Hormones

Hi Folks, my dear friend Cara was berating me last night for not writing my Blog recently. But don’t worry, I have lots of excuses!

Don’t we always? I for one can easily divert my thoughts onto all the things I haven’t done, need to do or have just done. 

Every book I have ever read concerning living more peacefully and living more meaningfully talks about “living in the now”. 

Indeed there is in reality only now, since (as the scientists have proved) there is no such thing as linear time - that’s just a man-made construct. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics but I like the idea!

But I’ve found, like so many things in life, the theory is easier than the practice. Living in the now is a bit like learning to ride a horse. Skyler, the young horse whisperer who was teaching me out in Montana, explained beautifully to me how to sit in the saddle while my horse was trotting. 

I concentrated hard and listened carefully to what to do...then my horse started to move and it all went out of the window. “Push your weight down in your stirrups and curve your butt into the saddle.” Yeah right. The horse was going up and down and I’m going down and up and the whole thing degenerated into an ungainly jiggle. The story of my life!

Just about sums up my last few weeks. 

We’ve had a lot going on in our business recently.Those of you who know our shops here in Petworth will know we closed our shoe shop last week. It has been a sad excercise. It’s never much fun ending something, and it was a bumpier ride than I’d imagined it to be. I’ve learnt over the 7 years that I’ve been a business owner that making decisions based on sound financial proof is the only way to go. But tell my heart that when I’m dismantling one of our dreams and admitting defeat.

But this is what I mean about living in the now. When we discussed this closure 4 months ago I was all for the streamlining of our shops. Our overheads were too high, our profits were too low - “you do the math” as the Americans say.

Four months down the line we have successfully managed the closure and secured a new tenant for the premises. I got exactly what I asked for - so why do I feel so lousy?!

Excuse number two: Hormones!! (men’s favourite) My husband keeps a closer eye on my Menstrual Cycle than I do. Which is why I found myself on Wednesday panicking quite spectacularly (and internally) about our future.

Now for those of you out there who don’t directly experience PMT I’ll describe my own personal symptoms:

Small dense black rain-cloud hovering permanently over my head.

A head full of demons (mine) who form a cacophonous background of abuse in my head. You know the stuff: “You’re useless. Have you made the right decision? What are you doing with your life? What about the future? What does your hair look like?!” Deafening and prone to cause paralysis.

Then there’s the leaking. Poor Chris is driven demented by my crying at this time of the month. The tears just leak out unbidden, all over the place. I read recently that crying releases the stress hormone Cortisol. Finally, the perfect excuse for a “good greet”.

No consolation when I’m trying to have a serious business conversation and have an overwhelming urge to throw myself on the ground and bawl. 

My old Jenners friends and I used to meet up regularly by the service lift to discuss work problems. Can you see the three of us, all dolled up in heels and big earrings, lipstick in place -  frazzled all to hell? 

On a really bad day when everything was out of control Sonya would say, our minds were going “whoop, whoop, whoop” (accompanied by eye rolling and upward hand gestures). The only answer was to call in a helicopter and be airlifted from the building. Picture it - a stressed out, hormonal fashion buyer flailing around on a rescue stretcher while the whump whump whump of the blades slowly fade away above the Department Store.

The rescue helicopter didn’t arrive this week and I had to manage through the morass that was my brain unaided. As we say in Scotland: “Ma heid’s mince”. Which literally translated means “my head’s full of minced beef”. Quite.

I make a promise to myself that I’ll keep up my Blog - no more excuses - being honest about what’s going on in my minced head and in the hope that some of you out there know what I’m talking about.

Laura x  

Teenagers

Teenagers - you can't live with them, you can't live with them.


We've had Chris's eldest son with us from Australia for the last month. It's the first time he's been back in seven months and I'd forgotten just what forces of nature teenagers are.


I'd forgotten also how set in my ways and used to my own space I'd become when, within half an hour of Jack arriving from Heathrow, a swarm of youths had descended on our once peaceful home.


I have now returned him safely to Heathrow and am once again mistress of all I survey - bliss. But spending a month in a house littered with teenage detritus (you know - electronic cables, empty glasses, stray friends, strangely bleeping machinery, random items of clothing) made me more tolerant. Far more tolerant than I would be if we were talking years of course, a month's enough! 


My own son is now twenty three - a fact that bemuses me as much as it does those who have never met him & remark on my youthful appearance. Well I can tell you, I'd look a lot more youthful if I'd never had a teenager!


One of my favourite authors, Steven Covey's, 7 secrets of success is: "Seek first to understand". It's an eminently sensible aim in any situation. But with parents and teenagers it often feels as though "there are no files" as my dear sister would say. Really, for both sides it frequently feels like we're speaking Chinese.


Which reminds me - too funny - my dear friend Dorothy is mother to 4 sons ranging from late twenties to pre teen. (She is also one of the most glamorous and gorgeous women I've ever known.) Her older boys used to say to her when she started to berate them over something, "Mum there's no point talking to us because all we hear is 'ning, ning, ning, ning'". See what I mean?


When my son was first a teenager, and we were living in our rather cramped flat in Scotland, I can remember one night lying in bed and thinking: "Being the mother of a teenager is like being forced to live with an ex lover". It's that exquisitely agonising pitch of emotions that seems to be sustained beyond all conceivable endurance...all the time!


Of course we all know how fearless they are about going for our weak spots. I admire the way our children can stab us right through the heart by using all of our demons against us with no qualms whatsoever. I think it shows a good survival instinct.


Did you know: It's not a teenager's fault that they're rude. Turns out that every time they lose it and disown you or seem oblivious to your wisdom, they're not just being obtuse. The part of the brain responsible for empathy is still developing. 


Yeah, so what's our excuse?!


And don't forget, it's a teenager's job to reject their parents - they're programmed to do it. So next time they tell you to p**s off remember that they're only growing into adulthood!


It turns out that even our teenager's inability to get out of bed isn't a deliberate ploy to raise our blood pressure. No, it appears that a teenager's body clock runs slower than an adult's - so 8am feels like 6am to them. Now it all makes sense. Oh how I wish I'd known all this when I was a young mum. 


But I'll tell you what's changed since Jack was last living with us. I did what Steven Covey suggested and I sought first to understand. I admit that it's taken me 23 years and a lot of mistakes to get here, but better late than never.


Or maybe I just took the time to remember: To be a teenager - to not have done enough yet in life to feel guilt; to not have the weight of experience to carry around; to have your entire future ahead of you; to feel immortal.


It seems to me that teenagers, if they're having a good time, are doing just what they're supposed to be doing - living in their own world, involved in their own passions. Surely this is the one time in most of our lives that we can? And all the while that they're driving us parents demented, their brains are growing and developing, preparing them for adulthood. Neat, huh?




Last week a fabulously mesmerising friend of ours had three of us in fits describing her boarding school escapades. These ranged from breaking into Chapel and drinking the Communion wine to exploding out of a cupboard onto an unsuspecting teacher and emptying a fire extinguisher over her. I know it's shocking but I have to confess to being envious of her exploits. Okay so I worked hard and have a degree to show for it, but oh how I wish at 45 that I'd been a little bit more of a teenager.


Well you know what they say, youth is wasted on the young. Which is why I'm practising being a Forty-Something Teenager: I'm fortunate enough to be in a position where I am finally able to put myself first. I can indulge my passions once more, happy in the sure knowledge that other people's business is none of mine.


As Kalil Gibran so beautifully put it in his gem of a book The Prophet, in the chapter On Children: 


"You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."
x

Here Comes The Sun

Aah, the delectable George Harrison singing Here Comes The Sun. Isn't this the perfect song to accompany the first of the Spring sunshine?

Let's all sing along!

Meditation

I am transcribing here something I wrote last January which I found and thought I’d include because you might find it interesting. I won’t edit, I’ll just copy. Excuse the swearing in advance!

22.1.2010

“I had an amazing experience while meditating tonight. I was lying on my back and stilling my breathing - breathing out all the stress and stuff and breathing in the Universe.

I can see it, see the energy of the universe, rushing into me, through me. And it feels like I have no boundaries.

I have my eyes closed but it’s not black. I have a vision of sizzling particles, buzzing energy and it forms a mandala around me. First I am looking at it, and as I breathe I merge with it until I am at it’s centre.

Now I am at the centre of the mandala. When I breathe in I have the sensation of reducing in on myself (except I feel no self). And when I breathe out I feel the energy expanding.

There are two things that always happen when I meditate. Almost simultaneously, as I relax into a medititive state, I see a light growing stronger behind my eyes. The light grows stronger the deeper I go until it fills my entire vision. 


At the same time (oh it’s 3 things) my head starts to lift involuntarily - weird. When I used to meditate sitting upright in a chair, I would start with my head falling forward relaxed. And as I meditated it would lift up until my face was tilting upwards.

And as if that wasn’t weird enough, at the same time as I’ve got the glowing bright light and the lifting head, I start to smile! Every time, totally involuntarily - how mad is that?!

I mean I can be doing my thing and not quite settled and there’re a few negative thoughts or problems flitting across my mind, and I start to smile. And I mean a big cheesy grin! It starts slowly - with the head lifting and the lightbulb behind the eyes stuff - and by the time I’ve finished, my head is tilted upwards and I’ve got this great big, open mouthed, beatific smile on my face. Mental!

Now I meditate in the dark lying down before I go to sleep. Which is just as well because anyone happening upon me in this state would get the fright of their life. Either that or they’d think I’d been up to some unmentionable act!

The other thing that always happens is that my body disappears. It’s a bit like a physical version of what I described earlier. Like my mind and self merging with the collective energy but in physical form. My body heats up very rapidly - a strange dry heat - hot enough that I should be sweating but instead it’s a prickly heat like static electricity - dry.

I can feel this buzzing, tingling heat but it doesn’t feel like it’s got any boundaries. I can feel the heat crackling around the surface of my body (I guess where the energy my body’s generating meets the energy around me) but I can’t define it. It feels as if my body has totally disappeared.

My breath becomes very shallow and incredibly slow. Sometimes, when I’m in the state I’m describing fully, I take a sudden breath and realise that I haven’t been breathing at all.

I love meditation. I spent a weekend in the basement of an Edinburgh townhouse when I was 14, learning to meditate, after a British Airways hostess friend of ours reccommended my mum and I try it. 
It was amazing, a revelation to me. The house inside was shabby and hippy. Incense burned and the residents all seemed to wear hessian and hemp (or so it seemed to me). 




Being a bit of a Hippy myself, I was delighted with it all - although way out of my comfort zone at 14. Anyway, that was my initiation into Transcendental Meditation a la Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of The Beatles fame.

When you are inducted you’re given a mantra which is unique to you. I can’t imagine it’s totally unique. Can you imagine having to think up millions of unique mantras, all with different sound combinations?! You’d end up with weird pig noises & swear words!! Oh that’s too funny - I’m having a fit of laughing now.

Just picture it - some poor bastard practising his meditation and his mantra is a barking sound or ”fuck”! Mind you, I’ve seen a few people audibly meditating then: “fuck, fuck ,fuck”... usually after falling over or dropping something! Oh I’ve made myself laugh again and lost my train of thought!

As I was saying, I love meditation. I haven’t done it religiously since the age of 14. I was diligent in my youth, right into my student years. It is an incredibly powerful state - healing and energising and empowering and inspiring and enriching.

When I was 19 and living in a student house in Edinburgh, I went back to my room one lunchtime to meditate (very diligent!) Anyway I didn’t meditate for very long. You’re supposed to increase from 20 minutes to however long you like but I generally last about 15 minutes. Any longer and my fidget-arse self gets bored and starts wriggling.

That probably explains why meditating suits me. I can go very quickly into it and pretty much anywhere. When I travelled a lot I used to meditate anywhere - on the Tube, on a park bench, with noise all around. But once I reach a certain state in that kind of environment the background fades out. It’s like an accute awareness and accute relaxation combined.

Sorry, back to my story: I’m a 19 year old student meditating in my sunny wee corner room in my student house one lunchtime. It must have been only 20 minutes but during that time I had a real Peak Experience. Now I understand the state better and the science behind it, I guess it was my first and most intense experience of the state I describe above.

But it was more than that: the light and boundlessness and the ecstatic feeling and the strength of the energy flowing through me were incredibly powerful. I was unable even to be aware that I felt that way. Awareness involves conscious thought and this was something else. I had no physical sense of who I was and no conscious awareness of the state I was in and yet I knew completely what it was and where I was and how it felt:

Boundless

Infinite

Like cosmic white noise

and yet defined

Understood

Remembered. 

It was the weirdest (and I’ve had some!) and most powerful experience I’d ever had (and have ever had) in my life.

When I came back to normality and left the house to meet my friends Scott and Jaime, I tried to explain it to them. But there were no words . The best I could manage through my smiling, breathless garblings, was that I now knew what death was like. The state we call death, that’s what I had experienced. Like a glimpse, a moment, of the state that is ours when we shuffle off this mortal coil.

Jaime was horrified. He’s a Spanish Catholic. (Come to think of it, he might’ve wangled me a Sainthood or something. I could’ve been venerated in a cave and people would pay to drink my bath water. Might’ve missed a trick there.)

But no, Jaime maintained his horror at my macabre “experience” and took me to see “Harold & Maude”. What a film - hilarious! An E Type Jaguar converted into a hearse because Harold’s obsessed with death. If you haven’t seen it - Harold’s about 18 and Maude’s 70ish - too funny.

So I’ve never been able to express what I experienced 23 years ago. Until tonight when it happened, in a different way, again.

It may have sounded morbid and I must’ve sounded nuts, but it changed my life. Well wouldn’t it? I had an experience of pure bliss and oneness with the universe, an experience that I know was real - because some things just are. 

That’s a good experience to have under your belt at the age of 19. My diligence paid off!"

     

My First Sculpture in 21 Years

My lovely hubby excelled himself this birthday and bought me some clay, a modelling board and some tools. So this morning, for the first time in 21 years, I created something in clay.
This is my first (unfinished) wee maquette (like a mini 3 dimensional sketch for a bigger sculpture). It's about 4 inches high.
I was so excited this morning when I woke up and remembered that I was about to get my hands mucky! 


21 years is a long time not to do something that I used to be so passionate about and practiced in. But I'd locked away my creativity, too afraid that if I carried on sculpting I wouldn't get on with 'real life'.  


And that's why I'm putting these photos on my blog - to ensure that I can't carry on as a 'margin artist' for another 21 years!


Thank you. x

Happy Birthday to all you Slippery Little Fish out there!

Hello everyone, it's my birthday today - 45 years young. I'll drink a wee toast to you all!
Happy Weekend!
Laura x

Sing, sing a song. Sing it loud, sing it long." The Carpenters

I love music. Songs are truly the soundtrack to my life. It was pointed out last October by a dear new friend that we met in Montana, that I have a song for everything. I spent the entire fortnight finding songs appropriate to every situation. I just do. It's fun.


When I was pregnant with my son Max, I had few cravings: Granny Smith apples, the colour red and classical music. Mostly Bach and Mozart - I enjoyed their ordered simplicity, it soothed me. Occasionally, when feeling particularly hormonal, I would listen to Chopin.


I have to tell you the funniest story. It happened when I was pregnant I think, or at least Max was very young. Gavin and I were driving up to Colinton in Edinburgh. I shared my mum's old Fiesta with my younger brother and it was my week for driving. We drove past a Hedgehog in the middle of the road. Being bleeding heart Art Students we decided that the only possible action was to stop the car and rescue the poor soul. 


As we stopped the car, a lorry drove past, squashing the Hedgehog flat. Yes, what's so funny about that? Well nothing. Except that as we watched this poor creature shuffle off this mortal coil, Chopin's Requiem was playing on the tape recorder.


It was too funny. I told you, God's a funny guy! Who do you imagine invented humour?


Anyway, I digress. Actually I've digressed so much that I've completely forgotten what I had to say.


Oh yes, music. You've probably gathered that I have fairly Catholic tastes in music. Funny expression that. The Catholics I've met - in real life and through study, have seemed to me pretty conservative in their tastes. Although I am happy to have had the privilege of meeting many wonderful exceptions to this rule.


I thought about it and guess that the term was coined to describe the Vatican's well read and well educated house. "know thine enemy". It comes from a good Source and for good reason. How can we control our subjects if we don't know what makes them tick?


Shame though. They missed out on a lot of fun by banning and denying all that great literature and art.
No matter of course since it only serves to make it more powerful.


My musical tastes - Catholic. Okay it's pretty safe. I like a good melody and interesting words, and a good beat, oh and the potential to sing and dance along. Not many requirements. I am innately lazy and pleasure seeking in my musical tastes. I love James Taylor and Lyle Lovett. I love Ella Fitzgerald and Joni Mitchell and Carole King and Carly Simon. I love Reggae music. What a beat. 


We watched a programme on BBC 4 and they explained the beat of Reggae music. The trick is to fuse the drums and the base into one beat, one vibration - like a heartbeat. Brilliant. My favourite is "Stir It Up". 
I had the pleasure of seeing The Wailers at the Vintage at Goodwood Festival. They were amazing. I'd been feeling a bit miserable, and behaving miserably, much to my disgust. I was standing in a long slow queue for the toilets when I heard the strains of "Stir It Up" drifting towards me in the dark. I was mesmerised - swaying and singing harmonies like a loony. I didn't care.


I watched them for as long as I could. Dancing and singing at the top of my voice, a permanent grin on my face. What's not to love? A stage full of beautiful Rastafarians full of talent and sure of who they are - their place in the world. That's very sexy. And the music is sexy - primal and rhythmic and in tune with who we are in the best sense of the word.


Mmm, I also love ballads. I'm a Balladeer at heart. I'm not a rocker, although I do fancy myself as Trailer Trash Country. I love The Dixie Chicks. My friend Cara put me onto them and I am eternally grateful.


One of my favourites is "Tonight The Heartache's on Me". It's brilliant, telling the story of a woman alone in a bar when her ex lover walks in with his new girlfriend. She looks like an angel and he looks smug as. Her answer is to take it on the chin and invite everyone to drink a toast to her - the butt of the joke.


I also adore Paul Weller - Mod Father and founder of The Jam. I first fell in love with Paul and his beautiful songs when I was about twelve. I used to make my own badges and listened to all their albums. Favourites of mine were Eton Rifles and All Mod Cons. There is a song on All Mod Cons that has my stomach turning somersaults just thinking about it. It is a song called "English Rose". I am hoping that our new friend Skyler the Cowboy will sing it when we move to Montana. It begins with the most beautiful and haunting fog horns. Yes really! And then the achingly moving and simple voice of the Mod Father himself soars quietly above the waves and the sound of trains in the distance. Exquisite.


Oh but what about Disco?! I love Disco. "Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci". I begged my mum to bring me back a bottle of Halston perfume from America. I treasured it for years, still do. It felt and smelt so glamorous - just like Studio 54. 


One of my favourites is "Young Hearts Run Free". I identified so strongly with the lyrics of that song. I used to sing it to myself while working on the shop floor as a Management Trainee for Jenners. I would day dream about a time in the future when I could go back to my first loves - sculpting and writing and singing and living in La La Land.


My list is endless and you've probably had enough now. So I will leave you with another line from a song very dear to my heart.


Perhaps a wee hymn, it being Sunday n all. "Sing Hosanna" is one of my favourites. I was a choir girl after all. God and I sing that one a lot. You can really belt it out and it sounds pretty funny, especially when I burst out involuntarily. God really does have a sense of humour.


Thank you for reading this and thank you even if you didn't.
x


PS: I've put links to some of my favourite songs on my Blog - take a look!