Respect yourself

Love is respecting the person you love, having admiration for their accomplishments. Love is trusting the one you love to be true no matter where you are because you know they are committed to you as you are to them. Love is catching up, discovering a slightly different person than the one you knew. Love is an understanding that is almost telepathic, love is a heady mixture of old and new.

Love is also respect for yourself and love for yourself. Love is forgiving your flaws, accepting them. Love is understanding what you need in your life and what you don't need. Love is taking care of yourself, of being who you truly are.

We all need someone to love but we should not need someone to love us, we should love ourselves.

Happiness is.....

Happiness is a warm shared glance with someone who knows you better than you know yourself. With someone who has made a study of your every mood and expression. Happiness is shared jokes and memories. Happiness is feeling loved and loving. Happiness is excitement for the future, and fondness for the past. Happiness is sharing on every level, unselfishly.

Freedom

Freedom is emotional maturity and emotional maturity is freedom.

How do we learn to be emotionally mature? by taking responsibility for our actions. By acknowledging our mistakes. When we see our self truly and love ourselves unconditionally we have no need of another. All choices are made freely without the constraint that need can wrap us in. When we do not need the constant presence of someone to give us an identity, we are truly free.

Emotional maturity allows us to forgive ourselves and others for we are all the same, only the mistakes are different. Always help a fellow traveller if you can but not in a way which impedes your journey.

Each of us has to make their own journey. If we are fortunate we have a companion for some of the way. When we no longer need a mirror to know who we are we are truly free.

  

Travelling

Well there are finally no more obstacles or reasons for me not to go, and I am going to go travelling. I will travel light and write as I go, its the only thing I want to do. So many things that are nearly ready but I must not forget new stuff, I am writing in my head most of the time now. I have a lot I have not listened to which needs to be said. And it is all said when it is written. I have worried all  my life, always been anxious. I will travel with no thought for the future and see where I lead myself. A life's work I think to undo the chains but a worthwhile journey, one with no particular destination.
Heigh ho I guess a garage sale is on the way
Keep you posted

Creativity heals

Hey folks
I believe creativity heals, writing and messing with my pictures is helping me stay cool in this hot weather (sorry that was yesterday). Seriously I love photoshop, just got a full version (yay) only had elements before.

I have plucked up courage to put a few on my Flkr page.

Search

I haven’t been writing for a while and I realise that’s not good. My voice is here, the child is here again and to hear her voice I must write, that’s why I couldn’t write for so long – I denied her voice.—Vicky said when she did that Reiki session that my problem was about communication. I have tried so hard (I thought) to connect with my child and all I had to do was listen to her voice – stopping second guessing her and trusting her. And it feels so good to be writing, it feels natural, no censorship I enjoy it so much—I don’t know what I am writing -It is a stream of consciousness thing – after all the child has had forty years of thinking but has rarely spoken- she has a lot to say – and it may be that I am talking utter rubbish but because it is honest and real it feels like it is Pulitzer prize material – but this honesty is the seed and from it will come work- hurray, hurray- I should have been doing this a long time ago- I have a lot to make up for- but I am not bitter – my journey has made it possible for me to be right where I am right now – happy!

Whether I make money with it or not I know this is something I will do for the rest of my life and at the same time I am healing my child, I am loving her, listening to her and giving her life – how easy it is in the end)

Where have I been?

Well hallo gang

I am raving about the NHS again but for a different reason. Now in need of Mental health Services myself I am appalled at the limited provision.

However, my plans have changed a lot since the last time I spoke. The house sale fell through and although it has just sold there is no money for a boat.

So..............anyone know of a place to rent that's a bit country ish or near water, got to be cheap though.

I am seriously writing again at the moment which is delicious, but less time for weaving and craft.

Looking for opportunities to earn a living through it. But live a very simple life so don't need much dosh. When we live up to our income we become slaves to the MAN. You would be surprised how little you really need. And the freedom is wonderful, I have the time and less stress and am feeling more creative.

Still would have liked my boat but........... joy comes from strange places and the byways can take you to some amazing places. I have learnt an awful lot lately and we should all see experience as positive even if it isn't at the time. At the time it may be terrible but when time has gone by and we reflect we can gain many insights that help us on our journey.

Bye for now

Turkey

Hi folks

Well here we are again. I seem to talk to you late at night when I have taken alcohol (medicinally you understand)

I am still looking for moorings but.....  have spoken to a lovely French man about a boat which is moored in Turkey. It will need a little (I hope) work to make it seaworthy and some time and love to refit it internally. But... it is a good price and I will have no problem with volunteers to help crew it home to England and best of all it is a motor sailor which will help considerably with cost of fuel. So if the house sale ever completes (time warp, time warp) I may well be making a sea trip from Turkey. My children are concerned that I may not know what I am doing, (role reversal) but I intend to ensure I am seaworthy also!!

Life is too short ....

Last night I had dinner with a couple of girlfriends from my life in the corporate mainstream and they were talking about their jobs. Away from them I have no feelings of inadequacy or guilt because I have become a "non-achiever" but while we were together I found myself trying to justify my decision to "opt out" and I talked about things I was considering doing. What is that about? My view is life is too short to commit to a role or circumstance that is against your essential nature or harmful to you and I am fortunate, my children are grown and I am selling my house. The idea is to lower the essential monthly costs as much as possible so that there is no enthrallment to the man because you have commitments...this allows a much greater freedom and choice....it is not about wanting to do nothing but about being able to choose what you do because it doesn't matter what you earn.

Surely we should all aim to be able to choose what suits and gives pleasure rather than what we can sell to the highest bidder.

Look where an investment in property has got many of us!! Before that it was pensions! If we can accept that there is no surety for the future, no way of fixing the odds so that we are safe our whole life through we would accept the twists and turns that fate deals us with more eqanimity.

And get pissed more often, fuck a lot and work to live not live to work!!!

Where Grace came from

They say life begins at forty! Mine did!

University, necessitating a move of 150 miles from home alone but for my son. We did okay.

Proved to myself that I had what it took to get a degree, then I got a "proper" job, in the NHS.

Wow, I had arrived, I bought a house and thought I had found a career. Big mistake!!

They tolerated my unconventionality and colourful clothes and hair (red hair with black tips and spiked, my firestarter phase) but did not enjoy my honesty (some would call it bluntness) or understand my values. They were equal opportunity employers (look we even employ hippy types with nose rings)I in my turn became so disillusioned with the targets and the bullshit, that got in the way of the real objective of my work, which was to improve the service patients recieved, that when they asked for volunteers for redundancy I volunteered.

I had broken up with my partner and the plan was - sell the house, get the redundancy and go visit friends in New Zealand. Look for a new way of life that got the work/life balance right.

Got the redundancy but... house didn't sell straight away, redundancy money (not much, I hadn't been there long) got swallowed by the mortgage.

House is sold (except it is taking unconscionably long to complete the process) and am looking for a boat to live aboard and also sail around the med, earning what I need as and where I can.

Have found boats of the kind I want (de-commissioned fishing trawlers, particularly the Scottish wooden ones) but finding a mooring that is not on a marina full of gin palaces and people of the type I would not feel comfortable with and who would hate to have dirty dreadlocked hippies around is proving very difficult.

I need a river mooring, that is cheap and that is residential.

Anyone reading this who knows of a mooring please let me know.