The Generous Gardener Rose

Suddenly a break through moment when a picture can emerge. After weeks of unending pain and complete inability, just a little window - enough
to do a quick pastel of these beautiful roses that grow in my garden.
Can never do their beauty justice. Their scent is divine. Joy fills my
heart - joy above the pain which is still rampaging, but not
triumphing!

Thanks to everyone for your kindness , thoughts and all the healing
sent and most gratefully received. Every comment is precious and
loving. So sorry not able to read everyones blog or make individual
comments. A blessing to you all,

love Hopping Moon.

Just too ill
Just too ill to think
Just too ill to write
Just too ill to use the telephone
Just too ill to listen
Just too ill to comprehend
Just too ill to walk
Just too ill to wash my hair
Just too ill to cut my food up
Just too ill to make sense of anything
Just too ill to read
Just too ill to stay in touch
Just too ill to explain
Just too ill to stand up
Just too ill to sit in the chair
Just too ill to deal with anything
Frankly I am just too ill for anything
Just so very ill yesterday, today
tomorrow.........

Four Miles From the Sea

There is something about builders working in harmony that gives me a
great sense of comfort and safety. There is a camradery that binds you,
too, to their world. They only pass through yours, yet somehow they
are recreating it into something that will last way beyond their time
with you. And when it is done professionally and with care that care
rubs off into the very fabric of your home - it becomes part of the
cetainty of your life, part of the foundation.

Coming to the end of 10 months of building work, the team of builders
who came to finish of various pieces of work have left me with a peace
in my heart and a great sense of lightness in the cottage - as if the
cottage itself appreciates all the careful alteration that has been
lavished upon it. Walking through the much expanded building yesterday
left me with a sense of real pleasure and joy - a feeling of rightness
that the cottage must surely feel too. It has been restored to how it
should be . There is a sense of fluidity about the rooms all flowing
into each other. There is a lightness in the air and excitement in me -
because now, yes now , we can really start to live in it, just as it
is, just as it is meant to be.......

......and that feels absolutely fantastic!

Four Miles From the Sea

My life is a simple life. It has to be said because it is true. I do
not do very much at all. This fact cannot really be got round. In orderto write about my life it is simply not possible to exclude the ilnessthough that is what I would dearly like to do. It infiltrates everypart of my being and impacts upon my experience of the world.

It makesvisits to ordinary places to do ordinary things virtually impossible.

It makes seeing people a trial rather than a pleasure despite the fact
that I always described myself as a people person. I am sadly this no
more , at least , not on the outside.

I am it seems or at least I have become a silent person - a person who
loves as well as needs deep outer peace and tranquility to cope at
all with the world. Noise sensitivity is infact a dreadful thing - a
massive barrier to communicating. Everything irritates - especially
electrical and man-made noises. Natural things are easier to cope with
, though as I write I can think of more and more things that drive my
ears crazy - flies buzzing, bees humming, the cuckoos early morning
song that goes on and on,

Though it is not only noise that irritates me, it is vibration and
movement.There is a particular hover fly that hovers in the air then
darts about - and returns to the same place. Believe it or not, it
torments me. I cannot be outside if there is a lawn mower ; even
children playing can be too loud . Noise sends my symptoms into over
drive and often I have to lie down in a darkened room, as my energy
has drained away and my pain is screaming at me running riot in my skin
and muscles.

The sound of ponies walking down the street though, or the sound of
the waves swooshing gently on the pebbles; these things are
surprisingly a joy.

Life is then quite a complicated existance for me and anyone who wants
to stay in touch or engage in real ongoingrelationship with me. Sadly
many have not stayed the course. To be close to someone with severe ME
you have to truly see the person , through a range of complicated
symptoms that would alienate and divide, given the chance; you have to
really understand and reach out moment by moment , I think, to stay and
be with me, to find the joy of a moment of peace, peace within yet
somehow beyond the pain.

It has taken me many years to understand andaccept that my irritability
is not my fault.

It is the illness that keeps me apart from the world. Because I cannot live in the
world as I used to do at all. It is inaccesible completely, except in very tiny
moments. And yet because there is someone who chooses to live and be
with me, I am not isolated or alone. I am complete.

Life then has had to become simple. Yet it is simplicity itself that
makes us happy. For it is in quietness and stillness,in moments of
simplicity that we connect beyond the place of suffering to a deeper
more mystical place : where love touches love and all is well.

Four Miles From the Sea

There is nothing so lovely as to see a happy smile, especially if that
smile is on a happy man and even more especially if that man
happens to be your own beloved husband.

Because every smile is
priceless .

A smile touches your heart. A smile brightens the day. A smile is God’s
secret gift to the world -
because when you see a smile you feel joy
and that joy brings great freedom in that moment. Even if you feel a
little down ( or a lot) , then a smile can touch your heart and the
world can seem suddenly brighter.

There are so many different smiles - there is the smile that says I
love you, the smile that says I am shy, the smile that says ‘oh, you
have seen me!’ and there is the smile that comes from your boots right
up to your ears - the smile of a man who has achieved something big -
who has , through skill and determination made something happen, that
will make a difference in potentially thousands of people’s lives.

The
happiness that comes from genuinely reaching out to others is
indescribable , for it is lifted by the Spirit into the Heart of Love
and blesses the whole world.

This is the smile that greets me every day. This is the smile that says
everything is ok. This is the smile that won my heart.

Four Miles From the Sea

What is the meaning of Still life ? I was thinking about how I love to
paint or at least , how I used to paint. Nowadays I have turned to
pastel. I am not quite sure how one describes being a pasteller ,
because I am sure it’s not quite that! It does not seem right to call
it painting. Do I say I have pastelled a picture? I am not honestly
quite sure. It does not sound quite appropriate for the seriousness and
effort of the endeavour somehow.

Oh yes, I just pastelled does notsomehow have the ring of the authentic artist who can say, all coveredin oil paint and smelling of turps that they have just completed their
oil painting - somehow this looks and sounds much more grand.

Pastel is afterall just a glorified chalk, as my husband illustrated so
well only the other week. Why, I ask ,did we pay £25 for a £50 set of
pastels and think we had done really well, when my husband went out
and bought 10 beautiful smoothe and brightly coloured chalks for
65pence and then proceeded to produced a fantastic picture?

But there is infact an incredible joy that comes from lining up a vase
of flowers and creating something that did not exist previously. Of
bringing the stillness to life.

Infact I actually love to use pastel - it is in reality a wonderful
medium and , for someone with extremely limited energy, much more
immediate than having to set up pots of water, set out all the
brushes, find the watercolour paper,mix up all the colours and then
wait patiently ( or impatiently in my case) for the paint to dry
before applying another coat. Ofcourse ,if you do not wait, you get a
muddy messy dirty picture that disappoints the eye and ends up in a
torn heap on the fire - the transluscence is all gone. And this is
afterall the reason you paint with watercolour - it really does have a
beautiful freshness and simplicity.

Sad to see the beautiful flower youwere trying to paint turned into a mucky tired wilting dirge of a
tulip.

More recently I have discovered the art of portrait - it has taken a
long while. My husband and I tend to be people who love to passionately
do the same thing ,then do it in passionately the opposite way. So I
do pastel, he does pencil, I do watercolour, he tries oil paint, I love
flowers, he does faces and so it goes on. I never thought in a million
years would I ever be interested in faces. Far too complicated. Far too
detailed. Far too skilled - after all , a face does need to look a bit
like the person you are drawing - it needs to have some recognisable
features. Me - I have done cartoon figures all my life - and my
drawings look like an 8 year olds( no disespect to an 8 year old
intended). Or so i thought till one winter evening I had no flower to
pastel....

And so began a new romance ; the romance of colour and shadow ; the
creation of a beautiful face from an empty page. And I discovered that
actually I could do better than I had imagined. The face that
materialised before me was a joy to create - each line, each nuance,
each shading of white where the light was shining on the cheek or the
forehead. Each stroke transformed the face from stillness to life. It
really was amazing - a magical discovery. I saw for the first time how
much of a face is light - how radiant and essential it is to use the
white pastel to create the aliveness of the face. Without light you
have no contour, you have no smile, you have no joy.

And when I finally showed my husband the picture I had done ,it was
just such a pleasure to see him smile in recognition - for I had shown
him something of himself that he had not previously seen. Because I had
painted it in love and love had wrapped tenderly around each pastel
line and stroke to create a living piece of art it seemed that smiled
back off the page and said ‘I am truly beautiful.’

In actual fact I had used a photo for the image and I kind of felt
like it was cheating. But then I realised it is the life that you put
in to the picture that counts , the tenderness of the way you stroke
the paper with the pastel, the feeling towards your subject brings the
still picture on the page to life. . Even an apple is alive - as my
sister gleefully informed me at about the age of 6 when she
mischievously told me I had just murdered the apple that I had eaten.
So the concept of still life is afterall, an anomaly
because it is, still , life - and full of aliveness ,in just the same
way that lying in bed unable to move, is a very still life indeed.

But it's the way my husband tenderly strokes the pain away that brings my
life to life. He sees the inner me and somehow he brings it out. He
sees the life in me and he loves me tenderly - he sees the light and he
brings it out in all its radiance - his love light shining towards me.
Even paralysed as I often am then , I can still say in absolute
honesty - it’s still life. A great and true motto to have after all.