News and views

My news is good! It's taken a long time (more than a week) to be able to take the "effort test" which was needed to find out what is wrong with my heart. Done it to-day and although I could only walk on the treadmill for 4 and half minutes, -so steep and so fast was it-, the results are sufficient to be reasonably sure that there is no lasting damage to my heart or indeed any narrowing of arteries.

Mind you, I would have been very cross to have a narrowing of the arteries, because I have not smoked a joint or a cigarette in years...not drank any alcohol for nearly four years (and not because of fighting alcoholism, but in order to be able to meditate at will...), nor eaten any meat for at least as long as that. So the risk factors are not great, really!

The funny thing is, that apart from thinking how good it would be to die in my own country,-ah! la belle France!, when I thought I might be dying...that is - thought which took me somewhat by surprise, well apart from that, I have been quite remarkably calm.

There is a mental thing I have been taught which is called "having a determined thought" and which is a cross between being a mad optimistic and acutely stubborn but which operates from a place of steely strength, a decision made irrevocably, even when one does not have control of all the factors involved, or indeed any of the controls of any of the factors, other than that will. It was like that with my determination that the test would take place within days rather than the expected weeks. And it worked! Again!

One of the first time I held out against systematic lunacy was when my car had been clamped because I had not displayed a parking slip. That car park had previously been a free car park and I had not intended to defraud anyone or to cheat the system, since I was not aware of the new requirements. When the clamping chaps immobilised my car, the only thought I had, as if printed in huge red Strongbad letters all across my brain was :I AM NOT PAYING A PENNY. The chaps argued, "impossible, got to pay, impossible to remove shoe off your tyre without payment.etc.etc."; all I heard was Blah blah blah blah. I spoke to a lady in an office informing her that I would NOT be paying and they may as well have my car but I would NOT pay etc. "Impossible, you've got to pay etc" I heard blah blah blah blah blah blah, and I thought I am NOT paying you a penny! Well, I am not so pleased with what happened next, because it is a bit embarrassing...in a small way... but I had an asthma attack. It was neither completely real, nor completely put on: I was pretty upset by then. I had only gone to that car park because of a shop where I could buy a toothbrush holder a little bit cheaper than in any other shop. (We are talking 50 pence or so!!!and the "fine" was £92 + £6 for using a Visa card if you didn't have the cash: I tell you, it was a horrible thought)

Still all I would think was I will NOT pay a penny....you can guess what happened? The lady came back on the phone -the cell phone of the chaps who had the power to unclamp my car- and told them to set my car free.

And I did NOT pay a penny!

Meanwhile, I saw three people part with the extortionist sum demanded...by the way!

Later on that day, I was regaling my friend Danièle with the story and she told me that she had in fact also been caught in the parking trap at that same place, that same day and had paid the fine. Though, I am jolly sure that if she had had the time, like I did...

Why am I telling this story? Because I intend to carry on with determined thought for all the difficult moments of my life. Because I do believe each one of us had much hidden power, much power to resist and even break unfair systems, systems which make light of our integrity, systems without logic and without compassion.

Because we all individually have an absolute right to have our integrity respected by others and by the systems which we, human beings have set up within any given society.

So, yeah! Hurray for determined thought!

They were very pleased to see me again at the Hindi evening class, and I was pleased to see that The Brain was still doing its elegant stuff when it came to languages.

I have a new ambition, now that I am 56. I plan to study music in a more systematic way, so that I know if the titles I download on Kaaza Lite are what they say they are: I have had some Beethoven which was pure Mozart and vice versa...I'm sure. I knew that, but I'm sure also that sometimes I think I'm listening to No 536 and I'm in fact listening to No 234!!!If you know what I mean: opus wise!

What a joy to think that learning CAN be infinite! I plan to learn right up to my eventual demise, with a determined thought that no senility will take place. (My maternal grand mother died completely aware and intelligent at the age of 96 and a half after saying goodbye to me on the phone and accepting the permission to leave I soft murmured to her, and my father's mother was completely sane when she went at 97! So there is much hope on that score...and much learning still to be done.

Well take care of your grey cells: avoid bombarding them with too much of the old bad stuff, and enjoy the results.

Warm, healthy-heart felt greetings of universal peace,

Jocelyne

Perhaps not!

Perhaps it would be better if I didn't ever get "that" excited. Let me explain: I flew to Paris on Wednesday and I ended up in a hospital near Paris with a suspected heart attack...well I did feel pretty unwell, tired and so on and so forth. In the event I managed to persuade the medics to let me come back to the UK where I shall now be fighting the queuing system to undergo the necessary tests- which in St Lys would have been performed immediately, but well, I wanted to be near home in case of surgery etc...

But would it really be better, to live a passion-free life than my roller coaster of joys and gratitude, wonderment and emotional bungee jumping (at times!)?

On the way to hospital I saw very little of the landscape, just the top of a majestic forest of trees and the apex of grandiose stone houses, but on the way back,at night, I saw a tiny rabbit caught in the lights, for whom we had to stop the car dead in order to save his little paws from a fate similar to death...and....a horde of wild boars, going about their foraging business in the rusty leaves. There were five or six big ones and two or three smaller ones. We stopped, and extinguished all lights and they carried on as if we weren't there. It was a magical moment of Obelixian proportion. I was so glad that they hadn't all been eaten by the old Barbarian mob!

In the hospital, I had to explain yet again that having health issues did not render one stupid, or powerless and I insisted that no criminal act having been committed by either myself or those who were accompanying me, there should -in all fairness- not be any punishment either. Injections I don't mind, being seen as a mere carcass I do. Those of you who know me will be glad to hear that by the end even the worse case of "job's worth" had mellowed to my pleas for humane treatment and that I was allowed a) company and b) a certain measure of dignity in the performing of obligatory functions (details will not be necessary I am sure!) Not easy, but can be done if enough determination is put into play!

So now I am back home, and extremely happy not to have died -as I thought I might do-and to be in a more familiar environment where I really can speak the language.

Of course I do speak perfect French BUT I don't speak the language of the French. My body language is different, my eye contact is different, my expectation of respect is different. When I speak I do not "imply", I "say". My own feelings and impressions are not a negotiable element in the equation: I feel what I feel and I know what I am feeling. I pick up on others' "hidden agenda". Hidden agenda is freaky: skating on the wrong kind of ice. The worse part about it is that those who commonly carry a hidden agenda assume that others also practice the same methods: they then engage in a frantic though totally futile bout of decoding, for something which was not encoded in the first place. In an ordinary context, I observe that with some amusement and a few internal giggles, but on an intensive care stretcher it becomes less entertaining.

So many experiences in so few days...AH, .... all adds to the grist. I still think it is lovely to find more than 3 species of mushrooms in the supermarket and rye bread which does not weight a ton...

I'm off to cook something nice...may be quinoa and mushrooms? I have to read up on Potassium, seemingly sorely lacking in my system????

Don't worry about me: I'm sure I'll be just fine!

Cheery love,

Jocelyne

I am THAT excited!

My voice can now be heard on the net!!! How is that for magic? please do not be blasé...

Dave, Paul's friend originally and now mine too (I'd like to think, albeit with all due "respect" to the generation gap...), Dave then has put my voice on the internet. He is incredibly patient and kind and played the piano to my singing "Ne me quitte pas", one of Brel's most poignant songs (ah! that is saying something!). I am now going to put a link to his very honest and funny blog ...wait for it....wait for it...perfectlybeastly

I hope you like my voice: I do! And singing is giving me a lot of joy. Every week I get together with two old mates of mine, Tony -who used to be my best friend's fellow, and Charles- who still is, I think, a good friend of my no longer husband Mike, and Tony and I massacre a few old jazz standards, with lots of half tones while Charles finishes them off on the piano; we laugh a lot in the process and there's always next week to get it right. None of the folks I just mentioned have a Blog, otherwise I would have been practising the link thinggamy again. (You must remember my ridiculously unsavvy approach to information technology: hence the "grasping the nettle").

Anyway, that's enough excitement for one day! So good-night and sweet blessings to all,

Jocelyne.

PS: A DISCLAIMER: Although I do love the song, I do not subscribe to the emotional dependency it expresses; people can leave me as much as they like, I ain't gone be noone's shadow ...no siree, let alone the shadow of their dog...But there you go, poetry will get you anywhere and I do love singing it as though I mean it!

I have been reminded ...

...that it is NOT the first time that I felt so good being by myself, and that I had already written about that very feeling. Oh well! You see, what happens when you concentrate so much in the present moment is that the rest disappears, and in true short-attention-span-gold-fish-in-a-bowl mode , you rediscover stuff over and over again: never get bored, life is marvellous....

So no real apologies for repeating myself: if I have forgotten, I'm sure noone else (apart from he who remembers everything with his super brain! -a wink and a smile here, you know who you are!) would have remembered either.

Have yourself a lovely autumn day in the northen hemisphere and spring day in the south,

LOVE anyway,

Jocelyne

The joy of solitude (or: alone but not lonely)

To-day I did something I have NEVER done: I enjoyed a walk by myself in a wood. I had an appointment in a house in the middle of the country (to do with improving my health,... again!), and there was an hour's delay before I could be seen. So I decided to go for a walk up the hill in the wood behind the house. Nothing extraordinary in this you may think. Well for me it was! I had the most thrilling feeling of being complete, of not needing to talk to anyone, not craving the presence of another human being. It was an exhilarating experience.

As I was walking up the hill in the thick of the trees, quite alone, I suddenly thought: I don't feel any fear, how nice is that?!

It reminded me of an exercise we did on a spiritual retreat once, which consisted simply in being focused, but then absolutely focused in the instant. Thus the wood revealed to me its myriad facets, thus I could just walk, up a hill, with nothing on my mind but what met my senses.

It was muggy and I could smell the organic damp of the undergrowth, the huge mushrooms, in their hundreds (oh that I knew how to tell the yummy-eaty ones from the killy-throwy ones!), the lovely rotting smells of fallen trees and moss.

A wood, left to its own devices, is incredibly untidy: fallen bits everywhere, new growth higgledy-pickeldy, tangles of brambles, and fronds of ferns, heaps of fallen chestnuts in their prickly burr.

Ha! real chestnuts, which grew there, fell there and which with an expert roll of the sole of my shoe I separated from their hedgehog covers; the little ones, a bit withered, I am sorry to say those I left for the squirrels and other small creatures of the wood, but the shiny fat round ones, I tucked safely in my coat's big pocket, and have just finished eating, just before writing this. They are probably the fuel which powers this typing...The whole house smells of roast chestnuts, and I am the Queen of my castle.

As I was searching for one perfect autumn leaf to bring away as a trophy, I realized that most of the leaves were, somehow, a bit less than pristine, and yet that the overall effect was of subtle harmony. That's why I love nature: no matter how disheveled, or imperfect the parts, the whole always blow me away by its perfection. All the colours always match. May be that's what the sheep in the field next to the wood were reflecting on as I stood there singing them a little song...(that's something I do, sing to cows and sheep...and I have it on good authority that I am not the only one...so there!)

I am off to sing to myself, the pleasure of having discovered that I am now able to enjoy my own company -whatever the sheep may have thought of my singing!

Signing off especially for Paul: "TREEEEEEZ!"

PS (and sincere apologies for this PS): Anyway it was better to do what I did than to cry about the result of the American elections, no? (Don't Americans realize how uneasy that steradent makes the rest of the world feel????? And that is even without considering his politics ) Oh well, I guess we can just all go up in a puff of smoke together...

Have a nice day! Anyway! I did....