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.   

Coming back to my blog after a while spent thinking. The format has changed while i have been pondering which is a little disconcerting. This happens on social media platforms too & i know i am not alone in hauling up sharp with a jolt when the change is effected. These things are meant to stay the same. My creature response is similar to my creature response to the aisles in my local supermarket being changed. I mention this because its really not a big deal but it is something that paused me before i started to write and that moments pause has altered the path of my thought thread. 

If my thoughts are like water running in a stream a stop will hold the water back until the stop is overwhelmed, crashed over or else slid round. Thought is a constant, an ongoing movement. The body of us, us being that which is alive maybe, is a mass of thought, a sea, an ocean, a forest or jungle being a sea of green holding, containing the thought of time now, time passed & the seeds of time that will be. This seems like a big thing to make out of a small change to my blog platform changing but its the butterfly in Kyoto effect what i say next is not what i would have said if my blog platform had not been altered. 

This year has been shocking & we have each adapted to the changes imposed on us by Covid-19 differently. Our bubble lives are now shockingly visible. Bubble lives are not a new thing, a workplace is a bubble, a family, a nation lives within a bubble, we have class/wealth separated bubbles, skill bubbles, the sporty, the arty, the musical, the dreamy, the logical, the mathematically minded, the feelings focused. Passing through life our journey takes us towards those we are most like, have most affinity with & as we connect to those the opportunity to meet minds less like ours diminishes.

What had i hoped to begin my blog with was an update of my thoughts, a posting that lets me look back at the past year and i guess that is how i will continue now. The slight alteration in platform format really being no more than a hop over a puddle really. One of the things i have noticed happens to me now is finding myself lost in memories. I don't recall this happening when i was younger but now i find myself in times & places that are my long ago. I wonder if this is a collecting of that which has formed me, a reconciliation with what i cannot change but may now see with eyes & being that is different to the person that experienced the moment even tho the person was me & is me or part of me. I am like a boro garment holding the past, patched up & threadbare in places, still whole in others, a work in progress. Is this how a soul evolves ? 

Looking back at old photographs is a peculiar game, fresh faced we gaze out of the images, a snapshot of a moment that may or may not tell the truth about that time. I have spent a lot of my life longing for another life, i know that is a bad thing, i look back at my life & wish that i had revelled more in the intimacy of bringing up babies but being a single parent i was often lonely, craving adult company & struggling to get by, i smoked too much hash & was lost in a vapid unsatisfying external wannabe lifestyle. I also learned in that time to be content with the small things, began to know my body through yoga, dance & shiatsu, became softer in essence through meditation & have learned (& am still learning) how to express myself through my creative practice & i hope that i mothered my children adequately if not perfectly. 

I wonder if one of the things i struggled with on my MA was how inconsistent it felt with my truth. It may only have been me that felt like this. I struggled with the pushiness, the get yourself seen, put yourself out there, make connections for connections sake, display for displays sake, it felt gross & quite alien to my practice. That is my experience. It is a relief to no longer be swimming in that sea but also my failure to rise to the challenge has knocked my confidence. I had hoped i think to be seen but ended up feeling unseen maybe because i was unable to engage with the modus operandi we were being taught to follow & hold my integrity as a person & artist. 

If i feel like a misfit maybe it is because i am a misfit. Being a misfit doesn't make me a bad person but perhaps makes a solitary life more likely because not fitting i am not a comfort zone. I am quite a lot not comfortable myself, i don't mean i am physically uncomfortable but i am prone to question & doubt. The comfort of certainty is not often mine.

But of some things i am certain. These things are most commonly feelings. I trust my feelings. Trust is i guess a key player when it comes to certainty. One of the things that help me to trust is my movement practice. This lockdown i have given myself an hour each evening to move. I have given myself an hour each evening to move, i have also made it an appointment, a thing i don't change. I did something similar for some months when Jon died & my grief was so vast i needed a holding space. Then, i marked out a square (about 1metre by 1metre) with masking tape & tho my body could go out of the square in space that which was tied to the ground could not. It gave me a safe boundary in a most peculiar time that allowed me to reconnect with life. Similar to now i also fixed a time boundary. There is much to be said for creating self determined boundaries when large parts of life feel (or are) out of one's control. 

Walking is part of my creative practice but i have been lazy about it this year. This is daft, walking would help me stay sane but i can't seem to motivate myself to get walking. I am not sure what the block is but i am giving myself room to meet it in the hope that meeting it i will overcome it. I have found that forcing through blocks does not work well for me. My encounter with my body in my given hour each day lets me come to myself like a sea meeting shore. There are no wrongs or rights in that hour & giving my body control lets my mind free flow in a way that is similar tho not the same as walking and maybe will see me past my block. Yesterday i hit up against some ancient rage, i suspect that will keep surfacing until whatever pain has caused it has been healed. The day before my mind/body working together gave me this: 

step by step, one step after another, and another, and another. step by step, can be fast, slow, sideways, backwards,

forwards, one step after another. the destination is death. the way, life, is the path chosen.

I guess it is a poem tho i am not a poet so i feel shy calling it that. I guess it is just because of how the words link & because they are in a slightly odd shape it feels like a poem & not just notes jotted down tho in fact it is just that. I guess that is what i wanted to blog about today, the comfort that step following step gives me, the uncomplicated ease that the thought of putting one "foot" in front of another without mind for the step after, or step after the step after. This sequence is i think how we lead life, knowingly or not. Who would have thought this time last year that our lives would be being lived as they are now but step by step this is where we have come to. And the course that our steps take now, into the future, will determine the shape of our lives to come. It may seem like all is lost but each one of us has within us that butterfly in Kyoto & our being, our movement may alter the course of the world history whether that being is as an individual or a collective. We are maybe more in control than we really want to acknowledge.

I come to my blog this morning because i think my mental health is beginning to break. There is a fine line between being able to cope and not. People who are good at masking are often the ones whose line is finest. I may smile and seem ok, and i may be ok, but i may also be covering an inner turmoil, and only the sensitive will notice. And even they, busy with their own lives and handling their own stresses and strains, may not pick up on the hidden trauma. 
Coping is a habit. Learning to cope is a life skill. Fall over. Pick yourself up. Fall over again. Pick yourself up again. If you are lucky you'll have been caught before you fall as a child or held when the catch was not quick enough, this creates a sound base for coping. The childhoods of each of us are different, even within the same family children are treated differently, character and birth order affect this, rapport with other members of the family, and the environment into which a child is born all go to make up a person's notion of themselves and this affects our ability to cope and our life outcomes. 
So i have had a fall. I failed my MA units. Both of them. Four learning outcomes to each, and one marginal fail on each. 3/4 and 3/4. It hurts. I received my marks about a month ago. I am still taking it in. It is hard. But it gets worse. There isn't support from my uni. Responses to emails initially were curt and offhand or just didn't happen. University policy maybe. It didn't help. Eventually they came back with two tasks for me to do to pick up my grades. Two essays that both require time and deep thought. 
I pondered these essays for some days after receiving the brief but i am also currently making work for the Raveningham Sculpture Trail, an exhibition i have been in before curated by Sarah Cannell who is quite brilliant. I have a choice. I can try to do the essays but i suspect i will not pass and the energy it takes for me to do that will mean that i can't make the work for the trail. Or I can not do the essays, accept my fail, let go of my MA. I know that my mental, emotional and physical strength will not allow me to do everything. I will break. 
I had hoped that my university, especially in the peculiar circumstances that Covid19 has created, would be wanting to be flexible around students. Maybe they feel they are. I had hoped that perhaps i could retake the term, but no that's not possible. I eventually picked up the threads with my course tutor in a long and emotional tutorial on Monday. I said what i would most like to do and he intimated that he thought it unlikely but would make enquiries which he did. The post-grad team got back to me and i to them and my understanding is now that if i fail to submit the essays for the tasks set my mark will be down graded to Fail. It is semantics, word-play, both fail and marginal fail are fails but a fail is a harder fall. And because i submitted for last term i cannot re-do the term again. There are forms to fill in. And just thinking about it all pushes me further to breakdown. 
So here is my dilemma. Let me paint a picture. I have fallen over a cliff edge and landed on a small outcrop of rock, if stay here i will die anyway, i can try to climb back up to where i was, i may fail and fall in the attempt, or I can take a leap of faith and go over the edge into the abyss beneath me, it might feel like flying, both scenarios are a risk. 
What do i want ? I want to be able to make the work i am making for the sculpture trail as well as i can. It may or may not appeal to all eyes but i hope that it will make some people happy. It's a take on Alice in Wonderland, a prayer piece, a contemplative journey through Wonderland. Making it is helping me to stay alive. It is about hope, joy and curiosity. Curiosity keeps me moving forward, whats this round the bend ? how is this feeling moving me ? who are you ?
The tasks set by the university are not unreasonable, they are interesting even, and i might at some point do them for pleasure, tho i probably won't, but with a deadline and judgement at the end, and a head that is full of fear and sadness, screwing my head to a table trying to fulfil criteria that i have already failed once is driving me insane. 
Also, I am exhausted. I don't know if others are feeling this way but the huge surge of adrenalin that pumped through my body before lockdown in March and after official lockdown in March, and during that lockdown while trying to put together an online hand-in knowing that it was taking the time i had allotted to picking up the shortfall in my studies (this shortfall was what i failed on), receiving my fail, assimilating my fail and then to this point receiving the tasks asked for if i want to be called good enough, whilst also taking in the peculiar political space we are living in, where the government is seemingly winging it with not much care about who dies or gets hurt but mostly minding the money bags and shovelling what they can into the hands of the people who have put them where they are, has left me brain shattered, bone tired and sad. 
How do i close this blog today. I must close it because i have stuff to do. I suppose that i know that thought is a stream that keeps flowing and, having reclaimed this space as my own and not part of studies, my voice is free again which feels lighter. Covid19 is making me rethink my values, what i want, what makes me happy, not superficial happiness but true joy. At the beginning of lockdown there was a peculiar rapture that happened, humanity silenced and largely stopped created a beautiful void that got filled with birdsong and flowers. It was not that i'd not noticed or loved them before but absorbing nature's grace fed my heart and soul at a time when i was screaming inside, with fear, for myself and even more for my family, my children and grandchildren, mother, father, stepmother, godparents, humanity. Nature softened the edges in a way that university emails and teams meetings did not. 
I wonder now if i should have let go of my MA then, not bothered to submit, i might have made more soul-healing use of my lockdown time, but then i would not have written my term up in my blog which i have a feeling will be useful to me in future for reference, and similarly would not have created my MA page on my website which presently i will need to add an NB to to mark that it was not completed and that my work failed. 
So there i leave it. My head feels softer for writing and that i guess it what i use my blog for, voicing that which i cannot voice to a blank page and letting it go where it will without strictures or edicts. I have learned a lot over the past six months and made work that i needed to make. So although i am marked as a failure. I feel i can hold my head up and say that i tried. Now, back to my cliff edge scenario, what do you think ? jump or climb ? 

ASU2. SNU. And here it is the end of this term. The last hand-in blog post. I feel sad because i don't know if what i have done is enough and after i submitted i realised i'd missed things out, the Pecha Kucha presentation for instance and its frustrating and i hope that links to here and my website will be enough but i'm anxious because i didn't submit folders of images and word documents, but it is now in the hands of my assessors, and my horrible lack of certainty in my ability to express myself as i want to express myself is overwhelming. A part of me likes that my submission includes opening one folder and then another to find the work within but i don't know if my tutors will feel like that or if it will draw a black mark. Whatever the result now of my submission i can only hope that the little ship sails and reaches port. And if she doesn't, if what i have done is not good enough i will have to try again. I had forgotten how painful the constant testing of education is. It is what i wanted but now i find it very difficult. Maybe it is too honest of me to say that in blog post that will be read by examiners. But maybe it connects to the themes of my projects this term, the awful stripped down nature of both of them demanding i lay everything bare, not a demand from outside but from within, to expose, reveal, let be seen that which is normally unseen. Why did i go there ? why did i do that ? it may be that having done that, and by necessity not just in the safety of studio space but also now online, i regret being so open. And if i had written what i have written on a word document would i have written it the same or is the nature of writing a public document also part of the process. Does it bring me closer to christ's very public death ? what a daft thing to say, or think, but maybe it does, so much of what hurts, what makes us vulnerable is kept out of sight, hidden, disguised, a part of this terms work has been to step out of the shadows and this too is what is happening here, now in this moment with a sickness that is terrifying, under a government that doesn't care, the good and the bad is now shown up. And there needs to be conscious reflection perhaps, a preparedness to see what we don't want to see. But after we have seen, what then ? 
My sadness today is perhaps also exhaustion, day after day of writing and writing, a term of working my butt off, weeks of re-orientating myself, to a new social climate and a new ask from my course, the same for everyone, and for each one of us something that will have thrown up its own problems. Still it is done. I will only post Covid19 Diaries for now on my blog until i am graded pass or fail. The Covid19 entries are one of the ways i found to make sense of the oddness of now, and my blog is where i put them so i know where to find them for later. They feel simpler and smaller, and i find them more comforting than all of the words i have been typing this past month. So i sign off and close this part of the story with this blog post hoping i have given enough. 

SNU. ASU2. You might wonder why i keep slipping in diary entries into my blog. I am noting them down because i have a mind to make a small book or pamphlet of them at some point, to have on record this moment in time and how it was for me. I see that this is what artists all over are doing. Its an obvious impulse how creative people manage disruption is to meet it with hands open. The virus is what it is. The governments response is what it is. We have little say about the external circumstances we find ourselves in but we do have control over our internal response. One of my other external circumstances is this hand in. It has to be done. It is frustrating because my heart wants to paint and draw but what i have to do is tap tap on a keyboard. Writing out what i had hoped would be seen. And then after i've done this i will likely have to write it out again to save my tutors the bother of reading it all tho i will hand it all in. 
But that is as it is. The covid19 diary is a side project but it is also connected because it is happening now and everything is tied to this virus. Our befores and our afters presuming we have an after and don't die. I'm using the royal we i guess we are all in this together but also we are not. Another thread i have come back to over and over again the notion of being in someone else's shoes. It is the capacity to see this that seems to be the crux of the problem with man as a species. We do know it. Babies will cry if another baby cries, empathy seems to be mostly innate but somewhere along the lines it stops to a greater or lesser extent. It ties in with the collaborative project about how homeless people are seen/witnessed/judged. It ties in with the way that i have begun to illustrate the stations of the cross. It ties in with my childhood and my relationship with Jon. Is it just too much effort in a world on sensation overload, is it a thing that we drop to survive, looking away because looking asks us to feel what we would feel if we were in their situation. I had printed some little caterpillar boots because boots and shoes are a bit of a leitmotif for me. The boots were the subject of work i made for a multi-generational series of workshops in 2017. And are the beginning of my masters project which is suspended until lockdown is done. The silver shoes are a memory, another part of my childhood, and i've put up an image because i was hoping to work with them but the lack of time mean they are just part of the picture, the packet of seeds not sprinkled or planted. They connect to the red dolls shoe and the boots and where that story will go is not known and likely will drop to the bottom of the stream to be picked up sometime later along the line.       

ASU2. I was making these prints of Jon and Southwold and thinking about how to work with the seagull images but as I was due for a tutorial with my Fine Art tutor i figured i needed to give some time and attention to that module. Remember i've got two story threads going. ASU2 is about Jesus, the stations of the cross and his life leading up to that. 
My brain is on fire trying to carry and work with these two pretty intense emotional journeys. For ASU2 I am thinking about the last supper. Looking at Leonardo Da Vinci's last supper, thinking about last suppers, thinking about Judas, thinking about the garden of gethsemane, thinking about jesus at the temple, just before his crucifixion and jesus at the temple as a young boy, thinking about all the people who have relationships with jesus, his disciples, his mother mary and mary magdalen, also his father, thinking about the politics of his time, thinking of politics now, thinking about Corbyn & Tom Watson, about betrayal and denial, the cock crowing three times. Thinking about how the life of one may impact on another. This links to my SNU story thread but the link is a filament thread, a thought thread. I am also looking at Michelangelo's Pieta in Rome and Bill Viola's Pieta video. 
As well as this a collaborative project that was begun last term needs attention. This project is with four young business students from the UEA we need to put together a presentation for St Martin's Housing Trust in about four weeks. No work has been done since we were initially introduced by our universities, NUA & UEA last autumn. I had not realised i was signing up for a collaborative project when i went to the first meeting which was described as an opportunity to learn about branding and story telling. Story telling is one of the things i want to learn. That is an aside. In fact the theme of the project feeds into the ASU2 theme in some ways. We are looking at homelessness and how the homeless are witnessed by society. 
Work made for the first tutorial is just ideas, the christmas sketchbook which i don't think i showed, and also some working thoughts in my Playbook of Jesus in the garden of gethsemane and also the last supper, the empty table after the party has left to go to the garden. I think that Mary Magdalen is there unseen, left behind while the men go off. I think of all the people thinking their separate thoughts no one quite knowing what the others are thinking. I think about Judas and his thirty pieces of silver and Cornelia Parker's piece with that name. I think about him hanging himself. The betrayed and the betrayer both damned to hard deaths. Who is the victim in the story ? I am looking at all the points of view. My mind is a little fried. 
I am also thinking about the colour palette i want to use for my stations project and how the pencils, paints and inks i want to use act on the paper in the book i was thinking to work in. The colour palette i'm thinking of is not the brights in my Playbook but more sombre, darks with blues and reds and maybe golds i am thinking about medieval paintings and also the italian masters, of paints made from gem stones, burned and raw earth, lamp black and real gold.  

Bibliography
Goldscheider, L. (1950) Michaelangelo Sculptures Complete Edition. 2nd edition. London: Phaeton Press.
Parker, C (2000) Cornelia Parker Catalogue for exhibition. 2nd edition. Boston: ICA.
Walsh, J. (ed) (2003) Bill Viola:The Passions. Los Angeles, California: Getty Publications.

Good Friday 2020

Today's walk ... a goldfinch, a song - don't worry, about a thing - coming, not too loud, out of the back & side of a large auto repair unit on the main road, old fashioned yellow roses in someone's front garden, a river view from a red bridge, blue sky and the sunshine warm 

Easter Saturday 2020

The person behind you coming in too close because they think you are not moving forward as they'd like or judge distance differently ... quietly we are breaking into tribes

Covid19 Diary

I am hoping that if I jot down a few words, a few more will follow, and if i let them flow out of me maybe i'll find a way to take in what is going on, inside me and outside me. This is British Summer Time weekend. The hour springs forward as if nothing has changed but everything has changed. Everything is strange. This afternoon i thought "its Sunday, what am i doing on Monday ?" but one day is not so different from another. I will try to pull my next week into a more work-shaped form because i think it will help me to re-orientate myself to how things are now. 
This week past tho' has been about absorbing and assimilating. I had tutorials on Wednesday with my uni, the first one reduced me to tears because the tech didn't work and so for twenty minutes we tried until i broke down and said that all i wanted to do was cry and it was hard to see the point of learning outcomes. Full credit goes to my tutor for being patient and understanding and sending me a helpful email and letting me answer it in my own time. I think everyone responds to stress and/or change in different ways i have needed to go inside myself to find out what is happening there before venturing into the big wide world of zoom chats and video link-ins.
My MA is now to be done online and it feels all wrong. A communication  design student from the RCA made an instagram post that was about online art school not being art school and i'm inclined to agree with the gist of what was said. I know that what my course leaders are putting together is the all they can do, that corvid 19 is circumstances beyond their control, but a cobbled together online course is unlikely to be worth £2.5K, the value of the course was for me access to equipment, expert technicians and material resources at an affordable price, also interaction with other students MA and BA from first year to third, we learn from each other, its a creative network that cannot be replicated online. I hope that the university will find a way to compensate students who stick with them rather than leaving or deferring. Perhaps they will offer students what they have missed out on for a further term or 6 months maybe after their course ends. This would be fair and honourable tho' I doubt that they will offer this if students don't ask so next week i shall have to write to ask. Thats assuming that i'm here next week because the scary thing at the moment is no one really knows what the next few weeks and months will bring. 
The ideas and processes i was previously working on are mostly in arrest at the moment, the planned creative trajectory stalled.  The new work that needs to be done for me to get through course units is cataloguing and writing up which makes my heart sink, handing in a digital folder rather than a body of physical work, feels dry, cold and stiff. I am trying to think of ways to do this that allow me to own my submission to love what i'm giving to my tutors to assess rather than dutifully ticking the boxes which is how i feel at the moment. 
Oh listen to me, people have lost their friends and family to date well over a thousand people have died from this virus in the uk alone how can anything be more important than that ? And world wide it goes into tens of thousands and is set to rise steeply for some time. Trapped inside today I have been watching Born into Brothels a documentary about a photographer who went to live in one of India's infamous red light districts. As she photographed the women's lives she got to know the children there, a group of whom she became particularly fond of through teaching them to take photographs. I would recommend this film, it is humbling on many levels. 
Last week i was speaking on the phone to my godfather and we were of course talking about the virus, it was why i phoned. We agreed it was scary, it is. And then he spoke of India and called to my attention the horror of Covid in the slums of India where people live cheek by jowl, then an instagram post came up on my facebook thread saying much the same thing, how self isolation is in fact a rich person's luxury and so it feels. 
Those on the inside are fussing about cleaning their houses, entertaining children, occupying time and feeling the weirdness of their strange incarceration, it is strange, it is uncomfortable. Meanwhile the essential workers, nurses, doctors, shop workers etc are on the outside with letters showing they are essential  There's a new them and us, the inessential workers safe but imprisoned, and the essential workers, heroic  in their activities. we are living in different worlds. I wonder how we will reconnect when all this is done.  Surely it has to be the beginning of a new world order, a new understanding that the values we have been living with can no longer be tolerated.  
I hope if you've read this far you'll forgive me for returning to my journey through the stations of the cross. At the beginning of the week my meditation which has lasted some months now had me with Jesus dying on the cross and then being taken down, with his mother holding her lifeless son in her arms after he was taken down, then the man, the body, the corpse, laid in the tomb. This is where the stations end tho sometimes they are finished with a resurrection scene. Here in my necessary solitude i could be Jesus in my tomb. We could all be. Our time entombed could be a time for contemplation. A meeting of grief, the emptiness, the loneliness, these feelings give way to change, there is no choice, change will be. 
I think this week i amongst others have been preparing myself for grief, i don't know if i'll see people i love again and it hurts, i want to be able to give my mum a hug, even if she and i fight passionately, i still love her, she can be sweet and funny and wise. Likewise my dad and my stepmother and my godparents and oh my god my children and my grandchildren, please may they pull through and my ex husband, and my friends and all the people they love too and so on and i imagine most are thinking along these lines. Please let my family be safe, please let them be well.  
I step away from the stations because the moment takes over. Art is just art, to be relevant it must meet the moment i think. If the moment changes then the art must change too which means that as i look at the body of work i have made this term, and there is good work, i need to see if the good work still stands as work that meets today or if it is still good work but good work that belongs to yesterday. How do i know if it still stands only time will tell. The wheat is being sorted from the chaff. The chaff will blow away in the wind only that which is good and of worth will remain.  

The problem with not getting it together to write my reflective journal/blog as a good habit is that weeks go by and i haven't made a record of what i've done (most important for uni), what i think about what i've done (also important for uni), and what motivated me to do what i did (possibly less important for uni but important for me). So then i have to consciously re-run the days/weeks not recorded and surely some stuff gets missed out. The missing out of some stuff may be a good thing and i think when things are going too fast, or are overwhelming in a way that means i can't verbalise my being and doing, i can only hold my process and hope that i will remember enough, remember what is most important. 
Important, important, important. I wonder if the same happens on other courses but one of the things i have thought over the past few weeks is that it is very difficult to know sometimes if, or if not, you have lost perspective and become a self important wanker. Excuse the language. What i mean is that in arts degrees it's very easy to become very obsessed with yourself and what you do. I've noticed myself doing this, me-me-me thing and other people too. Talk to pretty much any of the full time MA students and they all talk of exhaustion, stress, deadlines, anxiety. Third year students coming up to their final hand in and graduation are even more wired. I remember living that thread, the end of year show was critical tho' looking back it feels like much ado about not so much. But there, you work three, four or five years, depending on how you built up your portfolio before starting your degree, and the need to make the energy those three, four, five years took worth expending becomes a high pitched whine. A mosquito that won't give up. If you knew then what you know after, which is that life goes on, you'd be a bit less fraught but it's hard to hold on to that. It is holding onto that that stops you being a wanker. 
Those are this weeks observations and they stem from me being in a filthy mood for the past week. I think i was pretty cross at the end of last week but this week my patience is so stretched it snaps at the least inconvenience, being even halfway nice has been a struggle and some people have caught my sharp side. Some people have deserved it but not everyone.  
Anyway all that said i'll try to jot down the course of the past weeks in work. For some time i have been sitting (not literally) on my CMYK plates of myself as a teenager, my brief bit of adult life before i became a mother. This is a funny stage of life, there is a breaking free, but also a not knowing how to be other than how your parents raised you. I'd been looking at the plates i'd made of this girl woman and calling her "horrible girl" because she has a face on her, sulky and dark. I do remember the moment the photo was taken, i was very hungover and totally fed up with the two blokes i was living with never clearing up.  But the more i looked at her, the more sympathy i felt for her (remember she is me but she is also just an image i am working with). I thought about how i needed to find my way. I thought about where my "fuck you" attitude stemmed from. Oddly this week with my fed-up-ed-ness i felt enough love for this younger part of my self to re-integrate the person she was, her mosh-pit elbows, her daring dress sense, her wilfulness and longing for risk. I was making the CMYK prints with a view to putting them in one of the MA curator's shows but the work didn't fit with the vibe of the show and i didn't fit with the vibe of the show. This was mutually agreed with the curator but there is an awkwardness that is not yet resolved. It is uncomfortable being told you are not wanted and do not fit, even if you agree that you do not fit. The course brief, i think, for the curators is to hold an exhibition in an unusual space and so they have chosen various venues. My not fitting into my curator's venue has made me think about where i do fit. I think this is LO11. It has made me think about how i would mount a show if i was putting it on myself and not relying on a curator to find and make the space. Where draws me ? and what would i put in ? I'm giving this thought, and more thought.
But reeling back to the beginning of the week after my last blog. If you've read it you'll know i had hit a pretty low ebb. I went in to uni on the Monday with my head down, feeling very sad and like i didn't belong. Was too wobbly to work in the 3d studios so retreated to the print rooms to finish the various photo etched plates i'd begun the week before. On the Tuesday things got worse, i'd gone in to make a plaster mould and my anxiety levels were so high i was in floods of tears and panic-y when the plaster leaked out from the mould. One of the technicians suggested i let myself go home and i took his advice and it was the right thing to do. On the Wednesday i was cheered by a really interesting lecture by two of last years MA students, one of whom, said "go with your gut" which was what i needed to hear. And a helpful chat with my SNU tutor. On Thursday we had a guest artist Melissa Pierce Murphy for our ASU seminar who also spoke of following your gut, nice to have it re-iterated. I loved her work and how it met other practices, dance and science, The workshop she led after her presentation with magnets and drawing and shards of polished steel was food for my hungry soul. Friday i think passed without too much friction and a feeling of starting on work for my ASU module helped me feel less shaky too. It is hard to balance the two modules, one always seems to dominate the agenda. However they are drawing together as the weeks go by and hopefully i am building a body of work that will meet the criteria i need to fulfil to pass.
Criteria and learning outcomes are frustrating. I know why they exist. In my head i know that they are useful and help us to draw focus but they are hard to make sense of and sometimes education can feel joy sapping. It makes me think "Of Mice and Men". If i remember rightly there are two brothers who are walking to a farm to find work. One is simple but strong and the other clever. The simple one has a mouse in his pocket but he squeezes the life out of it, later he breaks a puppy and a girl i think. It's a long time since i read the book so i may not have got the story all right but this is the way education can feel sometimes. The student is the mouse in the pocket of the big man.
After making a two part mould and realising that what i wanted to do wasn't going to work i then had to make a three part mould the following week. I managed a little bit better with this one because having made moulds the week things like mixing up plaster felt more familiar. After the moulds were made and wax cast the wax casts had to be set up on cups with sprues and risers ready for investing last Friday and the pour which is happening this Friday coming. Uni has lots of deadlines, the deadline for investing, the deadline for the Pecha Kucha presentation which is next Wednesday. All the time there's a feeling of needing to get this done, that done and not enough hours to make it happen and home is crazy, not a room tidy enough to be called comfortable and all the time more art (i guess it is art) pouring in and books from more than one library calling to be read. Not enough time, not enough time. 
There has to be enough time. One of the ways not to be a self important wanker is to remember that it is only art, that it is not life or death. It is hard to remember this tho because the desire to make something good or better is the thing that keeps me going. But being a horrible person isn't going to make my work better it's just going to make me and the people around me either miserable or cross. Yes keep going, keep trying, push to the limit but know the limit. And maybe hold back a little from the limit so there is a little gas in reserve for closer to the deadlines. 
The work that i was working on for the exhibition i am not anymore going to be part of has come out beautifully. It's exciting to know now how to print with more than one colour using multiple plates. This term i have used photographs mostly and it feels a bit of a cheat but has also got me looking at photographs and image making and learning basic print skills. It has been helpful because i have several pictures to work from and each of them is different and tells a different story and learning how to story tell with images is part of what i have come back to education for so that is a mission being achieved i guess. 
Enough with the blog/reflective journal i fear i have said too little and not enough but it's words down and they will lead to the next set of words like a stairway cut into a mountain path. There is more to say but the need to put together my Pecha Kucha is making a noise in the background so if there is more to say i'll have to say it another time. 

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 as i'm writing down the books and films and web pages i've come across, i see how good it is to have it recorded. In my head, as i note down The River which i watched right at the beginning of the term as a window into India, i am taken back to early 1950's India. I remember that the film gave me my starting colour palette. The River is filmed in Technicolour. It gave me sounds and images and a way into India. And the extras to the DVD were documentary films from the late 19th century through to the early 40's which let me see India as a colonised country through a very English lens. The documentaries made me realise that my not having lived or visited India was less of a problem than i thought maybe because nobody knows the life of another, the India of the Mughals was not the same as the India that was held by the British Empire which was not the same as the India of the 1950's that i was looking at through Alan Ginsberg's eyes and mind, or the India that friends spoke of or the India in my mind that comes from 30 years of yoga & meditation or the India of the Ramayana which is the seed point for all my work this term. It made me think that a man/woman cannot live in another's skin but through imagination we can gain some insight and that art and writing may offer passage to the being of another.
The man who did the cinematography for The River was Jack Cardiff. He also shot Black Narcissus and one of the documentaries which led me to look for more by him on youtube and it was from watching one of those, Temples of India, that i began to think of columns and stories carved onto columns, because learning how to tell stories is another aspiration i have come to university to learn. 
Thinking about columns made me put a long sheet of lining paper up on my studio space wall that i could start to scribble on , first with water soluble graphite pencil, then glue (uhu), then paint, then varnish, and more paint, and more varnish (some with sand mixed in), and collage, and more paint and so on. It ended up a big ugly mess but it didn't, it doesn't, matter because doing it made me think of stories and how they layer up and change and how bits get missed out and bits get added on and who knows what the story started out like at the beginning and maybe it doesn't matter. And all that connected to my reading and watching half a dozen retellings of the Ramayana, all of which have key connecting points and characters but all of which have varied here and there. And from painting, the ugly painting, i then was inspired to draw some of what i was thinking about on the back of secondhand copper etching plates and one was the column in my head with a turtle which is one of the incarnations of Vishnu who also incarnated into Rama to save the world from Ravana. And some of this i know from reading the Ramayana over and over again, and some of it i know from reading Ritual Art of India by Ajit Mookerjee which was a brilliant introduction to Indian culture along with Tantra Art also by Ajit Mookerjee which i'll confess i've still only just dipped into and also Tantra Song by Franck Andre Jamme which i've also only just browsed. Because time, time, runs away with itself.
At the beginning of my MA i felt like a snow globe that had been shaken up, forgive me if i'm repeating myself, it was an overwhelming impression. Now i'm aware of how i have had to keep my foot down on the accelerator pedal just to achieve the little i've achieved. Sometimes i think i've achieved a lot and then other times i think how so much time has passed and still i'm only just beginning and haven't made any work that is more than a scribbled idea. If i get another lifetime as an artist i'll try to get cracking sooner. i wish i had learned to print at 18 or 19. But i didn't so that's life and i guess it's better late than never. 
This term i've been learning inks and papers and process. I've tried sugar lift as a way of making a mark on an etching plate and next week i'll try at least one other way. And i've tried using more than one ink on a plate because one of the 2nd year students i chat to was doing it and so i asked Jess, the technician, and so i've begun and can now plan to do that if i'm thinking about what to make and i know that it's called a la poupe. And next week i'll maybe try chine colle which will add a collaging element to my printmaking. I must read more about it before trying. 
In the screen print room i have learned how the tables work. And in theory how to register the print with tabs of masking tape. I need to try other papers for screen printing and to think in layers of image and how to be more careful with my lines so that i get the picture i want at the end. My first screen printing was really just learning the basics, how to mix inks, the manners of the print studio, how to be part of the space, how to be competent at the process not worrying too much about the work i was producing. My second screen was full of itsy bits that then took ages to print and so i tried to make a three layer print which felt like new learning, and was, but i rushed the lines i drew and so the finished picture is clumsy, so next term i will try again in the hope that i can make something i'm more satisfied with. 
I'm going to stop soon but i just want to add into this blog post that after feeling disheartened by my tutorial the week before i raised my sadness with my tutor and he was lovely. I realised that his job is not to pat me on the head and say very good but to get me to learn as much as i can while i'm on my MA, that that is some of what i am paying for, a critical eye, and tho it is uncomfortable sometimes it has to be that way. If learning was all easy it would be less precious, less hard won. Those are my thoughts not thoughts he put into my head except perhaps by being my teacher and pushing me to be my best.  
Later in the day after i'd spoken to him, we had a group crit with most of the full-time MA fine art students and we looked at everybody's work and the teachers talked about it and asked questions and it was so interesting to see and learn about fellow students work and process. At the end Desmond aka Mr Desmond said that all of us need to look at more modern contemporary artists and the idea of a dream exhibition was also mooted as we fell a little short on our knowledge of contemporary artists who weren't ourselves. I think looking at and seeing others, other's work, other's lives, is a way to avoid becoming too narcissistic and self absorbed.
I love the idea of a dream exhibition and i've been mulling over who i would have in mine. Who would you have if you could have any half a dozen artists, some living, some dead ? It has got me pouring over books and the internet to see who inspires me and made me ask who i am making work for apart from myself, what context do i see myself in, why am i doing fine art instead of illustration or creative writing if story telling is what i am interested in. I have discovered Kiki Smith and Laura Owens as a result of my search.    

I promised myself that I would write a blog in which I spilled a little less of my blood onto the "page" but I don't really know how to do that. I think I write in blood because I don't have any ink. Call ink style and blood passion. My blogs tend to come out of me when my heart is bursting with need to express myself, when my mind is on fire with thought and I can't hold it all in. 
But what I want to get started on is blogging a quiet pilgrimage I am taking. Using the word pilgrimage I hope gives a sense of the form of the journey I have embarked upon. I do not know if I will reach my destination but I have started the path and that is enough. 
Lots of people walk the coast of Britain. I've been following a few blogs over the past few years and most recently a man on twitter who is doing it the adventurer's way with a tent. But I am not an adventurer. I have however wanted to walk the coast of Britain for years now, maybe as long as twenty, thinking about it and not knowing how to start, where to start, making it all more complicated than it needed to be. 
Because in October last year I just began. I walked from Southwold to Lowestoft. Just because I could. I started in October because October was the anniversary of Jon's death. He gets the whole month because his actual death date is different from the day I found out by nearly two weeks so in my body he has two deaths, his actual death and the death of him that happened later when I picked up his sister-in-law's email informing me of his death  
Southwold was the beach Jon took me to on our first proper date. And we walked the length between Dunwich and Kessingland over and over again in different parts during the six years we were lovers. Starting at Southwold meant that my coast walk began with Jon as my journeyman, a ghost journeyman. I suppose that I hope that walking and walking will help me to lay his ghost to rest. He is not, for me, an easy ghost to lay to rest. I meet him everywhere. And sometimes I like that and sometimes I don't. 
I took the first step of this pilgrimage on a date that was before the actual anniversary of Jon's death but was the anniversary of a friend and I going to Southwold the week before he died. It was a strange day. I was tearful and thought I saw him on the bus and we found ourselves in places that he had taken me to on our first and last dates, places that connected me to him where memories had been made, and places he'd shown me that belonged to his childhood. I couldn't get him out of my head. I wanted to be there alone, or with him. My friend kept saying I had to give up on him. I had. I couldn't have given up more. But it hurt. I guess my head had given up, but my heart hadn't. Hope still defying reason.
I digress. I took the first step on my pilgrim path because all the time we have choices. October 2018 was the anniversary of Jon's death and I needed to force myself back to life, to seize the day, carpe diem. I took two walks in October and have taken four since then. Southwold-Lowestoft, Lowestoft to Gorleston, Great Yarmouth to Caister-on-sea, Caister-on-sea to Winterton, Winterton to Happisburgh, Happisburgh to Mundesley. 
Mostly I go by public transport and mostly I go alone. So far the exception has been Winterton to Happisburgh when my son, at my ask, helped me out by driving me to Winterton and then parking up at Happisburgh and walking back to meet me at Sea Palling. Mostly I like going by public transport and walking alone. Walking alone gives me time to think and public transport especially buses allows meetings to happen that wouldn't normally. 
This walk, this long walk, began with a trick. I was just walking from Southwold to Lowestoft, no big deal. The second walk was more conscious, on my birthday, the anniversary of the day after I found out he was dead. Lowestoft to Gorleston. One walk and then another and another, beginning. I needed to begin and then I needed to keep going and then when Amis joined me I needed to ask for help because I could feel myself stalling, and I wanted to share what I was doing with someone I loved, someone living, a tangible, physical presence. Ghosts and spirits are all very well but not the same as flesh and blood, body and living soul. Amis' help briefly made my path warmer and sweeter, less lonely. Time and space are gifts. I was glad that Amis accepted the gift of my time and space and gifted me his in return. Time and space are gifts worth treasuring. 
Following my day with Amis I walked Happisburgh to Mundesley, passing the shameful nets at Bacton a week or so before the sand martins return, the cliffs looked mean and grim and bleak. I am so thankful to the people who got those nets removed. They stand as heroes in my eyes, everyday people who rose to a challenge and beat a system that says birds lives are worth less than money and man. I wonder if that is the mark of civilised society, the ability to understand that that which is not us, is not "I", is as of much value as us, we, ourselves, "I". 
Food for thought maybe for my next stretch Mundesley to Cromer. My walks are not too long at the moment and it might seem like I'm dawdling, taking this walk at such a leisurely pace and with no certainty of reaching it's end but it's a choice I have made to allow myself to be slow, to let myself go gently. Going gently, taking things softly, means I will do what I set out to do, I don't respond well to a whip but I give all that I have if my heart is resolved. I want this journey to be a healing path. I am walking it widdershins, tempting the devil I suppose but my hope is that the pull of my road will give me time to work out where I am going and will find me moving forward even if my forward is met by sometimes going back in time. 

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.  

So, I seem to be on a blogging roll, or maybe i just need to get words out of me. I don't know if the words are of worth or not but sometimes just laying them out on a page allows my thoughts to fall into place, or, if not exactly into place, like in "52 card pick up" the act of flicking them out into space at least means they have a moment to fly. 
I've been overthinking, thinking and thinking and thinking, and sometimes that gets a thought to where it needs to be, and sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it gets a thought to where it needs to be but it feels like a long drive without rest-stops and that afterwards the mind is a bit shot and dull. I think maybe that's how i've been feeling. 
Sometimes i wonder if that's how i've always been, thinking, my brain always buzzing with ideas but not always good ideas or ideas that come to anything. And, because before i act on one idea the next pops up and then i'm off on that one, and when that one finds itself at a dead end or somewhere i don't want to be i have to back up and try to find my way back to where i was, or where i wanted to have been, or where it was that the idea or notion went off course or germinated but return is never quite return because the light is different, or the nose, or gathering. 
Today I took a day off thinking. Or rather i stopped trying to nudge or direct my thoughts and let them go where they will. I mean i do that, but i guess, of late, they have been focused on Jon, and then intentionally focused on something else so i don't think about Jon all the time, and then also sometimes other stuff will come up and that will take up my attention, but that gorgeous free flowing space that feels like flight hasn't really happened much of late. There was insane just after Jon died, and now maybe to counterbalance i find myself steering towards sensible reality, sensible is good, it is steady and functional, but where i like to be really is somewhere in between, arms held out wide to help me keep my balance and my feet carefully treading the centre line. 
One of the things with having been so nuts after Jon died is that then it's hard to gauge how sane you are later. Often people who seem super-sane on the outside can feel un-nerving, a bit Stepford,  sort of borderline psychotic in there normalcy. I mean who is normal, what is normal, normal is not the same thing for different people. And normal in the uk seems to depend upon fairly fixed circumstances, like running water, supermarkets, electricity etc take those away and most of us would be stripped back to an inner being which may be decidedly less cute unclothed.  
Yesterday morning i heard a folk singer, apologies i forget her name, being interviewed on radio 4. She spoke about touring with her family; with her parents, who were folk legends, and i think her brother; and how families have a way of relating that is absolutely normal to them, or perhaps more likely to which they are accustomed, but once you've been stuck on a tour bus for 6 months you forget how to relate to the real world and don't know how to talk to people. 
We've probably all been there, in other people's families observing, uncomfortable, working things out, this is their normal but maybe not yours and likely our own family is met similarly by outsiders. Worlds collide. Each one of us is living in our own little world that revolves around us and our way of being, doing, thinking. How we are, who we are may or may not feel absolutely right, or maybe it feels ok but there is some yearning that draws our focus away from our family. Another lover, or an alternative lifestyle that looks more exciting or less exciting than our own, something which seduces our senses away from the everyday get-on-with-it functional reality that is the lot of the living. 
This gets me back to reality, which is one of the things i wanted to blog about, because despite my decision not to think, thinking happens. Well, reality, and time, and i guess normal too are all elements that have strange edges. On the surface they can seem quite fixed, but look closer, begin to explore time, reality or normal, and it becomes obvious that these apparent boundaries can bend and stretch, become tight and constricted or counterwise open and extended. They are not definites except by consensus. And consensus is also not definite because a shift in the make up of the those who create the consensus can change the consensus.
I was thinking when i went for my walk on Jon's birthday how small a life is, how brief a life is on the grand scale that is time, how what seems of such great consequence is not really anything. Life feels easier when i feel small and insignificant. And yet on another level i was thinking yesterday as i was walking home from the art school library how being seen is also important. I think maybe the desire to be seen varies from person to person but that being totally unseen unless you have chosen that course is uncomfortable. I often think that if i could have a super-power being invisible would be a good super-power, but would it ? Would it actually be quite lonely ? And in many ways are all of us going about our day to day mostly as nobodies to the people we meet, therefore more or less unseen. Unseen except by those who love or care for us.
I've been blue-sy this week. This that and the other, stuff causing me sadness and anxiety, and feeling odd after visiting Bungay too, lonely maybe, or just unseen, un-met. Jon met something in me that i had not had met before, i guess it was something he reflected back at me that i didn't know existed until i knew him, and i miss the way he did that. And by the same token i also feel a bit frustrated that he has eaten the past six months of my life up, that sounds odd, i think i'm frustrated with myself for still loving him maybe for not picking myself up and getting on with things, for not moving on, for being slow and not brisk, but also frustrated with myself for losing the something that was special between us, like missing the beat in a dance class and then always being a step behind and unable to find my grace. I've always been terrible at counting. And choreographed lines. Terrible ? Well slow to pick up choreography and often off count. Maybe Jon was very good at leading the dance and so falling in to his rhythm gave me a false sense of my abilities.
And then later on yesterday i was thinking about time again. Thinking about jumping back in time to when Jon and i were good. And to just before he died when i had finished a busy summer and was feeling like i was waiting at the crossroads for something to happen something to guide my way, my "if" time. In hindsight I wonder if i was waiting. Waiting for Jon, not knowingly but deep inside, it is odd that two people noticed my hand oddly shaking in the week or so preceding his death, in fact the second time was the morning of the day he died. The shaking stopped after his death. Did i already say that in a previous blog ? Sometimes things happen and in hindsight they feel like they were more prescient than was realised at the time. 
What if all those moments are all still happening, are still ongoing, all of them, as if they are one moment, even the moments that contradict. So there is Jon alive and well and showing me the flowers in his garden, or smiling and catching me in his arms as i walk through the door of his house, and offering me a cup of tea, eyes light and kind, or maybe i'm in a time before we knew each other, as a young mum, or way back in my childhood, playing in the sandpit, or learning to ride my bicycle, or picking blackberries and then i'm picking blackberries with Jon and making blackberry and apple jam, or crumble, or later after he'd left picking blackberries to dye cloth with. and all those times are one and the same because time is very long and a lifetime is very short so why make so much of it. 
And what if there are other realities. It's a balancing act living between alternative realities. There is the concrete reality which it is helpful to hold on to, concrete reality is accessed through the senses, i see, i hear, i smell, i feel by touch, i feel bodily, i taste.  And then there is less concrete reality that allows us to know that what happened before was once real and tho' it now exists as a back space on a linear scale it is still accessible in the now and still has some ties to concrete reality because the memories are often founded in sensual  and/or emotional experience. And there is the future which is unknown but made real in dreams and projected hopes or fears. Death is a bit of a gate crasher into that party because death steals the dead from the future, their place in the future no longer exists, they may be there but as an ethereal being which is all very nice but not the same as an arm around you or whatever, it easy in grief to wander the path of "if", it's quite a labyrinth, but it's a step out of concrete time, space, reality, it's a sweet, and sometimes a resting sanctuary for a sore heart/mind/body, but it is no way to live. A wraith's existence.
In life there's a fair whack of "suck it up" it doesn't come to everyone in equal measures. We meet ourselves in moments of great joy and great disappointment. In winning and losing. We find the company that keeps us going, we find the company that takes us down, we learn who to trust, who to not trust, who cares, who doesn't. Suck-it-up situations ask us to pick ourselves up, sometimes a helping hand, or guiding hand, makes all the difference. Alone we are vulnerable. We are vulnerable alone in triumph or defeat, and knowing ourselves to be part of one big body system allows us to play a socially co-operative part in the construct that is life. Life is bigger than us. Life is not birth to death it is birth and death, before and after, and all that is. 
I suppose that reality and time both feel quite infinite to me. How can infinite be quite infinite ? I mean infinite is infinite the quite defines the level to which i feel able to take them without totally losing the plot and finding my feet have lost the ground and that i am floating into outer space with only my imagination for company. 
Normal is maybe infinite too but perhaps normal goes inward, or maybe that's just how it feels to me, that normal reins in the imagination demands physical definition, that physicality is cellular, or particle, interaction and as the cells/particles become smaller the inside of infinite becomes apparent. Normal is sweet and comfortable, it sits in habit, but too much sweet and comfortable, too much habit, makes both mind and body flabby and slow. Too much normal can lead to sense of confinement which i guess varies according to how much the normal you are living suits/fits you. So again it's about finding a balance. 
And those balances are ongoing. All the balances are ongoing. The shifts and changes that happen to a lesser or greater extent have to be taken in and assimilated, or allowed to pass, understanding comes with time and practice, it doesn't stay the same because new layers, new stories, new narratives , new understanding supersedes the old. 
Sometimes i wonder what life is all about. I think what the hell am i here for ?  Much of life hurts. And then i think that life just is. That life is about life. That life is life. That it is all ongoing. And that whilst some hurts some too is pure light and brilliant and beautiful and that if the hurt is the sacrifice i make for the bliss it is  a bargain well made.  
I think that lives come together sometimes momentarily and sometimes for longer. That we are made up of scraps of moments, that life is those scraps of moments, each life a scrap of moment. I think maybe that life in the short term is  perhaps about what we do, but maybe more importantly that it is how we do it, how lives touch each other, that what we leave when our bodies part this world is the impression we left, the way we marked our journey through life, the presence we left. 
I wonder if the present is infinite and if maybe our presence too if infinite, if our presence is the air we breathe, in, out, the air we share. I think maybe air is life. 
I always struggle to know how to close my blogs. I guess if my blog was just a journal i'd stop wherever and it would make no odds. But because i put them out it means other people may read them and i want to finish them better than i do. It is something i need to learn. How to stop. In the mean time i will have to end with my threads still trailing. Maybe it is not until all those threads are caught up or cut that the end is finally met.