Angela Jeffs

Ten flights in six weeks. Around the world in 44 days.

Not as impressive as it sounds, of course. Back in the twentieth century, before planes turned us into wannabe birds rather than the nomads we really are,  Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ was knocked into a cocked hat (curious expression; did I make it up?) by Elizabeth Jane Cochran.

Verne’s novel, published in 1872,  is pure fiction. Jane, however was an investigative journalist (using the pseudonym Nellie Bly) at a time when the mere idea of digging deep (she pretended to be insane to report on conditions in a so-called lunatic asylum) raised eyebrows.

Few know of her now of course, because in the main women were – and still are – relegated to her-story rather than his-story. Born in 1864 in Pennsylvania, USA,  she circumnavigated the world in 72 days, pen and paper at the ready. An amazing story in itself. Check her out…

Before I left Scotland on February 25, and much inspired by Jane, I made a vow: to keep a record of my trip to Canada, California, Hawaii and Japan. I even bought a special logbook, with a woven indigo blue cover and inviting creamy pages.

Toronto was all about family; Montreal, friends…

Like you, maybe, I have often begun to keep a diary. When I look back, however, these dives into self-reflection (in the guise of reportage) were at low spots in my life, acting as vents for anger, depression, misery or blame. No longer.

This time I promised my self to write every day, adding paper memorabilia, quick sketches and materials such as dried flowers along the way.

Bits and bobs, odds and sods from San Francisco: a trial haiku; angel card reading (after the retreat); sprig of lavender; slogans on fashion items that drew attention, made me think…

Of course there were days when – and here come the excuses – I was too busy or caught up in other mindsets and mindfulnesses, not in the mood or just too lazy. But in the main I did well and kept up, even if the quality of the writing varied to a ridiculous degree.

Japan, for example. So familiar, so extensively investigated,  described and reported over the years, became more visual than text orientated, as if I was on holiday, which I realise now I was.

Entrance tickets, brochures, and the weather!

How did the diary begin? As follows, and written in the hotel in Edinburgh on the night of the 24th, because of my early flight to Toronto via Newark, NJ, the next morning:

We are as packed and prepared as we can be. Akii in his usual panic, but I have thrown my hands in the air: can do no more. The gods are with us: the security alarm seemed to work (though still no phone or broadband). 

The garden was rippling white when we drove away in Lady Marion’s taxi – she advertises as LADY DRIVER! – thousands of snowdrops being played around with by the wind. Above, branches whipped the sky, black on blue: a fine day.

Six weeks later, returning with Akii from Japan:

Got to Dunkeld and phoned Marion, but not there so left a message. Luckily she phoned back, having had her supper but “no alcohol as yet!” Bless her.

Feels good to be back but Akii coughing and I feel something not quite right.

Question: Am I allergic to Scotland? 

Having returned on April 10, we both promptly fell ill. An inflight virus no doubt, exacerbated by the exhaustion of over-stimulation and relief.

The very last entry in my log is a reading from the I Ching, recorded a few days later inbetween fits of coughing and wheezing. After all, the referral before leaving, urging me to “attend to the path and not the goal [and all will be well]”, had stood me in good stead. Maybe this would help bring me full circle?

“Darkness reappears unexpectedly. Caution and reticence are in order.”

Which may explain why the last five weeks have done little but take me one step forward and five steps back. Mostly computer muddles and tricks. I have even had to rewrite the last two thirds of this blog, because a week after posting, text, photos and captions disappeared overnight.

Which makes my choice of QUOTE OF THE MONTH (posted the same day as the original blog in mid-May) all the more apt.

Time to throw caution and reticence to the wind and simply accept:

Life is so mysterious, if you allow it to be…

Welcome back. To you. To me. To this website, via a new address: angelajeffs.co.uk

While in Tenerife in January, my old domain (angelajeffs.co.uk) was snapped up overnight in a repayment muddle and I lost all rights to it. Unscrupulous buyers then cheekily tried to sell it back to me from the States, but I was not having any of that!

Then while on retreat in California (March 11-15) I was informed that this website had been hacked into and all content “disappeared”. Blogs, information, photos, everything.

At the time, it would have been easy to be distracted, devastated even. Instead I simply chose to see it as a sign. (http://embrace-transition.com/2015/03/04/picking-up-on-those-messages/)

Had I not that very lunchtime been talking with an American well-being coach who was working online with clients all over the world? (Next Steps: www.hilarynicholls.com)

When I worried that the technology might be too much for me, Hilary laughed.

“Believe me, Angela,” she encouraged. “If I can do it, so can you.”

Ah ha, I thought. Maybe I was simply being told that my old site was redundant – it had served its purpose through my early transitional phase – and it was time to move into a new one with, maybe, a new website?

Now I see that it’s a bit more subtle than that. Mark Newton-Carter who, when not creating websites (http://www.designmark.co.uk) is usually to be found galloping the mountains and glens of Perthshire on a carthorse, is rebuilding… an ongoing process that may take a while yet. But it also started me thinking, and we are working towards creating a new page: DOTWW online. This too may take a few months to become operative, but a move in the right direction for sure.

In the meantime, I’m scrambling to encourage students to sign up for the DOTWW eight-week course due to start May 9 in Birnam. You can see details under SCHEDULE to the right.

Suddenly there seems a lot to do, and it’s all very exciting.

I have been quiet the last month or so, reflecting on the best way to move forward as we begin our third year here in Scotland. Being perfectly open and honest, I hit a brick wall and slid ever-painfully back into old behavioural patterns of anxiety and panic.

There have also been health issues, that I believe – know – are not disconnected. Year one I suffered blockages. Year two, I pushed too hard. Year three, I began in spasm, with medication that threatened to turn me into a near zombie. Not me at all!

In Japan I might have headed for the nearest flotation tank. Instead I fly south for a week or so of sun and to reflect on progress made, progress not made (including a fair number of quite unintentional errors of judgement) and where to go from here towards restorative healing and positive change.

Watch this space!

… this beautiful, ethereal, uplifting space…

I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that although I have facilitated creative writing workshops for near on ten years, I had never in my life attended one myself.

The chance came at my local BOOKMARK festival (Blairgowrie, Rattray and the Glens) this last weekend. The theme in general was PLACE, and when friend Marion indicated she had signed up for a writing workshop with Scottish author/creative writing teacher Fiona Chadwick on that very topic (M: “I have always had trouble with description…”) I thought, well why not, what the hell! I have no trouble describing people or places, whether physical or emotional, but there is always something to learn, right?

Right? Write. I also submitted a 300 piece, Tora’s Labyrinth, for an anthology compiled by Blairgowrie Writer-in-Residence, 2014, Joan Lennon. A single line from each of the 20 selected entries now adorns the floor of Perth Museum and Art Gallery. My own line:
ancient willows, youthful ash

Right.

Apart from the odd feeling of being led instead of doing the leading, I was surprised to find I wrote so sparely. Compared to Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’, for example, which is so rich in detail that the pages become quite tiring to read. Nowadays, he reads “old fashioned”, as in over-blown; but in Mann’s day, the reader needed – nay demanded – to be spoon fed every scrap of detail.

By contrast, Raymond Carver – he who helped wean us away from such visual and emotional feasts of intensity – took inspiration from Japanese literature, and now (more fashionably) allows us to fill in the spaces. I remember the first time I read Kawabata Yasunari’s ‘Snow Country’ and on reaching the end being left in shock: what had happened? where was the plot? the tension? the point?

All those evolved essentials of Western literature had been left to me to imagine, discover, invent, visualize, translate. Reading as active and creative interaction, rather than purely passive enjoyment.

It was not that I began consciously to edit, cut and pare back my writings on the page. It happened on some interior level: I simply found myself writing more simply, more sparely. I can see how – and as – it happened when re-reading my book, Chasing Shooting Stars (Amazon.com): the writing becomes tauter, more restrained as I learned over the decade it took to write that I did not have to put everything in to be effective. In fact, the more I left out the stronger the work became.

The theme of the anthology – 20 pieces of writing, 20 pieces of artwork, all by local people aged 6-77): PLACE

Returning to Fiona’s workshop, I was also reminded how easily and quickly I wrote. Automatically indeed. Mind on hold; intuition wholly in creative mould. Mind you, everyone – including the one elderly woman who admitted she had never really written anything in her life before – said the same. In part this was because of the way in which the exercise was presented: starting with ten minutes writing about sound (start writing now!) and then with reduced time allowances of  7, 5, 4 – and no breaks, on touch, taste, smell and sight: the five senses.

Here is what I wrote. Unedited. No great shakes, but a good learning curve and an exercise I shall use or borrow from on occasion.

Sound? Silence. Does it exist? Sara Maitland wrote a book on the subject, exploring whether there is such a thing as silence in this world we live in, and no: there is always noise. Cut out all external sounds and we begin to hear our heart beating, lungs inflating, deflating, the blood coursing through our veins.

She went into the forest. She went into the desert. She climbed to the top of mountains, and listened, as I am listening now: to the scratch scratch scratch of pens on paper, and someone’s bangle hitting the surface of the table. Stop. Listen again. My cuff on the paper. Fiona doing something on the far side of the room – tearing paper? A page being turned over…

I am touching my lip. A proprioceptive action, one that I was not aware of, but now I am. The pen feels smooth but anxious between my fingers. My other hand supports my face, surprisingly cool. Also smooth! What does this mean? That I have smooth skin or I’m a smooth operator? No, I feel rough, not quite right… I need Tora’s softly smooth fur to quieten me down…

That banana at breakfast was a bit too new and straight off the boat to be perfect. Akii likes his ripe; I don’t. I prefer a slightly raw texture, one that feels fresh and young and on its way… I wonder what that first banana tasted like? The one my mother handed me in 1945 and said “Here, eat this!” I have no memory of how it tasted, or even whether I liked it or not…

The smells and aromas of summer have given way to those of autumn. From sap risen to sap settling into sleep. And the scent of death, but not in a depressing way. Many people hate this time of the year, for its sinking into rot and decay; it reminds them if their own autumn to come. But I like it. I love the colours, the flurrying of leaves, the scattering of seed, the sudden unexpected sunsets…

Our eyes are one way to see. Most imagine there is no other way, but the Sages knew… know there is an internal eye that sees beyond the obvious. Second sight? Maybe there are layers of seeing… I think of Akii not even seeing that there were cherry trees outside his apartment in Chigasaki. I saw them with my eyes. I appreciated them bursting into flower. I witnessed the fall of petals that in Japanese culture remind us of life’s impermanence. But he had not even registering the obvious: the avenue of trunks and branches, leaves and flowers.

Obvious to me that is. But things are different now. Only a few days ago he looked up and said, “Oh! Sheep in the sky!” I looked across the road at the sheep in the field and then upwards to see them replicated in white clouds strolling across blue…

Another exercise that Fiona gave us involved folding a piece of paper in half and writing a list of nouns down the right hand side of the fold: in my case, tower, eye, bracelet, coin, notebook, tsunami, quiche, hamlet, plough, buzzard. Then turning the paper over and listing ten verbs down the left-hand side of the fold: swim, like, escape, follow, note, add, watch, investigate, hide, leave. Opening the paper out offered ideas for linking verbs to nouns that we might otherwise have never thought of: The coin hid from eye and plough for centuries; the fishing boat swam into the tsunami ; the buzzard hung in the sky, ever watchful…Three sentence/phrases that I came up with that might lead off a longer piece of writing, or may even be woven into a work in progress.

I would like to thank Fiona who led us forward through three hours of exploration and discovery. We had a good time and everyone went away enthused. Most importantly, everyone left with a new or revised belief in themselves as writers: the mark of a successful workshop on the written word.

Marking a successful project within a successful festival – a celebration of the written, printed and published word

Why do YOU write, I asked last month. To which more than a few of you replied. Two thirds of the respondents quoted began their journey as students of Drawing on the Writer Within and Proprioceptive Writing in Japan.  As to the rest, some write professionally; others are otherwise employed. What they all share is a proven passion to communicate via the written word.

Twenty-four years in Japan, documentary filmmaker, recording engineer and cross-cultural communication specialist Jeffrey Jouson lives in Ibaraki, north of Tokyo. Born in New Jersey, he was halfway through level 3 of DOTWW (and among the first non-Japanese volunteers to start work in Tohoku) after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns of March 3, 2011.

I write to try to make better sense of myself and the world. To work through intense emotional times and conflict. I write with the hope to capture fleeting moments of insight to help us navigate this ongoing journey that is life. 

Margaret Grant is halfway through her second novel. Visiting Scotland from Eire last month after travelling and teaching in Portugal, Japan, Brazil and India, and beginning a Masters in Creative Writing in Corsham, England this autumn, she offers up this one-line nugget in her inimitable succinct style:

I write because I have an urge to do so, and I’m happier when I do than when I don’t.

By contrast, Sarah Oba who having moved 20 times in as many years is currently based in Tokyo, writes at length and with great nostalgia for her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where and how her writing journey began. What follows is an edited version:

There is a journey in the written word which I encountered from a young age.  I remember my first writing project was conducted under my father’s careful supervision – he provided notecards for me to write thank you notes to relatives and we put those in the mail.  

Writing was important and my responsibility.  The letter needed to be in my voice and not my father expressing gratitude on my behalf.  I had no idea that I was discovering a craft in the process.

A later discovery was exploring my father’s wardrobe that had an antique key to its mirrored door and behind it finding the handwritten love letters written by my mother to my father during their courtship and their wedding photos.  Her writing opened an unknown world for me, and made me aware of the unspoken stories.

Writing has always been an affirmation of life in the midst of loss, sadness and emptiness.

When life detoured from my dreams,  I found myself proofreading for others in Japan – rather than creating my own body of work.  I dedicated myself to career and family. Approaching a celebration of two decades in Japan, I signed up for for a writing programme – Drawing on the Writer Within – for which there were simple rules and guidelines but no critiques and no outlines or agendas.

After the structured background of my school years, this class provided the freedom to create and explore in a safe environment with other persons looking to write in order to discover and explore an unknown area.

This class brought me full circle to discovering the power, truth, and beauty of the written word.

James Howard, Jacinta Hin and Kathryn Matsumura, all graduates of the four-level DOTWW programme, in Yoyogi-koen park, Tokyo, April 2011

Kathryn Matsumura (who has lived 45 years  central Tokyo with no plans to ever leave) also returns to her American roots for reasons as to why she loves to write.

I don’t know why I write, but I have always done so.  Before I could actually spell, I wrote stories in my head. 

I suppose the logical answer is because I grew up in a family with a rich tradition of oral storytelling and a lot of interest in everyone else’s business.  Family and community history were kept alive with these oft-repeated stories.  

Growing up, I realized through the stories that life was by turns hilarious, sad, traumatic, dramatic, filled with times of unexpected good fortune and misfortune and too, but somehow it was all beautiful and worth remembering.

People tell me I think of the past too much, but I don’t care.  As Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.”

Having been born in north of the Mason-Dixon Line, technically I am a Yankee and I just keep doing what I was brought up to do.  I just keep telling stories.

Ruthie Iida, also American but living south of Tokyo, is a storyteller whose writings flow with little apparent effort. This is not only because she puts in the hours to hone scribing skills; she is also unstoppable!

My grandfather was a silversmith, so we had elegant silverware that was brought out and 

polished (by my industrious grandmother) every year before Thanksgiving dinner. As soon as 

 the dinner was over, the same utensils were washed, wrapped in velvet coverings, and  returned to their special box in the china cabinet. I always admired my grandfather’s work, but not until I was an adult did I appreciate my grandmother’s part in caring for them.  

In the end, I did not inherit the family china and silverware, but I did inherit the need to create and care for my creations. I find satisfaction in the first outpouring of words that come together to form a single creation, and again in the loving examination and polishing of the final product. My essays are my secret children, tucked away in their own digital folders, and some day I hope to send them out into the world. They’re not ready yet, but with a little more polishing, they will be.

English-born Emma Parker, who after many years of working in central Tokyo is actively seeking to move into inaka (the Japanese countryside) “to write more”, gifted four paragraphs that with her usual skill allowed for easy editing :

I write to hear myself. 

I write to stay connected. 

I write to give shape to my dreams.  

At the end of the day, I think I write just because I can’t imagine a life without writing, any more than I can imagine a life without growing things, or moving between languages, or the smell of rising dough. Sure, I could live without it; but why would I choose to?

 

American-born James Howard, who lives in the western suburbs of Tokyo, works at Amazon, Japan, where he analyses customer service data. He also teaches at Meiji University. The book he began in 2010 on his African-American family and ancestry is currently on a back-burner.

I write to make sense of the cacophony that is the noise in my head.  It straightens out the rough edges…

 

Netherlander Jacinta Hin divides her working life between Tokyo and Shanghai but is based in Japan. While acting as a prison visitor, anti-nuclear activist and enthusiastic kick boxer, she is also editor-in-chief of a website (http://embrace-transition.com/) which seeks to help people deal with change in their lives.

To write means to be in an intimate space with my self, a bubble of some sorts in which the whole of me is engaged, and the outside world does not exist. As I am writing these words, I am sitting in a local coffeehouse in my village, a public space, where I write best. I am here, yet not here. People around me talk, but their words don’t reach me.

I write to make sense of what I feel. And to help others make sense of what they feel.

I write to find myself and to help others find themselves.

Above all, I write to connect so that I can find my truth, and inspire others to find their own.

When I write and get into flow, I feel timeless and capable of anything, in sync with myself and the world. Perhaps that’s also why I write. Because, when I do so, I am truly happy and present.

 

Always an active member of the UK’s National Union of Journalists, Humphrey Evans has lived in London all his working life, writing freelance for publications such as The Observor and the Radio Times. Describing himself now as “retired”, he is still putting together pieces such as the introduction to his Kindle ebook “Edit: 23 Guidances for Editors, Subeditors, Copyeditors”.

I like to try to make words work and I like to try to entertain and inform.

 

Duncan McLaren (with Kate Clayton) at the DJCAD (Duncan of Jordonstone College of Art & Design) Masters Degree Show 2014, University of Dundee

Duncan McLaren from Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland has written books about contemporary art (Personal Delivery), John Ruskin (The Strangled Cry of the Writer-in-Residence), Enid Blyton (Looking For Enid). All reflect his interest in creativity, especially the literary and visual arts. He’s currently working on websites reflecting his interest in Evelyn Waugh (www.evelynwaugh.org.uk) and Kate Clayton (www.strangebundle.co.uk).

I write because I like to think about my own stuff. And once I’ve thought about it – or even as I’m thinking about it – I like to write it down. That is, create patterns with words, patterns that deal with the emotional experience being thought about and which are aesthetically pleasing. 

So it’s all self-indulgence, then? Absolutely. Luckily, one person’s self-indulgence can tickle another person’s fancy. Witness the case of Evelyn Waugh and me, reader turned writer.

Another Scot born and bred, Marion Duffy, who lives in Meigle, Perthshire, is one half of Mirren Jones (http://www.mirrenjones.co.uk/) whose novel Eight of Cups was self-published in 2013. She and her writing partner (who lives in Wales) have just completed the first draft of a second work of fiction, Never Do Harm. Marion is also moving towards writing under her own name.

I have always enjoyed the writing aspect of any job I have had – and I’ve had loads of different jobs  in education, research, and management.  But writing fiction is something else.  It’s private time, in secluded personal space, with no chattering critic on my shoulder and no fears in my mind.

 A genuine version of myself is the one that writes – with some gentle humour, and hopefully a perspicacity on what goes on in the heads of my characters.

And it really is a lifelong journey – with so much scope for development of style, broadening of ideas, expansion of imagination.  I feel I am only just starting and that the process will continue to energise and please me till the day I am no longer able to engage in it.

 

To communicate for sure… but to whom, and on what level beyond writing shopping lists, arranging by e-mail to meet someone for coffee, or conveying good wishes on a birthday card?

Not that many do even the latter anymore. We can send greetings online and more and more of us are doing just that. So easy. So much cheaper. So convenient.

I was talking with my mail person this morning. A lovely guy who thinks his days are numbered because all he delivers these days are bills (to those of us not paying online), begging letters from charities, and advertising fliers.

“I’m not a postman anymore. I’m just a commercial lackey,” he observed sadly.

How many handwritten postcards or even typed letters do you receive a week? A month? A year?

How many do you send? We reap what we sow after all.

One of the boxes I brought from Japan contains hundreds of letters written by friends from 1986 onwards, slowly falling away from around the late 90s until the fax machine and personal computers took over. They are very precious now, documenting social history as well as individual lives.

Pages and pages of fascinating scrawl from Sarah who was in Africa at the time and as excited by everything she saw and did as I was in Asia; ditto from Maggie in London, who wrote minutely of her more circumscribed life in a detail that would put Jane Austen to shame. Everyone else? Somewhere inbetween…

Writing letters, postcards, articles, blogs, books… even in the deepest midwinter. My writing life! Writing my life! Writing life!

These days I am making a conscious effort to write to my grandson. At age eight he loves to receive personally addressed correspondence. I want him to know what it’s like to receive and write letters, which, for so many, is deemed old-fashioned.

I also write to D, a man on death row in Texas, through an organization linked to Amnesty International. There are strict rules, so I’m limited to postcards and letters. I also have to be circumspect in what I write about, which is challenging to my normal unedited free flow but necessary if correspondence is to pass scrutiny from prison authorities.

I print out letters to D, whose eyesight is failing. But writing postcards means re-discovering the practice and age-old craft of hand-writing, which is good because otherwise my deteriorating scrawl will go beyond the characterful and simply become illegible.

At his school in Canada, my grandson is being taught from scratch – with pen and ink! – and really cannot see the point. Why bother, he argues, when he can use a tablet or smartphone. But what would he do is suddenly there was no electricity, I point out (which is what happened to northern Japan after 3/11). To which he responds with a shrug and a look that says “Mad! As if that could/would ever happen…”

What else do I write?

Morning pages sometimes.

No journal or diary as such. On occasion I find odd notebooks and pages from the past and can easily identify them as written in hard times – times when I was sad and in dire need of an unconditional friend. When life is in balance there seems the need.

Which begs the question, do we write out of broken places?

Do we choose to write out – and through – damage and pain?

Does one have to be damaged and broken to be a “good” writer?

E.L Dotorow once described writing as a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Hemingway (a writer I don’t especially admire!) believed there was nothing to writing. “All you do is sit in front if a typewriter and bleed.”

As to Kurt Vonnegut, he thought we all needed to realise that “all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being. Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?”

Well, no, not really Kurt. Rather maybe we need to redefine what constitutes great literature. Which to me means documenting and interpreting the precious gift of life in ways that may prove useful to readers, with the emphasis on the positive rather than the negative.

I write to make sense of my world and bring it to life, perhaps along the lines of Australian aboriginal people singing up their ancestry and landscape as they walk their land.

I write to keep myself healthy and in balance.

Desperate to leave their mark… a prehistoric standing stone on the road between Essendy and Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland

I write to create rather than destroy or deface. I write to remind myself of who I really am.

In my youth I aspired to be an actor. But then I changed direction. I began taking off my masks, gradually losing the need to try on new ones. These days I present myself pretty much naked to the world; I hardly ever wear make up.

While actors live many lives, a rather younger writer, and another woman to boot, Natalie Goldberg is quoted as saying “Writers live twice.”

Only twice? I think the best thing about writing is that the written word is limitless in its permutations and we can reinvent ourselves over and over again. While at the same time becoming closer to our authentic selves an truly honest.

I write to maybe leave something of my self in the world when I die.

But really it’s no great matter. Through our words we live forever… in the ether of celestial creative memory if nowhere else.

Why do you write?

Writers who craft their words authentically are fewer than you might think. Which is where Proprioceptive Writing really comes into its own.

People write for different reasons: to create that mythical blockbuster that will make their fortune and provide celebrity status; so that ego can claim it’s A Writer; to tell stories;  as a proven record of life lived, often it being irrelevant whether anyone reads or wants to know or not; or to sing up life into being, as I try to do.

When someone comes forward to learn PW, hoping that it will help them reclaim their sense of self, in order to write with genuine authenticity, I breathe a great sense of relief. For this is where PW’s strength lies.

Inaugural session of Proprioceptive Writing at Clunie Hall on May 3

This happened on June 7, at the second ‘first Saturday in the month’ session of PW.  (See schedule for future dates: www.cluniehall.uk.com)

A young woman came for the first time with a powerful motive. She was recovering from an accident and while her body was healing, her sense of who she was in distress.

“I’m here to recover my self”, she said. She felt a powerful – and exceptionally mature – need to be as honest as possible about what had happened to her and rather than seek blame, see the experience – however steep the learning curve – as a lesson.

She thought PW could help her, and it will.

Proprioceptive Writing involves a peeling away of the layers of our stories, the stories that ego begins creating to protect us as children. This young writer’s problems had intensified at school, where she had been bullied. It will take many WRITES (written rites) to recover her sense of self, the strong unafraid trusting child she once was; she will need to remove the masks of persona one by one, however painful.

The wonderful thing about PW is that progress is at the pace chosen by the writer, so while there can be revelations and often tears, recovery towards authenticity and well being is gradual and supportive, never pushy or demanding. In this sense it tends to be remarkably pain less.

Perthshire, towards the Highlands. Landscapes are layered, just like personalities

Our personalities are psychologically as complex and multi-layered as any physical landscape. No sooner have we stripped away one layer than another reveals itself. Sometimes the going is relatively easy; sometimes incredibly pain full.

As someone who has bitten their nails since childhood, I know what it’s like to strip a bit of cuticle or skin but then ouch! let go, because to go any further will cause bleeding and deeper suffering. Stripping back who we have become to who we were as tiny precious all-knowing babes, can be just like that. We get close to a source of old pain and back off rather than take that leap of faith into the fear-full unknown.

It happens in PW all the time. That is the purpose of the first of the four questions facilitators ask at the end of each 25 minute ritual writing meditation: WHAT WAS HEARD BUT NOT WRITTEN? What does the writer hear (inwardly) but chooses not to go there (write about it) for whatever reason: fear, guilt, a general feeling of discomforture, etc.

It is being brave enough to tackle such internal whisperings that allows the thickest layers to unpeel, fall away and allow further ever more powerful integration.

Is my own voice 100% authentic? Of course not. But I do try, and you’d be amazed at how much criticism results, especially in my writing. The last piece published is a good example, in which I reflect on the sources of irritation and anger with my partner: http://embrace-transition.com/2014/05/29/east-and-west-bitch-of-a-month/

As a very dear friend of many years just mailed me: “I will never understand is why you want to broadcast such deeply personal things to the whole world. Although it’s a severe self-indictment it affects your partner too by exposing your personal lives to the world.  If he can tolerate that you are a very lucky woman.”

When I discussed this with my be-loved, he read the piece (in general finding it too hard since English is not his first language) and shrugged. “It’s okay”, he responded, smiling.  “It doesn’t matter.”

I am indeed it seems a very lucky woman.

Lucky to have friends who live in beautiful restorative places…

Lucky to have such a beautiful restorative place to return to…

And since I don’t really believe in luck, but rather good fortune, blessed to have a partner – my be-loved – whose glass is always half full

On the road to somewhere in Highland heaven

What you cannot see on this page header is the rainbow. So here is the photograph in full, from a commercial postcard to which I would like to give full credit but cannot find. I’ve put it somewhere safe, as usual! I do recall that the caption read LOST IN SCOTLAND (or something of that ilk), which made me smile in wry fashion.  “That woman walking under an umbrella could be me”, I remember thinking, feeling more than a little lost at the time.  But no longer.

We have landscape like this within a few miles. As for the sheep, they are everywhere right now. Being Japanese my husband is entranced by lambs; there are few sheep in his country (excepting on the northern island of Hokkaido) and being a city boy (Tokyo!) living in the countryside is a total novelty.

So are rainbows as fact not fiction. I remember a few from my 26 years in Japan, but here they are part of the everyday landscape and its climatic variability/swift changeability. That Scottish mix of misted rain and sunlight, following swiftly one upon another and often together (think ongoing April showers) seem to spark rainbows in abundance.

They choose their moments also. There was a splendid arch over the moorland behind Forneth, the hamlet that is our postal address, on the morning after my aunt died in 2012. And that was in December, not April!

It replicated itself soon after Akii arrived from Japan, as if offering a welcoming gift, and the photo he took is now on the Clunie Hall website (www.cluniehall.co.uk).

In April we drove west to Fort William and then crossed by ferry from Mallaig to the Isle of Skye. I had not visited since 1953, when I was put on a train – the Caledonian Express, no less – from Birmingham to Edinburgh, to spend time with my father’s elder sister who was based in Inverness. Their younger sister Betty had died in childbirth, and the trip was to spare me that reality. Thoughtful maybe, but it was years before I was enabled to put the two events together, and then it came as rather a shock.

My aunt drove us west from Inverness to visit friends in Lochcarron and “over the sea to Skye”, with a part of this journey described in my book Chasing Shooting Stars (Part 2, page 153):

In the morning I play shinty on the loch-side road, with local kids, using my stick more to hook and drive debris from an overnight storm – branches and seaweed – back into the water than to hit a puck: a pebble I think.

On the ferry over to Skye (there was no bridge in those days) I lean over the side and one of my aunt’s mittens fall into the sea. My hands has been cold, and she had taken off her gloves and out them over my own. Though a bit if a stickler, Catherine treated me above all else as if I was an intelligent being in my own right. She was not only extremely kind, she was also considerate and respectful. I liked that.

I remember nothing of Skye itself, beyond a feeling of being completely over-whelmed.

Returning after sixty years, that sensation remains undiminished. Skye is stunning in any weather, and that first day – cold, rainy and wind-swept – blew me away. Water was streaming and cascading down mountainsides; we could hear it water-falling through the windows of the jeep, and ongoing misted landscapes were more magical and inspiring than monotonous. (You would not believe the negativity of the average tourist: the weather was awful, there was nothing to do or see…the trip a waste of time!)

Soft and gentle

We drove through five rainbows that first day alone, on our way to Portree. And I remembered Anastasia’s joyous piece of writing on the DOTWW course earlier in the year, about the single rainbow she and then boyfriend had driven under and through near Perth on a weekend jaunt. It was an omen, she felt. A message…

Dark, low(u)ring, deeply profound

Five messages were a blessing, but by the end of our three day trip, our count was up to ten, which is beyond a blessing: it’s more an awakening.

Not the mystical awakening I experienced in Japan, sitting one day in my garden. More a reminder than the especially intense kick up the backside that inspired the following lines. I leave you with them, together with all the pots of gold found at the feet of so many arches of splintered light, a bountiful bouquet of rainbows gathered from the sky above Skye.

SURRENDER
I am my skin in which I fit,
I am this seat on which I sit,
I am the sun warm on my face,
I am the stones that pave this place,
I am all trees that give me shade,
I am all grasses, each single blade,
I am the fresh milk in my glass,
I am the cloud that makes to pass,
I am fur, feather, nail, beak and claw,
I am heart and soul and so much more,
I am earth, air, water, wind and fire,
I am the sum of sexual desire,
I am the planets, stars and moon,
I am the eternal galactic tune,
I am everything yet nothing at all,
I am a dancer at the universal ball,
I am here, gone, yet here again,
I am wild and free, all-knowing and tame,
I am at peace in a state of elation,
I am at one with the act of creation.

20 April 2003
Zushi, Japan

I have been a writing a series (within my monthly series) for the website www.embracetransition.com.

It began as a single article: Letting Japan go… Pretty soon, however, I realised that I was not well enough (labrynthitis aggravated by bronchitis) to think it through. So what I had written became Part 1, with Part 2 promised.

Faced now with having to write Part 3, I have a sense of being close to closure on the subject. However, with a deadline looming, I’m not sure how it will begin, let alone end.

On March 11, the third commemoration of the earthquake, tsunami and meltdowns of 3/11, we got up at 5.30am to mark the exact time the earth began shaking in Japan: 5.46pm. We sat in silence in the darkness, remembering…

Remembering…

Remembering how life had been in Fukushima before that dreadful trembling began, and the ocean rose to sweep away so much, so many…

A mother feeding her baby. Her husband shuffling papers at the local City Office. An old man watching TV. A group of women chatting at a street corner. A taxi driver on his way to pick up a fare. School students bent over their books. The priest sweeping the steps of his shrine…

It was the time life changed for us all, and the ensuing nuclear meltdowns of the Daichii plant changed Japan forever.

Deciding that I must look back at 3/11 in order to go forward, I checked my old DOTWW blog  covering the days that followed on and found what follows:

[24-3-2011] Meet a remarkably courageous group of young men (aged 22-30) from the Philippines. This evening (the day I returned to work in Tokyo) I was privileged to help them write about their experience as tsunami survivors.

Shown also on GALLERY

On a government training scheme, they had been working as welders in a shipyard in Sendai  when the quake struck. Told of a tsunami warning, some began climbing the nearest crane, others managed to cram a few valuables into rucksacks before joining their friends. They watched as the wave came in, sweeping away many of their Japanese colleagues who were trying to get home, in cars, on bikes, running… some have footage on their cellphones: terrifying. They then clung on for the next 12 hours through a night of pitch blackness and driving snow. They got very cold. All were traumatised. One of them, Khoi, and the only woman in the group that evening, Maya, who had been at home at the time, had kept diaries at some time or another, but none of the others had written anything “creative” before, let alone a poem. They created a vocabulary associated with sounds, images, feelings, then one by one wrote a sentence containing one or more of these words. They then read aloud the nine lines, and added one of their own on the end, to make it both a group effort and their own. Finally, they translated it into Tagalog, so making it wholly their own. Since English is their second language, with some being more fluent than others, I have with their permission made the tenses consistent and added one conjunction.

TSUNAMI
The tsunami was scary.
I heard a disturbing sound coming from the sea.
When the earthquake came people were panicking,
The sea was roaring,
And I saw snow, and felt thunder and lighning from the sky.
Like a nightmare that we cannot forget in our lives,
The roof was scrunched by the flood,
So we climbed up the crane and I prayed
For us to be together again someday.

By (in no particular order) Rodney F. Famorcan, Genner A Gonzaga, John Mark F.de Guip, Lito (Khoi) Bela Jr, Romnick Benalla, Christian Javier, Jacob Jaycian, Michael Brutus, Maya Kurihara

To place this in perspective, they had struggled their way inland the next morning (a horrific experience in itself) where they were found, picked up and taken to the Wesley Centre in central Tokyo. Being located close the Embassy of the Philippines, it was being used as an evacuation centre.

This was where I was running creative writing courses, and had been halfway through Level 3 when the disaster occurred, or began rather! The students were ready to start again but it took a week or so to help the evacuees move on, vacate the meeting rooms.

One evening colleague Kristin Newton and I were asked if we could occupy a small group  for an hour or so. Time was hanging heavy, slow and emotional as they – Maya apart- waited to hear whether they would be relocated to other shipyards or be sent home.

Drawing with Kristin

Kristin, who teaches drawing (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), encouraged them to express their experiences and emotions on paper, using colour and images.

After my own session, I  invited the group to Kamakura on the Sunday, and a woman from the embassy said that travelling money would be found, and she would bring them down by train and take them back.

Snack lunch, courtesy of the Philippine Embassy

Under the benevolent gaze of Kamakura’s Daibutsu, Big Buddha

It was an amazing day, that ended with a curry-rice dinner at our house in Zushi.  Akii had prepared the meal while I acted as tourist guide; neighbour Yuta brought in his guitar. The boys – for so they seemed to me – disappeared on the way back into a conbeni (convenience store) and emerged sheepishly with a small sunny flowering pot plant and two cheap bottles of whisky. We then ate and sang our way through the Beatles songbook until it was time for the last train. It was, their chaperone said, the first time they had laughed as much as they had cried since that terrible day which they all said, would haunt their lives forever.

I didn’t hear from them again. I know only the names of those who were distributed around the country to continue their (so-called) training scheme. And those who were reunited with their families.

Flowers, a thankyou letter, a list of names. Never forgotten…

It’s good to know they are all well and moving forward in their lives. But are they? Or ought the gift of life – survival – be enough.

It’s a question I am asking myself.

As winds roar,  rain lashes and snow drops, we have been making sure that all is well with the cottage, and stocking up with supplies of wood.

Like the proverbial duck to water, Akii has taken to hauling tree trunks and cutting them into manageable lengths for drying under cover. Who would have thought it of a Tokyo boy born and bred? Being Japanese, of course, he takes it all very seriously, dressing the part with baseball cap, thick jacket, visor and gloves: “I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay, etc.”  Chainsaws are not to be handled lightly, he adds darkly, and quite right too.

For my part, it felt as if January had taken off like a rocket.  Compared to last year, that is. There are the Friday night DOTWW sessions, with everyone turning up early and leaving late. There was the taster workshop at The Bield with a full turnout of ten, and four more on a waiting list.  Plus the Holistic Fair in Perth,  which being held on a Saturday (rather than Sunday) was bigger and better than Autumn last.

The holistic fair at the Salutation (Scotland’s oldest hotel) in Perth on February 8, 2014

It was the fair in 2013 that provided me with a launch pad for my work. I saw an ad, rang a number, booked a stand and went along.  I felt a bit of an oddity among the psychics, reflexologists and herbalists, but still my tiny stall – offering website (via my laptop) fliers and books –  pulled people:  several to the PW sessions at The Orchard, one to the first-level course in Birnam.

This time around was even better. Not only was I remembered and made to feel very welcome, but I was kept busy answering questions from 10am to 4pm. Of course eyebrows have been raised that I would even consider promoting myself in this way, but I have to start somewhere. All part of laying the foundations of a new life, I say.

Foundations need to be strong. They also need to be true, as in honest, and aligned correctly.

Which brings me to neighbour Paul’s reconstruction of the dyke leading down to the burn. Looking at it now, weathered and mossy, you would think it decades old, but in fact not so.  He did the work while we were still in Japan, and periodically sent photos as he progressed.

The interesting thing was that the old wall had never seemed in balance with the stretch higher up, nearer the road.  When he dismantled it and dug out the foundations, he found them angled in a slightly different direction.

“Go with the original”, I mailed, when he was wondering what to do.  And guess what? The new (old) wall stands in perfect harmony with its neighbour.

Newly reconstructed in 2009, thanks to Paul Latham, whose dykes have strengthened community for many years

And so to another analogy:  rebuilding my self after realizing that I was not in alignment with who I really was, what I had been born to be and do… Who I had been before the authoritarian pressures of  family, society and church skewed me out of line, messed around with my own foundation of body, mind and spirit.

We need to acknowledge our foundations and strive to  stay true to them.  We also need to build on them as best we can.

Making sure foundations are correctly aligned and rock solid

In the meantime, winds roar, rain lashes. And even more snow drops.