I had a dream

No sleep, no dreams.

Pre dream

I rarely dream. I listen to friends who do dream and wish that I did.  They always have so much fun, and if we were inclined to do so, we could spend ages unpicking them to find meaning.  Sometimes we do, like recently my friend dreamed that she was looking for her Prince Charming. He's over there, someone said, up in the maths tower which you have to climb.  My friend has a memory of swinging in through the window of this maths tower on a vine (like Tarzan) instead, so she didn't have to climb it at all. She did not say anything about Prince Charming inside so perhaps he had dived out of one window as she was swinging in through the other.  Wonderful. We couldn't work out what any of that meant, so perhaps we will wait for her next dream and try again.  I am told that I do actually dream, everyone does, but that I do not remember them.  Possibly because I wake a lot in the night and they don't have time to really get going, or because what deep sleep I do have crams them all in and my brain explodes.  I really do not know, and perhaps you can put me right on this.

Night time used to be a fearful place for me. Many years ago I did not sleep well, and did not want to face the darkness.  There was something about the long quiet dark hours of the night in which I could not escape from my own thoughts that made me try and avoid it.  I would resist going to bed, resist going to sleep, and keep the radio on to help me.  To lie down and stay still, to know that all the chattering in my mind would be louder and louder in the quietness, and to feel the anxiety in my stomach in the early hours when I woke after only a small amount of sleep, made life very difficult.  I did sort it out after many years and in the end, and it was quite simple.  Mostly, it was a decision to stop dreading the night, and to have a proper bed time and wake time.  I read a good book about sleep, put their recommendations into practice, and the long dark scary nights began to recede. I love my night times now.  I sleep very well in my own way, and don't worry about it if I don't.  But still, I do not remember my dreams.  

The dream

 My life is full of meaning.  The work I do, the people I meet and the places I go means that I am often concentrating hard on what the outcomes are.  Much of what I do is about energy and energies which includes healing work, listening work and creative work. It can be very intense - it is intense - which is why it works.  The deeper and more difficult things in our lives take time, focus and energy to deal with and when I am working with someone, I use love and kindness alongside time, focus and energy, and it draws on resources we forget we have.  Sometimes, my work is an encounter with someone out of the blue, and I may not know who they are or what their name is but we encounter each other and for the time we spend together, there is an exchange of healing and experience.  

When I go to London, I carry loose change so that I can give it to whoever asks for it.  One time, a very misshapen young man, obviously not right in the head, left his cardboard box and beckoned me over.  Would I go into the coffee shop and get him a sandwich and a coffee?  With sugar? I did so, and while I was buying it, he wandered in looking filthy and strange. I feared the coffee shop owner would refuse to sell to me if it were for this man, everyone stopped and looked at him.  But the coffee shop owner gave me a smile and said that as it was for this man, who he addressed by name, he must have cake too.  Apparently this young man is often in the shop, and the owner loves it when people listen to him and buy him what he asks for.  When they don't the owner gives him the food anyway. The young man and I left the shop, he asking me to come back another day, and buy him some more.  The healing here was through the coffee shop owner, and the experience was for me. The vehicle was the dishevelled young man.

So, my dream.  I dreamed that I was in a dark, black place, so dark that it was impossible to describe.  The blackness had a texture to it, like velvet.  It was not a frightening place at all, despite the deeper than dark darkness.  I had a person, that was neither alive nor dead, and in the darkness I had to lift this heavy body and put it back into its soul.  It was hard work, and I struggled to manage the weight of the body with me, and I remember thinking that I had no idea what a soul looked like, or where to find one. At that moment, to my left, a ball of light appeared which was so bright, so light and so beautiful that it took my breath away.  It was flat, not spherical, and in the centre was so much love and I knew that this was the soul I was looking for.  But I also understood that this amazing light was looking out for me too.  Somehow, I raised the figure above my head and into the soul and as I did so, I knew the figure that I was carrying was that of my son who has so many troubles.  In the distance I began to see other lights appearing, and I knew all was well.

Finding the soul and it finding me.

When I woke, I was filled with the beauty of this light, the feeling of peace after the body and soul were united, and the memory of the incredible blackness in which I was struggling to lift this body.  Days later, I am still in awe of the whole dream and keep coming back to the light.  I like to dwell on the power of this and feel the most important part of the whole dream is that the soul light, though it belonged to someone else, was magnificently looking after and out for, me too.  Wow.

Post dream

Of course, it was a dream.  But it felt more than a dream.  It felt like something hopeful, something wonderful, something beyond me.  I am reassured, inspired and relieved by it.  We struggle along in our lives, and many of us feel we are alone especially when things seem never to improve. Life can be so relentless and lonely, and at times, we long for reassurance that we are not wasting our time, that doing our best will pay off, that somehow things will get better. Even those of us with a faith of sorts can feel abandoned.  It is hard work, when the going gets tough. I do have a faith and I do believe in a God of love and kindness.  I do think there is a purpose to life and that if we can remember it, we are not alone.  Of course, we don't always remember it, how can we?  We are only human and sometimes it feels like we blinking well are alone. But this dream came to me when I needed something to reconnect me with hope, and I think it was a spiritual experience in a dream.  So much so that I have tried to paint the experience, which when I was doing it, boiled down to two colours, black and white.  But I did paint it and used Prussian Blue and Paynes Grey for the darkness, because those are luminous and there is depth to them whereas black is matt and flat. My head is painted in matt flat black which shows up against the depth of the blue and grey, if you look carefully.

I went to see my son and decided to tell him.  I showed him a photo of the painting, and he liked it.  There is always a chance that when one talks of a dream experience like this, that it will not be taken seriously and dismissed as nonsense.  My son was quite taken with it, and I am glad.  Since I had to raise him above my head into his soul again, and he was jolly heavy, it was the least he could do.  Ha ha.

Post script - a dream experience like this does not necessarily change things in the world.  It would be wonderful to think that suddenly all is well, and that we are all healed.  We live our lives as we choose, and our stories are our own, even if we feel they are not.  Life is nothing if not an ongoing, extraordinary, painful and joyful series of lessons, experiences, losses, gains and understandings.  A dream like this, though I describe it as a spiritual experience inside a dream, is for me and I take from it that I, and my son, are not alone. I take from it a feeling of comfort and connection that is beyond what I normally experience, and a knowing that the whole of existence is vaster and more intense than I could possibly know in my day to day life.  I like this, and it helps me accept a bit more what I cannot change. 

Light is everywhere, even when we cannot see it, which is most of the time.

  

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Rebellion in my soul.

 

Twin passions, net curtains and Ribena

  How it started.

I was born rebellious.  A nice little girl, born to wonderful parents in a Catholic/Protestant household which was properly mixed faith in those days, I was brought up to behave well.  Except, I did not always want to behave well.  It seemed, to my little fairy brain, that behaving well meant no glitter, no dressing up in net curtains, no running away from nursery school. Why would we not want to do all those things? I wondered.  Following my heart did not always turn out well though and I soon understood that it was better to do what was asked of me.  I do understand, it is no fun having a class full of good little children with one wayward fairy disrupting everything.  And I only ran away from nursery school once, but I did so with a pretty beaded purse I had found in a coat pocket in the cloakroom on my way out.  My mother returned me and the purse to school where everyone was very nice because at five, I was considered too young to be a proper criminal.  Later, at my nice convent school in Liverpool I found a shed full of packed lunches brought in by the children.  I must have eaten a good third of them before I was discovered, and though it looked bad for me, I had no idea that these were lunches for other children.  It was just a mountain of food, and so I dived in. I was discovered in a Ribena coma too, I had never experienced Ribena until I found it in all those lunches and could not believe anything tasted so good.  I vaguely remember focusing on going through the mounds of packed lunches like an addict looking for more Ribena.

At no point was I aggressive, mean or willfully naughty.  I just did not understand the rules and so I went my own way.  I suppose now I would be given a label and extra support.  In fact, my father who always thought I was perfectly fine, did take me at my school's request to an educational psychologist.  In their report he was told to give up, because I would never make O levels, let alone A levels.  I remember that session and being asked to do some drawing.  I drew male hippies in bell bottom trousers and flowers in their hair all over the place and did not really engage with anything else that was part of this assessment.  So my father, probably a fairy himself too now I come to think of it, took me to another one.  I must have liked this next educational psychologist because I came out as super intelligent.  Everyone liked that result better, so we went with that one.  I want to balance this, and say that I am neither educationally subnormal (first assessment) or super intelligent (second assessment), I am just a creative person much like other creative people.  Very creative people (me) have a different take on life, and it is as simple as that. 

However, I did get to university, I did go into the real world afterwards, and I did find it all very difficult unless - I could do my own thing.  And therein lies the rub. 

  

Doing my own thing.

From the word go, I did my own thing if I could get away with it.  I bleached my hair white in the early nineteen eighties and then coloured it pink.  Instead of getting a job, which was very hard because I was inclined to be a bit unemployable, I squatted in old houses and flats in London and made art, met mad people, and became very alternative.  But even that did not feel completely right.  I liked being nice, and it upset my family that I was so far on the edges of polite society.  Too right, polite society would have run a mile if they had had to engage with me.  I could tell them how to break into empty houses, how to find the nearest reggae sound system and where to collect your dole money.  But I was at heart too nice to be this far out of the loop.  Despite living in squats and having pink hair, I was a moderate in the eyes of my companions, I was nice and I didn't smoke, take drugs or drink.  I must have seemed odd even to them.  I spoke well, was well educated, and thanks to my mother I knew how to make a proper bed and to wash lace.  I did not really fit in. 

Bolt cutters and a cheery smile

I did get a job, eventually, and became a well paid member of an economic consultancy as a receptionist and then an assistant librarian. It was a culture shock, and very good for me.  I really tried to conform, but it ate at my soul, and after ten years, I left. Not without much gratitude and respect for the lessons learned, and I think economics improved quite a lot after I had gone.  I was not very good at my jobs.  But people liked me, I liked them, and I think I was kept on as light relief. 

Doing my own thing, trying to understand the rebel inside and living in the real world outside made me ill.  I hadn't the courage to be really me, nor the ability to integrate the conventional world around me into my own world.  It seems now, looking back, that I had many lessons to learn and most of them were about who I really was.  Once I got that sorted, I could make sensible headway with everything else. 

It was tough.  I married my first husband, lost him (mutual agreement) and had my three children.  (Before my husband left).  I struggled with money and life but I managed.  This is no sob story!  The moment I began my upwards journey was when things could not get much worse, a friend offered me space in her studio to paint, and I took it.  I became a full time proper artist.  I was, at the time, a divorced mother of three tiny children and weighed sixteen stone.  Within a couple of years, I had lost five stone, run a London Marathon and was calling myself Artist Exraordinaire. Well done Antonia.  Except that I still couldn't work out how the world actually worked, and still had much to learn, experience and understand.  Onwards and upwards, then, carry on with the journey of life.

And now -

Here I am.  Aged 61, once divorced, twice widowed, living alone and making my way as an artist and many other things besides. I have grey hair, four grandchildren (not linked), a studio and some peace. 

The rebel in me is much quieter now, but more discerning.  I have done much homework, I had to work out who I was and who I am and yes, it is ever changing.  We never really arrive at the definitive Me, every time we think we have done so, life throws something else at us and back we go to square one. But as we get older, we retain the memory of who we have been and who we want to be, and somehow it is not as hard as it used to be when we were younger.  So now, I feel better about stepping outside the box because I feel better about myself.  I do not have to worry about so much.  So now, acts of rebellion feel like the right way to go.  Unless I get arrested or kidnapped, neither of which I want, I can always come home and shut my door and unless either my brain malfunctions or my hands fall off, I can write, paint and draw. I can cook, pick flowers, and make things. I can be creative, I can be a fairy.  But a rather unconventional, grey haired fearless one.  These days, I take my personal freedom very seriously.  I live my freedoms and do not wish to comply with nonsense, but I do not need to make a fuss about it, I just do it.  Once, long ago, when I had pink hair and frightened my mother's posh friends with talk of what bolt cutters to use on locks of empty houses, I felt I bumbled from one crazy situation to the next.  Now, as I get older, I care much less about getting things wrong - though I do still care - I have enough history behind me to know I will probably be OK.  In fact, it may be that this next stage in my life is where I man the barricades at last.  Rebel Grandma has arrived.

 

Rebel Grandma.  Naughty, but nice.

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What has lockdown ever done for me? Surprisingly, some good.

Waking up and smelling the tea.

I resist the idea that any good at all has come from such a destructive thing as a lockdown. It is well known that I do not agree with it and that I believe it has caused incalulable damage and trouble for everyone.  Whatever I feel about lockdowns as a policy, they were used, will be used and are here to stay. And so, it's best I find a way to get on with life.  This is something I have done, and somehow I am still alive, so are you, and the world has not ended. It may have tilted on its axis, but it did not end.  I look out of my window and the honeysuckle in my garden did not give lockdowns a second thought.  The sea at the end of my road went in, and out, and ignored all the madness of mankind.  Walking on the Downs as I do showed me the beauty of nature was immune to all of this stuff, and gave me and all the other walkers there some hope, some joy, some perspective.

I am lucky.  I live alone, I have a garden, I don't have to look after anyone and I can work from home.  There are shops nearby to buy food and I have internet access to go online and I have a phone to call people.  No one depends on me.  I do not have to keep a shop open, find a way to make a business work, lose sleep over losing money with a lack of customers.  Antonia Rolls is one lucky bunny rabbit.  

All that aside, lockdown gave me panic, loneliness, fear, isolation, helplessness.  Same as most of us.  Lockdown shut down my great year, the one I had worked so hard to create, and my busy world came to a screeching halt.  And, on top of that, nothing worked any more, all the support structures that I had unthinkingly depended on crashed.  No one could mend my oven.  No doctor appointments. No hugs from my grandchildren. No nothing from anyone.  I was an island in my own lovely home, cast adrift forever under house arrest in a pretty prison in Bognor Regis. But I could still get takeaways delivered, that worked.  And Amazon parcels were safe.  And I could wave at people from my window, that was nice. Here in Bognor no one monitored how many times I went to Sainsbury's in a day so I was never arrested for forgetting the milk and having to pop back for it. 

Waving to the Amazon delivery man who is like me still alive.

But.  Here I am a year and a half later, in my Bognor home, alive and well and somehow changed for the better. I have benefitted from lockdown as well as suffered.  And actually, all things taken into account, I have barely suffered. Not like those who have no money, no choices, no space, no help, no hope have suffered.  I was angry and sad like most of us were, but my suffering was not helpless and distressing as those who were ill and isolated were, those with children and no options or resources in confined spaces were, those who were too terrified to go to their front doors were, those locked behind protocols over which they were powerless were.  No, I had a great deal going for me in that I had space and agency and autonomy.  I cannot say I suffered compared to those who actually did.

What changed?  I was removed from the bustle and chaos of being permanently busy.  I was forced to stop.  I did not like nor appreciate it, there was a terrible realisation that all I had worked for was being dismantled without a backwards glance.  I had a new exhibition on addiction as part of the Brighton Fringe all set up and ready to go in a venue of my choice.  I had the A Graceful Death exhibition showing at a Dead Good Day Festival in Southampton, and a one woman show at that same festival.  I had a marathon walk for Macmillan, fundraising for cancer help, and in my mind the gateway to international stardom was to be opened.  It was all coming together.  And I was fitting my book into this sparkling schedule.  Of course I was distressed to find that it was all cancelled and all that beckoned was another morning in my sitting room in Bognor Regis.

Thrown back onto myself, like many of us, to actually do nothing was impossible at first.  I planned all the jobs I had put off and did them.  I was still feeling busy and purposeful.  Everything wooden in my garden got painted blue.   Furniture I had wanted to upcycle got upcycled. I discovered gardening, I experienced zoom, I tidied my studio and hoovered the floor. I planned my meals, and eating became my highlight of the day and still the lockdown continued.  My father still languished in his care home with his dementia and Alzheimers, now hidden from all of us and left to sink into depression and nothingness on his own.  He could not know why none of us visited any more, and once when I tried to zoom call him as he lay in his bed, with the help of one of the carers who were so wonderful, he tried to find the phone where my voice was, and flailed his arms around making small frightened sounds.  I did not do that again, it made me cry and it showed in my voice.  In the end, he simply stopped living and I made a video about his dying and death. My brothers and I made it to his bedside in time but it should never have been this way, and you can see the video here  Dying Not Quite Alone In Lockdown 2020

During this enforced time of absolute leisure, I began to question myself, what I believed in, and how I was living.  It was a painful process.  For one thing, I saw just how much I had taken for granted.  It never really occurred to me just how hard doctors, shop workers, all those businesses out there who's main job was to make my life easy, work.  Now that they were all gone, I saw just how much I relied on them.  Another home truth I did not want to acknowledge was that if I was all over the place, which I was most of the time, did it mean I could be a little superficial? I did not like that.  It became clear that the more I was doing the less I got done. Now, when the country and world had closed and I was alone against my will in my house, unless I planned my days one after the other so that I could keep busy, there was free time.  Free time was scary. I began to sit down more often and think.  And then I found I would day dream.  And then I found I enjoyed it and soon, I would spend whole afternoons on my sofa doing nothing.  Perhaps I would read, perhaps I would stare out of the window, perhaps I would make lists.  But I discovered that time passing was not my enemy and that there was a much quieter, less anxious person inside me.  I began to enjoy and accept the passing of time and I began to notice the play of light across the days in the rooms of my house.

Another thing happened.  I began to question the news.  I had wholeheartedly accepted everything I heard and read until the first lockdown, and now I began to ask questions.  Things did not match up and now that I had time, I could see that what I was seeing, living and experiencing was not what I was being told I was seeing, living and experiencing. This too was uncomfortable.  I was being challenged to think for myself.  Many things that I held dear because they were so easy to believe turned out to be more complex.  Much more complex.  All my easy certainties needed some careful unpicking and now that I had time to do it, now that I was not distracting myself by being so busy that I could not think, I found I had to rethink many of my beliefs.  I stopped listening to and watching the news. 

My spiritual life changed. With this new time on my hands I began to ask myself what do I actually believe in? This went hand in hand with looking at what I thought I knew and questioning how authentic I thought I was, and asking myself what I was afraid of.  Why do I keep busy?  Why does it matter if I succeed?  What do I mean by succeed? What and who are my priorities?  And how much time do I give to looking after myself? Does any of it matter?  Not in the sense of hopelessness, but in the scheme of things how important are any of these fears? 

A wise person once said that nothing is all just one thing, it is made up of balances. So lockdown has forced me to wake up in a way that nothing else has and not for the reasons I would have imagined.  I still got Covid, and obviously, recovered. But being in lockdown took me off the hamster wheel and made me take a look at my life.  It has forced stillness on me and made me see that constant movement is not necessary.  Quietness, contemplation, simple things are just as necessary as movement.  It has put my feet on the ground and given me space.  It has also made me more aware of the world around me and given me focus.  I did not know I lacked focus until recently. 

I have, in effect, woken up and smelt the coffee. (Except it is also well known that I drink tea, but waking up and smelling the tea does not have the same punch.)

Post script - it is also well known that I am in no way an evolved human being, yet, and that though I am grateful against my will for having been shaken up by something I do not agree with, nevertheless it has started something good.  All I have written about here is true, but knowing things are true and living them are very different things.  All I wish to say is do not be fooled into thinking I have the answer to the universe now.  I do not, not yet, and when I do, I will of course let you all know.

Not yet perfect.  Unfortunately.

 

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The healing room. Making earrings in the sunshine.

 

Claire working on a piece of complicated jewellery loveliness

Ups and downs

I witness many stories.  It is what I do, whether through art, words, image or presence, I witness lives, livings and sometimes, dyings. Though I have experienced my own fair share of stuff I do not know half of what other people have to deal with.  It is always surprising to see how other people deal with the lot that is dealt to them and how, when I think I would not manage to cope, they do.  And also sometimes, when I think I would cope, they do not.  There is so much tied up with living.  It is never a simple straight line, peacefully stretching without interruption from morning till night for ever and ever. Oh no, it is a bumpy, complex affair that can hold both peace and conflict at the same time if it wants, can defy our logic and reason. It shows us that we are also full of paradoxes, we are both simple and sophisticated, we are both full of wisdom and full of ignorance, we are up and we are down - and no matter how we try and control events, or go with the flow, life simply happens to us often and we struggle to explain how and why.

When things are going well, we think we have the answers.  This is how the world works, we say, this is the truth of things.  But when things go what we would call badly we are shaken, our certainties are challenged and we try and find answers to make sense of it.  We want reasons for why things happen, and often because we no longer feel in control we look outwards for where to put the blame. 

 Me

Mustn't grumble.

I live in a lovely home, with a garden that I call my favourite room in the house.  Now that my children are grown and live away from here, I wander with joy and surprise (at the silence and order, mainly) through the empty rooms and feel both utterly delighted to be able to do what I want, and a little guilty at the lack of sentimentality I have about being alone at last.  To put that into context, I raised my three children alone and without a leader (as Horace Rumpole says, the wonderful grumpy old barrister from John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey books. His first triumphant win as a young barrister defending the undefended was despite the lead barrister in court not being there.  Rumple won it alone and without a leader).  I had very little money, space, time or peace in those early days.  Now that I am older, and time has moved on, I can live in glorious solitude (mostly) in this lovely house in a way I could only have dreamt of at one time.  I love my life here.

My friends

My three close friends here live with cancer, the results of cancer surgery, and the uncertainty of living itself.  I have seen the effects of illness on their bodies and have watched the struggle to keep their minds from giving up. I have also seen their determination to live and live well, to find ways to get through, to laugh and look for the silver lining, while telling it like it is.  

The healing room

Before she began her chemo, my  friend Marie was visiting.  The sitting room here has doors that open onto the garden with its flowers and colours, and a big oak table covered in beads, threads, earring making wire and old necklaces to be dismantled and re used.  The sun pours through the garden doors in the afternoons, the big old bright pink sofa is covered in African print cushions, and the sound of the seagulls calling outside reminds us that the sea is just at the end of the road. It was Marie's idea to come and sit at the table when her chemo started, when the treatment for her cancer became difficult, and to make beautiful things with colourful beads in the sunshine.  We asked our friend Claire to join us.  Claire is finding her way back to strength and a place in the world after life changing surgery.  Her cancer treatment from ten years ago has left her vulnerable and physically changed, leading to her recent operation to have half her jaw removed.  So she joined us, and the healing room began. Though she is well now and working again, our friend Gill drops by, just for the love of it, bringing her warmth and wisdom and laughter.  Gill's cancer has also left her physically changed with disabilities for the last twenty years that may floor most of us, but that Gill works with, understands, and will not allow to define her.  

Marie and the box of hair

The healing room is not really called the healing room, but that is what it has become.  Once a week Marie, Claire and sometimes Gill, come to sit and eat, drink tea, play with beads, and create in the late summer sunshine.  It is a space to laugh, forget the difficulties of getting by, and also to talk of things both good and bad.  Each week, something is different.  Last week, Claire arrived with her hair dyed blue.  This week, Marie arrived in a turban with her hair in a wooden box.  She and her boyfriend had shaved it off now that the chemo was kicking in, and it was falling out by the handful.  Instead of making jewellery this week, Marie is going to make something with her hair.  What she ended up making was a false beard and eyebrows and made us all laugh.  But she is serious, and is aiming to make little figures with it.  Marie is a very extraordinary artist.  She will do it. And Gill?  Gill brings flowers, and cakes that she makes, and sits with us understanding all that Claire and Marie are saying.  It has been her story too. 

 

While Gill helps polish the silver (I know) Marie tries out her new hair-beard.

Later, when they have left, I think of their courage.  I think, how would I feel if I were dealing with a possibly life limiting illness?  Marie is beginning her treatment, and has a long path ahead.  She has only just recovered from heart surgery too.  How would I cope if my hair fell out? How would I cope with open heart surgery followed by chemo followed by another operation?  I am not sure.  I hope I do not have to.  Marie's energy is inspiring, and her beauty is wonderful.

I think of Claire who has more will to live, and to live well, than most people I know.  A tiny person, who has a feeding tube into her stomach, half her jaw missing, and a need to eat enough calories not go under seven stone and yet is as elegant, creative and beautiful as a model. Claire has sass.  There have been many tough days for her but she will not give in.  So it is no surprise that she turned up last week with blue hair.  Claire uses real silver for her earrings, and brings her own.  She can swallow but not well.  We give her tea in a teeny cup made for one of my grandchildren.  She manages half of it.

Gill loves the sea, the sky, the wind, the rain and the breeze in the air. She belongs in nature and swims in the sea all year round.  She is tall, slim, brown and free.  Life has been challenging for Gill and I know that she has made the choice to be better than much of what life has thrown at her.  Gill can't eat much either, she has no lower bowel after her cancer and an operation that left her in difficulties, but she does all that she can to live well and that living well includes loving all of us, and supporting us when we need it.  She dropped by the other day to have tea with Marie, Claire and me, before going off to swim in the sea again, and because she is Gill, she brought us home made cakes and flowers from her garden.

And so -

This is how our healing room looks then at the moment. It seems to have created itself, and we are all a part of it.  What seems to work for all of us is the fun, the creativity, and the forgetting of the world out there, unless we want to remember it, in which case we do.  

There's a big world out there.  It is full of people who find pockets of light in difficult times.  For as long as it lasts - our healing room seems to have created itself when the need was there - there is a pocket of light for my friends and me, here with the beads, the garden, the light and the cups of tea and Gill's cake, with the unspoken gathering of people who do not give up and do not give in, and who want to let go for a while in good company together.

 

Claire me and Marie.

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My consciousness is both a divine free floating hippy, and an annoyingly open minded mum.

 Bognor Regis. Where all the deep stuff happens.

My mind is a wilful person in my head with no manners

I walked home from doing something or other last week through Bognor, my mind flitting here and there, thinking and chattering away to itself, as it does.  The day was beautifully sunny, the gardens bright with flowers all along the road back to my house.  I was wearing my favourite pink sundress of all time, since the last favourite one of all time, which had disintegrated and had to be thrown away.  This current favourite sundress of all time is showing signs of old age now too, it is only a matter of time before I will have to find yet another one.  Despite the warmth of the sun and the smell of the salty sea in the still air, I noticed that my mind kept taking me back to memories I would rather forget.  I should be enjoying every step of this walk home, I thought, how can I be thinking of these difficult things and not enjoying this peaceful summer loveliness?  And, I thought, I am wearing my pink summer dress.  Does that not count for something?

It made me think.  What is my mind doing, that it hones in on discomfort like this? Have I any choice?  It is true that I was thinking without thinking, so to speak.  I was not taking part in the physical walk, I was deep in the stuff going on in my head.  It was not all bad, much of my focus was on things I had to do that day which were very nice, but my mind would veer off at a tangent and become embroiled in things from my past, conversations I wish I had not had, bad judgements that led to bad outcomes, and without noticing the shift, I would be back in those things I don't want to think about.  But once aware I was able, also without thinking about it, to come back to my planning once more.  But I felt as if it had the upper hand, that I had to follow its lead, not the other way around.

I wondered about how single minded my mind is.  It does its own thing regardless of what is going on outside my head.  I mean, I can set up a lovely space in which to sit, for example, with smelly candles and red cushions, and think Yes, that will make me happy.  But if my mind doesn't want to engage, and be calm and happy, it won't.  Ungrateful wretch, I may say of my mind, but it is on a roll and doesn't care.  I have read of many strategies to tame the mind, to create awareness, to be mindful and come back to the moment, but I find them difficult to put in place when in the middle of a wilful and determined thinking experience.  There is therapy, at a deeper level, and professional help, but I wasn't quite that bad on my walk home in the sun in my pink dress. It was very curious, I thought, that despite not wanting it, despite having a nice day, and despite having real things to think about, my mind was walking off into the middle distance and fixating itself on problems.

My mind, I thought, is like a wilful person in my head that has no manners.  And then I thought, what is my mind?  This is where we can get lost in thousands of years of speculation and research, many books have been written, many wise people have tried to work this out, so rest easy.  I have no answers and we won't get heavy. But what I did come up with, is that perhaps my mind does not own me, I own it.  Do I have to go down these rabbit holes? Sometimes, yes, sometimes I have to mull over uncomfortable things and it doesn't do to evade them.  But who is in charge?  Wouldn't it be nice if it was me?  For myself, I mean.  I am not in charge of your mind.  You would hate that, I would paint things red and make you drink tea. The point is, I wondered, on this walk home, that perhaps once I know my mind has gone off on a tangent, can I exert some control over it?  Can I say to myself, No.  I am not going there, I see your game and I am busy thinking nice thoughts over here. And there are other things to think about, like the brain and consciousness. 

There is the question too of whether the mind is the brain, or is in the brain, or is something completely separate.  And what is consciousness? If I can step aside and see my mind as a wayward thing in its own right, how am I separating myself from my mind?  If all these thoughts are coming from my brain but now I am conscious of them, does that mean that I am operating independently of mind, body, brain and consciousness, and there is a me that is observing the whole process? 

What does it all mean, Batman?

Well, let's say that the thoughts that I have in my mind come from my brain.  And if I am aware of it, am conscious of it, then perhaps there are three things at play here, all of which are mine, so I will take ownership.  If I were to create characters for these three things, my mind, my brain and my consciousness, it could look like this. My mind is sometimes an unruly, undisciplined trouble maker. It can be really smart and on the ball, but it likes to do its own thing and thinks it owns the world.  My brain is a task orientated professor that has been running things for me since before I was born, has been in the job a while now and has no time for slacking.  My consciousness is both a divine free floating hippy, and an annoyingly open minded mum.  Never bats an eyelid at the weirdness of life, but wants me to keep it real because it knows me so well.  Often waits for me to catch up with it, and is never surprised at anything.

And then of course there is the Me that is observing the whole process.   

With this trio now playing in my head, and as the observer that is outside the whole darn thing, (possibly,) I decided to get to know the one that started all this questioning, my mind.  I decided to have a date with my mind and get to know it.  

The date with my mind.

Got my tray of tea, getting ready to go inside for a date with the unruly rebel within.

 I made myself comfortable, sat down with a good half hour to spare and scrunched up my eyes in an effort to go within.  I was having a date with my mind but did not know where or what my mind actually was, except that it had to be inside me somewhere.  This will be fun, I thought.  What it boiled down to was me watching what I was thinking, and observing where it all went.  That means the free floating divine hippy mum followed the undisciplined trouble maker with a view to understanding what it was doing, so it could be reined in a bit.  The professor would then put a plan in place to cement the understanding. 

I do realise that this is a very simplistic approach.  There are more things going on in my head than just my mind, brain and consciousness.  There is my life experience, my personality, my will and for some, but not for me, there are illnesses and conditions that affects the mind too.  But for the purposes of this little exercise, I was curious to know why my mind was so intent on doing its own thing and what on earth was its agenda.

I came up with a few observations.

• I quite enjoyed seeing my mind as a character, and felt as if it were a bit of a wild animal, in that I did not really know how to approach it or what it would do.
  
• My mind, that unruly and undisciplined troublemaker, can insist on following its own mind, so to speak.  If I am not paying attention, it can cover a lot of ground and make me feel very uncomfortable.  It can get stuck on tracks I do not want to deal with and is very wilful.
• If I am outside it all, then I am the observer.  And in control. Once I follow my thoughts, I can choose to stop thinking them.
• Ha ha ha. Rubbish. 
• While I am feeling thoughtful and unstressed, this all makes sense.  
• When I am feeling anxious and burdened, the divine hippy, the silent professor and and the unruly troublemaker (consciousness, brain and mind) are having a drunken party somewhere and can't even stand up straight.  I have to be very tough and bossy in order to make myself feel better, and it can be hard work if they are all out for the count.
  

The conclusion.

I started this blog wanting to know why my thoughts do their own thing and lead me into uncomfortable places.  Why, even if everything is nice outside do I get stuck in loops of tricky thinking?  Being creative, I decided to give my mind, brain and consciousness personalities to explain to myself why this happens.  I love the quirky, I love thinking outside the box, and this little idea of having a date with my mind really appealed to me.  It also made me laugh.

It is just another way of getting to know myself.  Every time we think we know who we are everything changes and we start again.  I spend much time trying to live a good life, to understand how to be a better person so that I can offer more to the people I meet.  But everything we do, investigate and long for comes back to the question Who Am I. 

The conclusion is that the mind, brain, body, spirit, consciousness that I am writing about here, is me.  It is all me.  I am all of it.  Especially the me that is observing the whole process, and that is where, I think, the real power lies. Who am I?  Does my mind rule me, or do I rule it?  Now that I am a bit more aware and have had a date with it, perhaps I can decide to rule my mind and see how that goes. And if my thoughts rule me in a way I wish they would not, I love the idea of thinking of them personified as a wild, unruly house guest that needs to be pulled up short. 

If you had to think of your mind, your brain and your consciousness as personalities, what would they be?  And who is the person observing it all in your case? Interesting way to spend a bit of down time.  

Still trying to work it out.

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Who are these blinking drug addicts

Hand of an addict. Charcole on paper.

One of the most difficult parts of being alongside addiction for me, is remembering that these crazy addicts are also people.  Dealing with someone who is intoxicated can be very challenging.  If you don't need to engage, that is fine.  If you do, then anything can happen and it is frustrating, chaotic and sometimes frightening.  If someone kicks off in your presence while having taken something (or many things) and you are faced with an irrational, disinhibited, paranoid and angry melt down, it is unlikely that you will say, "Oh, that is just the drugs.  The person themselves is actually very nice."  If you are sensible, you get the hell out of the way or if you are feeling threatened, call the police. 

Many of us have tried to reason with someone who has drunk too much at one time or another.  Many of us have experienced how quickly they can become angry, unreasonable and aggressive. When they are sober, they have no recollection of how badly they behaved. How about someone acting out on crystal meth?  Or cocaine?  Or someone causing enormous chaos while coming down from something or at a critical point because of needing another fix?  These are not people we can chat to or reason with or discuss how their behaviour is making us feel.  How, we ask ourselves, can they possibly allow themselves to get so bad? Where is their sense of shame, where is their self control?  We cannot understand why they do not get help.

Yes to all that.  And also, addiction is not rational.  An addict may defend their addiction to the death, literally, and blame you, me, everyone else, especially loved ones, all the way down. Addiction, to an addict, is reality.  The need (and it really is a need, an absolute catastrophic need the like of which we who are not addicted can have no idea) to keep using makes them manipulative, amoral, paranoid, psychotic, clever, dangerous and without conscience, boundaries or responsibility. And yet.  It is not always like that. There is always someone in there.  There are times when the person lost inside is visible, often it is very poignant.  Sometimes it is astonishing - how can that person who ranted and raved at the bus stop all last night be so interested in and interesting about music?  Or politics? Or whatever?  I have seen someone very addicted to alcohol and opiods sit with a frightened young addict who was hearing terrible voices, talking gently to calm him down and help him feel safe.

The thing is, at some point that person was not an addict.  When they first took something to make the pain go away, or perhaps because it was just what their family or peers did, it seemed a magical answer. It really worked.  It allowed them to self medicate and forget how bad life was, it allowed them to feel in control, it gave them confidence and helped them fit in when they felt isolated and alone, when dealing with abuse and violence at home and around them, when frightened by an undiagnosed mental health condition, when living itself was intolerable.  Checking out of pain and abandonment through substances is a powerful relief.  The person entering addiction feels as if they are in control.  Even when it is patently obvious further down the line that they are not in control, they can insist that they are.  This is denial, and addicts can be great at denial.  

I spoke to an addict recently who dismisses the idea that he is addicted.  Let's call him Bob.  I have a dependency, Bob said, I am not an addict.  Everything about Bob's life and choices points to a deep and long lasting addiction.  No! He said, I am able to stop at any time and I have a dependency.  It seems obvious that Bob cannot stop, regulate nor manage his substances.  How can he not see it?  I thought.  One of the reasons for dependency not addiction, I learned, was that once his medical records had Addict on them he was, according to Bob, discriminated against by the medical profession.  He would not receive proper treatment and would always be seen as a problem.  I do not know if this is true, but I have seen how badly addiction is treated by many (not all) medical professionals.  I must add here that I do not blame them, they are acting in accordance with what they have been told.  I think that addiction is vastly misunderstood, judged, untreated and dismissed.  It is at present, almost impossible to find reasonably effective treatment that is not private. Addicts are the modern day lepers with knobs on.

As we talked, Bob explained how wonderful the drugs are that he takes.  How good they make him feel, how so much of his time is spent looking forward to preparing and taking them.  Bob could describe how all the different drugs he takes affects him, how to inject certain ones to increase the effect, and how to experiment with mixing them all up.  "I love my life," Bob says.  He drinks heavily too, but mostly will not admit to it.  "I used to drink," he says, "but not recently."  I see empty spirits bottles all over the flat, under the bed, in the bins, and some by the bed still half full.  That is not true, and I think, denial.  More denial.  

I have seen Bob in powerful rages in public places because he could not get what he needed.  I have seen Bob in pain in between using, longing to feel a part of the world and to get better, I have heard him talk about loneliness and self hatred.  I have seen how he rejects help, sabotages kindness, chooses chaos and danger time and time again, and I think - are you in denial about all this too?  When you say you love your life?  But I see that whatever substances he is taking are succeeding in obliterating the terrible pain of real life.  It is a vicious circle and it feels like an insurmountable problem.

It is a problem.  I will never forget an addiction counsellor once telling an angry, distressed wife at the end of her tether, that she did not have to rescue her husband but that she could still be kind.  When her drunken husband fell out of bed onto the cold stone floor, she wanted to leave him there all night and make him suffer.  The counsellor understood her anger, understood her feelings of powerlessness and the fact that she had tried everything to help him.  "You cannot help him," the counsellor said, "but you can be kind.  You can put a blanket on him and leave him there."  

When dealing with addiction we try not to rescue, we try not to enter into the madness and we know we have to establish very firm boundaries to keep ourselves safe.  But, we can be very judgemental and unkind to both our addicts and ourselves.  We can want to punish our addicts for their awfulness and madness, and we cannot rid ourselves of that fear that perhaps the addict is right, it is our fault.  Kindness does not mean weakness, compassion does not mean we condone addiction.  We know we have to keep ourselves safe with firm boundaries which can feel counter intuitive at the beginning but are not.  We practice detachment with love and, at least for me, keep hoping for that miracle. And most important of all, if we cannot change our addict or deal with the fall out, we can try, really try, to be absolutely loving and forgiving of ourselves.  A wise man once said that when all else does not work, all we can be is a good example.

I have had to call for help many times.

Who are these blinking drug addicts then?  Without being sentimental or foolish because addiction is an absolute bugger, they are our children, our parents, our partners, our friends, our family.  They are Everyman and Everywoman. And, they could be us too. 

I have just been a guest on the Zestful Aging podcast hosted by Nicole Christina in New York.  We talk about addiction in my family, and how as a mother and of the hope, despair, troubleshooting and lessons I have to keep learning.  We touch on the Addicts and Those Who Love Them exhibition too.  Nicole is a wonderful interviewer.  She is a practicing psychotherapist as well as a successful podcaster.  You can listen to it here.  

Young addict, detail, oil on wood.

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Renaissance grandma

Portrait of my Dad, looking for him behind his Alzheimer's.  I added a little landscape behind my father, with a little figure in a boat on the right hand side of the painting, echoing the tiny patchwork landscapes of my favourite Italian Renaissance art.

In the beginning

It is a well known fact that I am an artist.  I paint, gaze into the middle distance, and once upon a time I had bright pink hair which looked lovely.  If there is an archetype of an artist, I am it.  Being an archetype does not mean I am a wonder, a genius, a trail blazer though I am quite good at painting and writing etc, it means I am a typical arty type and visible as such from miles away.  "Are you an artist?" people ask me, and long ago in my youth, I would not be surprised.  I embodied the bohemian, crazy, eccentric look.  The only other question they could have asked was, "Are you quite sane?" which would have been provocative.  As time has gone by and I have settled into a nice grey haired lady with colourful skirts and earrings, and always the red lipstick, I am a bit surprised when I am asked if I am an artist.  I think I blend in brilliantly with other middle class older ladies who have gone a bit boho. "But how do you know?" I want to say, but don't because it sounds defensive.  "Yes," I say instead, "how clever of you." 

My journey to art-hood was not through art school.  I always knew I could draw and it felt fragile.  Perhaps I felt fragile with it, because as a child and young person I was terribly easily swayed by strongly opinionated people and could find myself in a lot of trouble. Believing I was a fairy too from an early age did not help with my being grounded in reality.  But one thing I did know instinctively was that I could do art and if I went to art school I would lose whatever I had.  If I had to follow art rules, if I could not follow my own inspiration and protect this teeny little flame of absolute certainty that I was already an artist, I would become dissipated and fragmented and stop wanting to create.  So I chose university instead.  I would be safe there, I thought.  Based on what? I hear you say. Precisely.  I have no idea.  But when we are young like this, sometimes we just know things, with no grown up tendencies yet to analyse and dismiss what we instinctively feel.  I ended up studying History of Art at Aberdeen University and left in 1983 with a Masters in Art History.  And during those four years I discovered all I needed to know about the kind of artist I wanted to be.  We had an art library where I would sit for hours pulling out books and reading the lives of artists, looking at their work, and feeling as if I had absolutely come home.  

Pieta by Giovanni Bellini c1455.  Look at the intensity of the expressions, the light on the hair, the halos and the landscape in the corners.

To back track a little, by the time I arrived in Aberdeen I had already found my passion.  It began with my father showing me a Bellini Pieta when I was eight years old.  It blew my mind.  I had never seen anything so powerful, so beautiful, so extraordinary.  Later, while studying art history during my school sixth form, I was introduced to art from the Italian Renaissance, and was hooked.  It touched that nerve that had reacted to the Bellini Pieta when I was eight, and I developed a love paintings (and some sculptures) from about 1390 to about 1500, taking this with me later to Aberdeen, where I was able to study them in more detail.  This then was my passion.  Italian Renaissance frescoes, religious paintings, the lives and loves of the artists themselves and the amazing societies in which they lived.  

In the middle

I don't remember making a decision to base my artistic life on the Italian Renaissance.  It just seemed to happen. Painters and artists in fifteenth century Italy (and Europe) worked for a major family, or the church or a civic body.  These patrons paid for the works they commissioned and the artist and their studio could do very well both professionally and financially.  In my own century, a patron would be a client so I looked for clients and sought commissions. I found I could do portraits, and as a Renaissance artist in the twentieth century as it was then, I took ideas from the works that I loved and began to add attributes to my portraits - clues to who was in the painting, for example a person with a love of music would hold a musical instrument.  A sports player would have something from their sport with them like a tennis racquet or a rugby ball.  I put halos on everyone.  A halo is a circle of light that is painted around the head of a holy figure to tell us that they are divine.  Fine, I thought, I will do that.  Many of my portraits and paintings from the beginning until right now have halos.  I love halos. 

 Jesus on the Tube. A modern icon.

During my time in Aberdeen I found Greek and Russian icons too with the same wonderful lines, patterns and stylised images of the Christian Trinity (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost), of Saints and Angels that I saw in some of the early paintings in Italy.  Oh my, I loved them all.  For a long while when trying to find my way in the real world after university, I painted modern icons where I updated the subject matter and not only made it modern, but gave it a sense of humour.  For example, I painted an icon in the old style, of Mary, the mother of Jesus, having just given birth to the baby in the stable and having an argument with the Angel Gabriel, who had announced nine months before that she was to have this baby.  Gabriel, a top angel, an Arch Angel, had told Mary the baby would be called Jesus and be the son of God.  In my painting Mary was sulking because she wanted to call the baby Duncan. On a table beside her was a congratulations card welcoming Duncan.  From these icons came the Jesus on the Tube painting which showed Jesus sitting on a tube train looking straight out at the viewer, and being ignored by everyone in the carriage, all of whom are looking away. This Jesus on the Tube painting is my most well known image, having been used all around the world in schools, churches, books, Cathedrals, seminaries and convents.  

And now

Fast forward to where I am now where I can look back with all the benefits of hindsight, where I can make sense of things.  I no longer take commissions, my painting now concentrates on making sense of projects that are close to my heart and these projects are all about me, really.  The A Graceful Death exhibition explored death and dying after the death of my partner Steve and to do that, I needed total freedom to follow where the exhibition and subject would lead me.  These days my painting work is focused on addiction, on telling stories of those in and around it, and for this project I continue to need total freedom and autonomy to follow the subject.  

Lou, from the Addicts And Those Who Love Them exhibition.  Note the halo, the decorative motifs on her clothes and the fact that it is painted on a block of prepared wood.

 But! I carry my Renaissance aspirations with me still.  I add halos to, and tiny decorative motifs on the clothes, of people in my paintings.  Once or twice I have added little far away landscapes behind a portrait, and I am still moved and delighted by those early frescoes on the walls of the churches I used to visit in Tuscany, Northern Italy.  In the old artists' workshops the students would learn their art from their master.  There would be apprentices attached to each workshop and some would go on to become masters themselves, some would not.  Some would be more famous than their masters.  These apprentices all had jobs to do on whatever the studio was working on, perhaps painting the foliage on the bottom right of a painting, perhaps helping to create the long flowing material that the figures wore. Perhaps to paint a whole work themselves if it was a minor commission, so that the master would be free to work on and oversee the bigger projects.  I loved the idea of the bustle and industry, I loved how the skill of painting would be honed over time with actual painting, with just doing it.  This is how I learned my painting, by just doing it.  My teachers were in the books at university, on the walls of the churches and galleries in Italy and in my own imagination.  I was never taught any methods, never explored different media and had no instructions in painting itself which is why, probably, I only paint, draw and write. 

In my own life, that atmosphere of the bigger working environment of the old masters' studios came with meetings with, talking to and interviewing all the people who are part of the exhibitions, and creating with them the images to go into my two projects, on end of life and on addiction.  The meetings take place in my studio here, ideas are discussed and we go over how someone will be represented with their story.  And often, my inspiration comes from fifteenth century Italy.  

Today, I don't have to struggle to know who I am.  I have a clearer idea, and of course we never really know ourselves fully.  It is a life long process.   One thing I can say, is that I am still an artist and that if I were very bold (which I can be) I would say I am Renaissance Grandma. 

 

The Duke and Duchess of Urbino painted between 1465 and 1472 by Piero della Francesca was the inspiration for the painting below of Stuart and Sue Pryde.

                               

Painted for the A Graceful Death exhibition, we have the bright blue sky of Tanzania where Sue grew up, and the cottage garden flowers that both Stuart and Sue loved so much.  Sue ended her own life, and this is a diptych in her memory, as much as the above diptych by Piero della Francesca was a betrothal portrait.

 

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