Off By Heart - Off By A Mile

So today I have been mostly finishing the hedge that the estate started on the lane side of our bottom garden.  All I had to do was cut down the remaining growth from the last year or two and tidy up.  Apart from that I also took the Willow down, a couple of years growth there, cutting it back into a box shape for Dad as per his request, to make it look tidy again and follow the line and shape that he desired.  I have kept the willow shoots, the straight growth of the last year or two because I'm interested in weaving with it, learning how to first, possibly going to give some of it away to a local college called Ruskin Mill that do great work, I've been going to their farm shop recently and buying their produce for my vegetable dishes at home.

They use the willow they grow and materials harvested from nature like dogwood and others to create beautifully coloured hand woven baskets and things, and the pupils of the college get to learn how in the process, they do good work because the students are from all sorts of backgrounds and go there to do art, practical skills with their hands, work in the garden at the actual Mill site just outside Nailsworth and the cafe.

Anyway getting sidetracked as usual, I was thinking while I was doing the gardening about learning to do things off by heart, I feel a great deal of fear and anxiety when doing something new, for the first time, or for the first time in a long time, is it ok, up to the standard they require, am I doing well, am i capable?  Anxiety I said at one point is the feeling of fear associated with something that hasn't happened yet, it's guessing about the future and assigning all sorts of possible outcomes and worrying about those rather than being in the moment.  Like rehearsing conversations, before they occur, on the way to a job interview, a date, whatever.

So when we learn something off by heart, it comes from the heart?  It comes more naturally, like riding a bike?  Walking, talking, eating, I used to be shy about eating in public, at secondary school there was a lot of pressure on us from those ages, much more than at primary school which was more about country dancing and less about exams, I'm sure the kids of today in many ways suffer from these extra levels of anxiety, and it shows in the reported figures, of cases of kids, complaining of all sorts of things and attending casualty because of it, from bullying, cyber bullying, stresses about social media, their peers, so many sources of pain.

It must be hard, I don't think I would like to be a child in this climate, where schools and so many other things have targets placed upon them in an attempt to better standards, actually all you do is make sure that people do their best to show their best side, create a picture of what high standards looks like, ensure that the weakest students are sanctioned for bad behaviour and passed on to another school, you move the problem to another location, you create a more divided society where the 'Good Schools' are the only ones that can get the good teachers, it's all about what it looks like from the outside, for appearances sake.

All these tests and things, s.a.t.'s from the united states, all sorts of things coming over from there, from the i.t. industry and technologies that are meant to help society progress, just another way of dividing people, lines of folks in the gyms on treadmills, identical kit worn, monitors on their wrists, tech tells you when you're fit, you don't need to feel your own body, know your own state of health from the inside out, the tech is on the outside looking in, I love the fact that old style things are coming back, from vinyl record sales going back to levels not seen in 25 years, to the reintroduction of film for cameras, real 35mm film stock to take pictures.

In a way all the robots that are coming out to do our chores, the robovacuum cleaners, the stylised retro look gadgets that are from our future but actually seem to fill the gaps in what we believe our lives would be in the fifties, i wasn't around then but we thought we'd be eating our dinner as a pill and living on the moon by now.

Instead we're living in a world as dangerous as the period in the 80's when the cold war heated up a little bit again for the first time since the most dangerous period in the 60's when we thought Russia and the U.S. were going to go toe to toe and launch missiles, kids in school learning how to duck and cover, get under their desks, this mini ice age in relations between the east and west a bit of a weird situation when the people who live in most countries wanting peace only their governments, their leaders looking to war, to conquer, the travel situation allowing so many to go the world over, experience life elsewhere, see how the other half lives, we're mixing with each other, soon the average person will be a shade of brown, and what a good thing.

When we've connected back up together, the tower of babel will have fallen once more, we'll all talk at least one shared language, consider ourselves world citizens as many do today, whatever their so called nationality and things like war will be forgotten because why would we want to hurt another person like us?  A waste.

So how was I off by a mile?  The title would suggest I had a clue where this was going, not really, just ranting a little bit, seeing what comes out when my fingers do the talking, Got a lot done today, recognising the cognitive deficit though, in learning new things, although it's only taken me twelve years to work out ratchet straps i've finally got there, well nearly, I can remember episodes of star trek as though I saw them yesterday as for any room in my head for new things, perhaps that's an issue I can sight as one I can call hereditary.

Some saw the heart has brain cells, and the gut, so we aren't far wrong when we say about gut instinct or the heart knows what the heart wants, it sends signals to the brain, more so than the brain sends to the heart.  The heart has an intelligence, when we center ourself there, when we speak from the heart things work out.

I tend to feel as though there is much more going on than we are told, that schools and media, papers and television keep us talking about the lowest common denominators, keep us in an old paradigm, hold us back with hours of rhetoric, talking about what might happen, endless wasted hours of a reality that never existed, so many what ifs that are forgotten by the next day, the next hour, the next minute like so much fish and chip wrapping, yesterdays newspapers, which were already out of date, telling us yesterdays news, not todays.

Well, I've done my bit today, ignored the temptation to stay in bed and doze, although I value my sleep more than I ever did, my dreams especially, working on becoming more aware, of my senses during the day, so that when my dreams come around, i carry those behaviours into the dream world, where anything is possible, where meditation is of a very deep level and highly spiritual, where healing can occur, where nightmares can be faced and lessons learnt, where we can fly at will, visit deceased relations, live out our dreams and take that fearlessness back with us into the waking world, and realise the difference is only in our beliefs, only in the fact that we feel as though we are awake now, and asleep at night, to become awake at all times, allows one to get a better quality of rest, feel much more refreshed, energised, work things out.

That's the idea, I'm still putting in the ground work, I haven't flown in a while, but I'm meeting old friends, aspects of myself, young, brown skinned, lots of real world locations, real world events, coming into my dreams, they used to say that they were there to allow us to add them to our memories, to work through our daily lives and reorganise, file the folders, balance our checkbooks, but actually I have found that the more my dreams reflect my waking world, the more it means I am becoming concious that I am dreaming both up.

That's the idea of dream yoga, to become aware, to be the dreamer and the dream, to be able to die aware, enter the bardo state between lives, choose to face the scary realisations that abound within that awareness, to learn from the lessons we have experienced in this life, and take them into the next, actually awaken more.

It's all a lot to take in, so much more to learn, to be less attached, but no less connected, no less compassionate, no less empathetic, i'm more emotional, more open, sensing more, accepting more.