Neglect & Action Jen

Oh dear, my poor blog. I have rather neglected it again. Poor thing. So I have given it a bit of a remake and I have written some crafting posts which I will send out over the next little while.

One thing which I have noticed is that this blog is starting to get a little overwhelmed with the amount of posts on exercise. And so  I have decided to set up another blog entirely related to my training, races and thoughts around those things. That way this blog can get back to what it is supposed to be about. Or at least it is when I am not neglecting it. If you would like to follow my exercise stuff then feel free over at Action Jen, it will be good to see some friendly faces.

I do have an excuse – setting up my business, doing my MA, administration for a theatre company and a large amount of volunteer work as well. But still, I really should write more as I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.

So, no promises as to how often I will write, we all know that that does not work well for me, but still, some more writing will happen here!

2012

Well here we are, well in into 2012 now.

I have several things which I would like to focus on for this year, note I say focus, and not resolutions. I want these to be positive and not things to beat myself up with:

Running

The last few months have been a running disaster for me, I have caught lurgy after lurgy and it has had big repercussions with my asthma, I am going to write a post about that soon. However, I have been fixed and I have been out running since I got the all clear and remembered how much I love it and how grumpy I get when I don’t run. My aim for this year is to run a 10K in under an hour. Now, admittedly this is ten whole minutes off of my current PB, but that was on a really hilly course, similar to what I train on. I am hoping that if I get some treadmill training in and race on the flat I might be able to do this. So that I what I am thinking.

Blog 

After a lot of thought recently I have realised that I really enjoy writing and that this blog is a big outlet for that. So I am going to post at least twice each week. I know it’s not a lot, but I have been really sporadic in my writing and I want to put some focus on that and do something which I enjoy so much some more!

Happiness project 

I have already posted about the happiness project here  and I want to carry on with that. As a quick update on all of my daily resolutions I am doing really well on all of them. Except fruit. I haven’t managed to do it once, which is rather sad. I have got to get more focused on that! This covers a lot of things that would normally be covered in a big focus like I am writing here, but I would rather just think about them as the headlines of movement, space, spiritual, achieve, nagging task, fruit and be a good person. 

MA 

Well, strangely enough, I want to complete it to the best of my ability and make friends and contacts by the end of it. I have got my placement sorted out (except it is not just an internship – they are paying me for four months) and I am very excited about that and I want to do the best job that I can do, and it is a big challenge – I have to raise £40K in three months and organise a tour – it is a small theatre company. I also want to have something lined up for when I have finished – be that a job, several jobs, or my own company up and running. It is all very exciting and I want to have to trust in myself that it will all be good!

Spiritual 

As I have mentioned before I have the Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course starting next week, which I am really looking forward to doing. I want to use this as a chance to consolidate those things into my practice and refresh it. I will share it with you along the way.

I also want to continue my Pagan practice, although at the moment, I am not sure how that will take shape, maybe I just need to let it evolve, rather than trying to pin it down.  Maybe a little more trust that it will all be good!

Creativity 

Here I am going to acknoweldge that I am a creative person (despite what my rational, logical brain keeps telling me) and I am going to allow myself to express that this year, in what ever form that takes. It maybe writing, music, crafting or anything else. And again I am going for unplanned and unstructured.

Overall, I think this year that I will try to allow some things to flow and to trust me a little bit. Maybe that should be my ‘word of the year’. Trust.

2011 in review

Happy New year to you all!  I received this really well  presented report from wordpress in my inbox and I thought it was so pretty  that I would share it with you. I have to say that I get a great deal of pleasure from writing this blog. I love getting comments from my small readership but I enjoy the writing process as much as anything else.

I know that if I wanted this blog to be successful I need to concentrate on one subject, but I enjoy the variety of topics I write about. In that respect this blog really does reflect me. I am going to set up a site and a blog for my new business, which will be focused, but I enjoy writing about what I want here. Having said that, are there topics that I have written that you would like me to write more about?

For now, I leave you with the report:

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people

Click here to see the complete report.

Yule

For me, this time of year is a chance to turn inward, reflect and prepare for the year ahead. I LOVE this time of year, it makes me happy to draw the curtains at 4pm, light the candles and put on the lights on the tree.

For the first time ever since I left my parents’ home I have a real tree. This is mainly due to my wonderful OH, who encouraged me to make it as I wanted it. Christmas is a big deal for him, as is tradition, so for him to give up his silver tinsel tree was a big deal. I love our little tree and it will sit in the garden when we are done, ready for us next year. It is really small, but perfect for us and our home.

I have been very disciplined and focused on getting my uni essay done right at the start of the holidays, so now I can concentrate on relaxing and being creative, generally turning inwards. So, what do I have planned? Reconnect with my music; write a short story; do some brainstorming around my values; what I want to achieve each day to make me happy; spend some serious time in spiritual reflection. I am greatly looking forward to it!

My ritual was very simple this year, just me, my altar and deep thoughts and gratitude for the wonderful things in my life and the opportunities I have and prayers for others. Solitude and silence. Things I greatly enjoy.

Yuletide blessings to you all

Mindfulness and writing

As I was contemplating the end of my MBCT course , I read on Suburban Yogini’s blog that she would be doing a spiritual writing course. The sound of this intriged me, and so I did a bit of research and decided that I would do it.

Now, I suspect like many bloggers, I feel like I could write properly. You know – properly. As a former marketing manager I have written loads and been published (under a client’s or boss’s name), but always factual, or opinion articles about IT and Telecoms. Or marketing materials like press releases or customer case studies. Not very creative, but well written. To be honest it was part of the job that I loved most, aside from event organisation.

However, I seem incapable of doing any creative writing, mainly because I am scared of getting it wrong. I know, silly right? And yet, it is a paralysing fear. To the extent that I cannot write anything down.

A large part of this course is doing ‘small stones’

A small stone is a short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product – searching for them will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings & mind) open. Writing them regularly will help you to connect with the world, & to love it a teensy bit more than you do now.

now, when I started this course I really enjoyed writing the small stones, it tied in with the mindfulness that I was doing. And yet, I don’t seem to have been able to keep it up. Silly really as I often compose them in my head, and yet I am unable to write them down. Why, I ask myself WHY?!

Laziness or self-doubt?

I don’t know….but what I am beginning to realise is that I think I need to start letting go of all these things that I think that I could be or do in my life. Which physically and mentally clutter up around me. I have lots of paraphenalia around me from starting new hobbies and things that I might be.. like a photographer, musician, athlete….I am learning that I can just enjoy things without having to be brilliant at them, or even that somethings just haven’t worked out for me and I can let them go.

I can feel spring in the air and I feel like having a clear out on a massive scale of ideas of myself, thoughts, goals, aims that I have been subconciously measuring myself against and that I am not doing and therefore beating myself up. If I lived on my own I suspect I will have gotten rid of an awful lot of stuff in the house!

I will be sharing some of the writing that this course has made me do (which quite frankly I need), but also my thoughts from it. Serendipity has meant that I have finished a mindfulness course; started a mindful writing course; and begun a meditation and Buddhism course all within a short-time scale. It seems to be affecting my mind! Even though I am not doing much writing it is provoking a lot of thoughts in me.

If you are interested in the course, which is called Writing our way home, then I suggest you read Fiona’s pdf and then check out the next available course.

Creative genius

Posts-a-plenty at the moment and its not even a holiday!

I have always had a problem with my creativity – denying it for a very long time and being generally full of self doubt about my work, in any of its forms. You have no idea how hard it was for me to initially blog and to think I had anything to say which was worthy of blogging and to date I still haven’t told most people I know about it. In fact, my work not being worthy has been a recurring theme for many years. I wish I could pinpoint that moment when I started thinking like that, but I can’t.

Today on Damh the Bard’s blog I saw this video (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love – which I haven’t even heard of before I saw this link)

edited – damn it I just cannot get the embedded link to work. Sorry – you will just have to go here to watch it

Wow. The idea that our creativity is a genius – a spirit which lives outside us and inspires us is great. Why, at no point in my life have I realised this is fantastic. Surely this is what Awen is? And why haven’t I allowed myself to value that in me? Hmmm, I think I need to take a real pause for thought here. I have to admit that this video had me slightly in tears at the end of it. I really need to work to embody this concept in my life.

What about you – does this video resonate with you?

And you thought the post title was a grand claim about me being a creative genius!

Confession time

This blog has become so much more than I originally intended it to be and as such I am beginning to extend what I write about, to reflect much more of my life, rather than the narrow confines of what I planned  when I started it in August last year.

As such, I feel like I have been lying to you. There is a whole side of me which I haven’t introduced you to.

I am a geek. A real geek. Not only in the swotty, reads all of the books she writes on her bibliography (although that is  me too), but a geek who loves sci-fi and fantasy. I play World of Warcraft (WoW). And watch Star Trek, Buffy, read all sorts of fantasy and sci-fi  and love graphic novels etc etc. And right now I am really, really digging The Big Bang Theory – seriously I have watched series one and two in a dvd marathon which leaves one bemused when resurfacing in to the real world. And then gone back and watched them all again.

I hope my confession hasn’t caused you to sneak away.

One thing which repeatedly annoys me, makes me infuriated and angry in fact, is the lack of strong women in sci-fi and fantasy. More often than not the women are there to be raped, has been raped/abused/beaten etc etc etc and this is their driver.The alternative (in fantasy predominately) is that they are there to be mothers or should be mothers, etc etc. It really bugs me and really makes me want to be a writer so that I can address this and write decent female characters with feminist principles. (Minor problem of not having any ideas!)

As a long-term reader of Boing-Boing I knew that Cory Doctorow was big sci-fi writer and when I got Little Brother out of the library last year I was hooked on his work. And then I read Over Clocked. His writing is amazing. He writes strong women characters who just are. My favourite story in this book is Anda’s Game. Click here for the background to the story; just as an overview:

This is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth.

It’s written from a girl gamer’s point of view and I really can identify with it. When I first started playing WoW I played a female elf sorcerer and…. wow. I got so much crap from disgusting guys harassing me and making nasty comments that I quit playing as it disrupted my game and made me feel really uncomfortable. The whole point of WoW is it is a fantasy game and I really would like to be an elf who can throw fireballs! Nowadays I play as a male gnome rogue, with a full on beard, sideburns and moustache. I haven’t had a single bit of harassment, but I am not playing as I want to either (although I really do like being able to sneak up on people, garotte them from behind, punch them in the kidneys and then stab them repeatedly until they die). Ahem.

The story also touches on sweatshops and child labour in a cyber world, which made me think about a new angle on the topic of sweatshops. This is one story in a collection of shorts, but I really do recommend the whole book. Cory writes really well, is relevant and writes strong male and female characters. He also is quite politically active – he has been leading the storm surrounding the Digital Economy Act.

So, that was my geek confession. As I have decided to start writing in a wider capacity I will be coming back to the geekiness. I hope that’s ok with you and if you are geeky then please feel free to confess!

Meadering, bimbling thoughts

Hello there.

I don’t actually have a topic for this post, I normally set out with a specific idea on which to post; even if it changes as I write – something which has happened several times now. I do have lots of things on my mind and so I am writing to see if anything worthwhile comes out. Apologies if it doesn’t!

First up – bimbling – it’s not a real word, yet one which I like and use quite a lot. Hopefully you understand what I mean my it. I normally use it in the context of bimbling along when walking somewhere – no pace, no strong sense of direction. My other half is away on business at the moment (which is happening quite a lot of late, he has lots of big projects on the go) which tends to result in my brain whirring away with no particular focus.

I got the job which I mentioned before – so I am now a teacher in a secondary school – teaching 11-16 year olds English Literature and Language. I am very pleased to have got this job and I am really excited about starting. My first day is the 21 June – just after I complete my University course. Once that is finished I will be qualified to teach in further education and sixth form colleges: so, not in a school. As such there will be more training to do. At this stage I am not entirely sure what what this will be as I will already have a teaching qualification; its all very complicated and confusing. However I am not worried about it – just excited. I am a very good student and I love studying, so I will just do what I need to do and the school is really supportive, which is excellent.

Last weekend I went on a basic herbalism course at the fantastic Assington Mill. There are so many courses I want to do there and having been there I want to do even more of them now! Anne the owner is incredibly friendly and helpful and with her partner cooks the most amazing lunches. I was taught by Jude and Vanessa from Of People and Plants who were very kind and knowledgeable people. I have been interested in herbalism for a really long time, for example when I was Uni over ten years ago I made lots of herbal teas, but always from bought herbs.  Although I make my lotions and potions now I have never been confident enough to start picking my own herbs.

This course has really boosted my confidence and I have already been down to my allotment and picked a load of plants which were weeds before and I now see as medicine. I now have two oils being created and a spring tincture. I am hoping they will be running another course soon this was spring focused and I really would like one for each season to help me identify the plants who are ripe for harvesting. There really is something about doing things in person with a real teacher, as opposed to a book, which has given me great confidence to get out and start practising.

A few of you said you were interested in some of my recipes I mentioned in my last post. I am going to start off nice and simple with creations you can probably make from your kitchen cupboards, or after a quick trip to the chemist and I will get going on those shortly.

Hmmm, this is getting rather long now and so I will call a halt to my written bimbling. Hopefully there will soon be a post with more focus and something concrete to communicate.

Thank you

I just realised I haven’t said thank you for all of the lovely comments and emails I get from you.

I have a very tiny audience here at Dark Purple Moon and your encouragement is wonderful, so a very big thank you for all of your support and thoughts.

My blog has very deliberately not been a day to day diary type place, but one where I can put my many thoughts about topics into a (hopefully) coherent piece which makes me think, as much as sharing my thoughts with other people.

At the moment I feel I am very much ‘preaching to the choir’, but I hope that there are some readers who I have made to think about things in a different way.

Now, enough procrastination, I have an essay to write!

 

 

 

Morning routine and balance

Up until really, really recently I would sleep until the last possible moment, throw myself out of bed, dash around like a lunatic, chuck on some clothes, run my fingers through my hair, grab my bag and bound out the door.

Strangely enough this was never a particularly calm and relaxing start to the day.

On two separate occasions I have fallen down our stairs, causing my OH to start out of bed to make sure I hadn’t broken myself on the way down.

About a month ago I decided that I couldn’t do this anymore.

So, since then I get out of bed early – two hours before I need to leave home – walk s-l-o-w-l-y down the stairs and do a half an hour yoga or pilates session. I meditate for a while and then make a pot of redbush tea. I  drink this while I do some work in my journal, a mixture of thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, creative writing and my attempts at learning to draw.

Then I go and get dressed, making sure my other half is up so he gets to work. If he is feeling particularly awake he might join me for breakfast, if not I will eat it on my own while I read some blogs.

I love my morning routine and I have managed to stick to it as well (aside from being ill for two days). It is great to eat breakfast and feel fuelled for the day ahead, if my OH joins me, it is especially wonderful, but if  not I savour my time alone. I do not do any housework during this time, it is my ME time and any form of housework makes me feel annoyed or stressed out. (I will do a post on this at a later time)

Now I have been doing this a month I am looking to ways I can improve it. I really want a pretty teapot that is just the right size with small chinese/japanese bowls. And part of me wants to get up a bit earlier to get more me time!

Of course, the tradeoff is I have to be in bed early, but wow it is worth it! As my life is getting busier and more stressful than it has been for a long time I think it is going to be even more important to keep this ritual going. Cynics have said I am not going to get the time to do this as my course gets busier.

But I have decided I am worth the time to make myself healthy and spiritually strong.