Hermione Laake's Blog: Thoughts, page 16

Roots. Day 7 Discover prompts, ‘Below’

Below the ground.

Roots seem to merely lie.

After all roots are invisible.

They are sometimes colourful, but mostly take on the dull brown of the earth.

What point in paying attention to roots?

Of course roots are everything

They speak of your past, which affects your present and your future

You may wish to escape your roots or put down new roots of your own, different roots from your parents, friends, relatives, you may strive to improve your situation

Or you may learn from your own errors through living wild and free and not keeping still, not putting down roots.

Still, I’ve noticed that this tree remains rooted in the ground, here, exactly in this place, where it was planted or where it seeded itself, either way, both ways surfice.

Each season, this tree springs to life and sustains and I wonder whether that is simply a result of putting down roots

And the birds sing like never before

Creative Power

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Naïve art painting, by Hermione Laake, painted in

1991

While the rest of the world is playing catch up to the power of creativity, I thought I’d write a short blog here for you.

Today Linkedin announced they are offering mindfulness advice for people working from home.This is a good way of being aware of your feelings, and mindfulness does help you to feel more in control.

As part no learning development team, we worked with students and offered them strategies to manage exam stress, one of which was mindfulness classes.

Colouring in pictures is a form of meditative practice that you can indulge in to relax if you don’t have access to a garden. Gardening works in the same way, allowing your mind to relax as you concentrate your thoughts on the plants.

There is another way of processing thoughts, and that is creative writing.Writing your thoughts down helps you to process them. Even if you are not someone who wants to write creatively for a living, this practice helps you to avoid worrying thoughts going round and round in your head.

If you want to avoid talking about worries with relatives at the moment, then writing them down at the end of the day is a good way of processing them. It is also a way of leaving them to one side.

Another positive that arises from this practice is that, should you have questions, often the answers come to you when you share them, if not with friend and family then with yourself on paper. You may be surprised at how you gain insight from reading back what you have written.

Some useful ways of writing down painful thoughts are to distance yourself by writing as though you are an animal or an inanimate object, such as a chair or a pen.

Another useful way to express your feelings is to write as someone of the opposite sex. This method can give you surprising creative freedom if you are a writer and you may produce some interesting work.

Pink Moon and the metre/meter meadow

Tonight we experience a pink moon.

Usually I blog this on my other site, hermionelaakeloveslavender@wordpress.com – I thought I’d blog on here for a change, since so many of you seem to enjoy my writing.

Pink Moon gets its name from Wild Ground Phlox, a North American spring flower.

Below are some other pink flowers, which I planted two summers past, after finding them reduced in my local garden centre.

For now, since we have no Pink Moon flowers, I offer you a short podcast of birds singing and me watering the flowers, blessed by a delicate evensong for your patient hearts.

The garden centre have a resident robin, or should I say, visiting robin?

They feed the robin meal worms, and it has become quite tame, flying over the heads of customers confidentiality. This confidence is unusual for robins.

However, several birds do become accustomed to you in the garden. This year we had a pair of blackbirds visit the gardens; brothers. The female blackbird is brown, the male, black. At first they took flight everytime they saw me. One of them still returns and will now hop around me cautiously, when I’m sitting out getting a dose of vitamin D.

We planted a tiny meadow 3 years ago and I’ve noticed the blackbird likes that particular spot better than the rest of the garden, even though it isn’t more than 3 foot by 2.5 foot wide, so less than a metre wide both ways.

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Pink tulips in April.

Dish – part two

We cooked together, the flour a sticky mess, and used the remainder to make papier mache`pinata.

Today’s dish:

Home made sauce for pasta, or gnocchi.

Recipe:

Tomato puree
Olive oil
Garlic
1 red onion
Rosemary
Basil
1 stock cube

Method:

Lightly fry the onion and garlic in olive oil; remove from the heat, stir in tomato puree, add water, stir
Simmer for 15 minutes.
Add to pasta, or gnocchi dishes.
Use remainder to make a sauce with courgettes when in season.
Serve hot.


https://hermionelaake.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/wp-1586273744179.mp4

Day 2. Open, your heart

“Have some compassion,” he said.

Me? I thought. Aren’t I the most compassionate person on this planet?

I said nothing. I deferred to thought. Slow to anger.

What I have lost is compassion. I realised that this means that I am least compassionate to myself.

I am angry with myself for finally failing to feed my teenager after 8 years of success as a single mum; I am angry with myself for being able to dress well on a pittance; I am angry with myself for being articulate and able to ace any interview; I am angry with myself for being slow, because people want speed; I am angry with myself for noticing flaws in writing: my own and others.’

“Your greatest flaw is sometimes your greatest asset,” said that polymath from IQ.

Seeing the flaws, I suppose, requires a dispassionate eye. It is not that I lack compassion, it is that I have been torn open over and over again, until (have you noticed this?),

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the scar heals perfectly.

These Hands

these hands have held five babies, over and over and over again.

These hands have pushed trikes, bikes, chairs, swings, have combed hair, tied plaits, knotted shoes, scrubbed out the mud from football boots, held the handle of a hoover day after day after day, ironed, stirred, flipped pancakes, picked up ladybirds, ailing birds, and snails in the middle of the road.

These hands have held chess pieces, lit fires, clapped at concerts, and open evenings, poured water into paddling pools and planted trees, made homes for insects and ponds for frogs.

These hands have given ‘ holding time’ to one energetic boy child who always wanted to go his own way, after realising that smacking didn’t work on an 18 month-old that rolled over and got up everytime I laid him on his nappy, and a good thing too, since he’s now a doctor.

These hands have been held out for the cane aged seven or eight, until this person realised that the punishment of sitting on a chair was the better one.

These hands have penned 7 novels, 3 of them published,

These hands have held the hand of a dead boy, only 19 years, and placed a coat over another boy, this one not a brother but a stranger knocked down in a road in Spain.

These hands have signed documents of proof, and asked for references so that this person could go to university,

These hands have picked out tarmac from a child’s knee,

And held a book every single day for forty-something years.

These hands have drawn illustrations that may never be seen, except by a few small children,

These hands have typed over a thousand medical letters.

These hands have played jazz on a Victorian piano, and twinkle twinkle on the violin.

These hands have baked exotic dishes like biscotti, Victoria Sandwich and Gespatcho.

These hands have pruned, and planted, tended and passed, priced and tagged, clipped and mended, sewn and knitted, and still these hands seem unbreakable.

[image error]These hands

Ode to a dish

This plate seems ordinary,

Well alright then, extraordinary,

There isn’t one like it in the world

We painted it ourselves

It is green and red, a perfect watermelon,

Made with nature’s complimentary colours,

An art teacher once showed me a colour wheel

and said

Orange and blue

Yellow and purple,

Green and red

And now you are far away in London

And I have this dish

That we painted in 2008

[image error]This dish

The Age of the Imagination

The Age of the Imagination

“He will love those that he loved, and he will love them to the end.”

I heard this phrase on Radio 4 this morning. I thought, yes, this is the sentence that I most believe in; this sentence above all others. This is what sums up the general atmosphere that I feel permeates the whole world; at least the world that I have come into contact with in the past few weeks.

As a young mother, raising five, sometimes combative children, I noticed that a good way to bring them all together, was to present them with a common enemy; me. Now of course I didn’t deliberately provoke them or behave inappropriately; what I did was to put them all in the same boat, at times, to give them a response to their behaviour that all of them shared. Now it occurs to me that this pandemic that we are all, globally, experiencing is the one thing that could bring us all together, and I do mean all.

There is a saying, “All religions are one.” Now this is attributed to William Blake, but I think that it is much older than that:

All Religions are One

Accessed April 5th 2020

The reason that I feel this, is because the same phrase is inscribed on a bench in Bournemouth, a bench I sometimes sat on when I was living there for a decade (I used to take my children to walk in the park and sit on the lions, and to paint at All Fired Up, the pottery painting place, hoping to instil in them a love of art and an easy way to achieve respite when they were weary.)—the inscription, “All religions are one” struck me when I sat on that bench because it was offered as an epitaph for a soul that had passed, and that soul, if I remember rightly, was of eastern origin, and it occurred to me that the poets often relied on Eastern philosophy to guide them, although this is not often written about, perhaps because we have, for too long, perhaps, relied on the west as the epi-centre of it all. Of course, this is an ego-centric and mis-guided perception. (Yet, isn’t it natural to imagine that the weather is the same everywhere, or that the loo roles have disappeared everywhere, or that the queues for the chemist have only just started, when they reached London weeks ago. Ah, the frenetic pace of London, a city I worked in and loved and shall love until my death.) I have not researched the quote further, as my time was occupied in raising my five children rather than working, and dedicating myself to that task of educating and nurturing, since I myself was not able to have the education I deserved, as an accident of poverty. Of course, this is not something I discuss or have told them, and they won’t be reading this, since four of them are occupied serving this country in its moment of crisis. All four of them, including the creative one, are serving this country. Of course, the powers that be have forgotten about the ability of art to sustain us, and the connection between creativity and good. Except that an artist, that I wrote about elsewhere in a recent blog, did not forget and suggested that the imagination was key in this struggle for right and good and for overcoming. Yet we are learning and I would like to posit, as I did somewhere else a few years ago, but my manuscript was rejected, and I failed to send it out again, that this is the age of the imagination.

I was talking to my sister, based in London, the other day, and she said that she had not noticed the change in behaviour to one of love from those people she has come into contact with in London. I thought that was sad. But then I thought, it will come. It has certainly come to us her in south Glos’; we are out on the pavements clapping for our key workers, and we are keeping our distance and tending to our gardens.

The overriding feeling that I have had is to reach out to those that I love, to reach out to them every day and to simply share my love with them, via Whattsap and Twitter and WordPress, and video, and via writing. Sometimes love stays hidden; we do not express it. Perhaps, we do not want to interrupt the (often frenetic), pace of this current world which appears to be being undermined as we speak, and write, and create; and yet, sometimes what we should do is keep reaching out, no matter what.

It is harder to bridge the gap of distance when you let go and stop entirely; it is harder to explain why you have suddenly begun to take an interest, at least that is how it may appear to someone who is untrained or inexperienced in the pattern of love and loss. I myself have loved and lost seven people, and what that has taught me is that the only regrets that I have are of the moments when I did not reach out, when I held back, when I did not say those things that I should have said. When I allowed fear to get in the way.

My son has been asked to volunteer to step up early before he has finished his medical training for the NHS. The other day, I rang my son and asked him not to volunteer to work for the NHS on the front line, because I know that all his life he has had issues with breathing; I will not go into this here because it is private, I mention this only, because my first thought was self-preservation, preservation of those that I love, and, on reflection, this was selfish. I was thinking of our future life together; the one that would be lost, were he to succumb to a disease; I was thinking of his wife and his unborn children, I was thinking of all those times together that I was looking forward to.

Still, what right have we to decide when it is time to go?–and as my mother says, we all have a time when we will go. Perhaps we cannot influence this and we should carry on and do whatever it is that we have been called to do. With me, it is writing and that is why I am penning this for you now, because this is the most beautiful sermon that I have every heard and I wanted to share it with you in case it helps you to find peace.

I cannot see in person any of my five children, and yet, I know God is with them, and it doesn’t matter which god it is, because god is love.

The following sermon might help you to feel rested and forgiven and accepted, even if you believe that all religions are one:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000h28l

Accessed, April 5th 2020

All my love,

Hermione

Underneath the birch

This morning there are so many birds dancing underneath the birch.I often leave a few nettles and other weeds for the moths, and other insects that cannot do without them.

Here is a short film of the birch

7am, Great Britain
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Where streets meet

This is a writing prompt blog, vis-a`-vis Ben Huberman,

Ah, three streets? The first is right outside that stately building on Star and Garter Hill. That building with the view that Turner painted, that housed all the war veterans.

This war is silent, but more deadly my dear.

The second is the street I grew up in Lammas Road Ham, because ‘Lammas’ carries meaning; I looked it up once, I’m not telling, just leaving it there like a clue in a Clue Puzzle Novel.

The third? Mmm. The third; I suppose it’s the last, and I don’t get to choose another? Then it’s Gold Hill, Shaftesbury.

Ah yes, I have been truly blessed to pass all these streets daily for years as part of my daily constitutional.

Lammas Road, which is just a moment’s walk from the Thames, and Star and Garter Hill, right outside Richmond Park; and Gold Hill, in Dorset, not because I’m nostalgic about Hovis bread, I can’t eat bread anymore, since it makes my stomach swell up since I had that nasty infection when I worked in that hospital typing medical letters and eating at my desk, because everyone else did, even though at first, I was disgusted by the behaviour. (How quickly we learn to do the same as everyone else.)

But Richmond upon Thames and the park remind me of home, remind me of my father who carried me on his shoulder and smiled and laughed all through my childhood, except when I was scared of the hoover.