New Website

Ahhh, and up she rises with seaweed entangled around her ankles after three weeks of bronchitis.  The wonderful thing about having had something like that is you have a renewed appreciation - for breathing in clear and slow with no jagged edges.  Of not coughing up phlegm.  Of feeling the return of creativity and a lessening of fatigue (it's extra weird having CFS and something like bronchitis because the boundaries blur, but my fatigue levels had lifted enough before getting the bronchitis that having it made me feel like I wanted to stab myself with kitchen knives in abject frustration).

I have finally set myself up a writer website, my professional shingle which details my published bits and bobs to date and contact details.  It feels quite good to do this, being something that I've been meaning to do for ages (like my tax - oops, just remembered again!)

I'm wondering - do I wish to blog over there?  I'm in two minds about it.  If I do, it will be more writing-focussed than here, where I just spurt whatever (and the last few years that's been rather black squiddy depressed ink-type spurting). It's set up as a static site at the moment but I'm wondering about whether to start blogging there because (a) I'm barely blogging here and (b) there are so many writers blogging about writing that do we really need another one?

To be honest, I feel a bit disappointed by a lot of writers-blogging-about-writing websites.  I think because there's so much emphasis on the marketing maxim of give them something to takeaway, make yourself useful or else the eyeballs will flick elsewhere that that translates out into how-to articles.  Now, I'm a fan of how-to articles. I read them regularly.  But a lot of them are kind of ... well, depersonalised.  They are all lovely and shiny and you presume the person on the other end of them never has any writing hassles at all with anything.   Because they are set up on a writer's own site, where they're getting clients appraising their shingle and asking them to write for them, sometimes the excess gloss of professionalism tends to feel a little too thick, especially on content marketing-type websites.

I'm really not interested in writing how-to query articles (I'm so bad at querying that at the moment I could only write how-to-query-badly articles - which, now I think of it, could be kind of interesting).  I'm not interested in writing how-to-write-short-stories articles because I don't think I'll get my head around that mysterious space until I'm about 75.  That kind of blogging is not for me; it makes me feel about as deflated as an octogenarian whose Viagra script has run out.

So I've been thinking - if I do blog there, I would like to blog about the inside moves that go with writing.  How it feels.  But not a purgative dwelling on the feels, the sort that feels kind of self-indulgent, just like a big vomit for the benefit of the person who's heaving.  Not like that, but still coming from the inside.  What I'm interested in is the subjective experience of writing.  Of the emotional issues that go along with it and how to manage those in an emotionally intelligent way.  Or something.

I like the idea too of writing a blog that is about what I do to fill my creative well so that I have a lot to dip into when I write.  Using creativity as a means of expression.  I get out of the loop regularly on extracurricular creativity, though, because it takes up so much energy that it goes on the backburner, and I'm scared that if I set something like that up it would become a millstone if my health goes worse.  Plus I'm an amateur at lots of creative practices, but still, that could be an asset, I guess.  And it would encourage me to sculpt again, which I miss terribly, and which I feel a natural aptitude and talent for which I want to explore further.  But even now I realise that in trying to describe a well-filling-type blog, I haven't even begun to describe what I'm trying to get at, at all.

So much of what I wish to write about these days is hazy, blurry on the edges to myself.  I feel like I get a glimpse of it, of the container I could put everything I'm thinking of in so that it becomes more conscious, less fuzzy.  But then just as I feel I've got a grasp of it, it dissipates and falls through my fingers until two hours later or the next day or whatever I'll be thinking about something and it will ping and I will go, "That.  That's it."  I think it's the same thing that I would like to achieve with Liminal if I ever end up getting it off the ground, with a weekly writing meditation group that I would like to run some day, maybe.  If I was to categorise it into philosophy it would be in the realm of phenomenology.  It's something about living in our bodies and our subjective experiences of them being important, giving us meaning, in an age where the subjective is viewed with abject suspicion.

Something like that.

Ultimately, I feel like what I try to do when I write is pan out to the big picture, to connect things together in an interdisciplinary approach in a world that is fragmented and so super-specialised.  I feel in some ways that that's all I've ever been doing here.

It is very odd to keep feeling like you're stumbling forward with something you can't articulate.  Does any of this make sense to you (if you've read this far)?  Does what I'm trying to do feel more cohesive to you, make sense, than it does to me?  If so, I would certainly like your feedback!

Before Now

Okay, Jon, this movie is messing with my head :) The comments on YouTube are just as interesting sometimes as the portions of Waking Life movie chunk they're talking about.

I can understand why some people think that at some times this ventures into psychobabble. I can understand how some people would think all of it is psychobabble, but all that means is that the ride is not for them, as far as I am concerned. Luckily there's more than one ride at the fair. I guess it's just how much you want to think and ponder stuff. It can all get too much, definitely. I think and ponder stuff so much that this is not too much for me. Except for those days when I'm so sick of thinking that all our surmisings seem like self-absorbed psychobabble wank - as pointless as dancing to architecture (thank you Brian Mannix for that thought, thrown up like a dead fish from the 1980s).

I did a few Philosophy subjects at uni when I first began this degree way back in the Paleolithic era in 1998. Blew my mind. Got me excited. To sit in a room with a group of people throwing this stuff backwards and forwards - was like swimming in an ocean of 75% dark chocolate. I have toyed with the idea the last few years of going to a Socratic dinner, but that time isn't rght for me yet. Maybe some time in the future. I don't quite trust my mind to stay on track enough to indulge in philosophising in shared company for several hours without muddling or getting performance anxiety, but we shall see :)

Been thinking about the lines between things. About how the best kind of philosophy can lead into psychobabble. About how the best kind of art can lead to pretentious bullshit. Seems to be the process of things, this shelf life of certain expressions. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe the new wineskins just need to keep coming.

Anyway, I loved this part too of this movie. Because Before Sunrise is one of my favourite movies ever. And I didn't realise until before that Richard Linklater is involved with both, but the internet makes five minute experts of us all, doesn't it :)

I have had far too little sleep. Got myself all excited about thoughts and concepts and reality and time at midnight. Kept me awake and up like caffeine and viagra :)



Why does one eternal soul have to be an "ego thing"? :)

Waking Life

Thanks to Jon at Something Else, I have been watching part of another movie this evening. In 2008 movie-watching mode - that's on YouTube, in chunks. Hell, I'm not even watching it in consecutive order. But I'm kinda getting the gist of it anyway.

Anyone else remember this movie? Slipped right by me when it came out in 2001, but I was in CFS land and my whole life was slipping right through my hands back then. Those days turned out nothing like I had planned.

Anyway, this is kinda interesting. Who needs drugs when you have philosophy, huh? (I'm also thinking of how close genius and insanity are, and it's been something I've been thinking about all week, and I must say this is pretty trippy - and I don't know how much sense it actually makes - but gee, I love fascinating concepts :) I don't need them to be real necessarily, I just need them to be possible in all possible worlds. That's enough to float my boat ;) But having said that, this is something akin to the way I look at it all :)

Ordinary People

I sat on the train this morning, observed from behind my book the peoples (how interesting we are), the beauty in the ordinariness of people. The different shapes and colours of a disparate bunch of people of whom I was in the minority with my white skin. Arabs, undeodorised Indians, Asians. Breathed in the aroma of the ordinary. Looking at the people, the mob, mainly gazing unseeing or despondent out the window of one of the richest countries in the world, and thought, "You have the seeds of yourself within yourself, and they are more beautiful than you could have imagined" (well, I didn't really think that then. I rather felt it, but I think it now and write it so that thee, dear reader, can understand some of what I was feeling seeing there are no widgets I know of to stick 'this is how I felt' patterns on the sidebar of my blog. But here, have a fractal, instead. (A terribly slowly loading fractal, at least here on Samantha. It didn't take this long to load into my head, I must say, even in the morning). This is some kind of ballpark representation of how I felt when I looked at the ordinary people and thought, God loves them and some/most/all of them don't have any idea what that means.

None of us know. We really don't. Maybe dogs know, but even if they do, they don't know they know :) But one day we'll know.

And then Flagstaff Station loomed and yea, I stopped thinking philosophy and went to Capitalist Hell. Light and dark. Deep and dull.

Nobody is happy with how they look and most sit wonky near the edges of their skin, not centred within themselves, with their imperfection. And yet, if we could see the divine in each other we would fall at each other's feet, kiss the hands of lepers. No matter how gorgeous or ugly they or we are.

Sink into my heart, ponderings. Sink in :)

In Process: Blobbiness

I feel like there is a space in the top of my head of about 8 cm where the snot has receded a tad, and if I squash myself in up there I can think a bit clearly. Even though my head feels fat. So this is where I hope to live today. Squashed up into the top 8 cm of my head :)

I have been becoming a bit more aware of this paradox going on in myself which concerns safety. On the one hand, I feel safe in the world; I feel sure of my ability to go out into the world and make my own stamp on it. I feel comfortable that I can go out and get what I want (not in some kind of crazy egomaniac way, just in some kind of self-actualised way). On the other hand, I am becoming increasingly aware that at my core, I don't really feel safe in the world, or grounded, or something. Or there's a pocket of unsafety in me that doesn't. Maybe that's why it's a pocket that's remained uninspected for so long, because it's a paradoxical pocket. Me, feeling unsafe in the world? No! Can't be true! And yet none of us are all one thing; surely we all contain the seeds of our opposite within us, at least a moderate amount of the time?

But it is true, this pocket, and I am looking at it a bit this week, airing it, not sure yet of its shape or size or consistency or how deep its roots reach (it feels like something old from childhood I am dealing with here). Where once I would have felt so terribly uncomfortable at having this blobby unknown sitting there airing itself out in the sun, I don't feel at all uncomfortable about that anymore. In fact, I welcome it. How very strange. And cool!

I guess these days I feel more comfortable about being in process, about being able to just rest right where I am (well, except for when I'm sick, but more of that another time). I'm aware of not only being fearfully and wonderfully made, but being in the process of being fearfully and wonderfully made, bricks being knocked down and other ones put in place right in front of my eyes, my hands doing the work and yet unable to do the work unless God breathes, in some deep DNA kind of way. Co-workers.

Maybe God and I are co-workers in the way that you see a very young child "helping" their parent. You know that the child has very basic skills at best and te parent is really being indulgent, allowing them to learn, that they're not really "helping" but really creating more work. But that's okay. Part of the process of learning how to do the work themselves at some point in the future.

But that analogy doesn't really fit either, or at least not unless you extrapolated it out much larger, so that the area of the child "helping" their parent is a very broad area indeed containing a whole mass of wisdom and knowledge and such things, and the parent is extrapolated out just as much, into areas of those things we have no conception to contain yet, that if we did it would explode our heads. Maybe that would fit.

But there's no parental indulgence in the way God says to me, "Enter into your own work." It's not like it's not hard work, this knowing yourself. It takes guts to go there. Plenty of people never do. I don't understand how they don't because the ride is as correspondingly exhilarating and the benefits gleaned as priceless as the fear it takes to step out on the road. But all you need to do is step out and take one step. That's all that's ever required at one time. And then to wait until you know what the next step is. That's how the world is. Safety in the darkness.

Ahhh, dear, dear Land of Philosophia, I have missed being able to swim in you as much this week, and articulate about you out of the cotton wool. I love you, Sophia, you and your many facets. I'm glad to be back, even if it's rather squashy in an 8 cm space.

Happy Saturday, bloggers :) (And go Hawks).