seventeentimes

The first significant adventure Millicent had took place on a cold winter morning when she woke to find the whole world hard and sparkling in the midst of an ice storm. In a whirl of excitement Millicent wrapped herself up tightly in six layers of thick, warm, woolen underwear, threw an even thicker, warmer, woolen jerkin over the top of them all, and flew out into the crisp silent air. She made straight for the forest and was soon crunching along between the trees, her fingers dancing across the surfaces of twigs and leaves and bark. So transformed was the forest that she fancied herself a princess in a castle rendered entirely in diamonds, hung from every glistening column and arch with chandeliers and twinkling garlands. She stalked hither and thither, pronouncing decrees and ordering royal feasts and balls. She curtsied and smiled, counted her gold, pardoned squirrels and knighted blackbirds, and carried on with all manner of princess-like activities until finally she could think of no more.

Only then did she become aware of the muffled grumbling sound that was coming from her belly. The thought of breakfast quickly pushed all other thoughts aside, and the tremendous beauty of the icy world around her vanished as if in a sudden thaw as it dawned on her she had no idea how to get back to Muckleberry-Down-The-Lane. It is quite possible that she might never have made it home again. The forest was so large and she had walked so far that she might easily have gone on walking deeper and deeper into it’s wooden heart, only to finally curl up in exhaustion beneath some giant oak and never again open her eyes. However, that is not what happened. Millicent looked around her, licked her finger and tested the wind, and set off in completely the wrong direction - which is what saved her life. But not until much later.

In the wrong direction lay not only a complete lack of Muckleberry-Down-The-Lane, but also a large and hungry Black Bear.

A trip to the park a couple of weeks ago reminded me of the magic to be found in this particular part of the world. See if you can spot the elephant…

click twice for luck

There was once a young girl who was the attendant to a rich and powerful queen. Her name was Millicent Mint of Muckleberry-Down-The-Lane, because the village she came from was just a short walk down a pretty country lane from the slightly larger village of Muckleberry. Her name was Millicent Mint of Muckleberry-Down-The-Lane because her mother, her mother’s mother, her mother’s mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother had been called Millicent. Her name was Millicent Mint of Muckleberry-Down-The-Lane because left to their own devices her feet smelled strongly of cheese and every morning she packed her shoes with fresh mint leaves in an attempt to subdue the pungent aroma. Her name was Millicent Mint of Muckleberry-Down-The-Lane but everyone called her Milly Maybe.

The reason for this was quite simple and even less interesting than anything to do with grandmothers and villages and foot fungus. Millicent was known as Milly Maybe quite simply because she said ‘maybe’ a lot. Of much greater interest is why Millicant said ‘maybe’ so much in the first place, and that is a more complicated issue.

When Millicent was a very young girl - young enough that a single puddle could entertain her for half an afternoon - she struck nobody at all as being out of the ordinary. And since ‘the ordinary’ was limited to the lives of the handful of families that lived together on the barren, muddy land that curved along one edge of the Great Blackwoods Forest, it didn’t take much to stand out. She had two sisters and three brothers, all older than her, who had survived their own treacherous childhoods and now accompanied her mother and father every day in the fields. Millicent was left with her grandmother, who was one of the Millicent’s that she had been named after. Her grandmother had by then outlived her name and was known to all as Oba, the name by which all old women in the village went after a certain age. She was an easygoing woman and generally let Millicent do whatever she felt like. Luckily for Millicent this easygoing nature stretched to the drying, cleaning, sewing-up, soothing and mending required after Millicent was forced to stop doing what she felt like by a wide variety of spills, rips, falls, scares, scrapes, collisions and scoldings. Consequently Millicent learned quickly about the small world around her, gained common sense by the bucket load, and by the time she was tall and strong enough to climb the giant silver birch that marked the boundary between her families’ land and that of their neighbours, she was having all sorts of wonderful adventures.

The first significant adventure Millicent had took place on a cold winter morning when she woke to find the whole world hard and sparkling in the midst of an ice storm.

Some pictures here - clickety click like Dorothy…

I was being ever so quiet and tip-toeing as best I could (well, ok, I did tell my dad, but that’s all) and some of you heard me anyway… I’m so touched! Thank you for reading and commenting!

here is a kite x-ray and some pebbles to show my appreciation.

I was talking to somebody recently about my struggle with the emotions which come up for me during Aikido training - in particular the intense jealousy I feel towards keith when I’m not in a grounded state of mind. She asked me whether my marriage or my “hobby” was more important to me, and insinuated that I should consider giving up Aikido. It really annoyed me that she was unable to appreciate the value of spending my time on an activity that can build such strength of character and peace of mind (to twist a phrase). In addition it saddened me that she considered it an option to give up in the face of a challenge. In Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk writes,

You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.
It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

I don’t for for a second think that drugs and death are the only options left to us, but the essence of what he’s saying dings a little bell deep inside me - the one that chimes when you speak a previously untold truth, when you name a pain that you have born silently. How many of us know the sensation, often described as ‘emptiness’, of leading a life in which there is a scarcity of “real personal adventure”? What that means to any us is of a very individual nature, but there are clues all around that can help us find our own adventure.

To me, being on an adventure makes any of us a hero within our own story. Within our psyches exist many roles, but in the case of an adventure, it is the hero that takes the helm. I’m developing a theatre project about heroes that I used with two groups of kids in the last couple of years, based on Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology and hero stories. Campbell found that the same underlying structure of motifs, relationships, trials and transformations lay at the heart of hero stories from cultures spanning the whole globe, and ranging across thousands of years of human history. To me that just sparkles with the most magical, awe-some, “zhwaooum-zhwaooum” [sound effect] fairy dust (apologies to Evan). I pared down the structure Campbell outlined in detail and the kids came up with all the details of the stories and dramatised them to make FABULOUS, fantastical, hero stories. The goal is to create a theatrical process that echoes the adventure the characters face in the story, and to be honest, I really hope that just the involvement in this ancient, epic, universal type of story will be transformational in a way I wouldn’t hope to control. Of course, I get plenty out of this experience myself, not in small part because it’s nerve-racking to attempt this original feat of creation in a small space of time - in fact the ‘nerve-racking’ part is central to the whole experience. It makes the adventure.

And so back to my original point. For me, Aikido is beautiful and terrible; fun and painful; exciting and devastating. I broke my collar bone last November doing Aikido. Aikido is changing my life all the time. It’s my personal adventure. And I’m not giving that up.

Okay, so why I’m here, why I’m back, is because I love words, and playing with words, and particularly the magical feeling of creating beautiful, funny and peculiar things with them - places and objects and people and ideas that don’t exist until I’ve described them. Surely words - and whatever ideas and images and feelings they transform into when we experience them - can be seen to be as full of life as you or I, or the closest tree to either of us, or any jellyfish in any sea. I am alive, as far as I’m concerned my imagination is alive, and a great deal of my imagination is made of words. They’re the protein. What’s of interest to many of us of course is what precedes the words in the process of creation. Whatever the indefinable soupy stuff is from which those words are born is a mysteriously beautiful collaboration between myself and the world I have lived in so far. One can detect something of the awe-some-ness of the soup in the marvelous experience of ‘having an idea’. One moment you’re not thinking it, and the next moment you are. And it happens fast, in a flash! If I try right now….

I see an orange fish hanging from a silhouetted, dark tree against a crimson sky, and the whole thing is on a card, like a tarot card.

It’s quite possible I have seen this particular card before somewhere, but if not, how did this image come to exist in my mind? Like I said - it’s partly me, and partly ‘other than me’. At this point I’m left feeling that the boundary implied really starts to break down - when something as fundamentally personal as an original thought, cooked up by my own little grey cells, is constructed from materials ‘beyond me’, haven’t those things become part of who I am?

It seems parallel with the vague thoughts I am able to muster (with little grasp of physics) regarding the fact that between me an the end of the sofa there is no empty space, it’s all full of oxygen; but that the atoms that make up the oxygen are made up of electrons and protons and maybe neutrons - none of which I faintly understand, but which I have been told exist in relation to one another in terms of size and distance like distant stars; so after all there is a lot of empty space between me and the other end of the sofa, not to mention all the empty space inside me; and to cap it all off, I have been reliably informed, lying on this end of the sofa as I am, my body doesn’t ’stop’ where the sofa ’starts’, right at the edge of each of us, our teeny-tiny components actually overlap a bit. Curr-azy stuff*.

To my fumbling mind, these points collect around a central idea of the connectedness of all things. I don’t begin and end… anywhere, exactly. My words spring forth from soup that doesn’t begin and end anywhere either. So that soup, just what is in there? Is it finite? These questions do not so much compel me to attempt to answer them, as to want to dip my spoon into the soup and see what those little pasta letters spell out!

Put another way, I feel as if there is an infinite playground inside my head, and I want very much to play in it. Left to my own devices I don’t play in it even a smidgeon as much as I’d like.

My goal is to use this space to write in, a little bit, and often.

*If my attempts to describe these facts are so bastardized as to render them uselessly unscientific and damaging to any of the points I was trying to illustrate with them, I hope you will forgive me.

Yesterday a friend of mine drew my attention to a video of an intriguing activity that happened at Grand Central Station last month. The group responsible are called IMPROV EVERYWHERE and I highly recommend a little browse of their website to check out some of their Mission Highlights… I can’t wait to try some of these out for myself!