Clearing the Clutter!

This week Carla's challenge on wings4you is to get rid of something:

Choose something that you've been holding on to for a long time (two or more years is a good starting point) because "it's too good to get rid of" or you "might want to use it someday."

Well I have tried! Which unfortunately, so far, translates to I haven't managed this yet.

When we were on holiday in Cornwall, we had to go very near a friend's house. She has recently been making beaded medicine bags so I thought she might make much better use of some of my bead collection than I'm making of it. (Many beads have been in my collection for something like 30 years.) I really enjoyed going through my beads and deciding which ones to pass onto her, attempting to consider both which I really was ready to let go of and what she might make good use of. I also sorted out a bag of books with a similar set of criteria. However despite all our best attempts we were not able to get together so rather than passing on a big shoebox of beads (and feathers and things) and a carrier bag of books we actually cluttered up our overfull car with them and carried them to and from Cornwall!

If I needed a message that I'm having trouble letting go of things this was it.

However as I've thought before that this challenge made sense more as a joint venture between me and Jim I do have one success to report. On Wednesday Jim dug up my blue Hibiscus. It was in the way of our new vegetable plot. Rather than squeeze it in somewhere else that it would not be happy I watered it and wrapped its roots carefully. Then labelled the bag: "Hibiscus Please Take". I put it out the front and when we returned home some time later it had gone. I hope to a good home!

Now I just need to carry on and do this with something I'm rather more attached too... maybe I'll enlist Jim's help from the start this time.

Would a blog by any other name smell so sweet?

Imelda, the GreenishLady, has mentioned a giveaway by Peta of createcraft. Peta is giving away some goodies including a scarf "just in time for winter" (she's an Australian blogger rather than a slow knitter) to a randomly selected commenter to her "what's in a name" post provided they leave a link to their explanation for their blog's name. So here are two for the price of one:

My name is Caroline. When I first started to live in shared accommodation and had to label things as mine I normally just wrote Caro on them. So it wasn't a huge leap to think I might call my blog Caro's something... something to do with writing and drawing... how about Lines? :-)

Jim started a blogspot blog in April - he's called it JimPulse. He decided on the name by looking at words that started with im- that he could put a J in front of. He decided that both impulse and the Pulse part were rather good... certainly better than JimpLied or J-imPoster... though he did rather like Jimpact too.

If you want to join in write up the reason for your blog's name on your blog and then post a link to it over at Peta's.

A scrap of art

I've been inspired by some scavenged art on flickr (teresia, junkyprojects)... also our recent trip to this year's sculpture exhibition at Trull House (I blogged last years)... one of the flickr challenges I like to complete had a category of "flattened" that seemed to fit with these ideas.

I made both of these with things we had already but today I went out twice looking for squashed cans and bottle tops to increase my creative options - it was very odd being a bag lady... and the second time I'd not really gone collecting but was with Jim and had happened to collect a few bits but had no bag to put them in... the world them provided a neat empty cardboard box for me... rather better than a bag!

These two are proof of all the hot chocolate I was consuming last year and the year before... I liked the cans and kept quite a few. Since I gave up sugar at new year I've totally gone off the taste of even slightly sweetend chocolate... how does she know, you wonder, if she's given up sugar, surely she ought not to have had any at all? Good point. But I ran out of the hard to get hold of 99% chocolate and tried some 85% thinking it might by okay... however after the 99% the 85% tasted as though it was pure sugar! And a hot chocolate I had in a cafe was so horrible I couldn't drink it at all... they were very kind and made me an unsweetened cocoa instead.... I had no idea I could so thoroughly lose my sweet tooth... its taken 49 years or so but it seems to have happened!

Getting distracted...

I've decided that the time is right to write up some of my energy work and experiences. I've started a new blog for this: Beyond Health Kinesiology. A lot of what I'll be writing up will definitely go into the weird category (mine if not yours!). I started out hopeful but sceptical with a scientific background having prepared me to be questioning but also doubtful, I ended up rather impressed, though found I had to do a lot more work for myself than I'd ever have imagined possible let alone necessary.

Cornwall

Last Sunday we decided, despite the weather forecast, to go camping in Cornwall for a few days. Big mistake! It was very, very, very wet... However we did get some sun as well as showers, hail, strong winds, rain-battered noisy nights, low temperatures, etc.

We stopped just inside Dartmoor (Devon) for the first night on a camp site which had its own hydro-electricity - this meant it had the warmest shower block I've ever been in! And there was even a bath available too. The drinking water tasted horrible - all chemical - but the other facilities were amazing. However our goal was Cornwall. And it hadn't rained much yet... So on we went.

Nearly eight years ago we got married in Cornwall as a way of marking it as our future home. Recently I've been wondering if it was time to move there. (See my Looking at Houses in Cornwall blog). But the first real question is whereabouts. Most of our visits have been to the far South-West. I love St Ives as a centre for art and Jim has climbed on the sea cliffs, especially near Sennen (actually so have I but never again, thank you!), which is even further South-West than St Ives.

But thinking about living there means different things from holiday-style living. So this trip was partly to visit Truro, Cornwall's only city, to check out what it was like as neither of us had been there before.

We had decided to camp as this is so much cheaper than staying in holiday cottages - even looking for last minute "bargains" I found plenty of vacant cottages but no-one willing to do a decent discount. (I even asked nicely... but only got a meagre £50 off offer.)

The site we ended up at was mostly a retirement park. There were quite a lot of caravans and camper vans there too but we were the only ones foolhardy enough to be in a tent!

Truro turned out to be a lovely city for shopping so that's good and means we won't feel too cut off from "civilisation as we know it" if / when we move to Cornwall. On the downside the road layouts in Cornwall seemed to be getting worse and the drivers much more impatient and rude... incredibly so... worse even than Bristol!

I was so busy looking at Truro that I failed to take any photos worth showing you here! We also visited Falmouth and St. Mawes - photos of those to come in another post. And on the north coast St. Agnes and Perranporth.

St. Agnes is a place I was vaguely interested in because one of the houses I'd noticed in my house searches was an eco-house there. I'd already worked out that it had no garden to speak of so wasn't suitable for us but I was still curious about the village.

Having visited though I think I can safely remove St. Agnes from the list of possibilities. It just wasn't our sort of place. Whilst there though we discovered that we really ought to have been there for this weekend, the weekend following May 1st. As there are lots of celebrations of St. Agnes and the Giant Bolster, (that's a giant called Bolster, not, as I first thought, a big pillow!) over the weekend. Including a Beltane fire on St. Agnes' Beacon. Its a celebration of one of those strange local legends that Cornwall has in plenty.

After St. Agnes we headed for Perranporth and lunch. Another place neither of us had been before. Perranporth has a surfers' beach. There are lots of places in which to eat and loads of tourist shops too. It also has some pleasant gardens to sit in. Fun to visit. Too touristy to live in.

I loved this tile on the side of someone's house near the beach at Perranporth.

Aren't the terracotta seahorses fun!

One of the main reasons I'm interested in Cornwall is that the air is so much cleaner there - as its a peninsular there is a sea-freshness everywhere. I've always thought that living there I'd be a lot healthier. The downside of Cornwall is its tremendous inequality - the born and bred locals are often very poor and have to put up with much wealthier incomers buying up all the houses... house prices are falling there, as they are in most of the UK now, but it will take a much bigger fall to make them affordable by those on the "average", very low, wage in Cornwall.

On our way home we visited a Tortoise Garden at Lower Sticker. They have over 400 tortoises there. Jim was in his element.

A balloon on its way up

Jim and I were just in time to see this balloon being prepared to fly. It was a bit of a dodgy take-off... it was tethered to a Landrover and the wind was gusting quite strongly... at one point it looked like the Landrover was going to go up too... but in the end the balloon went up properly with everyone aboard and just gave the Landrover a bump as it was rising... unfortunately causing a dent to its bonnet (hood), and a crack to its windscreen (windshield). I asked the ground crew if this was normal and they said no...

Sorry about the slightly odd photo I was shooting into the sun.

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Yesterday after an accumulation of synchronicities I made my first two SoulCollage® cards in a year. I've only just noticed how close that was. On April 14th last year I made this:

Collaged from these: lotus flower by wayfaring stranger silence by Mario Scorza On the pink by hexion

I put it up on flickr but didn't blog it. And yesterday, April 15th I made these:



For more about them, including all the relevant attributions see this posting on my card blog.

I've no idea why I've not made any cards for the last year except that I just wasn't motivated to. I love making them when its time to make them.

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In one of her comments Joy Eliz seemed surprised that I'd finished Wyrd Allies... and yes it would be a surprise if I'd done all the exercises... I'm still working on the loops... more and more keep on revealing themselves to me.

When I'm in the mood for reading books I tend to have more than one on the go. I'm still slowly reading 7 Years in Tibet, I've got Positively Wryd started but currently stalled whilst I'm processing the loops from Wyrd Allies, most of my reading attention is going to the book about the history of Trance that I mentioned before - Trance: A Natural History of Altered States of Mind - which I'm finding very interesting but needs to be taken in smallish bites to relish it. Then there are the New Scientists that we have lying around the house. Who else reads like this?

Back to the Trance book - did you know that in trials with women who wanted to increase their breast size most managed to using hypnosis. Indeed one stopped before all the scheduled sessions as she'd got sufficient increase. A completely drug-free, pain-free way, and relatively inexpensive too. Not something that the cosmetic surgery industry would want you to know...

Quick check-in

I just realised I hadn't posted in over a week... sorry. Its probably that I've not got anywhere worth reporting with Carla's challenges and somehow I've been forgetting that there is more to this blog than those..

Maybe its time for a more general where am I and what have I been up to sort of post...

I've not been up to much... a little painting (and no I'm not showing on here yet... though at last I think I know what they are about!)... the odd walk in Bristol's various nearby green spaces... collecting Jim from the airport and getting horribly lost (how? I've no idea... I was the one that got lost...) but still getting there sufficiently early that I had to pay to park... you only get 10 minutes free parking there and it takes most of that to walk to and from the terminal... so hard to avoid at least the £2.50 charge for the next 20 minutes. If I hadn't got lost I'd have been much too early and been stung for the £4 charge (30 min - 1 hour) instead. I was a little impatient to see him after his adventures in the snowfields of Norway :-)

I've been reading a book: Trance: A Natural History of Altered States of Mind by Brian Inglis - its fascinating. I haven't finished it yet but am both appalled and amazed at the way scientists were reluctant to investigate hypnosis in the 19th century because of the damage it would do to their reputations!

Sharp Twists of Fate

Image: "Clerical Workers Sharpen Pencils in the Death Star Library" by ShellyS
Quote: "Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
John Kenneth Galbraith

I'm getting behind in doing Carla's exercises on wings4you... on Sunday she posted: You are on a Mission. I've been having a hard time even beginning to do this... I used to work for the kind of company that had mission statements... and as an employee I saw no value to them whatsoever. They were too abstract and took too much time, far too many meetings, and no feeling of direction or other benefit came out of them.

I do realise that doing my own mission statement the only person I need to have a meeting with is myself and as Jim is away this week I've no interruptions. I can also choose what level of abstraction to pitch it at.

Then I found this image of the pencil sharpeners. It puts all that past stuff about the future into context. Provides a wyrd twist on it all...

I've finished a first read through of "Wyrd Allies" and although I've only done a few of the exercises I think I've already noticed some effects... the first was bumping into one of my neighbours - she was the only person who lives around here that I knew before we moved in 12 years ago - and yet during that time we've hardly seen each other, not got to know each other any better at all.

When we met on Tuesday she apologised for being so focused on her own stuff and said we really ought to get together... so we arranged to meet at a local coffee shop the next morning. Later that day I was on my way to a hot stones massage and of course I bumped into her again... and she was off to a massage too... We met up the next morning and had a lovely time.

The reason I connect this with the book, is that to go to the shops I have to choose which way to go, I specifically felt for which was the wyrd way to go and then she popped into view - both times. Of course before reading the book I'd have called this following my nose... or my heart... or whatever part I was attaching the feeling to. So this isn't really new, just a different way of looking at what already is.

One of the more emotionally draining aspects of the exercises I have undertaken is in looking at the things which repeat over and over in my life, where I end up in the same role, the same position, even though I'm with different people each time it happens. I'm finding this useful but tiring! Some of the patterns are very frequent repeaters and definitely weird... by which I mean the things that are happening are not ones I could possibly have consciously arranged... so although I'm the only common element it is odd that the world, the wyrd, the whatever has put me into this situation over and over, given me the chance to replay it over and over... with enough variations to keep me guessing of course... like my very own Groundhog Day (the film)... though mercifully not quite so predictable!

For instance, when I went to my first school I knew no-one there - I lived 5 miles away from it - the others were all local and already mostly knew each other and could see each other after school and at weekends.

By the time I was 10 the year I was in was ready to go up to the next school. However you couldn't do that unless you were 11. All my classmates went up to the next school and I had to stay on an extra year at the primary school. This was all the more difficult as I was already 5' 6" and more woman than girl... I looked like an adult (couldn't get child fares!) but was held back because my birthday fell a month after the cut off date.

The next year I went to the next school. I'd made a good friend during the year stuck at primary but she was put in a different house from me and a very different timetable. I was all alone again.

For a more recent example of this continuing pattern see IF - Wind & more on Zero Balancing where despite the fact that we all started off as strangers and there were only 3 of us - I was definitely the odd one out.

Have you got any situations that repeat in your life that do seem strangely familiar but also ones you couldn't possibly have caused consciously?

W is for Wyrd, Weird, Wierd, Wired?

Book: Wyrd Allies: harnessing the chaos in your relationships by Tom Graves.

Yesterday I was in the Amnesty Bookshop. On Saturdays its much busier than on weekdays but I had a strong feeling there was something in there to find... I looked in all the usual places... but I wasn't finding it... I did notice though that quite a few books were very much not where they ought to be... so I had to follow my nose... I found this book, Wyrd Allies by Tom Graves, on top of the history books! (It ought really to have been in one of: self-help, esoteric or psychology - all of which I had already looked in, along with natural history...)

When I picked it up I had an internal struggle part of me was keen and part very not... how interesting... early on in the book he describes this weird feeling, the one where we have a real choice. And yes this book tackles exactly what I've been fretting over here recently the interweaving of fate and choice.

Something I especially like about this book is its list of further reading. He has 4 sections the last of which is fiction with only three books in it:

Bryan Bates - The Way of Wyrd
Marion Campbell - The Dark Twin
Alan Garner - The Owl Service

These books map onto my life like this:

The Owl Service was read to us at primary school, on Friday afternoons, sitting out under the big walnut tree in the playing field.
The Dark Twin, was a book I borrowed from the public library several times in my teens.
The Way of Wyrd, was a book my ex-husband had, and that the next man in my life said was the reason he'd gone out with me (thinking it was mine of course)...

Good enough reason to pay attention to the book itself!

I'll let you know how it goes...

"Easter Snow in the Brecon Beacons" by jim_r

Last Monday Jim was in Wales going up Pen-y-Fan with friends. Now he is in Norway and is learning to snowshoe!

There are only a few wolves in Norway so he probably won't meet any. However in Bristol I keep on bumping into them:

Even the wine I bought yesterday was from Wolf Blass! Must be the little red riding hood effect...

Update: You can read some of Wyrd Allies by Tom Graves on the web.

Values

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

One of the things about blogging is that when you read someone else's blog you have no idea how much of what they present as themselves is real... there are people who enjoy pretending to be different in all sorts of ways... and suddenly reading Oscar Wilde's quote I realise that my problem is that I've been attempting not to pretend. Does that make sense?

Dru commented on my Real Illusiions post --- "dodgy things, facts. I prefer truth, so usually only read fiction." which is another way of putting this.

In a past relationship I found the only way to get real emotions out into the open was if we both used glove puppets to speak through.

And so in the light of this here are the values I've finally come up with, though through a different process from the one Carla suggested:

Synchronicity - I just love synchronicities and though I don't necessarily ascribe "meaning" to them, some do feel quite meaningful... on Tuesday I was in a charity shop and wondered about buying this scarab paperweight. I didn't. I went in again yesterday and was glad to see it was still there what's more it was half price so I bought it:

This may not be a "golden scarab" but as a scarab its a good representation of synchronicity.

Today I saw this fridge magnet and I'd bought it as it's message is to "follow your bliss". Maybe a value in itself as well as the message that came through loud and clearly, via synchronicity, the day I first visited Carla's wings4you blog. (And doesn't it fit this metal pencil tin well!)

If you like it you might like to go to the website mentioned on its back: www.papayalicious.com. Where there are lots of other things apart from magnets.

Other values that come up for me:

Self-governing - as in the freedom to make my own choices, assuming freewill does exist, if it doesn't then this is moot. However the make-believe I had to play to do this exercise required me to use the model of freewill existing, otherwise there was no point to values (see Monday's post for where that tangled line took me!)

Non-belief - to be as free from beliefs as I can be. One of the difficulties of language is that describing an experience is almost impossible to do without using words that I and other people put down to beliefs. In general I attempt to work with different models and chuck them out when they aren't working for me. Provided I notice... and am not over-invested in them... so yes I value non-belief, I just don't always manage it.

Seeing one's self in the reflections of others - and the complimentary aspect of that is realising that other people are mostly seeing their own stuff when they react to me! I mean here the tendency one might have to like or dislike certain people, or things about them, when really its one's own's stuff being projected outwards.

Oneness - I was reading yesterday one of those things about how every breath you take is likely to have molecules in it that have been breathed by most of the famous, infamous, people in the past, as well as all the rest of course... that's one physical example, another is the sheer interdependence we all have on one another and the ecosystem that supports us. On a more spiritual level there is also the, occasional, experience of really being one with everything and everyone. I first had this when I was 8, but unlike many more mystical people it hasn't kept me all good and saintly... its very easy to let myself be pushed back into the shell that is me and to forget this.

Facts and Fiction - well that's how I've got to here so I suppose it must count as a working value for me today!

So there I am with 7 core values, or at least things that might be values.