Welcome to my blog – with extras! Extras like courses and events, cup of tea sessions, meditation recordings and podcasts, poetry and stories.
I am an elder woman: I’ve seen a lot of life and a lot of death, navigated many transitions and passed through numerous thresholds. I have worked in many different capacities but all of them are simply vehicles for my particular shape of love. This website is one way of offering my love and my gifts to you.
Please do feel invited to write to me, send poems, images and so on – I would love to hear from you.
I hope you will leave my site feeling warmer, comforted, smiling on the inside and in some way accompanied.
With love,
Nickie
“[Nickie is] like a magic porridge pot overflowing with love to give”. S.E.
- Buckets and burdens
There’s a song we sing in the threshold singing group I lead – “Lay down your burden”. We tell the person who is dying, they can “let go”, they are “pure love now”; but I’m alive and I want to lay down my burdens now. I want to know that I am love and I am loved and be unable to distinguish the difference.
I don’t feel I have permission to ask for more than I already have. “I want doesn’t get”, my mother said. “Don’t be greedy… don’t take more than your fair share”, and “be grateful for what you have… think of others worse off than yourself”. And her all time favourite, “Don’t whinge!” All good, civilised, reasonable stuff; except that perhaps I have misapplied it, so that now, I don’t know how to ask for what I need.
Fair share
Six, seven years on from profound loss, haven’t I had my fair share of sympathy? Shouldn’t I be ‘better’ by now, moved on, got over it all, sorted myself out? Aren’t there other people more deserving?
The trouble with this Puritan logic, is that it is based on a concept of scarcity, a concept that says there is a limited amount of a commodity and a limited amount of love, so that if I have more than my due, there won’t be enough to go round, someone else will have to go without. Maybe I should be the one giving to others whose needs are greater. Yet everyone with more than one child, knows that we don’t have to divide a finite amount of love between our offspring, that love expands to greet each new arrival. Our hearts are limitless in how much love can flow through them.
Instead of berating myself for whinging when I find myself hurting from head to toe (yet again), how would it be to lay down my burdens? The ordinary burdens of life which are no longer shared with another – bills, house maintenance, cooking dinner, insuring the car, house, dog, travel – and the burden of loss itself, of grief and loneliness for our beloved ones. I tell myself over and over how fortunate I have been to have had two children, one of whom is still here and a joy; how amazing it is that I found love, however briefly, with a good man; how very, very lucky I am to live in a safe home in a beautiful environment, to have kind friends and enough food to eat. How can I possibly ask for more? It’s not working: it simply piles guilt on top of the heaviness of responsibility and sorrow.
“Are you kind to yourself?” someone asked me the other day. Kinder than I was. “Eating well is an act of self love”. Oh yes, I do know they are right. But am I allowed to throw a tantrum and say,
“I’m tired! Sometimes cheese on toast is the best I can do because even thinking what to cook makes me weary, let alone having to chop vegetables and then wait half an hour until they are cooked. And then, to add insult to injury, eat alone!” Yes, I may sound like the spoilt brat my mother warned me against becoming but I’m hacked off that the only man who ever nurtured me has *#&%@ed off and died.
Grief is messy
Grief is messy. It isn’t well behaved or reasonable. Being self contained (oh my that’s a whole other blog!) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I am up to here with being polite and articulate. I want my man back. I want him to hold me when I weep and so I haven’t wept because he’s not there to hold me. I want him to cook me lasagne like he did that first night. I want him to stand alongside me, looking out to the world, our responsibilities shouldered together. I am sick and tired of being grown up, capable and alone.
And since I can’t have what I want, I am, like John O’Donohue says, “thrown back onto the black tide of loss”. The sea has gone out and I am washed up, stranded on this lonely shore, struggling to find the motivation to get up. Today. Perhaps not tomorrow.
“Lay down your burdens”, said a daily email post. “You are not built to carry all these worries. See yourself walking the long path to the feet of a vast Spiritual Being or even a mountain, and leave them at their feet.” I tried it and I cried with relief at feeling small in the presence of something big and benign. I can ask for help. And as I write that I can feel the shame and the “should be better by now, stop making a fuss” arise within me. The thing is, there is a hole in my bucket. Yes, I have been given many gifts but my early scripts and those of this culture, my separation from Nature, from Love and from my own well spring within, have rusted my bucket and it can’t hold the wellbeing and solace I need. Which reminds me of a story.
There was once an old wise woman who had two buckets which she filled with water at the well. The well was a good way off from her house but she loved her garden and so she gladly walked the long path to collect water for her plants. One of the buckets though had a hole in the bottom, it had carried water for many years and was getting old. The other bucket noticed that by the time they reached home, only he was carrying a full load and the other bucket was empty. This went on for some time. How could the old woman not see? Eventually he said to the old bucket,
“You are no use any more, you lose all your water by the time we get home and I have to carry all the water for the garden.” The old bucket was very sad. It’s true, he thought, I must tell my mistress to get rid of me.
“ I am no use to you any more,” he told her. “Have you not noticed that on our way back from the well, I lose all the water which you give me and I can’t water your plants?”
“Oh I know”, the woman replied, “but have you not seen all the flowers which have bloomed along the path? Every day you water them and now everyone who goes to the well enjoys all the colour you have brought to their lives.”
So yes, I have a hole in my bucket – we all do, I imagine. But maybe sometimes these blogs are the result of water trickling through those holes. Maybe in offering you an insight into my path, something resonates with you and you feel less alone. And maybe together we give each other permission to be as we are and remember that Love is not a scarce commodity but a well which never runs dry.
With love
Nickie
PS Please don’t forget, I offer one on one support, in the form of ‘cup of tea’ sessions (informal time over a virtual cup of tea, to unburden, be heard, feel less alone) as well as full one hour sessions. These can be one offs, sporadic or regular – up to you. Go to my ‘offerings’ page for more details.
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