THE BEAUTY OF BIRDS FLYING OVER THE WAVES WHEN PLANNING MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

MY BELATED INTRODUCTION TO WABI-SABI

Yesterday I spent the day in bed. I was no longer sure how sick I was but I slept and I slept and didn’t have the energy to inform my workplace of my absence. The dark room with slivers of light and a cool breeze coming through slits in the window cocooned me into the peace of getting better. Later, when I had more energy, I took pictures of my room; the light, the comforting bedsheets. It felt good. Those small glimpses of beauty for my exhausted, woozy mind.

Today, I don’t know if I am still sick but somehow work needs the definitive version. The entry of the sick line acts as evidence. I could not work today but maybe I could; maybe with a really special effort I could have worked. I do not know if I am sick or recovering or just fine and dandy. I don’t, now I think of it; know what sick is; it lives in the in-between world of purpose and function and production, rather than that of living and I wonder what production has to do with sickness; is that the only excuse we ever have not to toil for our living? And what is it when we are a little better? Where does the line lie when, nowadays, we could probably work from our sickbeds? Again; I know I could not work today but could someone else say that really means I do not want to work instead? I do not know.

After the children went to school. For the first time this week, now at the end of the week; I took Dash the dog for a walk. I wanted to see around me; observe the beauty of this late spring. The flowers were well defined for my phone camera in the dull light; the dark clouds made the walk dramatic; the wind woke me. I looked at the flowers and they were beautiful. I like the foxgloves whose picture I took, the lower flowers were plump and vivid while the top of the stem was an imperfect blur on the breeze.

As I walked, I forgot to look at the beauty around me and instead thought about a speech I am meant to be making and whose ending I want to change. It will be at a big conference about mental health services and the latest survey; the data from which we can learn about the state of our services in the UK. I am sure it is important data but, in my talk, I want to shine a light on the voices between the numbers. Those hidden people who, aching with pain, hide from family and friends and fall deeper into a grey, grey, world. Or those people who, seeking help, do not know what help they want and do not know how to express their hurt; those who need their helpers to seek out what they cannot say; even though they are there, hoping to say precisely what the matter is.

I like the idea of data being able to show the joy of watching a tern flying above the waves and what that means to me after my injection. I would like the data to reveal the exquisite beauty of paper flower sculptures on a forensic medium secure ward which will have way more than one murderer on it, but whose sculptures have remained untouched, undamaged for month after month; bringing beauty to somewhere sadder than sad.

Coming back home, I heard Wendy hoovering. She poked the hose out the door and pretended to sweep me up, at which point I remembered the hoover had no bag in it for the dust. She returned to her hoovering as I walked up the steps to home; not able to hear me shouting that there was no bag to collect the rubbish.

We sorted it; bickered. I made myself mint tea which I hope is healing. Wendy came into the kitchen and said;

‘Would you like to hear how I would have liked you to let me know about the hoover?’

and I said

‘No, I wouldn’t! I know exactly what you will say and I do not want to hear it!.’

We sat in the sitting room and bickered some more; this time about my food lists and my cooking and Wendys insistence that she had managed fine while I was away and I wanted to say, I wanted to say, I wanted to say….I don’t know what I wanted to say but I wanted the final word and didn’t have it.

We ebbed around our almost annoyance; we laughed and insulted each other and almost meant the insults. When I left the room to rest, I was almost cross. When I got upstairs to rest; I smiled and relaxed and wondered at a life where you can almost argue, almost get emotional and feel no fear; instead just affection and love and the realisation that this imperfect life is even more perfect than I thought it was.

Now I am back in bed; sent here by Wendy, who is anxious I do not overdo it. I am grateful to her. There is the sound of songbirds outside and the harsher cry of rooks, a breeze through the windows. A small sanctuary.

I have been listening to the story of a woman who fell in love with a poet when she was very young and then married a man who she was not in love with, until decades later, when they were both old, she found her poet again and now they live and love in happiness. That is, I think; wabi-sabi, if you are Japanese.

When I left a previous relationship, I had not learnt of love made up of respect and equality, or of laughter and silliness and trust, or for that matter, giggles and lust.

It was not something I contemplated at all; instead I anticipated a slow fall into loneliness and frailty and the loss of the vestiges of joy I still had around me.

One day, just over twelve years ago, I walked up to Wendy in a train station in Inverness and she walked up to me (My memory is that the station was full of steam, but I am sure to be wrong!) then, as we had planned, we kissed, and my world changed.

Thanks so much for reading this – to get copies of my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing do head over to Amazon or, if you don’t like Amazon, message me direct.