jigsaws

Here's a mosaic table I made in the days when I had loads of time and didn't know it. I like it a lot and would like to make more one day.....

I donated some money today. You know those crappy rubber bangles people wear that show they have donated money to some cause or another that they 'care' about....I hate them - token gestures that they are. But today I saw one for breastfeeding and it had the numbers of lots of breastfeeding helplines on it so I got one. I'm always giving folk those numbers and encouraging breastfeeding and I decided today that if I can -if I have time - I would like to be part of a breastfeeding advocacy group. It has changed my life wholly. Before, I often wondered what my role in life really was and what point there was to it and now I feel part of life...part of the planet and all the living things on it. Somehow connected to all other mammals and with strong instinctive direction. All from breastfeeding. I had thought previous to my daughter's birth that it would be the actual giving birth that would somehow change me but that all went so dramatically and hideously wrong that I can't remember much of it due to trauma and drugs...sad and something I will have to work through properly before we create a sibling for her but hey she's alive so it's all good really. But no-one had even hinted at how utterly fantastic breastfeeding is - even when it's a drag.

Enough milky talk! Tomorrow (or perhaps the next day) I am going to post a creative and insightful blog about culture just to prove that I am not just a one sided eco-obsessive-wannabe-earth-mother but also a musician with a brain......

(actually, before I do that I thought you may be interested to know my conclusion about the vegan versus leather shoe issue - I have decided to get rid of all shoes except for my lovely but murderous boots and replace them with just two pairs of shoes for all occasions - excepting concert shoes this is - and keep my boots til they die their second death. That way I am not offending myself on a daily basis but gradually making the switch to more ethical - in my mind - shoes. Obviously I will never judge anyone else on what they do - unless they breach human rights - everyone must go on their own journey).

......must stop rambling........

My little girl got her first word today...it's cat. She can't say it properly yet - it comes out as ye-at but she says it every time she sees a cat and points to it. Mind you she also says it when she sees a dog....she gets very excited about both creatures and I suppose from her point of view they are all as big (or bigger) than her and with tails.

I wasn't going to post anything today as I am singularly uninspired and I don't want my blog to turn into a 'today I did..." affair but I love it so much when one of you guys has a new post and I'm so disappointed when you don't that I thought I should just say hi. I'm going to read 'Waiting for Godot' tonight as I have the evening off and my husband is out working. Time for myself - luxury.....

laundry

...domesticity at the end of a lovely, wholesome family day...

sunny days

After Jessica's sunny beach post I wanted to go to the sea today but I wasn't sure the weather would hold out enough to make it a lovely trip so instead my next door neighbour and I went to the lake with our babies. We sat in the sun all afternoon while my daughter delighted in the sensation of sunshine on her bare skin and Katie's son got a bit more used to life outside the womb (he's only 6 weeks old). It was maternal bliss..



Now I had kind of promised myself I wouldn't post any full photos of my daughter on my blog but this one makes me feel so much love for her I really want to share it. She lost her hat today in her excitment at seeing the ducks and swans and the sun was so warm I wanted her head to be covered - shame the only thing to hand was her tights but I loved the effect(!). Cartoon Ukranian peasant? And her serious/sad face just makes me want to scoop her up in my arms and protect her from anything bad that might ever happen. Being a mother makes every emotion one thousand times stronger.

contentment

I don't think there is anything in my life that comes even close to the joy I feel when I breastfeed. It fills a deep need to nurture that resides so deep in my person I didn't know it was there... The process of feeding another human using nothing outside of your body is amazing, incredible. I will be sad to stop but the time is drawing near - already my daughter has decided that feeding from me during the day disrupts her busy playing schedule so she only feeds before bed and when she wakes up (when I'm not working) and I think the morning feed is losing it's importance to her. It's good that it's drawing to a close naturally but I will miss it. Good job I'm not a full time mother or I think it would feel more important to me. As it is it will give me a little more time to learn all the fiendish music I have to play.
I've found a brilliant new eco-product. Soapnuts. They are actual nuts that when the shells are cracked open and they are mixed with water produce a natural soap!! You can get about 5 full washes out of a few nuts and your clothes have no horrid detergents and there is no pollution at all. Fantastic! It almost beats my favourite eco-aware product - the mooncup - but not quite..
I love that we read each others blogs all the time. I spend my less interesting moments of each day imagining your lives...and we all have such different lives yet there are real points of connection. I think we should be made into a film - about us and made by us; jessica can produce detailed psych portraits of us and a fairytale plot, image soleil can shot beautiful location and candid footage and I shall set the piece to music which will manipulate the viewers emotive state. It will be feminist and political and yet simplistic. And I think we should never quite be seen on camera so there is always something left to imagine.



I'm so glad the days are getting longer. It's lovely to have some light still in the interval of a concert and when I'm at home we get really beautiful sunsets over the fields. Recently a young barn owl has come to live in the wood at the bottom of the village and he silently glides over us each day at dusk like a lost soul searching...

emotional.

I am driving down to somerset tomorrow morning to go to my friend's funeral. I have just spent the last ten minutes across the road in these woods in the dark crying....how will I be able to play tomorrow and not get emotional? I am not lookiong forward to it. I feel very sad today about a lot of things so I am going to go to bed. Goodnight lovely shiny people x

thank you...

Today Jessica I must thank you. I was working with the person I find really irritating again and I was sitting in the orchestra looking across at her with your words racing about in my head. She actually looks a lot like you so the 'reminding me of someone bad' idea doesn't stick and she is so unlike me I can't make the 'the worst of yourself' idea fit either - which left me with the scapegoat idea....which is terrible. And I'm so disturbed by my strong negative thoughts that I thought I MUST do something about this. So I joined a group for tea which included her (a thing I would usually run a mile from) and engineered the situation so that I was sitting opposite from her over the meal. I clenched every part of my body and overcame myself enough to make myself speak to her and look her in the eye. I can't tell you how monumental an effort it was. And it worked. She was very cautious of me to start but I was super nice to her and encouraging - holding out the biggest olive branch europe has ever seen(!) - and she soon mellowed into conversation. I realise now she is very scared of me but I made her feel at ease and now I think she likes me. I am not without some of the strange negative feelings I originally held for her but a lot are dispersed and I no longer feel bad about my own reaction to her. In fact I feel that today has been something of a triumph and the catalyst was you Jessica. I want to thank you by giving you something but I'm not sure how hard it will be for you to do. I want to give you an experience and introduce you to something in my world but because you live so far away you need to get it yourself which I'm not sure you will do. What I want you to do is find a recording of Mahler's 5th Symphony and the 4th movement in particular (entitled adagietto) and I want you to put it in a portable music device and take it to the top of a hill with a good view, on your own, and play it as loud as you can bear (through headphones of course) so you are totally engulfed and coccooned by the music - and I want you to think of all the really good things about human nature and the achievements of collaborative human efforts as you listen and get carried away into a soundworld of love. I want to share it with you as it is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever. Please try to do it for me?

can't speak anymore

...been playing seriously highbrow 21st Century music all day today and my brain is fried. I love it but it's exhausting. I have no ability to string words together at all tonight.....

tired

fruit and veg

I love thursdays because it's when our veg box comes each week and it's always exciting to see what lovely wholesome foods we are getting to eat. We get it from a local farm and all the food is locally grown and organic...lovely. Today we got the best box we've had for months - the seasons have properly changed and instead of celeriac, cabbages, beetroot and parsnips we got aubergine, radishes, tomatos and this gigantic lettuce. ~It's about twice the size of my head!
We are trying to better organise our recycling as it is not yet as green as I would like. We live in an area where recycling is an unknown word and trying to recycle is really hard. We have to drive about 25 miles to get to the proper recycling banks to get rid of bottles/plastic/carrier bags/shoes/clothes etc. Only some of our paper waste is collected by the council (our food waste goes into the compost bin in the woods across from our house). Isn't that bad? To recycle we have to waste fuel. It pisses me off but there is nowhere else....we rang the council to check and complain when we realised that really was it for the whole of Wigan borough. So we're setting up our own recycling centre beside our shed with seperate bins and I think I will try to encourage other villagers to use them too so when we eventually go to the council bins we are disposing of lots of recycling. It shouldn't be that hard...
Tonight in a concert a funny thing happened. I had made for my tea a fruit salad of mango, kiwi, blueberries and pomegranate which was really lovely and just what I needed on a rainy evening in a dreary northern town but it played havoc with my guts... later, in the concert, I was sitting on stage in this lovely hall surrounded by an orchestra and a full audience listening to a beautiful symphonic movement that had no flute part when I had an unexpected movement of my own(!) A really bubbly fart welled up in my belly and I knew I couldn't keep it in so I tried to fart into my chair to stop it making a noise. I was successful but it really tickled and I had to try very hard to not wiggle and laugh out loud...I know it's gross but it's real and I found it really really funny - some of that audience had paid up to £30 pounds for their tickets just to have me fart on stage. Classy.

bad karma

There's someone I'm working with this week that I dislike so much I can hardly bring myself to look at them. Is that weird? I really don't mind most people....either I like and respect them or I just don't bother hanging out with them. There are very very few people I actually really actively dislike. There isn't really much of a good reason for my feeling either which makes it so odd. There was an incident about two years ago where I think she behaved really badly but I don't harbour grudges at all so it's not that...there's just something so precious about her and she takes herself SO seriously I want to slap her...which doesn't make me feel too good about myself! Why do I care is what I wonder. Why can't I just let her be and ignore her? Why does her every move feel like someone is dragging their nails down a blackboard just behind my head? Such negative feeling must be generated by something yet we don't speak and I hardly know her. Not healthy.
I think this spring I'm going to empty our house and try to live with as little superfluous 'stuff' about as possible. We seem to gather other people's leftover furnishings etc and I'm beginning to feel a bit closed in by it all...I shall endeavour to be a little more nomadic - not so hard I don't think as the only 'thing' I'm emotionally attached to is my flute and I need that to earn a living.... anyone want any stuff?

the meaning of life

So today I've been rehearsing Mahler all day. It's not that I don't love the music - I really do - with all it's angst and abstract philosophy. But he didn't write the most exciting flute parts really....too much time not playing and when things are rehearsed over and over again and you're not playing you can't help but start wondering about other stuff. Last night when I went into the kitchen I found two massive slugs had made their way in through the cat flap and it set me thinking. What is the point of slugs??? They don't help the earth like worms do, they don't eat bugs like ladybirds and aphids do - all they do is get where they shouldn't be, eat things you don't want them to eat and leave trails of slime everywhere. The only good reason for their existence I can think of is as sustanance for hedgehogs and moles and badgers but that seems a bit shitty to me. Or they exist to make me feel better about my life...(that sounded really morose - I love my life really!)

tears and ideals

I've had a really crappy day today so I've posted a picture from our recent trip to cornwall to cheer me up!
An old friend from home has just very unexpectedly died and I have spent the afternoon trying to work out what music I should play for his funeral. Another friend whose dad died in the last 12 months of cancer contacted me to tell me about his mum who just had a massive brain operation to remove a possible cancerous tumor, and someone else has gotten pregnant and isn't sure whether she can go through with it or not. The circle of life. I know we value life so highly precisely because it ends but the end is so difficult for the people left behind. There are no words...

It's hard trying to be a good person. I want to be responsible in every part of my life - but sometimes circumstances just don't allow me to behave as I would like. Take for example the amount of travel I do...As a freelance musician I work with whichever orchestra books me - wherever they may be and that sometimes means driving 250 miles...one way. So how can I unify the amount of pollution I am creating with my constant attempts to be more green? Simply put, I can't. But what else can I do? I can only work where they need flautists and I always work locally when I can but it's just not that simple often - with tours and the like. Yet I have to work to live and it's a job I love. I am constantly envious of my canadian friend who seems to have created a beautifully simple, green life for herself yet I know I would not be happy if I were in a similar situation. I guess we can only strive for perfection and do as much as we can to do as little harm.

We had a beautiful day yesterday. It was the village easter egg hunt and all the folk gathered on the village green for age old games and egg and spoon races...It was a wonderful community event involving everyone. I feel very lucky to be living where we do - I think a lot of the sickness in our society is due to the breakdown of communities and I do everything I can to be involved in the hope that my daughter will be able to grow up in a place where everyone takes care of everyone else.

boots and butterflies

I think I may be too serious. I can be so boring at times...and irritating but I can't help thinking about things lots. This whole vegan business for example...I love not eating anything from animals - especially milk products and I am fine with the no honey thing too but what do I do about things like my shoes? I have the most wonderful pair of boots that I have worn all winter and will last several more winters but they are undeniably leather. Do I not wear them any more then? Or should I wear them right out so they at least will have served well before I replace them with something else? I think this is best but then that makes me almost contradict my own behaviour. And what about wool?? I realise all these things are necessary to be a vegan but I haven't had the strong feelings regarding clothes that I have about abusing animals to steal the milk intended for their own calves. So can I class myself as vegan or must I be more absolute to deserve the title?
Everyone is asleep again. I love this peaceful time when I can tiptoe upstairs and stand in the doorway to my little girl's room and see her curled up in amongst the twinkling rose lights twisted around her bed and the streams of silk butterflies over her little fuzzy head and hear her snuffles as she dreams whatever it is that makes her laugh in her sleep. I love that she is made partially of me and yet I have no idea about who she is and who she will become....

over a soya latte in my little garden

I find myself overwhelmed by persistent thoughts of veganism. I feel that since giving birth, and every time I put my daughter to my breast to feed, I am more and more awakened to the instinctive, base elements that are the foundations of who I am. And I constantly find myself fighting it. I am not an evangelical - in fact I hate people who are convinced they are right to the point of shoving their half-baked ideas into other peoples space....yet for the first time I feel that I am totally right and that until now I have not been totally awake. How to continue? How to change my life in inperceptible degrees so that I don't frighten people off by being too intense? How to combine these feelings with today's society? I am not yet ready to opt out completely but I don't fit....

The beginning.

So. I feel as though by starting a blog I am opening a little door in my mind which lets out the stronger, more persistent thoughts in my head and provides them with a route to a stage whereupon they can strut around flaunting themselves brazenly to all who may be interested...and baring themselves to criticism and ridicule simultaneously. And I wonder why It is I am doing this - why I am drawn to the idea of sending my thoughts and ramblings out into the unknown; my often introverted, perhaps mastabatory deliberations on nothing and everything. Yet all day the idea has excited me - since the moment I read my wonderful friend's blog this morning I have wondered what I will write and who it is for. Now, in the quiet of the night the only sounds I can hear are of my family breathing as they sleep - the deep, slow rhythmical breaths of my husband and the little squeaks and snuffles coming from my baby daughter and I don't know where to begin. Thoughts and questions come so quickly and I realise how tired I am after driving 250 miles tonight. Perhaps I will have to wait until tomorrow to decide where to start....