Month: July 2022

AND SO

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And so we come to what has happened to me recently and that has devastated me to the point where I am a shivering jelly. As we have no friends here because of moving back here just before I got cancer, and my brother saying I was not his sister and bowing out of my life after my mothers death, a clergy person offered to accompany me knowing that I was very ill and that there was no guarantee as to how long I would live. He knew everything about my condition and circumstances. He began accompanying me and it was ok for a while and then he suddenly lost his rag with me last night and told me that he could not deal with not being able to fix me. I felt devastated as I had come to trust him as he was very different to the usual religious leaders. I was not attached to any church, having stopped going long ago. However it is often the clergy who serve the hospices and often these are the people whom you relate to. I could hardly believe it last night when he said that he wanted to fix me and I would not be fixed. The hurt was unbearable. I am finding myself overcome by fear. He seemed unable to accept that I may die. He kept pressing me to do more than I could and then blamed me for not being “fixed”

THANK YOU

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There comes points in our lives when we cannot be our own strength. We may have been strong all of our lives but when we lose our bodily health and find ourselves unable to rely on our bodies, as in the state I am in now, you become very vulnerable and afraid. You are at the mercy of others and others are not always to be trusted. I have discovered much to my shock, that this is true. Towards the end of our lives we may need others. We need to be able to trust. I have been writing about God and some people say that all you need is God and that you must trust God. In my opinion if there is anything we can call God at all, then it is the kindness that we find in other people and yet some are merciless and cruel. I have received much love from all of you at WordPress and I thank you.

MY JOURNEY

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I wrote yesterday of the God question. As stated yesterday, I have thought various things at various times in my life. I have always been a doubter. This was exactly why I finally did a degree in theology and then a Masters and then a doctorate. None of this was to get letters after my name and I never use those letters. It was all part of my quest for understanding. I met many wonderful people during that time, of all faiths and none. We all got on wonderfully well together. It was a very fruitful time for me. The first thing we studied was philosophy and all the different arguments for and against God. And of course God cannot be proved in the scientific way anyway. It is a matter of faith.

As many of you know I had a terrible childhood, with a horribly abusive mother. I had no love from her and there was much cruelty and violence. However when I was thirteen years old I encountered something different in a Methodist church that I started attending with some friends. At first I just went to the Youth Club. I loved the dancing, but also I loved the conversations that I had with the deaconess there. I was always a thinker and a questioner and we talked about the world and everything. Eventually the deaconess stopped me in my tracks by telling me quite out of the blue that God loved me. Well, having known no love at home I fell on it hungrily and thirstily. It was a good time in my life and a became a full member of that church. The church people became my family rather than my blood family. It was not long, however, before I was put in a car with a man from the church to deliver the harvest produce to some elderly people. The man groped me in his car and then locked me into his car. I was fourteen years old. I told the deaconess about it and she instructed me to tell nobody about it. The man was protected. Well, I got over but I was labelled the sinner, not the man. This did not dent my faith. It was the man who was in the wrong and not me.

I went on from there to become very involved in the church, leading services of worship. However, the evangelistic nature of the church bothered. Most were fundamentalists and you were not allowed to question. It got on my nerves. By the time I went to teacher training college at the age of eighteen I was fed up. I could not accept all of that stuff.

Having discarded that first faith I continued with my life. However I could never stop thinking about God and love. I did not know what I believed. I was young and just getting on with my life, getting married and working. It was later in life that I decided to pursue these questions about God and did my first degree in my forties. By then I had had many bad experiences. During this time I attended a Methodist church again, looking for community. However it was at this time that a terrible thing happened to me. I got raped by a man from the church. He was a treasurer in the church. He came to my own home and did it. The church treated me badly and silenced me. I did not remain silenced and have written about it and told people about it. I did not abide by the church’s edict. I left that church in the end and moved away and tried to get away from the memories of what had happened. I moved from Lincolnshire to Derbyshire. Where I was very happy, except that my father had just died and I went to an Anglican priest to talk about my grief. He too did something terrible to me, and I reported him to the church authorities. At first I was not believed, but after a year long case, which almost destroyed me, I won the case. After that I just got on with my life again. I still could let go of some kind of faith though. It was a very changed kind of faith that had to embrace suffering rather than anything else. I found what I was looking for in the Catholic church. Yes, I know all about all the abuse there and it is horrific, but I actually found love and acceptance there and also a theology that embraced suffering. You did not have to be healed or fixed to be accepted.

In all of this, I still found a great wealth of love for others within me. I listened to many people and accompanied them in their suffering. My own suffering enabled me to understand and be alongside others in their suffering. I accompanied dying people too. I worked in Nursing Homes, sitting with dying people and talking to them and listening to them, and attempting offer care and love.
I then moved back to Lincolnshire which is my home county, having discovered the mystics and finding that I could relate to them. They talk about suffering. I had suffered much in my life. I also had an abusive husband. I could have given up but I did not and continues to seek life and meaning. I did not always believe in an external God, but rather in the divine spark within us and the life force within us, which many would call
God.

Then I got cancer. My mother entered my life again. Needless to say she was just as abusive as ever. I still do not know whether I believe in an actual God or not often, I feel that the atheists have got it right however, I still seek to know the truth and probably will to my dying day.( I will continue this story soon. )

BEING ”FIXED”

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All of my life I have sought for light and love. My experiences of life have often been very dark. Still, however, I have sought the light sometimes I have found it and sometimes I have not. I am not going to start using the word God, because I know nothing about God. What I do know is that I am in a very dark place. There are many people who believe in God who want to “fix” us and become disillusioned and angry when they can’t, the they put the blame on us for not being “healed”. This has just happened to me and if I have to believe in a God who wants to “fix” me then blame me for not being “fixed”,I do not want anything to do with that God. We are all human beings trying to get through this life the best way we can. We don’t always get fixed. An comments gratefully accepted, even if you do not agree with me. I think I just lost any faith that I ever had.

I DID NOT KNOW

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I am spending my life running around in my head trying to quell the pain of what has happened to me and quash the fear. I used to write when I felt like this, but I am finding I cannot write any more. I did not just write serious stuff but funny stuff too and some murder mysteries and some horror, but I cannot even write those any more. I feel so afraid. We are so totally alone and have no friends here as everyone has either moved away or died. I feel as if I have nothing at all to hang onto. This is a horrible situation. I did not know that this could happen to anyone.

DIARY ENTRY

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As my health has got worse I have attempted to reach out to my brother again, but he is not giving in. He wants nothing to do with me. Yesterday I was talking to the vicar who will be doing my funeral, and he told me that he will tell the truth. He said that my brother will leave my funeral in shame. The vicar is so angry at what is happening to me. He of course recognises as the evil that my mother set in motion and that she indoctrinated my brother with. Also the rest of my family. I felt as though I was in the darkness of hell last night and was screaming out for the light but there was none. I never thought my life would end like this. Thhere will no one at my funeral, only the vicar and the undertakers. I shall be taken there by horses though, to the church in my home village. I cannot wait to go home.

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT

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Last night I dreamt that I walked down the lane
Looking upwards at the sky
I sigh knowing I will not walk there again

Faith was born that would never wane
Guarded by hope that would never die
Last night I dreamt that I walked down the lane

Beyond the bright stars no falling rain
Could dampen my joy I knew love was nigh
I sigh knowing I will not walk there again

Sometimes I am saddened consumed by pain
I have to be honest I tell you no lie
Last night I dreamt that I walked down the lane

My spirit still sings though my heart is lain
In cancer’s firm grip one day I will die
I sigh knowing I will not walk there again

The stars are shining in eyes that flame
With something so deep hear my spirit’s cry
Last night I dreamt that I walked down the lane
I sigh knowing I will not walk there again

RISING

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I hear
Birds call in trees
I once could see, water
Running beside me, maybe soon
I will
Run too
The lark rises into the sky
Her breast to the sun, sings
Her sweet song, hope
Rises

Maybe
One day I too
Will rise, face the sun, sing
A song of triumph, sorrow gone,
Tears wiped
Away
The sun calls me like the birds, shines
In my heart, warming me,
Do you see it?
Look now

A CHAPTER OF MY BOOK

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“And I saw  a river over which every soul must pass  to reach the kingdom of heaven, and the name of that river was suffering:  and I saw a boat which carries souls across the river, and the name of that boat was love.”  (St. John of the Cross).  

I looked down in terror at the raging, foaming water beneath me, and as I felt myself beginning to slip from the hands that were holding me I began to scream.  The hands holding me were those of my mother.  I was three years old.   We  had just walked one and a half miles from the village where we lived, on a hot summer’s afternoon.  I was exhausted and knew that we still had a long way to walk, for we were making our way to the nearest town.  We had reached the bridge over the river and I had begun to cry because I couldn’t  walk any further.  My mother picked me up roughly, shaking me  as she did so, crossed over the road, and held me face down over the river,  her hands like a vice on me,  saying,

“Look.  Look at that water.  I am going to throw you in.” 

Between me and her was the stone wall of the bridge.  Horror struck, I began to wriggle, and as I screamed my mother became even angrier, but at that point, just as I was slipping from her grasp, she pulled me back over the stone wall.   She then took me, still crying and screaming, to the grassy bank of the river, saying, in a nice voice,

“Look.  It’s alright.  It’s lovely  here.”  

Though at the age of three I had no idea what suffering was, I was experiencing it.  And, contrary to what St. John of the Cross said, there seemed to be no boat called Love to carry me across that river of suffering.  All that I knew was fear, and that  was what was going to rule my life for many years to come.

We  lived at the time in a very small village in Yorkshire.  I was born, however, in a rather larger  village in Lincolnshire,  where we lived in a romantically named cottage called Pear Tree Cottage.  There was, however, nothing romantic about it at all.  It was a very small cottage  with only one bedroom, and there certainly was not much romance going on between my parents, just the opposite in fact.  All that I can remember about my parents  is raised fists and fighting and, sometimes, I was in fear of my life as I heard and saw the clashing of knives.  Most people do not have memories that go back as far as mine do, but maybe it is because of the terrifying and upsetting nature of events  that my memory goes back a very long way.  My very first memory of all is of an incident at Pear Tree Cottage.    My parents were facing each other in front of the fireplace, and there was a lot of shouting going on, and the  occasional angry pointing of a finger at the wheel of my pram.  There was fury on the faces of both my parents, and the fight seemed to be about the wonky wheel of my pram, which I was actually in at the time.  I can distinctly remember straining to pull myself up to see what was happening.  

As the row became more and more furious, my mother suddenly picked me up in her arms and took me out of the cottage and walked up the road with me.  We seemed to have gone a long way, and then we were going up a hill with no houses on it.  As we were going up the hill someone appeared, walking towards us, and when they got to us they stopped and started talking to my mother.  Then, after a few minutes I was bundled into their arms and the person turned back and started walking with me back the way they had come from.  I began to cry and scream.  I did not know this  person and my mother had left me.  In my child’s eyes,  my mother had abandoned me and I would never  see her again.  I was with a complete stranger whom I had never seen in my life before.   I had no idea where we were going but we seemed to being a long way.  I felt bewildered  and terrified.   Eventually we turned down a long lane, with high hedges at either side of us and we seemed to be nowhere at all, as we had left all the houses behind.  However, suddenly I was being taken into a big house, and I was handed over to another person whom I did not know at all.  This person comforted me and made me feel safe and secure again.  This person was my grandmother, though I did not know it at the time, and the person who had carried me up the hill and to the house was my Aunt, whom I later found out was only thirteen years old.  

I was to discover that this house, a farmhouse, was  going to be my place of safety and refuge on many occasions when my parents were fighting, which was often.  In fact, life seemed to be one long continuous fight.  My world was constantly being turned upside down and I lived in a continual  state of anxiety.  Always, however, I found peace and  security at the farm  with my grandmother, my step grandfather, and  my two uncles.  Here, I learned a little bit of what love was.  It was this place that was part of the silver ribbon or thread that went through my life.  Perhaps, though I hadn’t realised it,  this was my  boat of love that carried me over the river of suffering that I knew in my childhood.  It certainly was this place  that got me  through so much.

It was  in this place that I began my search for God, a search that was to continue throughout my life.  As a small child I was fascinated by the night sky and the twinkling stars in the inky blackness.  As I walked along the long lane with my grandmother at night, to take the milk checks to the lane end for the milkman in the morning, I would be looking up at the sky and wondering where God was.  I have no idea at all where I found out about God, for my grandparents were not religious, but I must have heard of Him somewhere, and the one thing that I knew about God was that He  was big.  Vast as the sky was, there were so many stars in it that I could not see where there could be room for God.  As we walked along, my grandmother holding my hand tightly, I asked her where God was.

“Oh I don’t know ,” she replied, “but He must be up  there somewhere.”  My child’s mind was satisfied for the moment, but later in life, when I was thirteen years old,  I was to question much more, and find another boat of love that would carry me over an even greater river of suffering.

Our time at Pear Tree Cottage was to set the scene for what was to happen in the rest of my life.  It was whilst we were living here that my father left us. He ran off into the Army.   Being so young, I had no idea of what was happening, but my mother and I moved to the nearby town where my mother became  a live in housekeeper to a very kind man.   My mother was not housekeeping for long however, as she and my father got back together again and this was when we went to live in the tiny village from where my mother walked me the one and a half miles to the bridge that she hung me over. 

My life was very insecure, frightening and shaky even before I was three years old.  The bridge incident just built on that sense of fear and turned me into a very anxious child.  

I did not really know my father when we lived in the little village in Yorkshire, due to him having left  us whilst living in the village in Lincolnshire.  One day, my mother sent me off for a walk with him, and I was most reticent to go with this strange man.  At three years old  I was already very frightened  and did not feel comfortable with strange people.  However, my mother forced me to go with this strange man.  I do not remember whether she even told me that it was my Daddy or not.  She may have done but I did not know what a Daddy was. We walked to the corner of the  road on which we lived, and then turned onto a tiny country road.  I was  refusing to go near to my father.  I kept well away from him on the opposite side of the road.  We had not been walking long when we came to what was a shocking and terrifying sight to me – a dead bird with all its entrails hanging out, and covered in blood.  I had no idea what it was at all at that age but the sight of it filled me with a terror that accentuated all the terror that I already felt.  I refused to go past the bird.  My father was trying to reassure me that it was alright  really, but I could not walk past it.  We  turned back towards home, and I edged a little closer to my father, but he did not take my hand.  

In fact, there was to be no touch between me and my father until the day he died at the age of 76.  On that day I stroked his forehead and held his hand, talking gently to him as he left this world.  All that I wanted to do was go with him but I could not.  My mother had filled me with all kinds of feelings about my father, in an attempt to make me hate him as much as she did, and to despise him.  I never understood this, but she made me believe that my father was a totally bad man.  He it was who was responsible for everything that went wrong in our tumultuous lives – the constant moves and many more things.  And tumultuous really was  the word.  My life was never settled, and it was always filled with fear.  I never knew where we were going to be from one month to the next, and  each time we moved it would be in the middle of some crisis or other.  Something terrible would be going on between my parents.  In a way, they didn’t seem like my parents, and yet they were.  I learned to live in a world inside my head, looking, to all intents and purposes, to the rest of the world like a normal child.  But I  was not.  In many ways, though, I was expected to be the adult and the caretaker of my parents  whilst my parents were acting like children.  There was  no stability whatsoever, and all I remember is going to bed frightened each night.  

That fear has remained with me to this day, and  I go to bed still frightened each night, and I  wake in fear each morning.  Childhood trauma leaves its mark, and  no amount of talking about it or so called counselling helps it.  It just IS.  It leaves its indelible mark on you. Despite it all, I did well in my life and achieved much, but that  indelible mark was and is always there, threatening to overwhelm and destroy me, though I am now 73 years of age.  I will say much more about this within these pages, but for now I will just say that the boat of love that helped me across these raging waters, this river of suffering, was always my  grandparents’  farm.  I retreated there whenever I could, always pestering my mother to take me back there.  It was a most wonderful place, quite magical for a child.  It was from this place that I drew my strength, and though it is gone now, along with all of my family, I still think of it often and know that that place was very special if not vital to me.  My boat of love.                                  

ALONENESS

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No longer
Can she be whole
Her world is stripped
Bare like the trees in winter
A body
That isn’t a body
Non functioning
In a way
That leaves her alone
And that is the nature of it all
That aloneness is the way
That life is
And all things
Are merely a distraction
From the aloneness that we fear
My friend
Until you know your aloneness
You cannot understand
The nature of all things

FALLING

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Last night I felt the fear again
Thrown off the roller coaster
You pushed me
I fell from the very top
Stomach lurching ground rising
I fell through the air
Swallowed up by space
Nothing but air to hang onto
There is no end
No solid ground
Just a falling
Falling

Falling

Falling

Falling

SIGHS

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For far too long
I have held my sighs
And now
I must let them go,
No longer keep them captive,
Release them from their prison
Not in my eyes
But in my heart,
Sometimes I think
That if I were to cry
I would cry for ever,
For grief has been my lot,
Pain unsurpassable,
Yet still I smile,
For me it was the better way,
For if my tears were to flow
They would be like the rivers
Pouring from the temple,
But golden like the temple,
Leading me to Jerusalem,
The Eternal City.

A TERRIBLE OCCURRENCE

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Tomorrow I may be posting something that has happened to me tonight. For now, I just want to say that my heart has been completely broken by my so called family. I know that many of you come to my blog and find some inspiration and encouragement here. I have been trying to keep up the more inspiring posts but under the most terrible of conditions. I fear that I might not be able to keep that up. Tonight my family or what is left of it totally rejected me despite my always having been there for them. It is all my abusive mothers doing but that is a long story. She has dealt her final card. It is what she wanted.

My health is deteriorating quickly and I am afraid and tonight I asked my brother if he would be there for me and if he would be there as I am dying. He said no to both of those. I could hardly believe such cruelty. I am suffering badly from this. I do want to keep my blog inspirational but I have little strength left now.

DEEP WATERS

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Bring to light that which is hidden
Nestling deep in the darkness
Sing into being that which should live
Wing your chosen way onwards

Do not fear the deep waters
You were once held in this ocean
Too many times you stood at the edge
New life is yours for the taking

IN PAIN

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I have had a very painful day. I do not like to keep regaling you with my health issues but prefer to post poetry but things are deteriorating so fast. The pain in my mouth head and face is so bad. It is progressive and I am so frightened. Sorry to be not answering comments again. Please keep talking to me though as I am hearing them.

A NONSENSE POEM

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She sat and looked at the shiny sea
Out on the road so grey
The oaks that scoffed at the willow trees
The birds with bows in their hands
The sky was kissing the sun that day
And the moon was all in a dazzle
Till the rain came down and the gnomes ran away
And the cats made love to the rabble
Oh what a strange sight it was on the road
When the shiny sea came to stay

FEAR OF DYING

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When I had cancer I was not afraid of dying and indeed nearly did. Now, I am very afraid of it yet I want to go to end my suffering. I feel bad at this as there are people dying of cancer fighting to live. I have no family. I will most likely end up in a Home if and when I get old, and I dread that. Cancer and its treatment are brutal, but I was unlucky in that most people who have my particular cancer make a full recovery and live a normal life. I am finding my life very difficult and frightening now and I make no secret of it.

AFTER THE HEATWAVE

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You all know about our heatwave from what I wrote the other day, I was going to write about it a bit more but if truth be told, I am getting weaker and weaker every day and am in a lot of pain. To be honest I am frightened my body is packing up on me. I think the heatwave took far too much out of me. We do not have air conditioning here because we never have temperatures that would require it. In the evening on Tuesday we smelled smoke and discovered that wild fires had started to the south and to the east of our town. One was a forest but fortunately they have now got it out. I think there were fires in bits of woodland within our town too. But we are safe. I have become very phobic and trying to deal with rising panic added to body that is giving up. Poems will still be posted here

SO MUCH CATCHING UP

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I have so much catching up to do. First I got ill and then we got the heatwave, my cancer affected my bodys temperature control mechanism and it was panic stations. It was an awful time. Hubby managed to keep my blog going a bit and posting a few poems from my stock but was unable to do any more than read to me what you all were saying, the heatwave has gone now and I want to write more about it and will do. Thankyou for all your lovely comments and support. Smiles.

ILLNESS

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I am still struggling to keep my blog going and know that lots of you have been reading and commenting, thank you so much for that. I just haven’t had the strength to reply. This damned heat wave is not helping much either, hubby will keep posting my poems for me and reading your comments ❤️

LOST SOULS

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My heart aches tonight
For the balm of your love
For the safety of your knowing
And mine
But can two souls ever
Truly know
Touch each other
In the distance
I see a hand
Reach out
But find I cannot reach
It is too far
And too late
Far too late
The moment has gone
And you are lost to me
I know
That all must end
That fear took its toll
I took the safer way
And now I am lost

DOVES OF PEACE

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They’re broken now, white doves of peace,
Bought with high hopes of mending what was shattered,
I never meant for it to be,
But for you my words were just too much to take.
I was not like you.
I could not be your clone.

I placed them there, white doves of peace,
I wanted you to understand,
But for you these birds
Spoke not of restful things.
I could not move you,
Your face set hard like stone.