at artists, poets and film makers for inspiration, taking in the journey, the passage, that Jesus took to his death on different levels, considering his life as it is given to us by the saints who wrote the gospels, thinking about those who according to those gospels shared his life and death. Wondering about telling the stations not from his perspective but from those whose lives he touched. I trust my creative process to take me where i need to go. 
That leads me to my SNU project which is coming from my own story, my memories, my being. I was drawn to do this because i found some old photos of Jon on a memory stick over the christmas holidays. It made me realise that i needed to allow myself to bear witness to the life i had with him, in part because there is no one for me to share witness with him, our life together was mostly just him and i. I have buckets of memories but no-one to turn to and say "do you remember ?" and cannot bring him back to life in that way. I cannot bring him back to life physically but this is how we bring our dead back to life when we have need of them. 
When Jon died my counsellor said glibly that my grief would be a complicated grief. She spoke truly. My relationship with Jon was both light and dark and to deny either would diminish the whole. So i have to take in the good with the bad, and the bad with the good, they are front and back, left, right, night, day, up, down, a pairing. Finding balance between the pair creates a tension that i must meet or else lose the truth.  
My feeling is that my SNU project and my ASU 2 project will have meeting places but it will only be by travelling their paths that i will find them. Already i have widened the scope of the SNU to a broader theme that is memory and remembering tho i think this theme will dilate and contract as the pupil of an eye dilates and contracts, to meet circumstance, both past and ongoing. Widening the scope changes the theme but maybe that is actually the need i am meeting. Placing my relationship with Jon within the context of my whole life. Giving him, giving us, our being together, the space, the worth, that he, that we, that i, that he and i together, that i think we merit. His family have been absolute in their condescension, i am sure i am written out or cast as worthless or worse within their narrative. I guess that hurts. No, i don't guess, i know. It hurts. Maybe this project is also part of healing that hurt.  
I linger too long on a delicate subject. Of course being blanked, excluded or cut is painful. It may be that it is in felt experience that my SNU and ASU meet. Feelings run clean through time. Feelings may be the path that connects one story to another. 

Part Two ... because there is more, there is always more. I'm going to write about memories, again, history, personal and social, the who and how it is told. I imagine that Jon will slip into the story because although some people might say "oh shut up, get over yourself, he left you, he died, no one cares" their opinion has to be nothing to me because though he was surely and often a git i loved him and loving him changed me. I cannot deny the changes that happened to me and in me as a result of our knowing each other and so he stands as a markable, remarkable presence. 
So where to start. That so wasn't necessary, but i don't know how to write so there it is and there it is again. Where to start. I am currently reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I have just read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. Each one of these books are a historical account of a story. Wolf Hall tells a story that has been covered by many, a story that perhaps most English people over the age of seven have an inkling about, and a viewpoint or opinion even now, nearly five hundred years on. Private Peaceful is one of those books that makes you weep for all the men and women killed for living in an unjust time.  Michael Morpurgo, the author, addresses the injustice of 290 British and Commonwealth soldiers killed for desertion in the first world war with his usual grace and gift for engaging with heart, his own i think and his readers. Private Peaceful is a story told by one man, about his life and his brother's life and all that touched them. It's a story about a single death but also the life that led to that death. And living after death i suppose too. It's about how lives link and connect. Because we are linked. We are linked even if we don't want to be, sometimes the links we don't want are the hardest to break. The Sense of an Ending addresses human connection on a very personal historical level. It's a quick read but every word is meat. The story could be anybody's story. If we get to be old the likelihood is that somewhere along the lines we will have done something that perhaps at the time seemed like little but later turns out to have been a wrong. I have wrongs sewn into my seams. I imagine most of my friends and loved ones do too. 
What is it that i'm trying to say by mentioning my recent reading matter. I'm mentioning my recent reading matter because Wolf Hall in particular is making me think about how and who tells a story, or history. And because Britain is my country, and we are in a spot of trouble at the moment, and having a historical moment, and it's causing strife and disorder in the highest court of the land, i guess parliament is the highest court unless you count the Queen. Wolf Hall is also about Britain at a time of upheaval, and to me the story resonates with the history being made today. Maybe it is always like that to a greater or lesser extent. 
Wolf Hall, the book, is also set in my history, my history with Jon. How can something like a book be part of relationship story, i guess in much the same way as anything else if connection was made over a book then the book stands as a open door leading back to that connection. 
Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009 Hilary Mantel, the author, seemed to come from nowhere though in fact she had been a working author for years just not very well known except among her peers. I remember Jon reading it and talking to me about it, sat on the sofa in his living room, my reading it now flashes back to the time, i wish that i'd read it with him but books come when they are meant to and back then i was battling demons on all sides, work, college, my family and his, and all my energy was engaged in not giving in to feeling worthless and worth less than worthless. I am reading it now and thinking about him and that's nice but also quite sad. He's here reading it with me, as is my son, who read it last year, and who is thankfully still living and with whom i can talk to about it. Not talk to a past him but a present him, a now him. 
That's one of the big "fuck-off"s with death, i think. Not being able to hold another conversation except in your head, never to see the other person, to laugh with them, or touch them is really painful. I remember Jon talking to me about his mother after she died. He said that after she died she was easier to get on with because he didn't have to deal with her bad bits and could just relate to the best of her. I didn't know her. I gathered quite early that she and his sister-in-law had been at odds. And that her family rep (Jon, his brother and his brother's wife) was as someone difficult and unpleasant. But that at her funeral someone else had said to him how kind she was. I did not know her so my judgement of her is of no worth, she may or may not have been as described, she may have had reasons to be as she was described. Because people often do and may not know or want to acknowledge why they are as they are. 
Reading Wolf Hall has been mind-opening. Who can fail to be intrigued by that period off history ? It has legend written all over it and creative types have played with the storylines and characters over and over again. It is to me to read about Thomas More who wrote Utopia, to know him as a not-nice character, a torturer, a religious zealot, a mean husband, the image i'd had of him was as a gentle family man, someone almost saintly, this had, in the main, come from a 1970's film i have seen more than once. How easy it is to fall in with a narrative if it is the only source drawn from. 
This has been some of the problem with Brexit. Maybe any conflict where sides have arisen. I guess all the time there's a need to look more than one way if wanting a rounded understanding is wanted.  If wanting a rounded understanding is needed. If I see only my own point of view as valid then all i can do is dance on the spot and hope that enough people will dance on a spot close to me so that i feel myself not too isolated. Alternatively if i am prepared to see, to feel, to engage with other people's thoughts, needs, feelings then i have opportunity to step out of my spot and make my dance a more moving thing. My opening out to others creates space for interaction that holding myself tight shut like a shellfish on a rock will never do.
Because i don't think any one person can always be right. Most of us will have come up against someone who believes themselves always right. But, really ? Really ? I don't know how to deal with people who are never wrong. I suppose that the drip dripping of time will wear them down in the end but whew in the meantimes saint's preserve me from having to spend too much time with those who are are without fault. 
Er hum, where am i going ? History. Memories. Well a lot of my blogging has been about memories this past year and i have a project idea building at the back of my brain about memory, same as a million other artists, authors, play-writes, poets, film makers and all the others with a calling to the arts. But memories are a very personal form of history. And yet even as we write and read back to ourselves our own histories, they trip and fall and become imperfect. When i wrote a few weeks  ago about the church at Wenhaston and the devil weighing the souls, that was my memory, but returning a week after i saw that my memory had missed St Michael, and that he was the one doing the weighing and the devil very close by was just looking on waiting for the wicked to be weighed and passed on to him. And before that i spoke about my hair being green when i was pregnant and straight after i remembered that it was probably pink and blue and bleached a good white blonde and the green had been cut off just before i got pregnant.
Recognising the holes in my own memory make losing Jon feel harder because i know that the time we spent together is passing into kodachrome dream-like images, images that replay and feel real but also not real. I don't know how better to describe the feeling. It's hard to accept someone i love being so physically cinematic, so physically distant, but that is how it is for me now. It hurts, i don't want a sugar coated Jon, i want him good and bad, as i always wanted him. So, and there's that "so" again,   i find him in books, and fields, and hedgerows, and, and, and: and what i find is feeling, the feeling of him, it's not him, but it's him as i knew him, sometimes brilliant and sometimes a bastard. And the bastard is not such good company but i did learn a lot from the bastard in him just as learned a lot from his brilliance. 
Do I close there ? I struggle with endings. Some people are good at them, are masters, but i don't know how to close, for me there is always an after. Perhaps it is that sense of one thing leading to another and another and tho' threads drop and fall away new threads pick up the stream and go forward. Now I am walking the coast path very very slowly and maybe I'll blog about that next and put in a picture or two to lighten my blog. But it's life isn't it, it keeps going.
In a few weeks time Britain will or won't be a part of the EU but life will go on and the body of our country will have moved little. What the politicians are fighting over is a lot about money, i think, and power. Some care about the human cost and some don't. And i'll give my vote to those who do. And some care about planetary cost and some don't, and similarly i'll give my vote, my coat, to those who do. And that in the end is all the little man/woman/child can do is give their coat of arms to the causes they feel most strongly for, whether in their personal or political life. And there perhaps i'll end because it's as good a place as any.   

Here goes again ... launching myself into another blog ... many years ago when i was a child my dad used to sometimes take me as his sailing crew. I wasn't his preferred crew, my oldest sister Vicky was keener and more competent, but sometimes, not often i would be there in the boat with him. It would be planned the day before, getting up at whatever time was needed to catch the high tide, gearing up and going to the boat yard to rig the boat, it was a Tideway, a wooden clinker-built boat that my dad maintained well because that's how my dad is. When the boat was as rigged as it could be on land he would wheel it on it's squeaky trailer to the harbour slipway, along with all the other boats and their sailors, with me following. I was a bit of a puddle of a child, not sharp or clever or agile, I suspect taking me out sailing was a bit of a chore for my father, but the thought of launching into my blog brought back the memory of getting into the boat, leg deep in water and over the side before my dad pushed the boat out getting in as the boat sailed out into deeper water. I think of the salt smell and the clinking of metal ropes and the flapping of sails and the shouting and excitement and i think thats a good memory to have tho' i suspect i was really only part present as i was/am not really all with it, more often than not i am faraway in some dream world.
Memories are funny things. This year past has been full of memories of Jon, i think i've mentioned that before, and as memories of time i spent with him and without him have surfaced within the net are other memories and they are all very live, vivid and visceral in quality.
We are as living beings and bodies a container for the life we've lived, I think. I am repeating myself please excuse me. Repeat is a thing, part of our patterning. Here we go again, this way of living that actually doesn't quite work for us hitting up against the same or a similar obstacle and until we learn to meet it in another way. 
We, who is this we ? I've noticed i slip into this when i blog as if i can speak for others when i only speak for me. because how can i know how it is for someone else. Maybe it's only me that repeats mistakes, responds in the same way to some one or something that gets to me, makes me feel bad, or good, tho' feeling good would seem like less of a problem. But then what if good is an addiction, this drink makes me feel better, now i need this drink to feel better, now the drink doesn't necessarily make me feel better but i need it because if i don't have it i feel awful. I'm speaking with very ancient knowledge about drinking. Falling back into my late teens when my drinking was no more than any eighteen to nineteen year old's drinking but when if i hadn't had my daughter it might have gone bad. 
I am throwing up yesterdays because over the past few weeks i've been thinking about time. It began when i started using my instagram account. 
I'd had a look at Patti Smith's and looking at hers gave me ideas about how i could use that platform to make notes in a slightly different way. All social media platforms eat time. This blog is no exception. But if they perform a useful function then they are worth the time. This is a kind of diary. Twitter and facebook i mostly use as scrapbooks/notebooks often posting stuff to myself much as i might jot down a note on a scrap of paper. Face book memories are great. On twitter and facebook i get waylaid by national and global politics, then i become someone i don't like, mouthy and horrible, but i can't seem to help myself. I guess it's one of my patterns, it forces me up against a version of myself i am not comfortable with but can't let go, a part of me that has to fight when i think something is foul. A legacy perhaps from feeling desperately vulnerable when my children were small and Thatcher was in power. Anything that triggers feelings i recognise from those days tends to make me edgy and ugly. My body contains the fear and darkness of those days. Or maybe it is something even earlier in my life, something wary that hates to be confined. 
But back to yesterdays and why i am throwing those up in this blog it's because beginning to engage with instagram has made me wonder how long is an instant ? Is an instant a lifetime ? A lifetime of a species ? A lifetime of a world ? Is the lifetime of a thing that lasts less time, a mayfly for instance, of the same worth as the lifetime of something more long lived, a human, you or me ? Does their instant  weigh the same as ours ? 
Here I am a series of breath filled incidents that occur from the moment i'm born, or maybe conceived, until the day that i die. Does my instant go back into my ancestral past ? Does it go forward beyond my dying to my descendants and those i have touched whilst still alive ? 
It feels strange to me that a person's instant might end when their physical body ceases to live because those and that which i love and value is part of my being and so continues to be part of my being. Will that go on forever. I think of the me that got up early to go sailing with my dad, that me is still me, and the person i was before i had children, and later the young mother and the woman i am now. Every part of my being is part of my instant, my now, and in that instant, that now, even tho' some of the people and places i was once connected to are no longer accessible physically, their being still lives in me until i forget or die too, until i dissolve into the ether. 
I can feel resistance like a wall of wind as i write now. I am trying to finish this blog but i keep writing and then deleting what i've written and starting again. I don't know how to meet my next day.  I want to talk about Jon but also I don't. I want to stop grieving, I'm tired of grieving, is that a terrible thing to say ? I want to let go. But also i don't. I don't know how to move on without losing him. He was important to me and so the thought of forgetting him hurts. But forgetting will happen I think. Is that why i am calling my life a single instant so that the time we had together still retains some presence in my everyday ? He was far from perfect but a person doesn't have to be perfect to be loved do they. 
Understanding is a curious thing. The effort to understand can be unbearable, filling space with questions and mind-noise, but understanding itself, i feel, is quiet. I wonder if maybe the only path to understanding is to let go of some of the questions (some questions are un-answerable) so that silence and softness allow understanding to nestle gently in the steady beat of my heart, so the steady beat of my heart can carry me forward into tomorrow. 
I think this blog is to be continued ... this is maybe part one 

Two blogs in a row because the karma thing keeps coming up, my thoughts feel unfinished . And also because my blog serves as one of my notebooks, easily accessible and something i can refer back to, an old fashioned diary i guess. I write in notebooks too and sometimes i'll open one up and come across thoughts written years ago. The other day i found the one i was scribbling my pain into when i first heard that Jon had died, the first weeks when i was obliterated by grief. 
Why bring up grief, and Jon, again ? It's over a year since he died. Shouldn't i be over it now ? Shouldn't i have moved on ? Shouldn't i let go and stop making a fuss ? And of course that sort of is what happens. Life goes on, the absence is not exactly filled but becomes familiar. Tears which were daily are now not so frequent but sometimes, sometimes, grief grasps you by the throat and pushes you against the wall, and all you can do, all i can do is go with it, let myself feel whatever it is that i need to feel. 
There will be triggers of course. The spring weather last week did it, Jon loved those first few days in spring, he'd have been out in his garden with his shirt off in shorts, all hop-skippy in the sunshine. And, before the spring weather, the rugby which he loved. I remember him buying himself an England rugby shirt in the last year we were together, little things like that made him sweetly happy, he wasn't good at treating himself so it was nice when he did. Before i knew Jon rugby meant nothing to me, big blokes running round a field with an H shaped goal and mud was how i saw it. Jon explained it to me a little; and talked about playing rugby at school; and because the six nations was something he loved i loved it too; we'd arrange our weekends around the games he needed/wanted to watch and snuggle up in the warm to watch them together, it was all very cosy, wintry afternoons on his sofa  are cherished memories. 
And see that's how it goes with the missing of someone who is dead. In my head i can go back to those times and that's nice and i am glad to have so many gorgeous moments to crawl back into but it hurts that they are done, that there will never be more, that he can't feel the sun warming his flesh, or the rugby rush of testosterone. 
And so i return to karma. Because maybe that is also what karma is. Maybe it is the traces you leave in another, traces you leave whilst still alive and also after you are gone, after you are dead. 
Way back in the mid eighties when i was first pregnant with my daughter some members of my family were not thrilled. My paternal grandmother sent me a letter saying that she didn't want to see or speak to me again because the child was a bastard, and my aunt wrote suggesting an abortion. People have reasons for doing and saying the things they do and say. I was a feisty nineteen year old with green hair and attitude and no one was telling me what to do so i can't really claim to have been put upon tho' it wasn't the warmest of family welcomes for my daughter. 
But there was one member of my family who responded with extraordinary kindness. And with that kindness she left her mark. That person was my Auntie Leska. Auntie Leska wrote me a letter saying she thought it would be hard but that she was pleased i was keeping the baby. She knitted clothes for my unborn baby, wooly tights with braces in the bright colours i asked for. It meant a lot. Even the arrogant teen that i was knew that i was being shown how to be good. 
Here, this is what i mean about traces and karma. Our lives leave marks, good and bad. Some people leave us bruised or broken, some leave a stain or a scar. Others by their being give hope, make good, make things better. Our memories of those who have marked us is how their karma is carried forward. My Auntie Leska is long dead but what she did, who she was when she knitted my daughters layette made a difference and means she still lives in me as someone who showed me kindness, and my daughter, and maybe my grandchildren too. 
Last summer i went to Wenhaston, Suffolk to see a small art show in the church inspired by an artist called Becker. It was good to see the exhibition, the work gave me food for thought, but i was pleased too to have been drawn to the church because there is a fantastic medieval painting on one wall a part of which has the devil weighing out the dead's souls. Is this perhaps a version of karma ? There it is, the good deeds and the bad. And in the end by your life shall you be known. 
But a life lived looks different from different angles. I am very far from being saintly, when someone pisses me off i will lay curses on them, and hope that life slaps them down. But curses backfire so i try now to hope that people get what they deserve. However this too is unreliable, lovely people get hit with horrible things and horrible people seem to be able to be horrible with impunity. Hashtag Jacob Rhys Mogg for instance.
So that's what i mean about karma being more subtle than my British brain seems to be able to grasp. And i think it's because stories look different depending on your perspective. This i guess is at the root of most conflict. Two people with different ideas of what's right will fight it out, to the death if necessary, if neither one can find it in themselves to see, if only for a moment, the other person's point of view. If both parties are able to step into the other one's shoes then conflict resolution might be easier. The problem would likely be the same but seen through understanding eyes, listened to with understanding ears, felt with a body that recognises the other as equal, maybe then the problem becomes objective rather than subjective. I hope what i've said there is what I mean.
I can talk this talk, we can all talk this talk but conflicting interests are not easy to resolve even if everyone is tired of fighting and longs for peaceful resolution. What am i waffling on about now ? It sounds a bit Brexit-y, but it isn't so much that, what I'm thinking about is how i am struggling to let go of feeling angry with Jon's family, their manners seemed hard when we were together and drove a wedge between us. I have struggled to understand why they were the way they were then, and later why they didn't offer him more help, why they seemingly just let him drink himself to death. 
In the week after Jon died, before i knew he was dead, i was talking to my son who had just come back to England after two years in Singapore, i was saying how the time when i was with Jon was the only time in my life when i'd felt like i'd got it, that i was winning (winning is a word Jon gave me, if i was having a difficult time he would say/text/email me - "are you winning?").  i said how i didn't understand his family. He suggested that maybe Jon and his brother weren't close, as i am not close to my sisters. I guess that could be why. In 2016 after he had been hospitalised a second time I wanted to walk him dry, to get him close to nature which i knew from our time together put a spring in his step, an appetite for life and twinkle in his eye.  But i needed their help, i needed them to be on side. I wonder if they hadn't hated me so much they might have helped, i wonder if he would still be alive but it's neither here nor there because what is is. I guess that is their stain on me and maybe i have left a stain on them. My refusal to give up on the beautiful memories i have of him is perhaps annoying to them, maybe it upsets their story because i tell it from another angle and rather than join the dots they need and want to keep to their story and not connect to mine tho we were together for six years and shared so much. 
That's life isn't it. When Jon and I fell out and it wasn't worth fighting over i'd let hm know i'd given up by saying "hey ho" and i guess that's all i can do with his family, all i can do is say to myself "hey ho" and let go.  

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.