Will You, Won't You Join The Dance

Sorry this has turned out to be a pretty poor video of trees dancing in a sea sounding wind.
Last 30 seconds is the best, and it really can't be viewed full screen at all.

 Guess I shouldn't have expected so much from my phone camera,

 but wanted you to get a flavour of what it felt like to stand amongst this living  movement.

I'll try and find a better video and upload it if I do.

Isaiah 55:12

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

“Dance, when you're broken open.

 Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.

 Dance in the middle of the fighting. 

Dance in your blood.

 Dance when you're perfectly free.”

― Rumi

May you feel the dance of the universe running through your veins,

and may you be free

 to add steps of your own this weekend.

Blessings

Keys in The Darkness

After a cruelly wet spring, nature has surpassed itself with a harvest early, 

 and abundant.

Among the leaves of this dark leafed tree, (is it a maple?)

 the seeds, known as "keys", hang in heavy bunches.

Glory, glory, glory.

Hidden in the darkness the seeds of new life.

Promise that an empty darkness is not,

 cannot, be the end.

                                                                                                                          Photo:- Hazel Price

Who could conceive a key,

an unlocking,

 would lie in penetrating the very heart of agony,

picking the lock,

breaking the bar,

to open into vast and healing light.

Resurrection light, born of bitter seed borne up,
on wings of the Spirit's breath
 beyond that piercing,

sorrowful, place

into freedom's eternity.

Hope's harvest soaring wide, 

and wild,
, and full of  glory.

Blessings

"Surely our griefs He himself bore, and our sorrows he carried."

To read the whole of Isiah 53, from which these words are taken 

http://biblehub.com/nas/isaiah/53.htm

Send Out Your Light - Part 6

.Continued from Send out Your Light - Part 5 (Archived in Blog Posts List)

 In the interim between my being told I would at last be leaving hospital

 and actually going home,

 a bed was brought downstairs into the large middle room at home

so that things might be a little easier for Mam.

This meant that my mother would be nursing me in one room,

and in the next room off the hallway, she would also be caring for my grandfather,

who was elderly and far from well.

In addition to looking after us, my father, and brother, she ran a typical 1950s home,

which, in the Welsh valleys meant there were three coal fires to be attended to,

one each in the rooms where Grandpa and I would be,

and one in the kitchen range where every drop of hot water had to be heated.

There was no washing machine, so my formidable mother

 dealt with the bed linen from four beds,

 and all the clothes, and other items of the household of five

with the time honoured wash board and mangle.

The resultant mountain of washing had to be carried up

 some thirteen or so uneven stone steps

 leading up to the garden carved out of the steep hillside on which our house stood.

There it would be pegged out on a washing line that marched up the garden

 almost as steeply as the steps had done.

Washing day was not for the faint hearted!

Can you wonder that, knowing all this,

 I was immensely grateful to Mam for agreeing so willingly, to have me home.

From the outset I made up my mind

 to do everything in my power to make her care for me as easy as possible.
*

After so many months in the clinically stark wards
coming home was a strange feeling.
The walls, with their patterned paper and framed pictures,
seemed a much smaller cocoon than they had been before.
Similarly the comings and goings of the house were unexpectedly many and varied,
wearying me so I was reminded yet again I was still sick.


It didn't take long to realise being on the ground floor was not going to work,
as my room opened to the kitchen at one end, and the hallway at the other,
so I was slap in the middle of the main route through the house.
This, and my own need for a quieter place,
soon saw me installed in an upstairs bedroom overlooking the beloved hills.


Sadly my doctor insisted I should not be continually facing the light,
so the bed was positioned with my back to the window,
 and facing away from the beautiful view.
With it's old fashioned high wooden bed head
and my inability to manoeuvre myself to see around it,
 this pretty much left me the panorama of a blank wall,
but what the heck!
 I was home.


After so long continually in bed I still didn't sleep well at night,
but the joy of nights at home was in the feeling of calm and the emotional safety
which had been missing in the hospital.


Another joy was being re-united with my 9 year old brother.
Hospital regulations at that time banned visors of his age,
and I had missed him badly.


Rob was a auburn haired, (Mam forbade the word ginger),
fire cracker of a boy who kept the household very much alive and kicking.
Two of his favourite activities now I was home, were to become
a) snuggling down under the blankets with me to read, or chat,
or, (towards the end of my illness), watch T.V.,
and b) to torment me in any way he could devise,
The fact his older sister was reduced to a sitting duck was obviously too good to pass up.


One of his favourite pranks was the act of a moment.
He would dash into my room, grab a handful of hair,
give it a sharp tug, and vanish grinning back out of the door and down the stairs.
One of his more memorable tricks was timed to coincide with Mam's visit to a neighbour
at the same time as I had one of my medically induced migraines.
Creeping into the bedroom, he switched the radio on,
found a station broadcasting, above all things, a recital of Handel's Messiah,
and turned the volume up as high as it would go,
then left me to it.
The radio of course, lay out of my reach, and I could only sit,
 or more accurately lie it out, until Mam's return.
I have struggled to like The Messiah ever since.
*
My medical supervision now lay in the hands of our wonderful old family doctor,
and I will tell you more about him,
 and the development of my relationship with the inner companion
who had become so integral a part of life, the next time.


Blessings

P.S.  Sorry about the wierd spacing between paragraphs.  Blogger is going it's own sweet way today.

undecided

Towards the Old Cathedral, Barcelona          Oil on canvas board

This is a painting that I've been promising myself I would finish for some time.

I think I've become so used to seeing it stacked against a wall I am undecided if it's been worth the effort;

and now I HAVE done all I want to to it,

 is it worth framing and exhibiting?

Any thoughts?

It is so true that you can keep looking until you don't see any more.

Blessings 

P.S.  This is where a few comments would really be useful!

A Handful of Daisies

In the still of the late afternoon I am alone in the garden,

 planting up bowls of vulgarly cheerful winter pansies,

and simply enjoying having my fingers in the earth,

my thoughts free to roam and alight where they will.

I move on to dead head the mauve daisies,

a generous gift from somebody I hardy knew.
The seasons have grown strange so

like everything else in the garden they are moving too swiftly into autumn.

A full month too soon

they curl their petals in death.

I look down at the tangle lying in the palm of my hand

and remember all the places where the still earth is disturbed by unbearable anguish.

As the wind sighs in the tree tops 

the little handful of daisies become a prayer.

Be Blessed

Spring

  My six year old great grandson Zachary and his mum

 hadn't been to call for a couple of weeks

then when they did Zach went out through the back door,

 stopped in his tracks,

threw his arms wide and exclaimed,

" Wow!
 Nanny Hazel!
 What have you done to the garden?"

I replied that I hadn't done anything.

"It's just spring love"
I said.

It's JUST spring?

I think I'd missed the full impact
 because the arrival of spring is such a gradual process for me.

I prowl up and down the garden looking for the first hint
that snowdrop spears are breaking out of their winter fastness into the light,
or that the paper thin glory of the first crocuses are about to be scattered in the grass.
 

For me the fragile signs change is coming may be there for some time but

 winter's grey fingerprints continue to prevail for a long time.
 

But Zach is right;
"Wow"
all the hope and promise has burgeoned. 

 

 

From bare earth

 

and searching for signs of life

 

comes bouyant colour and freshness

 

 

 and fragrance.

 

I know full well that the return of life that we call spring is the ultimate symbol for reurrection,

of course I do,

 yet  Zach's reaction opened my eyes and heart still wider to the miracle.

 

A lovely part of meditation can be turning words over and over,

or looking at them in depth 

to get all the goodness out of them and I found that definitions of the word

 

  SPRING

 

included :-

A source, origin, or beginning.

  An actuating force or factor;

Resilience.

  Energetic bounce

   A usually rapid return to normal shape after removal of stress; recoil.

 

When we've been held in a winter of any sort,
when we have done all we can to bring about change

and there is nothing more we can do,
these are words to conjure with
while we wait as best we can.

 

Then one day we realise things HAVE changed.

 

Life is being renewed.

Wow!
indeed.

Be Blessed

 

 

Send Out Your Light - Part 5

It has been months since I wrote my blog.

 

Was it coincidence that I was trying to write about my experiences of chronic illness
 and the breakthrough of healing into my life when
 I was forced to break off because I became ill?
 .
I have spoken about things before but writing is so much more interior.
There is time to dwell, to feel, and to ponder on how much to reveal,
 whereas when we talk we can skim along the surface
conveying the effect we want without necessarily plumbing the depths.
In any event it seems strange that in the middle of this stirring of memories
 I should be pitched into hospital and find myself
  revisiting very much the same hopes and fears,
 light and darkness,
as I had lived through all those years ago.



All this has raised some serious questions about
  both the physical healing I experienced
 and the spiritual realities which have become so much part of my being.

To say it has been, and still is, a testing time is an understatement,
 but just now  I want to take up my story where I left off 

 and keep the things I have learnt, and am still learning for later.

So I take up the story again from the time I had left the main hospital
for the annexe all those years ago

when I was seventeen.
 

 

*

When I had been admitted to hospital I imagined, like most people,
I would leave once I was well.
I could not have foreseen how it was I would make my exit still flat on my back
and not on my own two feet.

As it was I was simply being kept in the hospital annexe
 to free up a bed in the main wards whilst
I was on months of full bed rest and observation.
I was the only patient there on long stay.



My  fellow patients came and went in the matter of a few days as stitches were removed,
or whatever final hurdles to home were cleared.
We may have been ships that passed in the night but
 as anybody who has spent time in hospital will know
 we were still able to get to know one another pretty well.
The close proximity and lack of privacy helps,
 but above and beyond this there are surface emotions
 and a need to be known
 that comes from a sudden unwelcome reminder of our mortality.

 

Life, if only for a while, has thrown up un-looked for questions

 and sharing intimate facts with strangers

is as good a way of teasing out answers as any.

I had been the recipient of many unlooked for confidences,

                 which preyed upon my mind.

Amongst all the comings and goings there was one lady who I will call Joyce,
 who was to stay longer than most,
 and have a decisive effect on bringing my own time in hospital to a close.



Joyce was a good twenty years older than I was and married
 with a daughter a bit younger than I.
She had recently suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage so,
 as the likelihood of a re-occurrence was apparently high,
 she too was being kept under observation.

We knew this because Joyce was not above finding her notes
and reading them to find out just how things stood.


In those days patients were kept in blissful ignorance about their condition
 unless, or until, there was a need for them to know anything.
It was very much as though our condition had nothing to do with us at all.
This being the case notes could contain very candid remarks about patients or their families,
and if what Joyce read aloud from her files was to be believed hers certainly did.



It could be difficult to know just where Joyce was coming from
 as her mental state was still rather uncertain.
Sometimes it was fairly obvious that she was "away with the fairies" as the saying goes
 but at others the things she revealed about her home life seemed real enough,
 and her husband's ill treatment of her was certainly a re-occurring theme.



For what must have been three weeks or so we were alone together in the ward
 with Joyce apparently making good progress,  it seemed likely she would soon be allowed home.


 One evening after visiting time was over as Joyce was standing at the foot of my bed talking to me she collapsed into a violent seizure.
Suddenly the laid back routine of the annexe was switched to full alert.
In short order Joyce was whisked away to the main hospital for emergency treatment,
 and even now, fifty six years later,
 I can see her tousled head, finally still on the pillow as she was taken out of sight.



The next morning sister, (that is the supervising nurse),
came to tell me that Joyce had died at 3.30 a.m.
but strangely I already knew as that interior voice which had comforted me so often
 during my stay in hospital had told me so as I awoke.

*

Later in the day sister came to my bed again,
 but this time she brought Joyce's daughter with her.
 Joyce's husband had come to the annexe to collect her things but
 they had been taken to the main hospital so I was told
 her daughter was to stay with me whilst he went to collect them.
So it was that I, a patient only a little older than this distraught youngster,
 was left to comfort her,
 and listen yet again to the circumstances of her mother's life with her father.



When my parents came to visit that evening and learnt about Joyce's death
they were naturally upset but Dad was his usual quiet self.
All I remember was his quiet seemingly deepening
as I told them about my time with Joyce's daughter earlier that day.




It was about a week later my father and mother turned up unexpectedly
 in the afternoon outside normal visiting hours.
They were ushered into the ward by a somewhat flustered nurse who quickly left us alone.

I was doubly mystified as they were both dressed in their best clothes.
Of course they were!  Bless their hearts
 they had been on what must have been for them an equivalent to an audience with God.

Somehow in those days of rigid hierarchy, and knowing your place,
 they had got an appointment to see my consultant
 and had succeeded in getting him to agree to let me go home.



It is difficult to imagine the enormity of what that meant in those far off days when doctors,
 let alone consultants, were a race apart.

My quiet dad had let it be known that in his own words,
 "things have not been going right"
 in the hospital for some time.



All the indiscretions about patients details,
 the crossing of boundaries,
 and now this final lack of definition between what was acceptable for a patient and what was not,
had all been noted and he had decided this ran counter to my well being
and now, enough was enough.



The consultant agreed that I had been simply getting more and more depressed
by being in the continual hospital atmosphere however
the only condition under which I could go home  was
 that I should remain on full bed rest.


Gamely my mother agreed to do the nursing and
 it had been decided that as soon as a district nurse was arranged to give me my injections,
 I could be sent home.
In other words I would be home in about a week.

(To be continued)


Be Blessed


 

Singing Meditation

Sometimes I focus on the Beloved with a singing meditation and I wonder if you do too?

It simply consists of opening your mouth and singing!

You can start with a line from a favourite prayer,

 psalm,  love song, piece of poetry, a word of praise or gratitude of your own,

or an expression of praise in tongues,...

whatever springs up towards the Beloved out of your spirit.

Just let the notes fall where they may.

You will be surprised,

 as you simply lean into the freedom of the Spirit,

 what melody and words pour out of you.

My experience is that I receive fresh revelation as I listen.

You may be thinking you don't have a good enough voice or musical ear. 

 If this is the case remind yourself you are singing from your heart to honour the Beloved

not putting on a performance.

 Crows have a beautiful voice to the creator because it is their own!

 In truth your focus will not be on yourself at all

 so just be free to enjoy drawing near.

The great joy about this is you needn't sing at the top of your lungs

 so you can do it anywhere you feel comfortable in not drawing an audience.

 Working in the house or garden,

 or enjoying the outdoors walking or whatever.

Hubby once did this coming home from work on his motor bike

 thinking nobody would think anything of it if he let rip in his Welsh tenor,

only to be pulled up by the police to be breathalysed

 as somebody had reported him driving  through  the village clearly under the influence.

 - After all why else would he be singing?!

 Needless to say they couldn't find any condemning evidence of what it was

 he was under the influence of, so let him go.
He was still chuckling about it when he walked down the garden path.

Singing is especially precious to me since I was healed from Myasthenia

 and got my singing voice back.

 This morning I simply took the line "How can I keep From Singing..." from the old hymn as my starting point
 because it has such deep meaning for me.

Here is the video of Aled Jones singing the same hymn
in the beautiful Lady Chapel in Ely Cathedral

If you haven't already, you might like to try this way of meditating
 and perhaps let me know how you get on?


BLESSINGS

Send Out Your Light - Part 4

I am taking up my story of the out pouring of God's light and healing into the dark places of my life again, picking up from the point where, after months in a medical ward, I have been transferred to the annexe apart from the hospital.
(You can read the first 3 parts of the story prior to this in the blog archive).

*
 

I loved my new surroundings and especially relished the fact of being able to sit up.

Not only did I have a better vantage point but it made the mundane act of eating so much easier too.

Now I could begin to read again,
 something it is very difficult to do when lying flat , or even on your side.
 Lying flat the arms give out after a few minutes,
 and lying on my side was not only uncomfortable but for some reason
 my eyes always watered horribly too.

Now I thought time would pass more quickly and profitably
 as I returned to my passion for books.

I would also begin to draw again!
 

Equally important was the possibility of (ahem) sitting on a bed pan instead of sort of lying on one like a recumbent banana . (Indelicate but true!)

Things were beginning to look up.

It didn't take long for me to understand that though my move had heralded changes
 I was still very sick.

The pain still remained, and sitting up proved exhausting.
 Simply sitting in bed my heart would beat so hard and fast
 I could see the print in front of my eyes pulsing,
 and the old bed frame castanets would begin their dance again.

 

Even the bright new company I was so glad of
 could be too much for me and I would be forced to lie flat again and go incommunicado.
 I guess my aspirin migraines and vomiting didn't make me the most congenial ward buddy either.

 

Above all else undoubtedly the best part of my move
 was leaving behind the smothering atmosphere of suffering in the main medical ward.

Even so it was one thing to leave the physical presence behind,
 and another to jettison the sounds and stories I knew so well.

I felt seared by the pain I had encountered
 and could only keep up the stream of prayer that had begun for those known,
 and unknown to me.

 

*

One of the problems of the ward I had been on in the main hospital
was the familiarity which had grown between myself and the young nurses.
 

I was near their age,
 and some of us were known to each other
 due to the fact of their being a year or so ahead of me in grammar school.
 This, and the fact of my long stay,
 meant I was almost accepted as one of them
 in as much as protocols of confidentiality were often forgotten.

As time passed
 I became increasingly privy to graphic details of the immediate effects,
and the prognosis,
 of the medical conditions my fellow patients suffered.
 Sleepless nights often found me listening
 to the fears of some inexperienced nurse facing a long shift virtually alone.

   On top of what I already heard and glimpsed in the ward itself,
 the extra burden of this knowledge
 increased the stress of living within this world of the sick.
 

Unlike these friendly young women
 I could not walk away at the end of the shift and take a break
 from the atmosphere and reality of the hidden world of suffering.

The ward had become my world entire.

*

I was soon to find that the easier regime which was a part of life away from the main wards
 gave greater opportunity for this breaking down of barriers between patients and carers.

It was not unusual for a nurse to wander into my ward
 from the children's ward on the floor above, bottle feeding an infant,
 and to casually describe the little one's medical condition.

If I had found it harrowing to learn of the agonies my older fellow patients were subject to
I was now devastated to discover the cruelty of congenital diseases, cancers,
 and the myriad illnesses these tiny mites were heir to.

I had believed coming to the annexe
 would be to break away from the enclosed world of suffering in the medical ward.
Ironically, even though I could now gaze
 at the world outside the large window alongside my bed,
 I felt even more engulfed by suffering than ever.

* 

If you are wondering why I did not remonstrate with the nurses,
remind them I was a patient too,
 or at least let them know how the knowledge of so much pain affected me,
I ask you to remember I was just coming up to my seventeenth birthday
and had been in hospital for almost a year.
Lonely, and glad of their friendship I was not about to do anything to jeopardise that.

Also I had been in hospital long enough to know there were many and subtle means
by which a nurse who was upset could make one's life a misery.
Especially when you were as dependent on them for everything as I was.

I wasn't to know it, but in the end it was the casual way things were done
 which was to lead to my escape from hospital all together.

*


The Blessings of Light be with You
until
 the next time.

A Word for the Year

                                                                                               Photo-www.catalystsytem.com

The last couple of years I have adopted the practise of
finding a word of expectancy
at the beginning of a new year.

Last year the word "Glory" led me into 2013,
  and yes, there has been glory a-plenty,
though I am ashamed to say
 I have often only seen it in retrospect.

Today in my meditation I realised the word
 "freedom"
was resonating at a deep level.

I hadn't been looking for a word,
 or even thinking about it this year,
 but there it was,
 and is.

It sparkles with sheer opportunity and invitation,
and far from suggesting a chance to take license
to me it seems rather daunting
in it's uncompromising openness.

Still, it's something I have striven towards
 for the longest time;
 especially in facing down fear,
 and one of my dearest scriptures is Gal 5:1:-
" It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.
 Stand firm, then,
and do not let yourselves be burdened again
 by a yoke of slavery".

So as the saying goes,
If not now, when?

Be Blessed