Meditation For Pesach

scared of the desert scared of freedom
scared of Out There scared of being alone
scared of nothing for miles around but sand and desolation
scared that there will be no food no cuddles no love
scared that

jerusalem

is so very far away
that i will never see it
except in my mind's eye where the ochre stone
breathes lazily in the evening sun
scared i am not strong enough scared that my fear
will keep me hewing rock and sleeping in resentment

until i die

Shabbat Shennanigans #2 - Too Blue To Jew

Over the past couple of weeks, a tell-tale sign of potential imminent health deterioration has been rearing its disturbing head. Despite copious amounts of sleep, draining and constant fatigue has been stalking me at every turn. You wake up after nine or ten hours slumber and feel no more rested than you did when your head hit the pillow - your mind full of half-remembered shadows of unpleasant dreams. The lethargy follows you throughout the day, and you appear rather spaced-out to others, if not downright grumpy. Your concentration is impaired, of course, and both my hands are currently strewn with the evidence of multiple minor cutting/burning accidents sustained in the course of recent kitchen endeavours. You feel of use neither to man nor beast.

Now, in the last two days or so, and particularly today, I have started to feel my mood deteriorate as well. Unfocused anger, bubbling self-hatred and a general feeling of dark clouds all around.

I have just made challah dough, and it is, as I write, sitting rising in the fire-warmed living room downstairs, and still I feel no better. I feel no sense of celebration, no sense of shabbat, no electric sense of a future being born every second. Everything feels dead, and unamenable to alteration.

Thankfully, I am veritably bombarded with psychiatrically-themed medical appointments next week. For some reason, they all seem to have come together at once on this occasion. On Monday I see my Counsellor at the GP's Surgery. On Wednesday, I have a session with my Psychotherapist at the hospital, and on Thursday I have an appointment at a nearby outpatients' unit with my Supervising Psychiatrist.

It is pretty lucky that all these disparate resources should randomly coincide in this way within one week, given the way I am feeling at the moment. I will, of course, be talking to them all about my current situation and seeking further advice.

Given all this, I am not massively feeling like intimately exploring my spirituality this afternoon. Not only is it Erev Shabbat, but Pesach is almost upon us too, and so I hope that I will be in a better place very soon as this is such a uniquely thorny, tangled, difficult and potential-laden festival to explore.

In the meantime, love to all of you, hag sameach and shabbat shalom.

Poetry Corner #2

Wedding Day - by Seamus Heaney

I am afraid.
Sound has stopped in the day
And the images reel over
And over. Why all those tears,
The wild grief on his face
Outside the taxi? The sap
Of mourning rises
In our waving guests.
You sing behind the tall cake
Like a deserted bride
Who persists, demented,
And goes through the ritual.
When I went to the gents
There was a skewered heart
And a legend of love. Let me
Sleep on your breast to the airport.

Kitchen Capers #2 (Addendum)

As promised, some pictures of the less-than-photogenic but fairly yummy pumpkin cake.


The preparatory stages.....

....ready to go in the oven.....

Humble-looking but eminently edible. Good moistness value. Quite nice with a cup of tea.

Kitchen Capers #2

Friday was actually quite a good day.

Dr Squirrel and I went out for a walk in Watergate Park, a popular dog-walking spot not far from where we live, which gives way to the slightly more daunting Washingwell Woods as you venture further in.



Predictably, Dr Squirrel went a little wild with the camera, taking some more rather cool close-up shots.

Some moss growing on a fallen log here.

While here we have a close up of the texture inside a fallen tree. Good work, it looks almost edible.

I got in on the action too, and tried my best to come to terms with something called "Macro Mode", which seems designed to allow you to be pretentious whenever you feel like it.

Here we have a close up of some grassy leaves, and here....

a close-up of a rather wobbit-looking dandelion. I'm obviously not in the same league as Dr Squirrel, but I was still rather chuffed.

While we were out in the woods, I had a strong and irrational feeling that my little nephew was going to be born very soon, slightly early. So far, no go with that, but we're still waiting!

Afterwards, when we got home, I made a quick pumpkin cake. This was somewhat experimental, as I haven't actually made a cake with pumpkin before, but I had a spare tin left over from the stash I had acquired in the USA last year and I thought, why not.

The pumpkin seemed to inhibit the proper rising of the cake, so it looked a little delapidated, and I was somewhat worried that this would have to be one of those recipes that was "put down to experience". However, when everything calmed down, despite not looking like a frontpiece for a Delia book, it turned out to taste very nice indeed - spicy and moist. Still, next time I'm probably going to go with grated apple and save myself the hour of worry.

This post won't tolerate any more pictures, I think, so I'll post the cake pictures in the next post.

Kitchen Capers #1

Thursday is shopping day. This is not something particularly exciting, you understand. It involves me driving my mother-in-law to Asda, and the two of us then spending an excrutiating one-and-a-half hours trying to fight our way through hoardes of exceptionally rude and stupid people armed only with a trolley each and our reserves of patient goodwill. Which soon run out. We come out gasping for a long drink, a fag, and a desire to be Anywhere But Here (TM).

These weekly Asda trips, though, are actually an improvement. We used to go to Tesco in Gateshead. Tesco in Gateshead is, in fact, a miniaturized model, accurate in every detail, of the seventh circle of hell. Thankfully, they're going to pull it down soon. Bring it on.

Anyway, despite being rather droopy and lacklustre this morning, I decided that I needed to get my plump and shapely ass back in the kitchen. So this afternoon, I enlisted the help of Dr Squirrel as my personal Kitchen Elf (TM) and set about having a good time with food.

It was nothing fancy - we merely made a "mur" (potato omelette with onion and parsley) and a simple salad of baby spinach, thick tomato slices, red onion and avocado, dripped with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (no, just the cheap stuff, I can't afford the good kind).

Despite the simplicity and indeed, near rusticness, of the meal we put together, it was very satisfying to be back in the kitchen doing my thing. The opportunity to cook and bake without treading on anyone's toes is actually one of the things I am most looking forward to about Dr Squirrel and I having a place of our own. He bought me a bread book for my birthday last week, and already I am fantasizing and plotting variations on various recipes contained therein.

Tomorrow, I'm going to make a spicy pumpkin loaf cake, inshallah. Watch this space. You might even get a picture. Hausfrau out.

Shabbat Shennanigans #1

You can tell from the fact that I'm sitting here typing this on a computer at half past five in the afternoon that I'm not exactly shomer shabbas. But shabbat is something quite important to me, which is why I want to try and write something a little bit reflective every Friday here on my blog.

At the moment, I am very unsatisfied with shabbat and its place in my life - and those frustrations more or less directly echo the ways in which I'm dissatisfied with my life in general. In that sense, shabbat is a bit like an archetype, a mirror, or an ideal, that you hold reality up to and compare. Obviously, that can be a dangerous thing - a person can pine over fantasies obssessively, waiting for the right time to start living their lives in earnest, while in reality, life is busily slipping past them all the time.

I don't want to be like that. But at the same time, I don't want to turn into someone who is completely accepting and resigned to the status quo - someone with no hopes or desires or preferences about the way things should be. I suppose it's all about getting the balance right, like a lot of things in life.

It's a bit like the whole concept of "Christmas". "Christmas" has to be this perfect, rarefied thing, spent in the loving bosom of a perfect family. Obviously, this is the sort of hype that is just setting you up for a fall. Mental Health and Suicide Prevention helplines notoriously need to put on extra volunteers around the "festive period", as desperation, loneliness and self-hatred seem to build to an unbearable peak then for so many people.

I still have fantasies of the Perfect Christmas. But I'm also more aware now that these fantasies need to be put in their proper context, and always seen for what they are. The fantasy of perfection should never be allowed to blind you to the real blessings - the messy, varied, incongruous blessings - that are already in your life. As a former teacher of mine used to say (usually in relation to some timetabling or scheduling issue): the good is often the enemy of the best.

I don't have the "perfect" family, all chuckling and reminiscing while we hand-ice home-made gingerbread santas, or gathering round the fairy-lit christmas tree to sing carols and hug. And I don't get to have the "perfect" shabbat, surrounded by loved ones who share my personal spiritual outlook, adoring children looking up at me as I play Obi Wan to their Luke Skywalker, a posh kitchen warming to the delicious smells of the challah I've just made from scratch. Maybe one day I will have some of that. Maybe one day I will have all of that. Who knows? But right now, it's a fantasy. And my life right now is a reality - I have to keep sight of that, celebrate it, rejoice in it, find the beauty and the many blessings in what I actually have, and take it week by week.

Shabbat Shalom, everybody!