The Week That Was

If I have learned anything from blogging it is that my body and spirit are more cyclical than I ever realised. That whether it be dictated by hormones, seasons, or tide, day by day, month by month and quite astonishingly, year by year, my life is dictated by patterns over which I have very little influence. Patterns un-compromised by event’s or actuality, but strong enough to shape that same actuality.

Before I had the vehicle that is blogging for documenting these ebb’s and flows in both mood and creativity I was only half aware of them, and certainly could never have pre-empted them the way that I am now capable… crazy creative enthusiasm followed by a short but fully felt dose of lethargy on the tail of contented but desperately un-productive whimsy that has me fluttering my eyelashes while failing to produce anything of any worth in any other area of my life: whether that be an inspired little puttery treat, words worth writing or cakes worth baking.

I do things in spurts. For a while there will be nothing but home-made bread cluttering my kitchen counter, or I will be churning out blog post after blog post, living for a certain tv programme, spending every evening talking to a man I will then fail to call ever again, intent on re-inventing myself in the image of a big bottomed supermodel, or Mother Earth, the perfect daughter, or delightfully dippy ex-wife. This week mostly gardening, next week learning a new skill I will never again use once it is mastered. Today the best friend you could have waxing enthusiastically about the merit of my prawn cocktail diet, tomorrow on a planet made of chocolate I’ve got no intention of sharing. (I never said I was nice).

I am faddy and obsessive and silly and I wish I knew how to live on an even keel but alas my mind just can’t stop dancing, seduced always by the possibility of more and better and compromised by comparison and imagined failure, PMT, long awful periods of writers block, and housewifes block and hair-washing block and worst of all, in my world, laundry block, that were it not for spells of crazed passionate activity, would have me sitting, glued to my chair and gawping in horror at my ineptitude and subsequent nullifying misery.

So somehow little by little things get done regardless and I know, that while I am more dramatic than most, I am not alone in these dips and highs: that perhaps a root through your own blog archives would describe a similiar if not quite so violently marked pattern in mood and output, and that ultimately resistance is futile: that there is little to be achieved in trying to outwit your state of mind. That in my case trying to write when I’ve got nothing to say just makes me feel like an idiot and that some weeks I have to wallow in the undemanding simplicity of domesticity because attempting anything more taxing merely plunges me into the kind of self-doubt that has me issuing rash statements and promises I all too soon regret when I’m in a less insular frame of mind. That the only thing certain in my world is a little boy who looks like an angel at bathtime.

Last week I nursed that same little boy poorly with a blotchy virus and wobbled his first wobbly tooth and told myself that curing my sciatica was my priority so sitting in front of the computer was out of the question and lying on my back, knees curled to my chest was the order of the day. I had my eyebrows plucked in the glorious haze of tangerine oil coating my therapists hands, closed the door on the chances of Mark and I ever getting back together and went to a parents evening at school where I was told they could not give my son higher accolade than to say he was a joy to teach. I de-cluttered everywhere from my bedside table to my handbag, caught up with Desperate Housewives and took the train into town where I bought my first pot of anti-aging cream because I am thirty seven in two weeks and time might start being unkind.

March always has me re-aligning my priorities. Clearing a path for the new life I imagine Springtime is going to bring. Track back through the Brocante archives and you will see that in January I write and create and produce and in February I am gloomy and in March I disappear. In March I plant bulbs and sweep away Winter and de-clutter and treasure hunt and scrub. And in April I am renewed. Stupidly ready to fall in love with my house and myself and any fool who cares to buy into the scarily chirpy version of myself I am all too willing to sell him.

When I was younger I thought that life ambled along a straight path and the only variant was speed. But now I know that sometimes the path traces the precipice of a cliff and occasionally you fall off and find yourself clinging on by your teeth and then you get back up again but there is a cross roads and you take the wrong path for a while just to see what’s up there or you see something behind you that you just have to have again, then a passing stranger offers you a lift and you miss whole towns you should have seen, or you take moss footed wanders through murky happy forests till you feel ready to join the traffic again. And sometimes you feel like sitting down and just watching the world go by.

Yes. That’s what it is. Sometimes you just feel like sitting down.
It’s so beautiful in Springtime isn’t it?