28th April
As April moves towards its tail end, there is a weariness lingering around my ambitions for the year. Today I am tired. Like a small querulous bird, I feel myself inwardly flustered, flying around, colliding with window panes, in a direction less desire to feel free of imagined limits and constraints. But find myself boxed in by a whole morass of things that need attention, infected with necessity and time constraints. Plus all the things that are way beyond my control.
External circumstances, like the weather, have turned chilly and damp in the weeks following the much milder and light flurry of Easter. The impulse to put the heating back on has to be constantly checked on principle. Less of an economic imperative, though that is a consideration, but as a defiant resistance of the concept of creating warmth artificially. We are nearly into May, god damn you!
So, yes, tiredness, emotional tiredness specifically. The daily striving just to keep our business kicking, whilst all around us political and economic crises, pestilence and war conspire to neutralise or put in doubt the efficacy of all our efforts. We keep plugging away at it, and its definitely a practice for us both to cultivate resilience and trust that with applied energy and resourcefulness we can find our way through even this. One way or the other, we will be fine.
Yet this keeping spirits up can prove exhausting. Its not as though we can look forward to an identifiable time when we know things will become hunky dory and settle down. Times are both turbulent and at the same time there is the whiff of stagnation, of repugnant decay. At present I know I'm in a state of profound pessimism, of burnt edges on crumbling pages. All I currently can envisage is more and more of the same, stretching out before me. And yet, even this is impermanent. The desire for something other than this is currently rubbing both me and reality up the wrong way, and the cuckoo of discontent has moved in.
May 1st
Who knows what the future has up its sleeve. It might get worse, it might get better, it might surprise us, but it feels all completely out of anyone's control these days. Control reveals itself to be an imaginative conceit, one you'd like to believe was true, but isn't. I'd like to believe I can vote in a democracy and effect change, but I'm sixty five soon, and I'm still waiting. Having reportedly regained its sovereignty, our government has turned it into something resembling a one party state, with its own state endorsed media. Any broadcast media who dares to hold the government to account has their funding squeezed or is threatened with being sold off. We have a PM, who despite the amount and stench of his own shit he wallows in, appears incapable of being shoved out of office. Our country has rapidly declined, lost its way and all credibility as a nation. I find myself disgusted by it, ashamed by it. There are days when I simply despair, because I no longer see how this will ever change for the better.
May 4th
As if on cue, yesterday my back acted up. In one moment, whilst I was standing, sanding a piece of wood in the workshop, it suddenly shifted from a small discomforting niggle to causing me to wobble around like a penguin in vertically compressed agony. There is always a judgement to be made with back pain, over how much sitting and resting and how much movement you do. Not too much of either, but enough to alter the physical dynamic regularly. Stasis is deadly.
That this arose into my experience was not entirely unexpected. I've known, for weeks, of too many knots and resistances being bound into muscle and nerves. And then, unusually for me, I slept completely through the night two nights running, my body being quite unfamiliar with this state. Of relaxation mixed with a pert alertness. The psycho physical poisons of anxiety, stress and stoicism, thus finding themselves in conducive circumstances, approved their release and bodily spasm. But as yet my physical response, built on the preservation of bodily integrity, is still asserting a tightly clenched degree of constraint over the whole physical process of release. I still await the dissipation, the dispersal of the energy and angst radiating out to the extremities. Oh the bliss of it all.
May 7th
Hubby and I have been regularly engaged with watching Interior Design Masters on BBC1. As a format its beginning to be past its best, as it ventures further down the route of valuing character over genuine talent. That said I was extremely pleased when Banjo won. He was just this very sweet, likable guy, with an instinctive genius for colour. He also has a fertile imaginative mind that comes up with back stories for who the clients are who he's designing for. His most hilarious creation was Laurence Llewellyn Bowen's sea dog sister Florence :-
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