shapeshifting

Last night I went off to my first yoga class in about 12 years (and I only did two back then) and, well, I loved it.

Naturally I have a lot to say about it. Heh.

So the woman teaching the class was very nice, slightly random - no, very random - and after telling me that I was there to just be, not do and that I should just relax, enjoy and be present (all of which I wanted to hear), tried to flog me some shampoo and body lotion. And some vitamins. I guess we all need to make a living but, er, no thanks.

It was a small class, just four as we started and twice that within 15 minutes. All but one of the other people were slightly older than me and the abilities were mixed. I decided to take it really easy, do what I could and no more. Be, not do. Our teacher was careful to tell 'new people' when to stop, to suggest rests and remind 'us' that at any time I could just stop, lie down and have a stretch.

She focused on mindfulness last night so all the way through she prompted us to, I guess, almost meditate. Focus on our breath, let thoughts come and go without latching onto them, be very aware of our body and what it was saying to us.

This was what my body and I needed: conversation. Last year, with invaluable kinesiology work, I became aware that my poor body was neglected and ignored. That I live in my head and beyond and rarely listen to my physical body even though it is wise and strong and gently holds all my experiences. Sometimes, not so gently, it throws them back at me and I don't blame it. Stretching and making physical space creates gaps for old, outdated and/or useless memories and beliefs to be looked at, recognised and released.

It's not right to talk about my body as a separate entity, obviously it's as much me as anything else, but it feels separate after so long with not talking. And frankly, it feels more natural to me to feel compassion and love for something other than my self. Which is hugely telling in itself. Baby steps...

So yes, the positive was a big positive.

I was also very aware that at no point, either in person or elsewhere, did our teacher say what kind of yoga she teaches (correction: her website says it's "based on ashtanga". Really???). Nor, except for once, did she tell us what we were doing, what the pose was called, how we should be doing it or anything else. Most of the time I was left wondering if it was actually yoga! She adjusted my posture just once (when I was lying down) and I know from my own training that some of the other people in the class were putting themselves in dreadful misalignment and at risk of injury. She also spent most of the class with her back to us in a hall with no mirrors so she had really no idea what was going on and it wasn't pretty.

I lay back and thought that one of my strong personality traits is the desire to know. I want names, descriptions, stats, projected outcomes...information. Which all boils down to a need for security. I use that information to build safety nets and walls alongside my ladders and pathways. So maybe what I should do right now is to let that need go. Try flying without the net. Leap into the unknown and see what happens. My body loved the freedom and space to just talk without me drilling instructions into it. Other things have urged me to let go and leap this week, maybe this was just confirmation.

However, I want to learn yoga and I am not going to do that in this class. And, once I give myself chance, I am pretty good at listening to my body so maybe with extra effort I could do that in another, more structured class too. Or at home. So I'm going to book in for an introductory 5 week course at a local Anusara studio, if there are still places. If I love it, great. If not, I can go back to square one or try somewhere else.

But I do know that I will be going somewhere, doing yoga somehow because that feeling, that making of space in my body...that was good.

One day.

(c) James W Vinner

Our very nice, conservation-minded Landlord has it in his head that there are too many jackdaws around this year and they're killing the songbirds. They're not. Anyway, he wants to make a pre-emptive strike and shoot the jackdaws.

my work station

We have jackdaws living in our chimney stack or, as Evie calls it, our jimley. They are The Jimley Jackdaws (and if I ever change my name by deed poll again I'm going to be Jo Jimley-Jackdaw because we all know that would be awesome). I love our jackdaws and do not want their death or the deaths of their subsequently starving chicks literally hanging over our heads.

I quite like it.

(Young jackdaws have pale blue eyes.)

I'm taking some time to be still. To slowly process the stuff that has happened and is happening to us. To find a way forward by listening not pushing. Too tired to push. It's a good practice and it's working. Slowly. We've moved on to one step forward and only one step back at least for a while. I am anxious and stressed and oh jesus h christ I miss Casey so much that it's a constant wound in my heart. But I know I have so much to be grateful for and so little to grumble about really.

To prove it, yesterday I was lovebombed by the sweetest of women.

From @SasLockey came sweet potions for my ritual of bathtime meditation and seeking of guidance. Perfect and so typical of her loving and practical self. Thank you Sas xx

From @mckinleyrodgers came The Wishing Year, a book I read some years ago when life was quite different and now...as soon as I saw it I knew that now is the perfect time for me to read it again. Perfect. Thank you Pen xx

From @creatingwings came Shamanic Reiki, a book that's been sitting in my wishlist for a long time. I read half of it last night and it's with me here now. Awesome, just awesome. And wait...the healing methods they describe...THAT'S WHAT I DO! Perfect. Thank you Meg xx

From @chestnutsfarm came an Amazon gift certificate. She knows I'd've spent cash on petrol or food. She knows that I usually have something bizarre that I really neeeeeeed right now. She knows me better than about anyone. She knows the freedom of choice is gold to me. She knows I now have - delivered today! - a desk easel and a hard copy of Do The Work. Perfect. Thank you Jackie xx

From @postcardsfrom came a tantalising email clue and some words that prove she sees in me what I am almost always afraid to see. Perfect. Thank you Leonie xx

From all my peeps and tweeps came such kind, sweet words for my birthday on Tuesday that I was overwhelmed. In a good way. My heart closed when Casey died. Not permanently but it needed to curl up and heal. You all helped speed that healing a millionfold.

I have some quiet but powerful wishes inside me for this next year. So powerful they're struggling to be contained. I feel, foolishly, that I have to get my ducks (chickens?) in a row before I hit the big Hawaii Five-O in two years. I mean WTF? How did that come around so fast? Still, I always did work well under pressure. I guess it just took more pressure than I could've imagined in order to get me to work. Yup.

Another long weekend for us this week: royal wedding and May bank holiday. The sun is here and I'm wishing for it to stay.

Enjoy yourselves this weekend.

x

This gets better.

Monday I woke up with a migraine. Welcome to my week off. Took a pill. Sometimes the pill just zaps out the migraine and I can function pretty much at full capacity. Sometimes the pill acts almost like an anaesthetic and I'm not really safe to be on my feet. As the pill is a constant, I guess what's happening neurologically in my body must change. Migraine takes many forms even in one person.

So there I am, not yet aware that I'm about to fall into a semi-coma. I have to meet my mother at the local Te3co Superstore (see H for Hell and Holidays), along with Evie and my 5 year old nephew who is lovely but all slugs and snails and hyperactive puppy-dogs' tails. She has some clothing vouchers that she wants Evie to benefit from and frankly, we can't afford to say no. Staying upright and responsible uses all my energy so I'm snappy and impatient. I drive home (I know, I know) and then it hits me full on. I go to bed for one, maybe two hours.

Later I try to download some photos from the weekend - and there are some lovely ones among them - and also, as it happens, the photos I took of Casey on his last day. Just before we headed off to the vet.

Something's wrong with the flash card. I can't copy them off it. I try everything, every method. Even data recovery software. Nope. They're there on the card but I can't have them.

Evie has reacted to the sunscreen she wore on Sunday. She has a livid, itchy eczema all over her face and neck, poor kid.

Charlie's boss comes over for the End of Trial Period Review. When he leaves we're down an income. Face-to-face charity recruitment is a tough game - sales of a worthy product maybe, but a luxury product all the same and this area is just being really hit by the downturn. Targets are nigh on impossible to meet. Charlie tried really hard. They don't care that this could mean we have to move to a one-bedroom flat in a rundown market town. Why should they? Most of the team he trained with have also lost out.

Tuesday means another pill but luckily no coma as I'm working with the Beagles. Since the death of their lady owner/breeder her husband and son (ages, I'd guess, 90 and 60) have soldiered on with my help once a week. They can't manage and so some dogs have been rehomed. They'd said goodbye to sweet Z a couple of weeks ago. Today I go in to find that one of my favourites, lovely T has gone to a new home and the grand old lady Beagle, D, has gone to be reunited with her owner. At 15, she faded out the way Casey did. So we're down to just four Beagles. Four sad Beagles. P, especially, has not recovered from the loss of her human. Today she comes and sits next to me - not on my lap as usual but just next to me. A sad little girl, leaning against me with a sigh. She is still much loved - I think she was a favourite of her owner and so husband and son are particularly attached. I think that T and D leaving has been a bit too much for her. I reiki her while we sit in the sun and she tells me about her sadness.

At home I hear from my sister that the two big employers in our neighbouring town - the two call centres that pretty much saved a generation from disaster when they opened in the late 90s - are closing. We will be flooded with young men and women with young families and mortgages and debt, looking for the few jobs there are available. One of them will be my sister.

Today, after a quick trip to the supermarket brandishing vouchers and reward points, I pick up Evie's best friend and bring them back here. Giggling, shrieking happy girls. I don't care that they're 'making potions in the bath' or destroying some part of the house...just let them be happy. I'll clean up later. While I'm out, the vet calls. Casey's casket has arrived back. Do I want to go and collect it? Well yes, but there's the small matter of having to settle the bill and I have £3 in my bank account. So he's sitting on a  shelf waiting for me to get my working tax credits so that I can pay to have him home with me.

...

Y'know what? I don't want to live my life like this anymore. I'm am so, so literally sick and tired. I'm done with this. I live in a beautiful place and I have so much that I am deeply grateful for but I am guilty of using it as a distraction. It is the opium of this person. I have to break the habit.

...

When I think about how put things right my brain engages and then fails. I know myself to be smart and resourceful and inventive but I got nothing. The very thought of trying again just makes me fall over. Oh I have ideas. Anyone who reads this blog will know I'm always having A Great Idea but now...now I feel paralysed by it all.

And so there is only one thing to do.

Surrender. Give it up. Let go. There is a real sense of things falling away without me even having to actively release them. They are not being 'taken', they are just falling away and I think that might be okay. I understand that it has to happen.

What I need to do is return to the practice I started at the beginning of the year. Healing, meditation, acceptance and space-clearing. Once that space is clear from anxiety and panic - even for a sweet moment of respite - I can hold it open for what comes next. It will come and so will my strength but for now it's just acceptance and practice. Easy to say.

Most of all, knowing that I'm done with the distraction of beauty (not the beauty itself, just the abuse of it), I'm ready to live my life the way I want to. The way I have to.

Part of that is writing about things that matter to me knowing that some readers will a) think I've finally snapped or b) laugh or c) both the above. But I'm done caring about other people more than I care about me. So I'm going to tell you that on Tuesday night I tuned into a drum and journeyed to meet my spirit animal. She's a young wolf and her name, she tells me, is Divna. We met some time back. I thought maybe her name was Irish but looking it up I find it's Hungarian for beautiful. She's certainly that and she's certainly a European wolf. This night I wait for some heavy answer to my questions but she starts dancing. And it's funny. She looks ridiculous and she's doing it on purpose. She's telling me to laugh. I see her dancing painted in broad strokes with energy shining from it

....

I've been trying, in snatched moments to return to Kathleen Dean Moore's Wild Comfort. I read half of it a month or more ago and now I'm back. On Monday I picked it up and randomly opened a page. Now, when I do this I don't usually get some profound sign, I get an advert for dentures or double-glazing. Sorry but it's true. I don't generally have good random-page-mojo but I did this day. This is what I read:

When you die, it's done, the chance is gone. So when you live? When you live, make it all. Don't wait for the rain to stop. Climb out of your tent with your mind engaged and your senses ablaze and let the rain pour into you. Remember: you are not who you think you are. You are what you do. Be the kindness of soft rain. Be the beauty of light behind a tall fir. Be gratitude. Be gladness.

Ever since, like a mantra, I hear, "You are not who you think you are. You are not who you think you are. You are not who you think you are..." and I may well still be curled up in my tent, but I'm looking out on a whole new landscape.

Thank you all for your comments and emails about Casey - they meant a lot. I know many of you have been where I was last Friday and the rest of you are an empathetic, lovely bunch so I was in safe hands.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about what gets us through the bad days. Online and nonline (just made that up. When you see it all over the place by next week...it started here m'kay?) friends play a huge part, that's for sure.  And all my 'funny little ways' that I've - it suddenly became crystal clear - rarely taken seriously, actually do lift me upwards and onwards.

The little steps, the moments of lovely, the act of creating something however small, temporary or even imagined...they really do work. The rituals I've used to work with my own beliefs and understanding of life...they mean something. Something real. The healing energy? It actually heals.

(The day of Casey's death, Evie said to me,"Mum? What you need is a fire. Or even a candle. And you get really close and you tell it all the things you want to say to Casey okay? It really works." Now, a) lighting a candle is something I would do anyway for a travelling spirit and b) WHAT??? Where the heck..? Talk about My Little Shaman. Chip off the adoptive block or what? I'm so proud.)

I think I'm going to focus more on these things here. The things that help me, heal me and move me through the hard places. I'm not going to say 'dark places' because dark is a good place to be sometimes. Powerful.

Anyway...I want to put those things here. Along with random chicken posts of course. Chicken medicine is some gooood shit. Especially from random chickens.

Random Ninny does her best Diana Ross.

"You Can't Hurry l'Oeuf"

I'm struggling a bit with this change over into Spring. No manic, takeovertheworldness this year. I'm feeling depleted and beaten. Weary and full of ennui. I know it will pass.

A lesson came to me this weekend about the strength, power and comfort to be found in the dark. I took myself into it and was told things that have left me back at the beginning. I am the new girl in class for this life lesson. I hesitate to write about it because I have no vocabulary that fits, that does justice.

I'll be honest, the thought of another new lesson, another revelation about life and my place in it fair exhausts me. I feel as if I have no more space in my brain to weave these new threads into who I am. But my intuition knows that they are not new threads, they are the old ones and I am just now remembering them. Feeling them and their pull.

In the past I would have rushed to unravel them. Examine them and proclaim the truth found. Not now. I seem to be in a place where the thing to do is sit and listen. I'm not required to do anything other than that just yet. The outside life is noisy - ironically we've spent the weekend being bombarded by our neighbours' loud music - and hearing this lesson is hard to do but I know it's important and I have time.

Here's the core of it: each life on this planet is part of a whole. Each life is a conduit for the voice of the planet. Each life is a unique song that She sings. When we let go and relax, we open to that song and life can flow.

Do I sound crazy? Sitting here, on a Monday morning, at a desk in a brightly lit office, typing about being the song of Gaia when my life is as chaotic and tense as it is...yes that may appear to be crazy to some.

I prefer to think of it as a line in the first verse.

P.S. Casey is good. He has no idea that he's supposed to be dying. He has this cumbersome swollen leg and he's just skin and fur and bones but he's still Casey, still totally with it, comfortable and happy. Eating for Britain, enjoying the sunshine, getting and giving lots of kisses and headrubs. His song is still rich, melodic and beautiful.

Thank you all for diving in on my rant yesterday; it seems I am not alone! I do hope I didn't come across as ungrateful. I'm profoundly aware of how good a life I have with my home, my family (need I add that I include 2 and 4-legged members?), my life in nature that nourishes me. I love and deeply appreciate their presence in my life.

There is a part of me that is unfulfilled and becoming increasingly stroppy about it. I swing between feeling guilty for wanting (even) more and feeling guilty for feeling guilty for wanting (even) more. Why shouldn't I want more? Because I have so much already. But why shouldn't I want more? Because...yadda yadda yadda. Dizzy.

Yesterday afternoon we got some sunshine and I went out with Nell and Jackson. We walked down a long narrow-ish field towards the Withy Bed, the old local name for the willow copse. In the field above us, farmers were turning over the earth and spreading manure, a practice that always brings in the birds. Where there are small birds there are bigger birds and when there are thermals, those bigger birds will be buzzards.

This picture of a Chalfield buzzard (maybe even one of those I saw yesterday) was taken by Charlie.

I once thought I'd seen five together, usually the most would be three at once, but yesterday there were nine. NINE. Possibly even ten. All soaring on the warm air in a bright blue sky, distinctive calls ringing across the fields. Pure magic.

We walked back along towards home and as I got to the gate - some distance from where I'd stood and watched the birds - I noticed one had followed us. I stood and looked up as it came closer and closer before circling a while over my head. It clearly took a good long look and then flew off. I've never been so close to one of these beautiful birds before.

Looking up the symbolism of the buzzard it became clear that there is a difference between UK and US terminology. In the US a buzzard is usually included with vultures; here it's a hawk. So I focussed on hawks and found this:

Intuitive ability to discern the message and seek the truth is one of Hawk’s powers that he imparts to humans. He teaches people to provide for self and family. Another lesson is to be observant and pay attention to what might be overlooked, possibly a talent unused, a blessing for which gratitude hasn’t been given or a message from spirit. He teaches people they must be awake and aware. Hawk’s medicine helps people to know how to interpret messages from spirit by bestowing upon them a higher perspective so they can see details of the bigger picture. He cautions humans to times when not to take action because they don’t have all of the information we need yet.

Well it's 11 months since I wrote this post and finally, with pounding heart and more adrenalin than can be healthy, I am ready to launch the Shapeshifting etsy store.

It's a small affair to start with but has huge significance in my life and I believe that with this first step taken, I'll be walking this path more often during the coming year.

* do ya see what I did there?

Yesterday, as I walked along an open track, Evie scootering madly ahead, I turned into the strong wind, spread my arms and just let go of as much as I could. Felt the energy blow through me, taking away stale feelings and stories, leaving open spaces for me to dance in, paint in, leave to grow wild.

I feel a little lighter. More able to leave the ground and take a wider view of life. It's good, very good.

Today I am grateful for:

• The elements, shaking and waking me up
• The Lite Pod (Miraculous, but 45 minutes? Two hours is more my level.)
• Hope

*with a hat-tip to this print by Kelly Rae Roberts that hangs in my home.

Before

99p thrift find

After

Jackdaw, wolf, horse, chickens, woodpecker, owl, jay, my bbc coven, badger.

Magic.