Sleeping well? You could be………

It’s not terribly long ago that I began to sleep what the medical profession call ‘normally’. Their definition of normal and my own, were poles apart.  Their normal was a recommended seven to eight hours a night.

Medical recommendations sometimes pass me by and that was one of them – my norm was four and a half, to five and a half hours a night. I couldn’t make it to the recommended  golden hours of zzzzz’s….. no way, no how. Besides – I’d been like that a life-time.

My ‘normal’ was so hard-wired, so entrenched and so deep-rooted, I thought I had to be one of those people who were at the short-sleeping end of the scale – however extreme.

Now I am convinced that it was unresolved anxiety was the under-lying cause. As a result of my lifestyle, I was running harder and faster to stand still, to meet what I experienced as increasingly inhuman demands – demands that are common in many corporate environments and organisations and in modern living. Work-life balance – was possible………. in theory.

It wasn’t just me though – I saw a lot of over-wrought people out there.  There was a macho culture about not ‘needing’ a lot of sleep. In some subtle way, we began to reward ourselves for our bravado, comparing notes about sleeping and not sleeping – the long hours culture gathering speed.  Arriving early and leaving late was a perverse signal of loyalty and dedication, of commitment. It was a form of grotesque inverted heroism in some and absolute control freakery in others. Sleep deprivation was a sort of sado-masochistic bloodsport.

Some people would claim, to ‘have slept like a baby’, which begged the question.” So did you waken up, bawling and incontinent?”

To paraphrase an old joke about voting patterns in Northern Ireland, I tended to waken early and often –   So what’s changed?

It’s been a long slow process in many respects – better sleep was an unexpected but welcome side-effect of other major changes in my life. A few years ago, I accepted redundancy. That came at the end of  another major upheaval – the end of a marriage.

The thing is, major life events are often predisposing factors for stress and depression – the consequence of which, might result in further disruption to sleep. What I noticed instead, was that better rest and better sleep just happened.  At first, I’d sleep a few extra hours in the afternoon – I’d feel ‘floored’ and that I had no choice but to do so. I feared that sleeping in the afternoon would compromise sleep at night, but in the round, it didn’t. The more sleep I got, the more I needed. When I could give in to sleep, at whatever hours of the day, it usually resulted in better energy levels for getting things done, AND, I slept better at night. The end of the marriage and the end of the job, far from exacerbating the problem, was the starting point of recovery on a grand scale – even though that process has been both, slow and profound.

The job itself was not a bad job, and indeed the marriage was not a ‘bad’ situation either, but they fed each other and fed off each other- and the impact on me was increasingly corrosive – they augmented each other in some grotesque pincer movement.  I wasn’t fit for it any more. Over time, the gap between what I wanted and needed for myself, and the demands of working life and the marriage, just polarised.  It was ultimately crushing.

I could have continued – bad circumstances can often feel more safe – ‘better the divil you know, than the divil you don’t……‘  but to do so, was taking more and more effort and evoked greater and greater anxiety levels.  Besides, when I looked into what the future might be were I to continue, the picture was a mediocre existence at best.

I know now, I would have had to shut down too much of my own life-force, too much of my humanity, just to continue. It might have looked like I was alive, but I wouldn’t have been. Dying inside is a slow, horrible death – it is a waste of life.

There are attractive hooks, which help to keep us in places we don’t want to be – salary, pension rights, sickness pay, holiday pay, employment rights, sometimes even status – ‘security.’ It’s slavery of a sort – the subtle sort, we opt into, strive for, desire and then get trapped by. (Just a thought)

It would be easy, in a way to conflate, marriage, job and me, and take on all the blame – that I was the common denominator – and just not coping.   Equally, burnout is too throwaway a term for what happened – it makes it sound like a personal failure – a weakness.  It isn’t.  Taking those types of judgement out of it and looking at it differently, what I know now, is not sleeping was symptomatic of a deep malaise. I was accommodating so much that didn’t sit well with me any longer. I rationalised  lack of sleep as ,’that’s just me……’., when I should have dug deeper to understand the underlying causes.

What I know now, is that it was a barometer of my own well being. It rectified as soon as the things which needed addressed, changed. For me, that has been an added bonus. It wasn’t something I anticipated.

Organisations would do well to pay heed to organisational cultures that predispose, precipitate and perpetuate machismo about low levels of sleep and give attention to the explicit and implicit ways this is fostered.

For individuals, I would say, pay attention – it’s not ‘just you’ and on this one, I’m inclined to say, the doc’s have got it right – you do need sleep. If you’re not getting enough – something has got to change. You’re worth it.

Songs of Heart’s Desire – The Lagan Love Trail

 

It’s not every day I stand under the trees at the side of the River Lagan at Minnowburn and get rained on; but I am happy to.  We have had a nostalgic summer; a summer with the type of weather we thought we always had when we were children, and this is some of the first rain after a welcome but unexpected and extended dry spell. The soil, grass and leaf litter underfoot soaks up the wetness and lets go big, grateful earthy smells.

 

Earlier, my dog had bolted into the river and swam away after a little moorhen. She’d rounded the bend and was heading for Belfast when I managed to get her attention and persuade her to give up being so anti-social, with her huffing and puffing after the bird, and come out. She is getting some sense in her old age but old habits die hard and the compulsion to spring some wild fowl is just in her. The ranger told me the Moorhen was not alarmed; in fact it had just flew up a little and popped back into the water behind the dog, flummoxing her in the process.

 

The sounds of flute music and the tune of ‘The Dark Island’ are amplified by the river and filter through the trees. The up side of the dog’s escapade is that I get to experience that at some distance from its source.

 

At the invitation of the protagonist and artist Liam de Frinse, myself, traditional flute player Gerry McKee, and photographer Nick Smith, have come to experience and participate in de Frinse’s ‘Lagan Love Trail.’

 

The Love Trail is an eco art project; a seven-mile love poem to the Lagan, and it stretches from Minnowburn to Lisburn. Liam tells us, ‘Everybody owns it, and nobody owns it. This is anti-bourgeois – no one can buy this and in the end it will all go back into the earth where it came from.’ De Frinse’s point of departure has been the song, My Lagan Love, a traditional song by Seosamh MacCathmhaoil (Joseph Campbell)

 

Where Lagan stream sings lullaby

There blows a lily fair

The twilight gleam is in her eye

The night is on her hair

And like a love-sick lennan-shee

She has my heart in thrall

Nor life I owe nor liberty

For love is lord of all.

 

 

Liam gets a buzz from the people who come to the outdoor Arts Lab. The project, which runs from May to November, is intended to be a prototype. ‘For what?’ I ask. ‘For whatever it emerges to be in the end,’ he tells me. I get that. He is sticking to his concept – that the project itself, is not only an open air arts lab, but it is also interactive, actively inviting engagement with the people who walk along the Lagan Towpath and those who want to get involved and it will, in the end, be the product of what happens. It is, as he says,  ‘a happening.’

 

Gerry is playing his music – the sound plumps out the intrinsic acoustic of the birdsong. Nick is collecting images. We make God’s Eyes and talk of Mexico and the protective talismans Mexican men make when a child is born. We talk about the significance of the colours that go into them and the symbolism of the circle of life. We sit at the ‘Love Nest’; it is woven from dogwood branches. Now that it has been there sometime, ivy, nettles and buttercups have grown into it. Elsewhere in this coppice, there are hearts hidden in the trees, a woven chamber of branches – a place where we can enter in and look out at the world as if we too are birds. Installations are suspended from the trees.  There are all manner of subtle and unexpected things. It is at its best when it is experienced.

 

We talk about creating a guerilla performance under Shaw’s Bridge sometime soon – to read poetry, play tunes and see what emerges. No one who passes is without curiosity. People stop to enquire what is going on, all the time. Some young people want to join in, ‘Are you guys making art? That’s cool.’ They are on their way to look for the Kingfisher, but promise to come back another time. One is a chef, one is a student of psychology, one is a photographer. They want to get involved.

 

It hasn’t all been easy. A large-scale sculpture, the Lady of the Lagan, was abducted………….. Maybe she eloped. I hope for better things for her. Her sister is being conceived – her bigger, stronger sister – a Goddess for the Lagan.

 

We talk about recipes for making ink from Gall – a product of some alchemy with oak apples – themselves the alchemy of a bug and a young oak. We talk about parchment and ancient manuscripts, boredom in monks, and marginalia. We talk about De Danaan and how the ancient Irish had the language of trees and each one had a story and a place in the every day stories – the narratives of the natural world and our relationship with it. We talk of industry, of barges, and the Lagan as canal. We talk of love messages written in moss, and concrete poetry.

 

 

 

And often when the beetle’s horn

Hath lulled the eve to sleep

I steal unto her shieling lorn

And thru the dooring peep.

There on the cricket’s singing stone,

She spares the bogwood fire,

And hums in sad sweet undertone

The songs of heart’s desire

 

Part of what Liam aims to facilitate is writing from the people who use the Towpath. He is encouraging people to write a seven-line poem that becomes part of the poetry tree. Anyone can take part, and to do so must submit their poems and a photograph of themselves out on the trail. They will get a certificate and a copy of the final composite poem. So write down your poem and become part of the mysterious work of art that is the Lagan Love Trail – the Lagan as muse.

 

 Keep up with all that is going on through the Facebook page:

 

Email submissions to: Laganlovetrail@gmail.com

 

One of the better versions of  My Lagan Love

From the new collection, We Are Bone

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St. Sulpice

At St Sulpice, I repeat my ritual. My last ten Euro so I can light candles and sit

a while. I remember the story Dine told me, of how Lawrence cried a big damp stamp

onto the stone, in that place – the grotto where Mary is holding

her dead son in her arms. On one side of her, the angel looks to heaven,

on the other, to the earth. How, here, when he was a little boy, his mother

brought him for his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, and how, later,

in his atheism, it was the one place he could grieve for her.

I have come to ask for miracles,

and so, I sit to remember. A grandmother appears. She brings three small

children; she is teaching them to pray. The black woman beside me weeps and

weeps and I am sorry I have no hanky to offer her and she rejects

my hand, but offers me matches.

I light candles, lighting one off the other as if the light of one person spreads

that way and it feels right, until one burns so bright so and so fast the container

for the votive goes in flames – so bright, so fast, so wild and full, it burns out

far too soon and I am suddenly inconsolable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Sulpice,_Paris

http://susanhughesartist.wordpress.com/using-poetry/response-to-poem-by-maria-mcmanus-2011/

Cello’s, Foals and Alchemy

Household is over for another year. For the weekend, the Ormeau Road became the Bohemian hub of Belfast. In over 40 venues of domestic urban space, artists hosted exhibitions, film screenings, funky hot tub parties, cool cocktails, music sessions, dance, architectural walks, stories, poems, soundscapes, letter writing, sculpture, graffiti, homage to cycling, painting, foraging, documentaries, home movies, cake and cartoons, literature and peace meals. In the afternoon, I joined Jason O’ Rourke on his Vernacularisms walking tour. Tom Clarke had translated the stories into Irish. The Lord Mayor, Mairtin O’ Muilleoir turned up for a while, and joined in, as any member of the public might have – get you Lord Mayor – good stuff.

In my house we hosted readings of The Cello Suites and Aill na Searrach/The Leap of the Foals,  with music from Tom Hughes the cellist, Jason O’Rourke on concertina and Susan Hughes with her fiddle. I read poetry and we exhibited Susan’s paintings which she’d done in response to writing by Jason and I. It was intimate and unexpected. We didn’t know who would show up or how it would work and still, we knew it would work – that the people would come and that something would take on an alchemy of its own in the middle of it all.

Those who came as audience members included four generations of the one family, a dancer of the Appalachian style, another poet,  a singer and a screenwriter/ film-maker.

We made time for chat, to share wine, to talk about what we’d seen elsewhere. It was rich and at the same time it was ordinary. Something is happening here, that is healthy and wonderful and effortless. The people played and let themselves shine.  Shine on Belfast; shine on.

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The case for flourishing now

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Today it is still warm in Belfast. I am sitting at my desk looking out onto the street below. People come and go constantly from the Asian supermarket opposite. Here is a vivid, culturally diverse, gritty and exciting quarter of the city.

I love it that one of the up-sides of more peaceable times here is that we are more culturally diverse, that there are more immigrants. It is a richer, healthier place for that, though I know too it isn’t necessarily easy for people to be here. It’s also a racist place; one full of contradictions; welcoming and hostile, relaxed and uneasy, progressive and deeply entrenched.

In the past, during the Troubles, and I know it is a generalisation, so spare me the corrections and bear with me while I explain what I mean – when people came here, who were from other cultures, for example from some of the countries of Asia and Africa, they were, most often, professionals – academics and medics for example.

This isn’t the case now. The majority of those who come here are working class people seeking employment, economic migrants, those seeking asylum. It means we have to ‘budge over in the bed’ and make room; adjust to learning new things; shift. In the round we are getting on with it, but I can’t help thinking……. let’s just say, we have some way to go. My own belief is that here is better for the diversity new people bring and for the challenges that come with it.

I liked Manhattan for that – another place full of contradictions. A place where people live cheek by jowl with their differences, difficult and all as that can be, whether what causes people to run up against each other is gender, politics, economics, race, sexuality, faith and religion.

Some things are unexpected. When I visited some years ago, I was struck by the fact that however far away I was, here, my own context had travelled with me. The pre-occupations I had at home were with me. The things that bothered me here, showed up and bothered me there too, though somehow, distance also gave a new perspective, and a chance to notice what was the same and what was different, and how the themes of our lives thread together, simply because we are human. I like to think about such things even when I haven’t gotten as far as a thorough analysis; even when all I can do, is continue to notice, to absorb what it is I see and experience – even if fully understanding remains an elusive thing.

There are things to be curious about and a value in being unimpressed too much by grandeur. Grit is interesting – the ways in which we run up against what is difficult and what we do when we get there.

The following is a poem I wrote while in Manhattan some years ago – from the privileged position of tourist and interloper. Unexpectedly, things came full circle for me and I inadvertently stumbled upon old painful memories of home, through old film in the archives of the Museum of Radio and Television. It is a small world. Suddenly I was remembering the death of a schoolboy peer, Paul Maxwell,  in the bombing in which Lord Louis Mountbatten died when his boat was bombed off the west coast of Ireland. Today the sunny day reminds me of the weather that day. I look out my window and the diversity I see around me reminds me of Manhattan.  Our news is full of Parades Commission rulings and ‘the marching season’. Overall, the atmosphere around doesnt feel too bad, and here, a place which was once an old flashpoint of it’s own, in the Lower Ormeau Road – things feel not too bad. In the round, things are so much better more of the time. Change is hard. It’s not always easy and it’s not always good, but it happens anyway, sooner or later. For now, we are on the better side of that. Oh, and here’s that poem…………..

Stepping out of Hotel Thirty Thirty.

for publication in ‘We are Bone’ Lagan Press 2013.

In the hotel

I check the phone book for emigres

and lie there flick-flicking the television from The Simpsons to evangelists

and back again.

wed rink hot apple cider for one dollar a cup

and pass the time in the street market;

organic Vermont cheese, handmade candles,

soap, bread from Connecticut, incense, Camolile tea

and lavender pot-pourri –

anti-abortion campaigners’ placard;

a solitary woman in red shorts

roller-skates upstream

into traffic at ten below zero.

You can get anything you want in this city; any time, night or day. Anything

you want.

Boston Clam Chowder, Lobster Bisque,

Chicken Noodle Soup, boardies, a Kink’s T-shirt,

a Jet’s hoodie, whisky, Thai,

Stiff Little Fingers.

Dog owners stoop

to scoop the poop

and pop pooches

into pouches,

but I’m sure dogs

would rather walk anyway.

The Homeless

sleep on vents from the subway all night and ride any train all day.

A gallery on Madison exhibits them in a window display of phot-portraits –

the subjects hold frames, salvaged from skips, to their faces.

Snaps od someone asleep on a sofa with a Labrador scatter down 5th Avenue,

past a cement mixer painted in pastel polka dots.

I drop a note into the empty carton

below a baseball hat tilted at hand height to me;

he is a child who lifts his face.

In the Museum of Radio and Television I punch in ‘CASTRO’ –

the same episode of 60 Minutes from 1979

turns up Crossmaglen,

Narrow Water Castle

Mullaghmore

the Pope

Paisley

and the British Army on red-brick streets in Belfast

with stoops in the manner of Brownstones;

all the things I had forgotten;

my father

stopping the car in disbelief

on the Queen Elizabeth Road

on a blistering hot August day.

Checkpoints.

Check point.

Dylan Thomas ghosts himself into ‘lamb-white days’

‘the streets suck the stars out of sight

                                      out of the sky……….’

‘Do not go gentle…….’ He belonged to his youth.*

A Veronese hangs in the Frick, outside the Enamel Room

‘The Choice of Hercules’,

[HO]NOR ET VIRTUS

[P]OST MORTE FLORET

Honour and virtue flourish after death.

Flourish after death. Flourish after death, but I am screaming, No. No. Now.

A bag lady washes in the ladies’ room of Central Park Zoo

and she cleans the bathroom every day to give something back to the city.

The street choir sings, ‘What a friend we have in Jesus,’ and the frame cuts to the man who drinks from the bottle of ketchup he found in the bin. He says,

I am Jesus. I am Jesus.

and I believe him.

*  denotes a  quote from poet Derek Mahon, speaking of Dylan Thomas.

Something for Sunday morning……..

A sequence of poems, I wrote while in Asturias in September 2012. 

Something for Sunday morning………………..

 

 

If you took a chance

 And let those plates stop spinning,

Stuck your hands in your pockets

Or your fingers in your ears

And stepped back –

What would happen then?

 

After all that clatter

And when the shreds –

All the broken pieces

Were shovelled up

Wrapped away carefully

And left somewhere for landfill

What then?

 

All that falling, can only happen once,

And then it’s over. Done with.

 

As an alternative,

You could gather in those plates

Stack them neatly, one on top of the other

File under ‘something for someone else

Another time’, and let them sit there.

 

Or you could just watch the wobbly poles

Come to their inevitable standstill and decide

Whether to break them, so that puts

A stop to this, forever.

 

One way or another – you could choose

Silence, choose stillness, stop playing.

 

You choose.

 

 

 

 

II

 

When Nuria tells me

The Robin died

Because it flew into the glass

I know it is true.

 

It thought

That what it saw

Was endless sky –

That this reflection of sky

And the Bay of Biscay was reality.

 

Its neck has broken

And it lies supine on the steps.

I dare say

Death was instant –

I hope so, and that it didn’t suffer.

 

 

III

 

I know this one

And will share with you

Two stories of my own –

Near-misses, if you like.

 

 

IV

 

The first was a dream

Of the Hummingbird

In all its shimmering brilliance, battering

On the window of my smallest most under-used room.

Outside, I’d made a garden, full of colours,

Into it, I planted tame versions of my dreams

Underneath the wild flowers

That greeted everyone who beat their path

To my front door,

 

But it was the illusion of the garden

Brought the Hummingbird

To beat itself to death upon the glass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

V

 

The second is the story of an interview.

I faced a four-strong panel. They were back-lit

With the afternoon sun

And the scene outside was rich and wonderful –

A river tumbled down a small green glen – all ferns and damp

And luscious. I could hear the sounds of water

Breakthrough the stultifying must inside.

The vigour of the river had, at one time,

Channelled a mill – the force of it ground millstones.

 

I remember I wore funereal black –

Considered smart and fitting

For such occasions; an indication

I was serious, reverential,

Intentional about the task –

It was a tailored form of knee-

Bending, a genuflection to authority, to formality –

A message that I would

Concede, submit, serve,

Toe-the-line, fit in.

 

Then, just as I gathered

My first breath, to lift

The register of my voice,

A summer Swallow flew

Full tilt into the image

Of that garden paradise

And was lost,

After it slammed hard against the glass

And fell into Montbretia.

 

 

VI

 

At The Gower when we walked

We looked skywards. You could

Tell the difference between Swifts

And Swallows, House-martins and Sand-martins.

 

They’re all beautiful to me.

I find that I am mesmerized and gaze

Always into the blue of where they are –

And it’s enough.

 

 

 

 

VII

 

This past year or so,

I’ve tracked the Swallows too,

From Ireland, to Wales,

To Spain and Portugal, to Hungary,

And all the way to Cape Town

And back again.

 

 

VIII

 

Was it you I told the stories of the Hummingbirds to?

I’ve talked about it recently again, I know.

 

I heard Attenborough

Talk about them on the radio – of how,

Amidst the chaos of this world, and the catastrophic,

Devastation of our earth,

There is one small hopeful story, and it is this –

 

How people have laid a corridor of sweetness

All the way from Costa Rica to the North of North America

And how in this symbiosis

The Hummingbirds flourish against all odds–

How they reward the wilderness

Of our grey lives,

Gem-like and shimmering

Captivating the available light

And give it back to us

As they migrate

North – South – North –South –

North………….

 

 

 They are delicate and tiny in the dying of this light.

 

 

 

IX

 

And then, there is another story–

In the poem of Sah-Sin. Tess Gallagher tells us,

It is the Native American name for Hummingbird

And she tells how, when she found one,

In torpor, in the cold – she lifted it

And slipped it in under her breast

Next to her heart, to warm it,

In the hope it would revive again.

 

 

X

 

Finally, here’s my last message

to you, for now.

 

I found a montage

Of Hummingbirds with the ‘mirror in the mirror’,

 

 

And I’ll play that for you sometime, but –

 

 

Between here and there

Between now and then

 

 

 

Don’t fear anything.

 

 

 

XI

 

 

And, if you decide

To stop catching those spinning falling plates

 

And, if you need something for your hands to hold –

Here’s mine.

 

You might.

 

 And if you take that chance,

 Just think –

 

Then maybe, just maybe,

We could dance instead.