Writer, Poet, Impudent Philosopher: (Pulling the gold thread from the grey weave.)
Author: philipparees
A writer ( mostly narrative poetry) of fiction and non-fiction. Self publisher of fiction and Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God (Runner-up Book of the Year (2013), One time builder ( Arts centre) Mother of four daughters: Companion of old man and old dog: One time gardener, lecturer, wannabe cellist, mostly enquirer of 'what's it all about', blogger and things as yet undiscovered.
If I must choose a word for you,
let it be river. Not the river’s smoothed banks
that, like skin, give form
to breath and blood, the throb
of twenty trillion red cells wildly
ferrying their burdens.
If I must choose a word for you,
let it be the word
for what flows. Down one river,
a ruined house, down another,
eight empty boats bobbing. Inside a ninth,
there is a girl on her knees, knife
in hand. A kind of river
is running through her.
Because the worship of rivers
is also the worship of a chimney
for smoke, the needle its thread
as it closes the wound, of the wire
for its extra electron.
Because all three are worships
of motion, which is why
I race after rainclouds and trains, the postman and bicycle messengers. Why…
When I posted ‘spin – part 1 ,’ I had a long series in mind. In the days (weeks now) since, I have instead experienced a painful staunching of the throat. So filled with outrage at the sticky threads of injustice and untruth in the current political sphere (I cannot bring myself to say ‘discourse,’ though I long for it), my words have literally stuck in my throat. My hands are of no use. Everywhere I turn, I feel cliche. “Nice guys finish last.” “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” “What you don’t know, you make up.”
And I’m left holding so much inside that I cannot possibly express it all. Not in a lifetime. More to the point, I want so very desperately to DO something about all the silencing. For me, that’s what it comes down to.
In the past week I have been introduced to a fascinating book, called Fascinate. Written by Sally Hogshead who certainly owns her brand ( There are 50 gallons in a Hogshead. What’s in your name smart ass?) and she no longer wants to marry a man called Jones.
Not only does she set out to fascinate but offers to tell you (after you answer 28 questions) exactly how you fascinate. It’s called the Fascination Assessment and it measures not what you are but how you are perceived by others. Armed with this insight she recommends you embrace (own) it and do more of whatever it is. There are 49 options based on your core two Advantages which is probably where other people’s perceptions intersect with something intrinsic in you. The essence of this is to encourage you to step up to your billing, because it’s where you fascinate. No hiding lights under bushels anymore.
Guess what? I come out clean as….no not the Catalyst I thought I was, nor the Maverick leader, not the Authentic but (wait for it) the Rockstar! Before you imagine that I am pleased to be a Rockstar let me disabuse you. Exhibitionistic flash I abhor, shouting too loud not my thing, taking the stand with a microphone? No. Yet the purpose of the exercise is to ‘do more of whatever it is, and do it better.’
But this assessment is a measure of OTHER PEOPLE’S ideas about you. Now I accept this Rockstar appellation as accurate because it is about other people, not me. In that it is plumb centre. It makes all my life fall neatly into place. Rockstars work alone, they use what instruments come to hand, they soldier through the performance until the end, and they accept any gig going. In that sense I accept some truth in it, because what life threw at me necessitated mammoth undertakings. I did not seek them, they found me, as easily as a steamroller finds a slope. Like homelessness had to build our house out of reclamation, the birth of a musician and needing to educate her without money. ( Plant sycamore and wait? Knit your own violin? No. Build concert hall.) What it also explains is why those undertakings brought such calumny from other people, such competitive and snide under-mining such determination to cut me down to size. And get others on side to help.
‘Now when the music starts bang the pots together. Ready?’
I begin to detect, for the first time, why even my failures have been of Rockstar proportions. Why my concert posters were torn down, why my reclamation built home was then desired by the rich neighbour and fought for until he lost at the door of the Court, why my orchestra was expropriated by the conductor I invited to conduct it. Why my concerts were boycotted. Why my frivolously rewritten Evolution is lumbered with Erudite and Magnum opus and sinks to the bottom of the pond.
It is the ‘solitary’ nature of the Rockstar. You can: You do: You are too BIG for Boots.
So how do you own your brand as a Rockstar and do it better? How much hissing do you want to invite? So I undertake a programme to understand failure and I do now understand it with Rockstar knobs on. I have certainly been helped to understand the past. The future looks less clear, and it was a future I was hoping to re-shape.
Any and all suggestions warmly invited.
Photo:By Hooterhouse (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Old writer who ‘straddles’ decides to write, and not dismount.
Quest2016 Finishing Line? Let’s pretend.
Imagine yourself on a specific day late in 2016. You reside in a comfortable place where you can reflect on your wondrous best self’s year. You’ve engaged in Symphonic Activities this year. You’ve been a Dextrous Creative engaged with key challenges and obstacles this year. And you’ve applied Rhythmic Creative Actions day after to help make your vision happen.
Tall Order! ‘wondrous, dextrous, Symphonic, best self’! I confess that makes me quail!
Okay I’ll play that hand you dealt.
Terrace in September/October
Let’s set it in September, and late sunlight on my terrace. It requires some stretched imagination from where I am standing. Where I’m standing is devoid of confidence, with little belief in energy to play symphonic anything. Let that go. I find myself with a new book published, perhaps the novel, perhaps a collection of short stories that highlight the gulf between New World and Old World characters and the lives they live; exposing assumptions that the natives never question. Somehow there is a modest group anxious to read it.
How they sidled in I have no idea, but I get enthusiastic cheer-leading, and emails of appreciation. My republished book of poetic narrative has somehow happened and seems to be garnering readers who listen to my short readings (those have mastered recording and editing!) and ask for more of them. I am not making money but I am no longer losing it, and I have (blissfully) stopped listening to marketing ‘Webinars’ The very word has been forgotten. ( While I think of it I have had a successful campaign banning all hybrid words like webinar and authorpreneur that should find no place in literary circles!) I am reconciled to modest support, but that has enabled me to go on writing for myself. I am part way through a memoir and it is going well.
But you haven’t done it alone. Why would you?
Imagine yourself as part of a Creative Pack. How does your body and mind and heart feel to be part of this pack? How is your best self engaged and respected? How has your best self grown as a result? How has at least one of your Creative Packs been instrumental in the success of your Symphonic Activities this year.
Much more difficult to conceive. My books are about ideas. That’s all. No ‘how to’s, no lists, no ‘methods’ no benefits beyond ideas. I am viscerally averse to any kind of proselytizing because essentially I believe people find what they need, and who am I to say they need what I am about. This is my greatest impediment to pack formation! The only ‘Pack’ would arise because others did find such ideas transformative. I have a few who loyally support me, but even they admit I am a hard sell. No series, no hooks, no romance. Who I am and what I’m about is not easy, especially not for me!
Who has been a key player in your Smooth Running Pack? Your Nourish Pack? Your Wild Pack?
Since this is an imaginative exercise I’ll let rip on the impossible. I have found a publisher who believes in me and puts real energy into helping me help myself. Dream on! But my husband who never wavers in support and eats indifferent food without complaint is still alive! My daughter still reads and critiques everything I write, and boosts me daily. That happens now and will continue. More I do not risk asking for.
I have met a couple of wild pack wolves who seem inclined to understand, and growl at all attackers on my behalf for there are a few of those. I have learned not to mind the suggestions that ‘if only you wrote…..’(fill in as appropriate) The ladybirds still land daily on my keyboard to encourage when I’m stuck. My symphony is scored for solo flute, cello and violin and can be played without great resources or space.
I have been through Artmark and extracted something that binds it all together, self acceptance, and a way to straddle with dignity. Straddle is an undignified skill and it is the only one I claim. It began on a horse at six, and seemed to set the psychological position, foot in both camps but never on a fence. The only essence in everything I write about, think about, is an ability to reconcile, and see both sides. But in September 2016 I have learned, at last, to do it for myself! I have accepted solitude as the basis for occasional interruption, and keep a fire burning and Prosecco in the fridge.
My barn again in use- by friends.
How have you reached out through friendships, social media, and conferences to do so?
I have tamed the belief that social media are an answer in themselves. I have interacted with those with whom I sense a kindred and spontaneous warmth, but learned to limit the time spent browsing or anticipating reciprocity. I have learned to respect the liberty of others to be indifferent, or simply busy, by getting busy too.
What key attitudes and principles guided you as you formed, grew, or changed your Packs?
To simply be grateful for what was genuine exchange. I will be happy with a few friends where friendship is the mark of shared interests or enthusiasms. Numbers will never be important, nor strategies where numbers are the goal. My attitude will get closer to accepting my age rather than defying it, and accepting that not everybody wants to be ‘challenged’ or concentrate for more than eight minutes, so I will offer snacks when appropriate.
A dream directs the source of conflict, and may contain a resolution?
Quest 2016 Goes Deeper
Calling All Dream Readers.
I am floundering with an inability to make any decisions: Reeling from both inner and outer events.
Last night I woke at about four o’clock beset with thoughts, all repetitive and unproductive. ‘Please help me think at a deeper level’ I shot out to whomever might be listening- my hopefully deeper source of wisdom, and as the dawn broke I fell asleep.
This is the dream that I had.
I arrive with my cello to join a new, rather ragbag amateur orchestra in a University hall with odd antechambers. The rehearsal is intended to cover two parts of a concert, one relatively simple with a break between it and the next. During the break I wander into an adjacent room, chat with a few and then when the second half is about to commence I say ‘This difficult half should have been taken first while we were fresh’.
When I return the cello is not to be found. I panic and go from room to room in search of it, trying to recall where I left it. I don’t find it, and inside something dies, but I still hope.
During this search I am hailed by a group of elderly, dread-locked hippie types standing on a raised dais, and called over by name.
‘Philippa we want to talk to you’ They then proceed to introduce themselves but I cannot see their features clearly, heavy hair, makeup, very layered clothes. One says
‘I ‘m holding a shower, mine is ‘white flour’. Another says his is ‘fabric scraps’, another seems to have piles of wool. I wonder what a ‘shower’ means. The only kind I know are baby showers, but these people are inviting me to receive their varied offerings. As I depart one gives me a bag of something.
I wander into a large hippie market hall ( many peddling varied tat like an open fete in Glastonbury), where near the entrance the bag given to me bursts. A pile of white flour lands on the floor. I realise that was the literal meaning of white flour, and I am stuck with the consequences of the ‘gift’. One peddler says ‘You’d better clear that up’. I have nothing to use except my hands and take a two handed scoop of flour (about half the pile) and walk out to dispose of it.
Outside I see a series of watercourses with clear clean water trained over a series of steps, falls, pools. I realise if I dispose of the flour there it will ‘cloud’ the clear water. But nowhere is clear of running water so I dispose where it will do the least damage. I then see a pile of thick rust coloured mud and take a large scoop of this intending to get it to soak up the remaining flour. When I return inside a peddler comes up, looks at the mud and says ‘Delicious. Have you tasted it?’ He rolls a small pellet and offers it to me. It is faintly sweet, but not unpleasant, yet I feel this is a kind of duping, persuading me that mud is ‘food’.
As I depart a Japanese man is embarking on a humerous ‘Act’ in and out of a straw African type hut. He disappears inside.
I wake up. This image captures what remains.
I have some clear ideas about this dream but before I articulate them I would rather hear from others (you?). I had such truly helpful suggestions about the ‘three fountains’ dreamthat I seek what might be called ‘the innocent view’ without corrupting it with circumstances that might skew your interpretations. I know it was a very important contribution to my current conflict.
Imagine yourself in the same place on the same day in late 2016. What was one of your greatest challenges or perceived obstacles in immersing in your Symphonic Activity this year?
No grail, no sword in stone, no clear path ahead. My dogged Quest has been mired in indecision. The final prompts to imagine the ‘Symphonic Creation’ that would raise the baton on January 1st has been met with silence. The orchestra is on strike, the chairs empty.
Why? When I thought I was doing so well-well… well enough. ( All the staging posts on Quest 2016- and work backwards) can be seen on my Odyssey site- since it seemed appropriate) This is more relevant to the journeys of others.
I wondered whether it was a wise reluctance to commit to what deep down I suspected might fail; or whether I had met a roadblock in all that collective resolve. My fellow travelers are conjuring up stunning websites, (that define them as a ‘brand- without doubt’) venturing onto ‘Departments of Hope’, holding joyful retreats on the sandy shores where sun shines. I truly envy this bright youth and wish them well. I truly do.Yet the belief that we create our reality might be tempered ( and legitimately) by age, fatigue, and having already created a ‘Symphonic Treatise’, the Book-That-Wrote-The- Life, and maybe I would be wise to pack it in, and set about clearing out the ‘might-be-useful-one-day’ both practically and metaphorically.
Rather than ask you to pick over half written plays, memoirs fading like dye in water, stories needing a quick burnish I am going to tell you why I only partly believe in the ‘create your own reality’ adage. This decision was prompted by a post on Synchronicity in which the writer, Viv Tuffnell, recounted something that seemed to validate her decision to leave the road more travelled, for the one less travelled, only to find a clear and explicit encouragement to keep going. I have linked to it in the post below.
Now, about roads utterly un-travelled I know quite a lot, and about synchronicities that accompany them. When I was deemed mad I understood that I looked as mad as any March hare. I knew I wasn’t but I did not blame those who thought I was. I had departed the shores of time and matter in which synchronicity only peeked like occasional violets through the stones of seasonal tramping and set full sail into the field of instantaneity, and reading thought before given words to wing it. Thought was event. A question that arose in the mind was answered immediately. There was only Now. Time and causality were a collective idea of partial understanding, created by the belief that matter was separate from consciousness. Hence the delays between them.
When you live in Now, what you understand is that Time is a kind of blindfold. It protects us from the consequences of thought, since we are not always in control of thought, it is a filter by which consequences can be assigned to others, the ‘field’, and we can be blithe, and semi-irresponsible. Without that you are naked as a babe breasting a drowning sea. To stay afloat I had to dance, and if you dance in the streets of London ( and you don’t carry leaflets for a vaudeville) you are clearly mad.
Why did I have to dance? To shut out the horror of ungoverned thought, the judgements , the hatred, the competitive, the ridicule, the savage glances, as easy to read as a billboard. Humanity exposed for what it is. In such a state it looked like a Goya painting or a Bruegel. Would you not shut it out? Is that insane? Nobody asked for an explanation and Bruegel wore a white coat.
Why am I telling you this? Because the ‘Power ( and peril) of Now’ or the episodes of synchronicity are believed to be a kind of ‘messaging’ that speaks to those ready for them, as though aligning right thought will bring the rewards that affirm it, a safe pointing finger. This new-age philosophy of ‘make your reality’ fails to take account of the ballast provided by other weighty contributors of unconsciousness and worse. This belief emphasizes an old/new virtue still governed by intention and will, whereas I know that letting go of intention and will and swimming in a tempestuous sea changes every moment of now. Events reflect the field of consciousness. Alive to the field, reading events is more a matter of integrating an ability to swim in a rolling tide, and avoid the rocks you can clearly see, or rest upon them. They do not sink below the surface or melt; they were not your creation.
If I have a quarrel with this belief in an imagined reality brought into being by a vivid application of focused intent, it is not that I believe it erroneous, but rather that it fails to understand that we are the recipients of a field, receivers as much as creators. Weaving a path needs to take account of that. We might be able to take the reins of ourselves, but the landscape has contours that shapes out path. The destination changes every moment.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Life as a journey is a bit of a cliché, really. I said once, “If life is a journey, then any short-cut is a death trap,” and I stand by it. My own journey has been an odd one. A long time ago, I looked at the metaphysical map and I saw that at the margins, around the edges, away from the established paths and well-known routes, there were areas marked “Here be dragons,” and I thought, I’d like see dragons. Ever since then, I’ve made forays into those areas of the maps that the map-makers couldn’t fill in properly because too few people had been out and explored them and come back with useful information. Most came back babbling about strange things they didn’t quite have the language for, and travellers’ tales that defy belief and rational understanding.
My kind of seasonal story. And to wish all good friends a very happy Christmas.
“Time to earn your place at the dance this year,” Mother said, shooing Pepper out of the door into the bitter frost of a late Hampstead afternoon. “While you’re about it, tell that fir tree that it’s wanted inside. And don’t forget to shake the ice out of its branches – the last thing I need is puddles in the living room.”
Pepper sighed and stomped up the garden path, thankful at least for her thick leggings and Doc Marten boots. The air smelt of stagnant defrosted droplets and woody conifers. Would this be the year she managed to entice Mr Keats to the dance? Hmmph. Unlikely. However much Mother hoped so.
“You’re wanted inside,” she said to the fir tree on her way past. There was a gentle rumble of earth beneath the snow white blanket as the tree uprooted itself and shuffled towards the back door. Pepper turned…
From OLAM SHANA NEFESH
“Time to earn your place at the dance this year,” Mother said, shooing Pepper out of the door into the bitter frost of a late Hampstead afternoon. “While you’re about it, tell that fir tree that it’s wanted inside. And don’t forget to shake the ice out of its branches – the last thing I need is puddles in the living room.”
PHI lippa. Letters of Love 
