An acquaintance recently joked about coming along to an impending workshop and being on her best behaviour. It was one of those jokes that had an undercurrent of truth and sadness, because all her life this person has been told she is too loud and too brash and too overwhelming and too… well MUCH really.

And there’s probably something to it. This woman has a real presence. You know when she’s in a room. You can’t ignore her.

And that isn’t the whole of her. Her vibrant character is warm and protective of others; it includes a self-deprecating sense of humour, brave spiritual questing and a core of vulnerability. So I really hope she decides to be true to herself on that workshop and forgets about any particular type of behaviour.

We’re all flawed and we all carry those flaws along like a snail with its shell. If we try to deny our flaws, they can escape in alarming ways. Perhaps the best approach is to acknowledge  the behaviour, the thought or whatever is (once again) harmful, greet it, then move on as soon as possible.

Not for the first time here, I quote the great rebbe Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

And remember that humour is a great medicine. Laughing gently at ourselves is one of my primary prescriptions for a compassionate life. Another quote, taken from Cardinal Basil Hume’s eulogy:

He took God so seriously that he didn’t need to take himself seriously at all

Image by Pink Sherbet Photography

Elsewhere:

I’m so encouraged by the attempts all around the world to go deeper, to explore the big questions. Clare’s been doing so here. And anyone who can weave together Star Wars, Matthew’s Gospel and lotus blossoms as Come to the Garden does is OK in my book.

Life isn’t always easy, is it? We get tripped up, tired out, over-committed, afraid.

That’s when we need to pull our communities and our stories around us like a warm blanket and let them draw out of us the strength and power that we all have, deep inside.

A great new e-course

Which is why I’m delighted to be a contributor to a new six-week e-course that Rachelle Mee-Chapman is launching at Magpie Girl on 13th September. It’s called Power Stories: tips and tales for standing in your own power.  Here’s the first part of Rachelle’s description of her course:

“Standing in your own power” is a phrase I use to describe a certain way of be-ing that involves listening to your intuition and following your gut. Too often, these things are programmed out of us by social norms and well-meaning institutions.

This course is designed to help you tap into your intuitive source of guidance; and to shut down noisy interlopers. As a result you will move through life from a place of powerful internal authority.

Learning to STAND results in:

• a strong sense of direction about personal relationships
• confident, “right fit” work decisions
• the strength to live into your own spiritual or religious beliefs
• a life that feels stable and energized – not timid and depleted.

Sounds just right, doesn’t it?

Now in the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that if you book a space on Power Stories using the link in my sidebar to the right, I get a financial reward. But I would not recommend anything to you unless I believed in it, and I’ll be joining in the first Power Stories course myself.

You can read more about the course and the contributors at Magpie Girl: just click here.

Interview with Magpie Girl

Rachelle

Here’s an interview with Rachelle about her course. And keep reading to get to an exciting offer at the end of this post.

1. What inspired you to develop and offer your readers this course? My post *8Things I know about Standing in Your Own Power really resonated with Magpie Girl readers, and people emailed me asking for more information and advice.  I’m always excited by topics that emerge organically from the community. So I created more material around the topic, since it was such a felt need.  Many women struggle with standing in the truth of who they are.  Institutions, male influence, cultural images of “ideal” women – all these can push us around. Yet my young daughters, ages 10 and 12, intuitively stand in their own power. This tells me we aren’t meant to shrink and hide ourselves. I believe we can recover the ability to be powerful.
2. How did you decide what other voices to bring into the class and what do you think the diversity of voices brings to the course? Because learning to stand in my own power is a growing-edge for me, I wanted to recruit partners in the process. I thought of women who just hum with power, confidence, and kindness; and invited them to participate in the course. The lessons I received back from them were incredible! Having so many voices in our teaching pool helps us learn from a wide range of life experience – gay/straight/bi, married/divorced/single; child-free/mothers, 30/40/50 – there are so many perspectives amongst the contributors; it’s bound to meet the needs of far more people than my voice alone could impact.
3. Do you have a favorite aspect of the Power Stories? I’m really pleased that it has collection of learning tools – essays, podcasts, videos, and worksheets.  That variety makes it very textured and accessible. And I love how communal it is – both that the idea for the course emerged out of the Magpie Girl community, and that it is led by a collection of amazing teachers. Plus I get a kick out of some of the downloadable treats my design partner is cooking up!
4. How does Power Stories tie into the other work you do on Magpie Girl, and Flock ? At Magpie Girl I provide care for creative souls. At Flock we are building an online soultribe for spiritual misfits. Power Stories offers a skill-set that both communities need. Magpies need to stand in their own power to develop their artistic voice and to make room for creative pursuits. Flock members need a deep-rooted stance to support them as they re-define faith and spiritual practice in their own powerful terms.
5. How will the course fit into busy lives? You can read each lesson in Power Stories (or do each worksheet) as they arrive in your email box every couple of days. Or you can save them up and give yourself a bunch soulcare goodness on a self-styled weekend retreat. It’s up to you. Plus, I’m sort of a lackadaisical minimalist. I like a nice turn of phrase, but I don’t want to read filler. So each piece of material is honed to be beautifully to the point.

An offer you can’t refuse

Rachelle’s course will normally cost $100 (£65) for the six weeks, which seems like a pretty good deal to me, given all that’s included. And I’m really excited to say that I have two spaces on the course to give away for free. Nada. Nothing. If you want to be one of two lucky readers to get this six-week shot of strength and wisdom for absolutely nothing, leave a comment on this post or email me and I’ll pick names out of the hat next Sunday, 5th August.

Elsewhere:

While we’re talking about strength, you might want to take a look at a post called What Do You Want to Look Like. Not what I normally talk about here, but I love clothes. Although I think slavish fashion victims are pathetic, it’s easy to underestimate what our appearance says about us. Don’t compromise. Look the way you want to look.

I was thinking about money the other day.

To explain: I currently work as an interim human resources project manager, taking on a series of short-term contracts. I just started a new nine-month contract, which is quite a long-term deal for me, a longer commitment than I ideally like. But as anyone who works freelance knows, there’s a sense of worrying that the work will dry up.

So I started thinking about how long I really need to work each year to support myself. I took this nine-month contract as a baseline and started playing around with some calculations.

And I had one of those eureka moments.

They say time is money, so I started thinking about what I buy in terms not of how much it costs in money, but how much it costs in my life passing by.

How long do I have to work to “earn” that book, that pizza, the groceries, that weekend trip?

I started a spreadsheet to record my purchases in time as well as money; it was a  revelation. It really helped me distinguish between what is of real (non-monetary) value and what’s just a passing fancy.

It makes frugality more attractive because by being less impulsive in my spending, I’m putting time into my piggy bank. And that can’t be taken away by a recession.

What do you invest your time in?

Image by kekremsi

Elsewhere:

Sally Lever has a great post called Frugality for the Terrified – click here to read it.

And if you’re interested in the mechanics of counting time, here’s what I did:

I took as a starting point that I don’t want to work at a conventional job for more than nine months in a year. (Actually I don’t want to work at a conventional job at all, and I hope this will be the last one, but that’s another story!)

So I took my gross earnings for this nine month period and deducted a rough sum for tax.

Then I divided this net amount by nine to get a monthly amount, multiplied that by 12 to get  net annual earnings. I divided the annual sum by both 52 to get weekly earnings and then that by 35 to get net hourly earnings.

Often when I’m talking about the Enneagram, people get worried that discovering their personality “type” is going to put a label on them.

We tend to resent being labelled, but we label ourselves all the time: conservative/liberal, gay/straight, old/young, extrovert/introvert. Some of our labels are factual, some are a question of degree, some are more important than others. Some may not even be true. None of them give the complete story of who we are.

So what use are they?

I recently took the Myers Briggs typology test again. (I used this site, which is fully accredited by the Myers & Briggs Foundation. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the MBTI measures where we focus, how we deal with information, how we make decisions, and the structure we prefer to use in dealing with the outside world.) I’ve taken this test before, but always in a business context, and this time I actually answered all the questions truthfully, rather than how I thought I should answer.

My new results (INFP) aren’t really the point, although it was a real ‘aha’ moment for me. What is important is that all these personality systems and tests are just a parlour game unless we make use of them.

I believe the work of our lives is twofold: doing and being.

And like the eagle, we must circle closer and closer to who we really are, because the two are intimately linked. If we don’t know ourselves, we won’t know what we are really meant to do.

Ayn Rand once said:

To say ‘I love you’ one must first be able to say the ‘I.’

That’s why I believe so strongly that structured ways of looking at personality, such as Enneagram and MBTI are really helpful, and that these “labels” are to be worked with in reflection, exercises, prayer and observation, not just left as a brief moment of illumination.

What are your experiences of helpful labels?

Image by playingwithbrushes

Elsewhere:

Claire writes about coming home to herself here, and Lucy talks here about the different parts of the song that make up the whole.

And happy 4th tomorrow to all my American friends!

God is not One is a new book by Stephen Prothero, and I was delighted to be asked to review it by TLC Book Tours.

Prothero, who is professor of religion at Boston University, has written a thoroughly interesting book.

Its premise is that in our attempts to look at different religions as separate paths up the same mountain, we gloss over the differences and attempt unity without ever understanding just how fundamentally different the religions are from each other. Our perspective is dangerously skewed.

The book has been described as controversial, something that always makes me a bit suspicious, as it seems to warn of claims made and phrases used in the service of publicity, not writing.

I needn’t have worried, it’s a delight. Well structured, knowledgeable, written with elegance, wit and humanity. I hadn’t heard of Prothero before this book, and I’m really pleased to have discovered him.

Structure

The structure of the book, after a scene-setting introduction, is to cover each of the “eight rival religions that run the world” in a factual way. Each gets its own chapter (with a brief afterword on atheism). I like the way in which Prothero gives us a one-line focus for each religion:

• Islam: the way of submission
• Christianity: the way of salvation
• Confucianism: the way of propriety
• Hinduism: the way of devotion
• Buddhism: the way of awakening
• Yoruba: the way of connection
• Judaism: the way of exile and return
• Daoism: the way of flourishing

Image by kanegan

One of the things I love most in this life is learning, and some of the religions (the word is used to encompass belief systems that may not in the strictest sense be religions) described here are new to me.

I had, for example, no idea that Confucianism is still a contemporary way of life (and is indeed undergoing a resurgence), I’d never heard of Yoruba, I had only the haziest notion about Daoism.

Pre-conceptions

I tried, and failed miserably, to approach the book with no pre-conceived notions. But of course I was brought up Catholic in the days when the following joke was doing the rounds:

A Protestant dies and is shown around Heaven by St Peter. Their walk through this beautiful place full of happy Christian souls takes them toward an area enclosed by a high wall. St Peter puts his finger to his lips. “Ssshh”, he says, “be quiet while we walk past.” “Why?” whispers the Protestant. “Because that’s where the Catholics are and they think they’re the only ones up here.”

One of the great gifts of this book for me was to challenge that ingrained perspective in many different ways. For example:

One of the most common misconceptions about the world’s religions is that they plumb the same depths, ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that see God as all good ask how a good God can allow millions to die in tsunamis. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after “the soul” in the singular. (p24)

History

Prothero does not shy away from the difficult questions, for example the verses in both the Bible and in the Qu’ran that appear to incite violence. But neither does he sensationalise them. The book is very balanced.

Image by alicepopkorn

He provides just enough historical biography of each religion to give context, understanding and a pathway to recognising how today’s practice has arisen. This is particularly interesting in documenting the inevitable splits that seem to occur once a religion’s founder is dead: Shia and Sunni Muslims, the different Buddhist schools, the Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant divides and many more.

Style

Prothero uses a couple of devices to ensure the book is never dry or boring.

One is to throw in fascinating snippets of information. For example, when talking about the wisdom of Confucianism, which promotes respectful behaviour such as listening rather than speaking, he tells us “the character for sage in Chinese is a large ear and a small mouth”.

The other device is something I didn’t spot until I’d nearly finished the book. Prothero inserts regular references to his students. For example:

In my introduction to religion courses I ask my students to invent their own religions. They form groups and dream up new religions. They then pitch their religious creations online and in class.

This is clever in two ways: it very subtly reinforces Prothero’s qualifications for writing the book, and it draws the reader in, giving both visual and imaginative reference points.

Conclusion

I especially like the way all the strands of the book are spun together in the conclusion into our common humanity:

Even in traditions of escape from the sin and suffering of this world, religion works not so much to help us flee from our humanity as to bring us home to it. “The glory of God,” wrote the second-century Catholic bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, “is a human being fully alive.” Or, as a contemporary Confucian puts it, “We need not depart from our self-hood and our humanity to become fully realised.”

I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone wanting a grounding in these major religions and some thoughtful reflection on how we can come together while celebrating our differences,  rather than trying to ignore them.

You can watch Prothero talking about his book in this video.

Elsewhere:

You will find other reviews of the book at Diamonds in the Sky with Lucy, at Knowing the Difference, and at Church for Starving Artists.

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.

In my last post, I talked about letting go of distractions and trusting that the information and people you need will find you.

Clearing the way

But what about the things that are left? Online, offline, all those small and large tasks we all need to do in order to really blossom and be present in our own lives. You can’t relax and be creative when you haven’t done your tax returns. (I speak from experience…) How do we clear those necessary tasks out of the way so our lives can flourish?

NB: if you’re one of those naturally organised, disciplined, non-procrastinating types that I envy with every fibre of my being, you can stop reading now. Go away and do something fun.

Productivity guru David Allen has it right when he advises getting all those tasks, ideas and options out of your head and into a trusted system which will remind you when you need to be reminded. Otherwise your brain will keep prompting about whether you paid the milkman or ordered the theatre tickets. I really recommend his book Getting Things Done as a starting point from which to adopt/adapt what you need.

Focus, focus, focus

Image by Klearchos

Women especially are supposed to be good at multi-tasking, but what does it really mean? I think men usually have a better take on this and I touched on the evils of multi-tasking way back when in this post. Don’t multi-task. Don’t split your focus. Do one thing at a time, do it mindfully, finish it, put it aside and move on to the next.

Here are a few specifics:

Don’t let email run your life

I deal with well over 100 emails a day using the following tips:

• Use an email program (Gmail, Outlook) in which you can create folders and rules for incoming email. For example, in my Gmail account I have all Twitter and Tumblr messages bypass my in-box straight into designated folders, which I look at once a week.
• Try and deal with email at designated regular times, don’t keep it open all the time.
• If you are already completely overwhelmed by a backlog of email to be dealt with, it really helps psychologically to get it out of your in-box. If you’re brave, select all those unanswered emails and press the delete button. If it’s something really important, they’ll get back to you. Otherwise create a folder called “to sort” and put all those emails in it. You still might not get round to dealing with them, but at least they’re available if you want them.
• There, now you have a beautiful, virginal in-box which you can keep up-to-date with. You’ll actually be able to enjoy responding to friends’ emails rather than fret about all the others.

There are some great resources out there on dealing with email and you can find some of them here.

Close that browser

Oh this is such a temptation for me. The insistent whispering invitation of endless internet goodies. It really helps to close your internet browser whenever you’re doing a chunk of work, whether it’s writing a report, building a spreadsheet or invoicing your clients (a task I hate,  although I don’t hate the money).

I recently started writing all my blog posts in Microsoft Notepad then copying and pasting the finished post into my blog. Then and only then do I decide what photographs to use and what to link to. It’s saved me hours of distraction and left me free to be creatively distracted when I want to be (more on that in the next post).

A warning: I’m sure you know this but don’t ever write your blog posts in Word. It does truly bizarre things to formatting when transferred to WordPress and other blog platforms. You need a plain text editor like Notepad.

Your kitchen timer is your friend

Image by hickr

Even though I’ve cut back on a lot of unnecessary complications, there are still tasks I hate but accept I have to do (did I mention tax returns?). I set the timer to 20 minutes and do whatever it is for that long. It really helps. You may find that once you’ve started, you’ll want to carry on after the 20 minutes is up.

I also use the timer for housework, or I tell myself I’ll do one task, such as cleaning out the fridge.

Losing the overwhelm

All these tricks and more will help you feel less overwhelmed and more able to enjoy what you really want to do. I’m not big on delayed gratification but when I do get the chores out of the way it really does feel so much better.

Wishing and dreaming

But tasks are not all there is to life, thank goodness. Dealing with chores is just a way to clear the decks for living rich and deep. Don’t lose sight of the wishes and dreams that pop into your head at odd hours, and don’t put them off. There are ways to have your cake and eat it, and they are the subject of my next post in a couple of days.

Meanwhile, my examples above are office and internet based because that’s what I know. I’d love to hear any tips you have on dealing with the chores.

Main image by Thomas Shahan

Elsewhere:

Well we were talking about email, so here’s a bonus about it from the great Seth Godin. And just in case you don’t believe me about distractions and being organised, read 6 Ways to Waste Your Time as a Writer.

Seeing through frames

I’ve been thinking about how we frame our lives, what we focus on.

Over Easter I saw the beautiful and familiar chapel at Turvey Abbey from a different perspective. There were many more in the congregation than usual and I couldn’t sit where I normally do. I was right at the back, my line of sight into the chapel framed by a polished wooden arch. This gave me a limited view. It struck me I was engaging my whole self to a far greater degree than usual. Leaning forward to see, and opening my ears to hear, I was using my body in prayer. Of necessity, I was more focused and less distracted.

There’s  a beautiful story about the framing of light in Elizabeth Goudge’s book The Bird in the Tree. At the end of the First World War, a young boy sees and hears things no child should as his wounded soldier father dies a terrible and protracted death:

…Terrified by it, he had fled one evening to the dark attic, slammed the door and flung himself down sobbing on the floor. He…sobbed himself sick and exhausted until at last, childlike, he had forgotten what it was he was crying about and had become instead absorbed in the moonlight on the floor. It had been like a pool of silver, enclosed and divided up into neat squares by the bars of the window. He had counted the squares and the lines, dark and light, and had been delighted with them…In some vague way he had understood that dark things are necessary; without them the silver moonlight would just stream away into nothingness, but with them it can be held and arranged into beautiful squares.

Information overload

As I sit here tapping away on my keyboard, I have easy access to more information than my grandparents could have accumulated during their entire lifetimes. We are served up an endless supply of goodies and distractions. We’re so afraid that there’s something vitally important we’ll miss, or that we’ll lose the opportunity to have fun or to explore some new excitement. I’m as guilty of this as everyone, grabbing for the next shiny thing.

Depth not breadth

There’s another kind of focus framed by living simply, leaving most of those distractions unexplored. It’s scary but it can make our lives very special. It’s illustrated by this excerpt from Crispin Sartwell’s intriguing book Six Names of Beauty:

The basic structure of the blues is almost always the same and the repertoire of riffs fairly limited. Indeed, part of the richness of the blues derives from its narrowness: any slight deviation takes on great significance within a system that is so restricted, in which the expectations of the listener are so determined. The arc of the song becomes evident from the first few moves. The expressive intensity of the blues derives from its roughness and simplicity. When you no longer have to focus on what the next change will be, you focus on how to express yourself within it, how to exploit it emotionally. Spontaneity follows on and reflects discipline.

I think there’s an important message for us in the concept of focus. Its discipline brings depth and profound richness. And it’s enormously difficult for people like me (and you?) whose love of new things keeps us flitting on.

Depth AND breadth?

Can we combine depth and discipline with spontaneity and joy? Yes, we can, and I’ll be writing about that soon. Meanwhile what do you think? What tips can you share about living with both focus and spontaneity?

Image by OliBac

Elsewhere:

I love this poem at Don’t Eat Alone, which sets out with great wit how writing can become a chore rather than a joy. Mary Jaksch’s post about deep listening at Goodlife Zen could, I think, be applied to deep blog reading. I know I often skim, and perhaps you do too. I just trimmed (with regret) a few blogs from my reading list so I can focus more.

And I hope you like the facelift I’ve given Anchors and Masts. Any feedback is most welcome, especially if there’s anything you find confusing or difficult to read (I might still do a bit of fine-tuning with the colours).

I always know when I’m resisting or blocking something, because I get these amazing highs of contempt and rage.

Usually it’s around learning and growth, and I’ve been experiencing loads of resistance this week in getting started on Christine’s e-course Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist, which I signed up for a while back and which began last Monday.

As the start of the course drew near, and was then launched, I welcomed my dear friends contempt and rage back into my life. Not contempt at the course, you understand, at everything else, like fireworks shooting off in all directions.

And this is where we get to the caffeine analogy. I find contempt amazingly energising! I love it, it really makes me feel vibrant and alive and awake and focused. For a little shining moment… and then there’s the crash.

It’s invaluable as a signpost, because what we’re resisting is often where we find the most growth. And of course now I’ve actually started working with Christine’s course materials, I’m finding them wonderful, empowering, enriching. Like the slow release of energy from really nourishing food rather than that caffeine high.

What are your red flag signals that you’re resisting growth?

Image by Refracted Moments

Elsewhere:

Talking of the path of the artist, I love this stunning image by Alice Popkorn, one of my favourite photographic artists, and in another beautiful image, Kate shares with us the glow of ordinary things. I think there’s a lovely symmetry between these two photographs.

I love old churches, so I was delighted to visit one at Staunton Harold in Leicestershire at the weekend while staying with friends. It is gorgeous, with most of the original 17th century features, including an extraordinary wooden ceiling depicting the creation (above), painted by Zachary and Samuel Kyrk (yes I thought the surname was apt, too).

And what a rich history this church has. I’m resolutely anti-monarchy and the church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, who was an ardent Royalist. So I don’t exactly agree with his outlook. But if I tell you he founded this church in 1653, two years after the end of the English Civil War at a time when Cromwell was Protector of England, and that he built it with all the High Anglican richness so despised by the Puritans, well you have to admire his courage.

Robert Shirley’s immediate ancestors had been Roman Catholic, and his brand of Anglicanism was influenced by Rome and by the teachings of Archbishop Laud (who had been executed in 1645). The man Shirley regarded as divinely appointed to rule England, King Charles I, was executed in 1649 when Shirley was just 20.

So the richness of this church Shirley built – which is not very big and was the private family chapel – created ripples well beyond his Leicestershire estate. Cromwell was enraged and demanded Shirley use his wealth to fit out a ship for the Navy. Shirley refused and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He died there, aged 27. The church he founded was completed by his son’s guardians in accordance with Shirley’s detailed plans.

Part of me is just really irritated by all this. What a fuss – on both sides – about the externals of worship; what a waste of life. But I’m also in awe of this young man’s bravery. He wasn’t fighting physically, but he was using his wealth to fight for the right to worship as he saw fit, and he paid the price in more ways than one.

The stone inscription above the church’s west door is stirring:

In the year 1653
when all thinges Sacred were throughout ye nation
Either demolisht or profaned
Sir Robert Shirley, Barronet,
Founded this church;
Whose singular praise it is,
to have done the best things in ye worst times
And
hoped them in the most callamitous.
The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.

Elsewhere:

A while back I started a blog focusing on creativity, Pilgrim’s Moon. I’ve dismantled it for the time being because it seemed like a false division of my life. I’m going to import a few of the posts over the next few days, so apologies if they show up in your blog reader software.

I’m thinking about the gorgeous bounty nature provides at this time of year: I’m a little envious of Elaine’s eggplant – I tried to grow some this year and failed; and Kate’s lemons are just so, well, lemony and the recipe sounds wonderful.