Catching Up (but not overtaking)

Well hello stranger, It’s been a while… I’ve not blogged for some time, but truth be told I’ve not had much to say. Or at least, I’ve not felt much like saying it. If you’ve been following this blog for a while (or feel inclined to scroll back a bit) you may remember that just over a year ago I made a few big changes, deciding to leave a teaching career and move from Manchester to Leigh on Sea in Essex. I’ve had a quick look through some older posts myself whilst deciding what to write and it occurs to me that when I wrote about “Winds of Change” on the 31st of May 2015 I had no idea how right I was, and goodness but they’ve been blowing ever since. It was on September the 1st of that year that I handed in my notice and set in motion a sequence of events that has brought me on a completely unpredictable and extremely challenging but incredibly worthwhile journey.

This journey started, when I moved in November and began to deal with the personal aftermath of leaving teaching. Of course, one might think that if a particular situation has caused you stress or upset, then to remove yourself from that place would solve the problem. This proved true, but only to an extent. Of course, in reality it was more complicated than that and the gradual process of really realising that I wasn’t a teacher anymore was a painful one that I found had unexpected implications on my perception of my own identity. Thankfully, my ongoing involvement with Education Support Partnership gave me a platform to work through some of that. Being asked to speak at a debate at Parliament in January (there was a detailed account of that in my last update but you can also watch a short video about the evening), as well as to participate in a radio interview on Radio 5 Live Daily in March (a recording of the entire feature is included in this post; I speak at about 13 minutes into the clip), gave me a sense that I was not alone in my experience. It also gave me the opportunity to meet and hear from others, as well as some comfort in the knowledge that in making my decision to leave, and then being very open and public about this, I had at least helped one or two struggling teachers like myself.

While all that was going on, perhaps especially because I was struggling to feel a sense of purpose in my new life where I was now making ends meet with bar work, I was keen to stay creative. Just before I left Manchester, I completed a new series of digital collages, developed from paintings and drawings inspired by Buddhist imagery. Titled The Impermanence Series, these were exhibited at the Manchester Buddhist Centre in November 2015, but had felt like ‘the end of the road’ for that set of work, a development of a development and with no inherent momentum to take forward.

 As I’ve always been inspired by my environment and having moved to a particularly beautiful area, it seemed natural to begin a fresh creative investigation taking this as a starting point. It was at a time of year when days were short and I had been particularly struck by views out over the Thames Estuary either at night or dusk and sunrise; and it did seem to be almost permanently in one of these states! I took some photos; I did some vague watercolours, a few sketchy ink drawings. I looked at the light around the horizon, played with abstracting it and gave the result a working title of Leigh Lights in January 2016. However, despite my aspirations to take this work into some more considered and larger scale paintings, it never transpired and I found these activities seemed pretty hollow, that I was simply going through the motions. I felt I had very little to pour into them, just wringing out the last drops of some residual creativity. It was as though I was carrying out the stages of a process because I didn’t like the idea of stopping, (or if I’m more honest, I didn’t like the idea perhaps that others would think I had stopped) not because I had anything much to say. I was merely making artistic small talk for fear of the creative implications of an otherwise accusatory silence.

Funnily enough, at that time I did find a more sincere outlet for my creative expression in the form of the written word. I have always enjoyed writing poems but never felt they were much more than a personal hobby, certainly not seeing them as related in any way to my professional arts practice. However, I decided to host a spoken word night at the pub I was working in, as much to give me something to focus on and in the hope that I might begin feeling involved in my new local community as for any genuine urge to be expressive. I was as surprised, as I think were the pub managers, when this event was so successful that we couldn’t fit everyone in the small space we were using for it and I realised I had stumbled across a flourishing local poetry scene. I was soon invited to read at existing poetry nights I’d not even known about and this, as well as hearing other’s work inspired me to keep writing. I found through this, a far more genuine and very refreshing outlet for many of my current experiences and so, in a recent overhaul of my website, I have made the poems more prominent with their own page. There are now 51 poems on line and I’ve more to upload when I get the chance.

While this was positive, it far from distracted me entirely from the gap that remained in my daily experience where teaching had once flourished. ‘So, what are you doing now!?’ people would frequently enquire with an excited enthusiasm that I felt anticipated the adventures they expected me to relate. And my heart would sink. ‘Not much.’ I’d say through gritted teeth, trying to sound nonchalant and not give away how cutting I found those queries. ‘Just some bar work for a bit… You know, enjoying not having to take my work home with me!’ Which wasn’t untrue. But it still hurt. When I was introduced by Sam Walker on Radio 5 as ‘having left teaching completely’ and ‘now working in a pub’ I could have crawled into a hole there and then. I found hearing someone else speak that truth an incredibly humiliating experience, in the truest sense of the word. I was humbled by it.

Because of these feelings, I knew my time in the pub could only be a temporary solution and that I would have to find a new path. It’s hard though, to determine a new direction on the map of life with eyes still blurred by the fatigue of your last voyage. I made a couple of half-hearted and unsuccessful applications to some arts opportunities. I did a bit of volunteering with a local community group, offering crafts workshops to disadvantaged children. I mulled over some options and found nothing that reignited any spark of genuine motivation in me. But my mind did keep returning to an inspirational talk I’d heard in October, at the Manchester Buddhist Centre. Delivered by a member of the Triratna Order, her description the work of a small charity called Young Indian Futures, at Aryaloka Computer Education Centre, a Buddhist social project in Nagpur that offers subsidised education to some of India’s poorest and most marginalised young people, gave me the fluttering of a memory of what I had once believed teaching was for.

A way of making the world better, not a method of paying the rent. Time and again I found myself thinking of this talk and the work being done there, so, in April, I got in touch with the speaker and the rest, as they say, is history.

I began an online TEFL course in May, trying to learn the finer points of a language that I am supposed to have a fairly good grasp of, but it appears don’t know technically at all well. Present perfect? Conjugating verbs? It amused me that at a time when so many people were telling me how much they enjoyed my poetry and I was being invited to write or speak about teaching, I was discovering just how much I did not know about the very tool I was apparently deploying so effectively. Nevertheless, I worked through it and was soon planning my now imminent trip to spend six months volunteering in Nagpur. After a little more running (Southend Half marathon) to raise much needed cash for the charity, see left!), it was straight into visas and vaccinations, travel insurance and flights. Most importantly though, back to lesson planning and back to a sense that I’d soon be once again helping to generate brighter futures, not just facilitating weekly hangovers.

Strangely, as the charity is founded by Buddhist practitioners, this move towards a fresh expression of my professional skills is also neatly woven into the exploration of a new, spiritual side to myself I had not known was there. Following my attendance of meditation classes and learning about Buddhism at the centre in Manchester, I felt a real sense of something missing when I moved away from that community. Happily though, I found it was convenient (if expensive!) to travel in to the London Buddhist Centre once a week, so I took up new studies there and soon decided that it was of value enough for me to hold close to the heart of an otherwise rapidly changing self. In June, I began thinking of myself, and identifying to others as Buddhist. In July, I became a mitra and in August, I formally requested ordination into the Triratna Buddhist Order. If you are interested in knowing more about that development, you can find a recording of a talk I gave last Saturday at the Varjasana Retreat Centre in Suffolk titled ‘Why I am a Buddhist’, (as well as a PDF if you prefer to read it) on another new page I have just added to this site, where I shall share and record anything related to my new spiritual voyage.

So, it may not have felt like it at the time but it seems quite a bit has occurred in the last few months and I now realise that what has at times appeared to be a ‘wasted’ year has in fact been really very well spent. A field left fallow may appear to be wasted land, the soil untilled and dotted with weeds, but under the surface is intense and critically important activity. Organic matter is busy decomposing, being eaten and excreted by various creatures; at once a process of death and decay and yet at the same time nourishing the earth with the nutrients needed to provide the conditions for new growth, fresh shoots and flourishing, eventually to bring a new season of fruitfulness.

I remember once, during a heated ‘debate’ with a (soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend, being told with an air of distaste ‘You’ve changed!’ Well, yes I probably had and what’s more is that I’ve kept changing. A damn good thing it is too. ‘Stasis’ is not a word in the Glittermouse lexicon. I don’t know exactly what the next six months contain but I know I shall step back onto the shores of the UK as a very different person to the one that left, grateful too for this fact.

Well, hopefully that’s bridged the gap of the last few months and we’ve caught up… But I continue to learn the value in not rushing things, not forcing life, letting things be. I was recently read the Wendell Berry poem Grace, in which he says of an autumn wood:

‘Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
The place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.’
 
And so, though we may have caught up, I’ll be making an effort not to be running away with myself again and I’ll certainly not be doing any overtaking. After all, as Berry says:
 
‘Running or walking, the way
Is the same.  Be still.  Be still.’