This challenge by Fiona and Kaspa at Writing Our Way Home is to produce a brief piece of writing each day which engages fully the present moment.

Here are my Small Stones from my journal during the second week of January.

Nine

Incense smoke doesn’t curl if there is no breath of air, it flows straight upwards like an impossible thin stream of water.

Ten

A lumpy shape lies torn in the middle of the sunlit road. Reddish fur coated with deeper red. A pointed face. A suggestion of bared teeth. I’m driving too fast to tell if it is dog or fox. Which is probably what the the driver who hit it was doing.

Eleven

The little girl’s full pink skirt flips in joyful patterns as she skips, hops and jumps her way along the road, one long sock to the knee, the other around her ankle.

Twelve

I scatter the damp brown compost through my fingers into the plastic-lined basket then nestle the purplish hyacinth bulbs comfortably into their dark bed. I tuck them in with more compost until even their green buds are hidden. They’ve been put to bed so that they can wake up.

Thirteen

The steering wheel is smooth and hard under my hands, pocked with tiny pinpricks in the matt surface, ample bumpy spaces on the inner rim for my fingers to grasp.

Fourteen

Today there are two small stones, both from a walk I took this morning. The difference is that the first was a moment of deliberate engaging in conciousness, in the second I had no choice. It was an interesting contrast.

Their cheery reds, yellows, greens and blues half hidden by sombre tarpaulins, the narrow-boats huddle together in the freezing marina, dreaming of spring.

My right foot slips: the fall happens in slow motion. I stagger to keep my feet but I’m on a downward slope. I have absurdly ample time to turn sideways and grab a solid low bush. I embrace it, thankful for my padded jacket and long gloves. I glance around: no-one saw. Struggling to my feet, I walk on as if nothing has happened.

I’m taking part in the Small Stones challenge by Fiona and Kaspa at Writing Your Way Home. Each day in January, we are writing a “small stone”: a brief piece of writing which engages fully the present moment. Here’s what it’s all about:

Most of us have crowded, busy lives. It’s hard to remember to pay attention to what’s around us – to pause and really listen to the blackbird’s song, or to notice the bright poppies by the roadside. But when we really pay attention to other people & to the world, we start seeing things more clearly – we become more intimate with them. We feel more loved and loving. We feel more at home in the world, with others, and in our own skin.

We pay attention by writing. We write short observational pieces called small stones, and we write in our journals, and we write books. We want you to help you wake up to the beauty of the world through writing too.

I’ve been sharing my own Small Stones at the Writing Your Way Home website, but it just occurred to me to publish them here also.

So below is the backlog, the remainder to follow day-by-day.

One

New Year’s morning. The board is bright white, the knife dull silver, the lime vivid. As I cut, juice coats my fingers. Thin slice then sharply fragrant in the mug of boiling water.

Two

Downstairs. My knee creaks. So does the step.

Three

Immediate prayer requested for a gravely sick child. My mind flusters. Is there a correct way? Do I believe it will help? Prayer chains of unknown people in India pressed into action: what nonsense. And yet yes, I do believe it will help. So I write his name on a piece of paper. I draw circles around it to encircle him. I picture him surrounded by love. That’s one way to pray for a gravely sick child.

Four

Cord jeans smooth and bumpy under my fingertips. Velvet with attitude.

Five

With a whirr, two alarming bumps, a wheeze and a loooong sigh, my printer springs into life, surprising me after a minute of silence with a gentle burp.

Six

The colours in the supermarket are too bright. Oranges and pinks clamour for attention. Even the fruit and veg are too noisy and look plastic.

Seven

The honeyed drift of scent from the jasmine candle next to my bed is suddenly undercut by a sharp animal tang from the cat litter tray in the bathroom.

Eight

Plump warm raisin pillows nestle in their creamy porridge bed then pop their luscious sweetness against my teeth and tongue.

A receptionist, let’s call her Helen, at the large organisation where I just finished working was in a pedestrian -v- bus accident a while back. The bus won. Helen was in a coma for two weeks but after three months is finally home from hospital and making good progress.

Our head chef, let’s call him Tony, delegated his corporate catering responsibilities and set to with a will, baking bushels of cupcakes which he sold to raise money for Helen’s family. He raised several hundred pounds, helping them with the extra costs you get when a wage-earner is out of action (even in a country like Britain where, thank God and politics, we have universal free healthcare, flawed as it may be).

What’s the point of telling you this? It struck me that a crisis can tell us a lot about ourselves. Tony is a really good executive chef. He organises his staff, his menus and his kitchen professionally and well. But when something touched him where he lives, he didn’t tell his staff to bake cupcakes while he set menus, he didn’t write a cheque, he took refuge in his real genius: the creative act of cooking.

It troubles me that many of our corporate and service structures are set up so that promotion is usually possible only with increased responsibility in the form of managing people, budgets and so on.

Gifted teachers (and God knows we need them more than almost anyone) can only earn serious money when they give up teaching and start running schools. Brilliant lawyers get pressured into running law firms and judged by how good their marketing efforts are. And all this happens while those who do have true creative genius for administration and management are seeing their jobs cut back as unnecessary.

Leadership isn’t something done only by those running large organisations or governments. Any time we see someone using their own particular genius, we see leaders in action: parents, fashion designers, priests, museum curators, counsellors, nursery teachers, painters, secretaries, electricians, programmers, nurses, sports people, dancers, even the occasional politician.

If you change only one life, you are a leader. If you change only your own life, you are a leader.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if everyone could work using their own unique combination of creative leadership gifts?

How can we make it so? Any ideas?

Yummy image above by clevercupcakes

Elsewhere:

Marcus Buckingham‘s book Now Discover Your Strengths was ground-breaking when it was first published for it’s emphasis on people honing our strengths, not trying to solve our weaknesses. His premise is that we will only ever be mediocre when we concentrate on our weaknesses, but if we do everything we can to develop our natural strengths and talents, there’s not stopping us. It’s a great book.

I also love Seth Godin’s uncompromising approach to excellence. He almost never writes anything ordinary but I particularly enjoyed his exhortation to be a passionate renegade.

My last two posts were about clearing away distractions and focusing on tasks we must do. Our reward? Playtime!

Are you doing what you love?

Early on in The Artist’s Way course by Julia Cameron, she suggests making a list of 20 activities you love doing. Fancy making your list now? Go ahead, we’ll be here when you get back. (Whatever you do, don’t list things because you think you ought to. Should has no place here.)

Now go through your list and put a rough date next to the last time you did each item. I was amazed when I did this. It’s been months and in some cases years since I did some of the things I love:

• Make collage and soulcards? About three months
• Spend time alone on the shore watching the sea? About three years
• Work on smallholdings with animals and growing things? About 30 years

And the task resulting from this list? Pick two things and do something related to them this week. (I’m making a collage tonight and I’m taking a day trip to the sea next Friday.)

Don’t wait for the right time

Image by Veni Markovski

One invaluable piece of advice given by Cameron and others is not to wait until you have large blocks of time for whatever activity you are called to. Maybe you have half an hour you can devote without guilt to tumbling down the rabbit holes of the internet, unearthing some of the magic that lurks there. Take those small windows of time that occur during the week and pick out a new melody on your guitar, sketch a short story outline, read a poem, dance to your favourite song, walk in the sunshine, juggle, pick through your treasure trove of ephemera and be inspired. If you wait for the perfect opportunity, the perfect moment, it will never come.

Make a date with yourself

Having said that, some fun things and some pieces of creative work do require a respectable block of time. Put it in your calendar, just as you would a business appointment or a date with your honey. Honour it, make it sacred, don’t let anything get in the way. I think there’s a bit of a contradiction about playtime: you have to be serious about preserving it, otherwise the day-to-day stuff will just get in the way. And if you’re a woman? I think creative women need that streak of ruthlessness creative men have always had. There’s a film about female artists called Who Does She Think She Is? that looks really interesting. Check out the trailer:

Life running out on you?

A sign-off I sometimes use in my emails is by coach Barbara Sher: It’s only too late if you don’t start now. I must acknowledge her fabulous book Refuse to Choose for the ideas below.

When you get to middle-life, there’s often a feeling of panic. There’s no way you’ll get to do everything you want. You have all this life pulsing through you but one day it will be gone and you don’t want to waste it. You want to do everything, to grab everything, NOW!

Make a bucket list. (You know what a bucket list is, don’t you? Everything you want to do and see before you kick the… There’s a film of this name with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. See if if you haven’t. You’ll enjoy it.)

Then take the biggest sheet of paper you can find and divide it into six squares. One square for each of the next six years. Write the year in the relevant square. Then take your bucket list and start with what you want to do most. (Learn Chinese? Visit St Petersburg? Work on a donkey sanctuary? Start a cult?) Write your most important item(s) in year one. Then put the next items in year two and so on. Stick it up on your wall. This isn’t set in stone, you can change it. But psychologically it’s magic because it means you have a plan. Life is not just going to go on by without you. You can use that sheet of paper and take the first practical steps towards making your biggest dreams come true.

Wishing and dreaming

Image by Gail548

Finally, a practical idea about not losing sight of those little wishes and dreams that pop into your head at odd hours. There’s something a little strange that happens when we allow ourselves to start living the lives we dream of. All those synapses start firing in our brains, making connections, and ideas begin to flood in. Don’t lose ‘em. I carry a little notebook with me always and once a week or so I transcribe the ideas I’m in love with onto cards for my dream deck. What’s a dream deck? A box of index cards on which you write all these random wishes and dreams. Find a gorgeous box to store them in. If the bucket list is the big picture stuff, the dream deck is the detail and the decoration.

Just scribble down “make and sell dream pillows“, “start a blog about growing rare variety tomatoes”, “earrings in the shape of angel wings” or whatever, each on a separate index card. Doesn’t matter how ordinary or how fantastical, you probably won’t do most of these. But it’s huge fun to leaf through them when you feel like it and see just how amazingly creative your mind is. And if that rare tomato blog really grabs you, then you can start it, the idea won’t have been forgotten.

So what dreams do you want to play with? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Main image from iStock

Elsewhere:

Chania Girl, living her dream in Greece (and having wise thoughts about the financial troubles) writes about her Joy List here. And Anita reminds us we need some lazy afternoons with this delightful picture.

After a trip to the dentist yesterday (no problems, thanks to my obsessive flossing!), I treated myself to a visit to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. I wanted to see their new exhibition of British quilts from 1700 – 2010.

Now I doubt I will ever be a quilter. The sheer intricacy, planning and skill required would beat me, I think. But there’s something about quilts that is expressive of something deep and enduring.

The exhibition was divided into several parts, from the domestic skill of creating quilts for warmth to modern art quilts. There were several illustrating rites of passage, such as wedding celebrations.

Even in early days, quilts were used as political commentary. In the 18th century, women stitched household quilts bearing pictures representing particular causes. Modern art quilts are more overt in their politics. One in the exhibition looks at first glance like classic toile de jouy fabric; when you look closely, the figures are homeless people. Another, all feminine pastel colours, is made up of little advertisements for how women can improve their housekeeping.

The most moving to me was a quilt by Michele Walker called Memoriam. Made to commemorate her mother’s slow decline and death from Alzheimer’s disease, it takes the starting point of quilt as comfort and subverts it, using wire wool and plastic. There are twisted strands of wire wool all around the edge of the quilt, representing the way Walker’s mother used to twist her hair hopelessly and endlessly. There’s a long discussion of the quilt as keepsake of identity here.

But of course these named artists’ quilts are very new. Mostly, quilts were stitched by ordinary people whose names we’ll never know. One thing that struck me about this anonymity is its similarity with monastic history. We have no idea of the names of those individual monks who created illuminated manuscripts, just as we don’t know the names of the individual housewives who stitched these objects of comfort and beauty.

I rather like that. As we enter Holy Week, the work of all those anonymous people is like building blocks of history, reaching out to us.

Image: “At the end of the day” by Natasha Kerr

Elsewhere:

Well of course my link today can only be to the acrylic quilt at Mind Sieve’s Capture.

This morning during meditation, my monkey mind was especially chattery, and an image came to me. In the room of my mind, narrow jagged cracks were splitting open in the walls and through them, dark figures came scrambling towards me. Rather frightening, and a very vivid representation of distraction. (Of course, for the rest of the meditation I had to keep setting aside thoughts of how I would share that image with you in this post…)

What has this got to do with books?

I felt quite sad last night as I looked through my bookshelves. So many books I’ve never read, or read years ago and will never return to. And a couple I have duplicates of for some reason.

Every one of those books is a distraction, a reminder of what I won’t do or what is past. Every one a witness to my monkey mind. But I love them and I want them to go to good homes. I’m reflecting that giving things away is actually a subset of hospitality, my word for the year. Sharing ideas and potentialities is one of the most hospitable things we can do.

So below are details of 15 books I’m giving away, with Amazon links for further information.

If you want one or more, let me know which in the comments – by next Sunday 28 February. If there’s competition for a book, I’ll put the names in a hat (do I even own a hat?) and pick the winner. Then I’ll email to ask you for your snail mail addresses. Don’t worry if you’re not in the UK, I’m happy to post anywhere.

1. The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. A very funny and insightful record by a secular Jew living in New York of his year trying to take the Bible literally. A great “delve into it from time to time” book.
2. The Reflective Life by Ken Gire. Creating pauses in our lives to listen and become more sensitive to God in our everyday moments.
3. Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis. His classic autobiography.
4. The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis. His exploration of why, if God is good and all-powerful, do God’s creatures suffer. The pages are a bit yellowed, I’ve had this forever.
5. Julian, Woman of our Day edited by Robert Llewelyn. An anthology of work by eight authors exploring the mystical insights of Julian of Norwich.
6. In Search of a Way by Gerard Hughes. Hughes is a Jesuit priest. This is the story of his physical and spiritual journeying.
7. Transitions, The Challenge of Change by Barrie Hopson and others. A thin, practical workbook with a sense of humour and cool illustrations that will help you meet change more positively.
8. In Search of Stones by M. Scott Peck. Subtitled A Pilgrimage of Faith, Reason and Discovery, and described by the author of The Road Less Travelled as “the closest thing to an autobiography I will ever write”.
9. Befriending, a Self-Guided Retreat for Busy People by Joseph A Payne, O.P. A practical book full of suggestions, exercises, scripture and other treasures. Flicking through it, I came upon lines by Blake: And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.
10. The Good Life Guide: Saints, Snobs and Sanity by Bernard Basset. A book about prayer and life that tries to draw a distinction between pleasure and happiness and does so in a very unstuffy way. Some of the pages are a bit scuffed – I dropped it at some point.
11. Why Did I DO That? by George New and David Cormack. Subtitled Understanding and Mastering your Motives. Someone recommended it and gave it to me as a gift but I’ve never been able to get into it. It looks very sound though, lots of diagrams and questionnaires.
12. Angels in Art by Belinda Wilkinson. A beautiful and very tiny book with colour plates of angel paintings by some of the great masters, such as da Vinci’s Annunciation and Gauguin’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.
13. How Proust can change your life by Alain de Botton. An exploration of Proust’s writing, and how it applies to everyday life. Described (by people more educated than me who have actually read Proust) as intoxicating, stimulating, charming and amusing.
14. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Let’s always remember the need for women to have financial, intellectual and creative freedom.
15. All God’s Creatures by Sister Seraphim. Old enough (1966) to be described as “gay” in the former sense of the word, these are the autobiographical writings of an eccentric, animal-loving Englishwoman who became a Russian Orthodox nun and takes “all creatures great and small” pretty literally. She rescues them as often as she can, like the live rabbit brought to the monastery as a gift for the dinner table. I inherited this book from my aunt, who seems to have inherited it in turn from the Surrey County Library.

Image by Vince Alongi
(check out his work – a very talented photographer)

Elsewhere:

Several links for the price of one: Christine’s Lenten Reflections signposts other moving Lenten journeys. By coincidence, she also mentions Jacob wrestling with the angel (book 12 above).

Today I’m playing along with Magpie Girl’s *8 Things post. This week’s topic is Artists Who Inspire.

Well how on earth to come up with such a list, to whittle down an amazing pool of world-wide talent to eight? I’m going to use geography and restrict my list to English artists. Of course I’m interpreting “artist” in the widest sense, and although some of these names are famous, some are not.

Here goes:

1. Rima Staines, who made my clock. Her life reflects her art, and vice versa.
2. Through Rima, I found dark folk musicians Telling the Bees (she did their website). Quintessentially English, they’re just beginning to get the recognition they deserve.
3. The inimitable Mr Crisp, who made his life the canvas for his art and style, proving that  you can be an artist in any way you want. He also wrote some very witty books.
4. Film maker Sally Potter, whose work is a wondrous festival of independent experimental intelligence.  Her most recent film, Rage, is for sale here. And I love this clip from The Tango Lesson from 1996, which Potter appeared in as well as directed.
5. Looking at clothing as art, we Brits are pretty bloody good at that! Although she’s mainstream now, Vivienne Westwood has never lost her early anarchic edge, and while Alexander McQueen and the insanely talented John Galliano (who was brought up in the UK even though born in Gibralter) are huge names, there are amazing young English designers pouring out of Central St Martin’s each year – here’s a link to their 2009 BA (Honours) Fashion runway show. Warning: serious fashionistas only, it’s over an hour long. Heidi Klum, eat your dull suburban little heart out!
6. OK, you got three for one under number 5, so this is the last:  writer Sara Maitland. Her work is extraordinary: intelligent, compelling, completely unpretentious and sometimes very funny. Enjoy her collection of short stories On Becoming a Fairy Godmother, or her autobiographical A Book of Silence.

Well all that Englishness has given me a yen for a cup of tea and a ginger biscuit. Those are my eight inspirational artists. Who are yours?

Elsewhere:

Go check out other *8Things entries at Magpie Girl.

I recently started a new creative outlet: SoulCollage®.

It was Lucy, a trained SoulCollage® facilitator, who put me on to this new form of self-expression and I’m finding it extraordinarily helpful.

What is SoulCollage®

You can read about it on the website. This is an extract:

Imagine learning to make your own personal deck of divinatory cards and then learning to consult them! You can do it! One by one you can create lovely cards by selecting images, cutting them out and pasting them on to pieces of matboard. Each SoulCollage® card you make will reflect one facet of your Self and or Soul, while the evolving deck will reflect the whole panorama which is “you” as a whole Being – your SoulCollage. I guarantee you will cherish your cards as if you were holding yourself in your hands. Bit by bit, you will be making them, fanning them out, putting this and that into perspective in your life, and overall, discovering your inner wisdom.

The process

It isn’t just cutting out a bunch of images and sticking them on a card… and yet it is just cutting out a bunch of images and sticking them on a card!

It’s a reflective process of finding images that really call to you and fitting them together. There’s a discipline to it: you cut the cardstock to a certain size (I use 7.5″ by 5.5″); there are four “suits”, each representing elements of the self; there are questions to ask yourself as you discover what each card represents for you.

The first suit is made up of the Committee cards, the psychological dimension, where parts of the personality are identified, named and imaged.

My first cards

I’ve made four cards so far and I’ve found the journey incredibly interesting on all kinds of levels. Most surprising for me was that my first two cards – the images to which I was most immediately drawn – were inner child dimensions of me. Surprising because I tend to be a bit cynical and dismissive about references to  the inner child. It shows you can’t suppress forever! Here they are:

The Frightened Child Committee. The part of me that cannot be rational about the monsters under the bed – because there are sometimes monsters under the bed.

This was the very first card I made, at a time when I actually was not consciously feeling frightened. And yet this little girl and the other images yelled for attention.

Making the card was a very helpful experience of discovering that yes, actually I was afraid, and I was able to identify what I was afraid of.

The Joyful Child Committee, made the next day, was a much lighter experience. So full of freedom and, yes, joy.

She showed me very graphically how possible it is to hold both joy and fear together, and that joy can overcome fear.

This really is an amazingly interesting and therapeutic process. I’m finding it really helpful, and what I love about it is that you don’t really know what’s coming out of your emerging image until it is complete.

Click on the images to see them larger

I often find myself wondering idly what I’d save if I had to rush out of my burning house. Of course I hope I never have to, and of course first would be my cats.

And now I rejoice in knowing exactly what the second thing would be.

Some months ago, I put my name on a waiting list with nomadic artist Rima Staines, for her to create one of her clocks especially for me. It felt really extravagant and slightly strange. I’ve never commissioned a piece of art for myself.

I love Rima’s work. It plunges you deep into a slightly unnerving world of folklore and fairy tales, dark forests in which you’re never quite sure what magical being might be peeping out from behind the next tree.

I wanted a clock to celebrate the adventure of my ageing. The attraction was something about a clock ticking away the months and years by my side. This was my “brief” to Rima:

What sort of clock would I like?  I envisage a magical, wise, wild older woman who could lead me through my own middle age into cronehood. Long white hair. Bare feet. Rich autumnal colours shading into winter. Moon and stars. In a forest, perhaps? Or a cave mouth? My September birthday means my Celtic sacred plant is ivy, representing regeneration. I don’t want do be too prescriptive but that’s a flavour of what I would like.

Rima emailed last week to tell me the clock was finished, on its way, and to warn me not to look at her blog if I wanted the clock to be a surprise, because it was pictured there.  With heroic self-discipline, I resisted clicking on the beckoning link to The Hermitage. After a few days the doorbell rang, and the postman stood there with a large flat package.

Upstairs I ran, and peeled off the first layer of packaging. Then the next. I was full of tension. What if I didn’t like what Rima had done for me? What if I was disappointed? Another layer. What if it was broken? Then a piece of red cord velvet revealing the final layer of packaging, about 10″ by 8″, bound by russet raffia. And then the clock.

It is so perfect, so beautiful, so intricate I got goosebumps, I had tears in my eyes. Here it is:

The wood is yew. You can see more photographs and hear the story of its making at Rima’s blog, here. If you want to commission one of her clocks, go to Once Upon a Clock (worth it just to be hypnotised by the ticking and the turning). Thank you Rima, I’ll treasure this forever.

Elsewhere:

Another artist whose work I love (and some of whose products I use) is Teesha Moore. I recently found her channel on YouTube, here, which has some great practical instructions on visual journalling, showcasing her unique style.

It’s a very special full moon tonight, the Harvest Moon, and the latest full moon dreamboards are being hosted over at Jamie Ridler Studios. Jamie suggested an “earth” theme this month, especially timely as it is the feast day of someone who would no doubt today be known as a eco-warrior and vilified in the tabloid press, St. Francis of Assisi.

I made the collage above to reflect both the abundance of the earth and that we are part of her bounty, not separate from it (I’ve tried to make the human figures “grow” out of the globe of the earth). It’s my dream we should all understand that we are one living organism.

Elsewhere:

Do go on over to see all the wonderful dreamboards at Jamie’s site. And talking of St Francis, if you haven’t done so already, you could do a lot worse than sign up here for daily meditations by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr.

Finally, I can’t resist putting up this video today (the last minute or so is skippable):