Quarr Abbey grounds, Isle of Wight. Photographed by myself 9th March 2024
Back in 2012/2013 we had what can only be describe as a “series of unfortunate events” – feel free to read about them on – End of Year Round Up and this from the end of 2013. [Please don’t sign up for this blog as I don’t write on it any more!]
When I remember March/April 2012 and Sept 2013 I remember those times with a lot of pain and a lot of anger. As it came round to the anniversary of my friend Tessa’s death this January I did feel sad but not that angry painful sad. It was definitely a grief but not like the feels I have around memories of 2012/13. So this got me thinking.
It came to me after I posted Roadside Shrines the other day – what I was feeling from 2012/13 was the trauma of grief which then clouded the grief itself. I was not able to really mourn the loss of whose who had died in any real sense without seeing/feeling the trauma of it all.
By being able to recognise that what was going on was that I was dealing with the trauma of the respective deaths I have been able to let go of that. I have been able to be healed of the trauma of the events. I can let go of the how and why they died and grieve the loss rather than the “what could I/anyone have done to make things different/to stop it from happening?”
I am now free to miss each person and grieve for them as individuals.
I do wonder if these roadside shrines help one to deal with the trauma of the deaths and so move on to being able to deal with the loss of a person – friend/family member/colleague/someone of your community?
Who knows. But what I know is that being healed of the trauma has helped me see the human beings who I have lost. And, for me, that is a good thing.
Sorry if the left-hand picture is a bit sqeamy. These are my son’s fingers on Saturday night
How often do we think we are too busy for self-care? How often are we too busy doing something to just spend time out to look after ourselves?
This on Saturday evening was a classic example. We were visiting my son and his wife, had just watched the rugby and son was cooking us beef nachos. I love my son’s cooking so was looking forward to it. Anyway whilst cooking his hand got splashed with hot fat. Instead of stopping cooking, running it under cold water for 10-20 mins and then taking stock of whether he needed to do anything he kept on cooking. It was only when we were all eating that he put his hand into a bowl of cold water. He carried on doing this on and off as we all ate and watched Crufts on TV. We then went back to our Airbnb. We’d just got in when my husband’s phone ran and it was daughter-in-law asking if husband could run son to A&E as he was in tears with his hand. The reason it was my husband who had to go was because he was the only one who had not had a couple of drinks whilst eating so was most definitely under the legal alcohol limit.
Turns out it was a pretty substantial burn and the fingers are still bandaged today!
But it got me thinking on how many times we feel like we need to keep going when we should stop. When there is that pain in chest or knee or headache or niggle and we just needed to stop, to breath, to rest a while but we keep going and have a fall, a heart attack, are rushed to hospital? Or we can feel something getting under our skins and know that if we stay in that environment much longer we will explode but we stay, have a huge row, say words we can’t unsay?
It would have been much better with my son, even if he had had to go to hospital anyway to have gone at 7pm rather than midnight. But I think we all do it. We all feel that we need to push through.
Why is it so hard to stop? Why is it so hard to put ourselves first? What are we afraid we’ll miss out on if we say Yes to the boss when we should say No? Or if self-employed keep ploughing on when time out to walk and ponder, to ask God/The Universe what needs to come next? Or if we do we have to justify it. We struggle to just rest, just to say “I’m ‘running my burn under the cold tap’“ [metaphor for so much there I think]
So I think I am going to challenge both myself and you, my reader, to have a look at what our ‘burn’ is, that thing that really hurts but we think we shouldn’t make a fuss about, and then what would our ‘cold tap’ be that would soothe so we don’t have to be rushed to A&E.
I could have added more – the Dunblane school shooting of 1996, the UKs only school shooting thankfully, or the floral tributes for Princess Diana back in 1997, and the many tributes that are now found in the UK on roadsides, beaches, and other public places.
The first time I saw a roadside shrine was when I visited the South of Ireland in 1980. There were not things like that in mainland Britain at that time. The next time was when I was in Greece in 1987. That was quite scary because I had hitched a lift in a truck carrying potatoes across the mountains of Pelaponese. The truck was speeding along and the driver was pointing these small shrines out and telling me in broken English that this is where people had died and of how their families would come to pray leave flowers, light candles, leave trinkets and pray for their souls. Well I must say it got me praying that I would not join them.
When I first got to really know God in 1992 the small charismatic Christian group I was part of said these shrines were Catholic or Greek Orthodox superstitions and that one did not pray to ones deceased family or friends once they had died. Dead was dead so to speak. At the time I hadn’t really lost anyone I was close to so I just accepted their word for it. So even though I found these shrines beautiful, moving and fascinating I allowed myself to dismiss them as superstitious nonsense like the good newbie Christian I was!
Then came the school shooting in 1996 where people from across the country, myself included, were sending flowers to be laid outside the gates of the school. I don’t know why other people did it but I did it because my son was of a similar age and at a school whose building looked similar. It was my way of expressing my grief and solidarity.
Princess Diana’s death followed close of the heels of the school shooting and the streets of not just London or the place she died but across the country were littered with flowers. I did not get involved with that, probably because it did not have the same effect on me as the school shooting.
Now it is not uncommon to see wilting flowers on the side of the road or on a park bench. Or like the above picture which shows the boy’s football shirt plus flowers, photographs, etc. Especially when grief is fresh this is what people need to do. They need to find a place where they can show their grief.
My pondering is – why have things changed so much? It is like that stiff upper-lipped Britishness of holding everything in is morphing into a more open Mediterranean show of emotion. Death is no longer something that is hidden behind somber church services and quiet tears. There is no longer the embarrassment of showing emotion.
I feel too as if we are moving away church involvement in death and so we need these places to focus our grief. Now. for whatever reason, a funeral can be up to a month after the death of someone. In the case of a roadside trauma it can be months or even over a year until the inquest can come to a conclusion as to what happened. Until there can be closure.
When theses roadside expressions of loss and grief started to appear on roadsides I found it odd and wanted to look away. Though in both Ireland and Greece I enjoyed looking. Perhaps for me it was that here, in a place I knew, someone was saying “look someone I loved died here” and that frightened me of my own mortality. I don’t know. But now I say a prayer as I go past for the person who has died and all the family and friends they leave behind.
Perhaps also as we go for more natural burials and more cremations and there are less and less gravestones we need a focus not just for our grief but for the grief of our fellow human beings?
From a walk I did with my friend, Lisa, in Feb 2024
I was reading the post from Christine Sine’s about Standing With All The Women Of The World and was at first challenged by how all of us, men and women, have happily accepted King David, from the Bible, as a murderer but very rarely referred to him as a rapist, which is what he did with Bathsheba. The young woman did not stand a chance.
Christine ends by asking
Now prayerfully consider your own response, firstly to Mary Magdalene and Bathsheba, then to women in your life. Are there misconceptions in your views of them? Are there ways in which you discriminate against women by not treating them as equals?
I know I can be guilty of not so much discriminating but of not praising other women. I am amazed by so many. My first reason for writing was to honour Christine and all the work she does with Godspace and the challenges she does.
I then thought of other women who do things but felt that this is where we can go wrong – and a direction I am trying to let go of – and I want to honour the women who just are –
my QEC coach, who is cutting back more and more, who shows that you can trust that there will be enough by just doing what you are called to do.
my daughter who has been an independent lady from the age of 19 when she left home for university. She’s had her ups and downs but at no point has she come back to live at home.
my friend who felt called to leave her home here, nurse her parents until they passed away, and now is rebuilding her life up here, is supporting her son who is between jobs at the mo, but does it all without complaining, and is always there.
another friend who walked out of a toxic relationship and has slowly been rebuilding her life
my mum who had to put her husband into a care home because he has Parkinsons and she was big enough to say she couldn’t cope, and is now doing a major make-over on her house and being willing to pay people to do what she can’t do. She is an amazing example of knowing one’s limitations
I know there are many many more I could list who do great things, who say challenging and encouraging things, who write great/interesting/challenging/funny/all of the above on their blogs, who are just there, those who help me to be the best me I can be.
I also want to make sure that from now on I let the women in my life know how great I see them and how I couldn’t be fully me without them.
[An aside – I’ve always struggled with David and the whole thing of him being man after God’s own heart – or is that a male intervention and not a divine thing??? – a thought for another blog maybe?? And whilst I’m on the thought – how many women have been labelled as being a woman after God’s heart???]
Llyn Crafnant 3rd March 2024 photographed by myself
Yes apocalyptic can look as much like a sun-kissed Welsh llyn [lake] as it can those “end of the world” movies some of us love to watch.
Do you get it sometimes when you’re listening to something and someone says something and you want to jump up and down and tell the world? This is my space to tell the world – or at least you my dear subscribers. Some posts I really really hope get out there to loads of people and some I’m a bit embarrassed by and some, like this one, I am writing because I cannot contain what is going on in my head and cannot yet find a way of bringing it up when out dog walking 🙂
I was listening to Drew Jackson [yes I have been banging on about Drew and the podcast on Godspace but, for me, it has been amazing]. There is one point, in talking about his poetry that he calls it apocalyptic, and then says that we are living in apocalyptic times. He then explains that, for him, apocalyptic times mean “unveiling times” and not so much as we’ve come to think of them as “end of the world as we know it times” – though it is a bit like that too. But it is much more about things, structures, being unveiled.
I was so excited because I had written around this from 2020 onwards in various forms, and keep saying to my husband when another “unveiling” of something corrupt comes on the news that, I think, the whole of the 2020s – until the end of 2029 – will be a time of unveiling, a time of relooking at things and saying “that’s not right” – governments, health care, education, racism, sexism, gender issues, climate change, nature issues, homelessness, poverty, materialism, the whole Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, and more that are not coming to mind at the moment. And more that I’m sure you can name.
This is what the book of Revelation talks about, what Jesus talked about when he said about the end times. It may not mean the world is going to end and we will all go off to heaven, or wherever. It means, as Drew said, apocalyptic times are times of unveiling, times of revealing what’s wrong in our systems. A time to change.
At the event I was at last week one of the women speaking said about how things are changing with regard to clairvoyants and how the understanding of spirituality is changing. She said how she believed that the control of religious structures was lifting and people are starting to explore different ways of being. All the way through that day there was an understanding that people are starting to realise that we buzz with energy, and that we do affect others by our energy and other people’s energy affects us. A lot of QEC is about changing your energy as you are healed from your traumas.
Again these things are unveilings, are changes, are seeing things that were there all along but were hidden. As Christians we need to make sure we don’t stay in our safe boxes but that we get rebellious, get out there and explore what is being unveiled. Get out there and really live in these apocalyptic times without fear. I believe it is what God talks of in the Bible but there has been a fear about it. Instead we need to view it as exciting, as change, as seeing things differently.
Also the reason for the above photo is that the sun still shines, the lakes are still beautiful, families still go out and walk their dogs. Things being unveiled does not mean the end but the in-between space before we go into a new beginning.
But again for me personally the most exciting thing from all this was that Drew was saying what I had been thinking. So if he is and I am and things on Christine’s Liturgical Rebels podcasts are saying things then … let’s be awake and aware and responsive.
Nothing overly deep or meaningful here. Just wanted to share the joy of March blooming in my local park. I find it exciting and delightful when the trees stop being a solid browny colour and start having these lovely green, pink and/or white tips to them. The sun is rising noticeably earlier and later in the day. Even if I’m not out in it to be able to open the curtains and have my living room flooded with light as I drink my morning cuppa before taking the dog out, or to have that same room still bathed in light as I start to feel ready for my supper is just such a joy. So I thought I would share that joy with you on this first Monday in March.
My beautiful dipstick dog stuck under the throwMy beautiful dog after being released from captivity
Yes I know one picture is from the other day but I thought you’d like to see the sequence
I think the dog forgave the throw for capturing him but I’m not sure. As the “kind” dog-mummy I am I did make him wait for his release until I had taken the first photo.
This is a follow on from my post the other day looking at Sorry. Please, if you haven’t read Beth’s comments about what they get up to at her kindergarten with their children around forgiveness/sorry do go back to read them. They are awesome. I wish I’d done that with my children when they were little
As I’ve said before there are times when God/The Universe just keep highlighting things and this is what has happened with the Sorry/Forgiveness things. I was watching The Way on BBC iplayer the other day and there is a part towards the end where one character says to the other – “I forgive you” and the response is “But I didn’t say sorry”. [I won’t tell you who says what to who because you might want to watch it. Be warned the link has spoiler alerts!]
What stuck me in following on from that previous Sorry post is that it is the forgiving that releases us rather than the saying sorry. The forgiver is able to let go, to move on, and to find their own direction. It doesn’t need someone to say “Sorry” for each of us to be able to forgive.
As happened on the Cross Jesus says “Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” Luke 23:34 [which is actually quite similar to the thing the one character does to the other. She thinks she was doing a good thing but he did not see it that way] Jesus didn’t wait until the people who crucified him said they were sorry. And it is possible some of them never were sorry because they did not see what they had done was wrong.
As with Beth’s children it is not about saying Sorry and moving on but about the child who has been hurt being able to say what they need to make them feel better.
Within the context of the TV program she had said and done things along the way that had help restore his self-worth, had given him the things that made him feel better for the slight that had been committed.
As with all things we have to slow down, to understand what our hurts are and what would make us feel better. As I heard on Drew Jackson’s podcast about Poetry as a Spiritual Practice often anger can be the surface emotion to something much deeper. But we do have to slow down to be able to really find that – whether that be through poetry, free writing which is my go-to, prayer, long walks, or whatever – find that thing that helps us explore deeper what we are really feeling and what will make us feel restored.
It has been looking at the book of Ruth and in today’s it says that
One of the themes of the story of Ruth is ‘hesed’; the word appears three times in this short book … It is translated as loving kindness or steadfast love and faithfulness in many English versions. It describes a people in covenant with God, who love unconditionally, not only doing what is required by the law but going the extra mile. It is this word that the biblical writers use when speaking of God’s unfailing commitment to his people (regardless of what a mess they are in).
It goes on to say how ‘hesed’ is how Ruth treats her grumpy mother-in-law, how Boaz goes the extra mile for Ruth, and how these are forerunners of how Jesus lived out ‘hesed’ in his healings, caring for, feeding, lifting up the marginalised.
So loving kindness that we are to allow to flow from us is not just ‘being nice’ but it is about going that extra mile, going beyond what is required of us to be good. But it has to start with us. If I don’t have loving kindness for myself then I do not have the energy to flow through me. So in whatever we do we need to get to that safe place that we love ourselves unconditionally then we can love others unconditionally.
I also that even though God loves us unconditionally anyway we too often don’t see that until we show ‘hesed’ [loving kindness] and unconditional love to ourselves.
Self-care = self-loving kindness which = peace which = being able to “love our neighbour as ourselves/love ourselves so we can love our neighbour”
Renly just emanating love and kindness especially after being released from under the throw on the spare room couch!!! Photographed by myself 1st March 2024
Yesterday I spoke on using creative writing for therapeutic purposes at an event on self-care. It finished with a meditation of which the key words that stood out for me were “loving kindness“. Loving kindness to ourselves, to our families, to our friends, to the random people we come across in our daily lives.
A lot of what I caught of the day was of how the energy we emit affects those around us. So if I feel at peace I emanate peace and so hand on peace to others. Again if I emanate fear then that is what I will pass on to others. That was along with like grounding ourselves, realising our own energy, loving ourselves, knowing our own power, trusting in our hearts, listening to guides.
It has always been something I have believed for a long time and the more I read and study the Bible see all the above as a total God/Jesus thing.
Yet it is so rare to hear talks in Churches or with other Christians about their energy, of living out their beliefs, of trusting that still small voice, of being grounded and connected with Earth and Spirit, when I think those things should be paramount.
I truly believe that if we could talk more about this and explored it from a non-judgemental stand-point we would understand it better. And then we would believe more about how connected we are to God and their Universe in a more holistic way. I think, again if we were open and non-judgemental when we talked with others about these things more people would see the connection of all this amazing stuff they are exploring with the God who created the Universe who loves each of us unconditionally.
So to give the Creator of the Universe a bit of a chance in this world that is looking for that connected unconditional love we need to believe it more. Also Christians need to stop seeing these lovely people I mixed with yesterday as outsiders who need to be converted to the Christian “norm” of whatever theology we believe. Instead we need to get into dialogue with them, and with others who have no spiritual leanings at all, again in the non-judgemental way. I think this will lead to us growing and learning and realising how diverse God actually is. And maybe it would increase our faith?
With all things we must put LOVING KINDNESS at the centre of all we do and say and believe so that this is what springs from us and flows to others.
Aspirational Adventures 