Rewiring my mind

Here I am at Phase 2.

That’s great, isn’t it?  All the synchronicities and wonders combined to make my dream possible; the cottage will be mine as soon as the money – or at least the electronic messaging system that passes these days for money – has found its way into the vendor’s bank account.

Wonderful.

So what is Phase 2?  It’s where I select builders, scaffolders, plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, fencers, decorators and so forth… and trust them to rebuild, repair and restore the sad, neglected shell and make it fit for habitation.

Just writing those words makes me quail.

It’s not that I begrudge the money.  I don’t.  Money is energy.  It’s no use to me while it sits in the bank, but when I’m using it to pay craftsmen and they are improving my cottage, we all gain something from that energy exchange.

No, my energy is depleted by the old wiring in my mind; the wiring that tells me of all the things that can go wrong – delays from contractors not turning up on time, shoddy workmanship, nasty and costly surprises lurking beneath roof tiles and plaster.

Well-meaning friends and relatives regale me with stories of botched jobs, rotten timber, un-met deadlines and the like, and at 2 or 3 in the morning those demons hold sway.

Like everyone else, I have to fight hard to defeat the ‘glass half empty’ mindset.  Most of the time I’m gloriously happy in what some would call my fool’s paradise – expecting and creating a life full of wonder and success.  It’s just that when a new and hitherto untested challenge appears, my mind does its best to revert to the old wiring.  It feels safe there in its reptilian ‘realism’.

It takes effort and a huge leap of faith to once again embark on a massive mental rewire.

First I give my mind a big hug.  I tell it how well it’s done to get me to this place.  I praise it for being brave enough to take on all my crazy new ideas and beliefs thus far.  I re-mind it that it has helped me – against ridiculous odds – to become the owner of a grade ll listed cottage, dating from the 1600s.

Next I carefully and lovingly remove all the rusty, crumbly, outdated wiring – the ‘just think what could go wrong’ ideas.  Some are buried deep in my DNA, so it’s quite a job.

Finally I replace them with a new wiring system.  The energy this system runs on is free and limitless.  It links me into a cosmic hub.  It allows me to tap into the potential of pure creation at will.

Free Energy (Photo credit: AlicePopkorn)

A year or two back I wrote a book that contained all the theory of this new way of being.  But theory alone is never enough, so now I’m creating a physical, tangible worked example of it – walking my talk, if you like.  Several people have told me they find my cottage story inspirational.

For that reason, I’ll finish this post with the words I used to finish the book:

You are a perfect holographic part of the creator.  You are conscious energy; so is everything and everyone around you.  You are creating in every millisecond of your existence.  Given that, you might as well create something astounding.  Make your life a masterpiece.  The whole of Creation will be the richer for it. 

 

Available in paperback and Kindle editions

LIFE: A PLAYER’S GUIDE by Jan Stone is published by FeedARead and available to order from bookshops or via Amazon.  Do give it a read if you’d like some guidance on creating your own miracles.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

On?  Of?

I was sure I remembered Prospero saying, “such stuff as dreams are made ON” in The Tempest.  Apparently it was Humphrey Bogart who decide to use the line in  The Maltese Falcon in 1941 but changed it slightly to ‘The stuff that dreams are made of.’  Hence the confusion…

So, full Shakespearean quote:

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

That, it seems to me, is The Bard’s way of saying that the lifetime we are currently engaged in is a brief dream (sur)rounded by ‘the big sleep’ of our wider existence.   (Interesting that the Bogart connections keep sneaking in here.  I wonder what that’s about…).

I particularly like the way Shakespeare sees us as ‘stuff’ – some kind of fabric or matrix – on which dreams are created.  The play is used as an analogy for life so many times in his work and in that quote, Prospero is talking about a play within a play.  Layers and layers and layers…

Still, I digress.

What I wanted to muse about today was dreaming.

When my children and grandson were newborn, I’d watch them dreaming and wonder what form dreams could take for tiny people with no verbal language.  Like dog and cat dreams, I suppose, they’d be filled with sensations, memories, emotions that had no need to be confined by words.  Were they linking to the ‘surrounding sleep’ – the awareness of who they really were?  Were they being given a brief respite from the physical world to return to the light of pure spirit?  In fact, is that what dreaming is about for all of us?

My grandson is now, in his own words, “two anna narf” – a magical age.  He’s starting to understand the difference between ‘dreams’ and ‘reality’ but the two are still gloriously blurred.

“I see biscuit people!” he announced joyfully to his mother as she went in to his bedroom one morning recently.  “They round!  And they real – not a dream!  They talk to me.”

The biscuit people seem to appear fairly often in his dream state.  He hasn’t been able to relate the conversations he has with them, but told me on Saturday that the biscuit people had been sad the night before.

As each of us gropes our way towards remembering and describing dreams, we are forced into using familiar symbols to squeeze such multi-layered experiences into words.  Our physical selves cling to familiar ideas with which to clothe these other realities we have visited.  I’d need to be a wordsmith of Shakespearean skills to even attempt to verbalise many of my dreams.  My own language falls sadly short.

Yet my grandson, it seems, has found another way of using dreams.  Having told his mother he was sad that Grandma had gone after I left his home on Monday, he later brightened up and told her he would try to have a dream about me.

What a wonderful idea.

After all, if we are such stuff as dreams are made on, we are perfectly capable of creating – dreaming up – any reality we choose.

Oh, and a very happy 450th birthday to Will Shakespeare 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lime Curtains

Could there be anything more trite and mundane to write about on what is essentially supposed to be a metaphysical blog than living room curtains?

Probably not.  And yet, read on…

As those of you who have been following the unfolding miracle that is Lime Cottage will know, I’ve been on the most extraordinary journey into conscious creation since the start of this year.

Through an amazing series of synchronicities I’ve reached a point where I’m now signing the contract to own a neglected 17th century cottage with an impossibly pretty garden in arguably the most mystical town in England.  I still have to pinch myself in the mornings to believe it’s really happening.

If you’ve yet to be convinced of the magic involved, take a look at the latest episode of the story:

It started when a friend from California was visiting Glastonbury for the weekend.  She’d heard about the cottage and was desperate to take a look.  The trouble was, until all the legal stuff is tied up, I don’t have access to the key.

Nothing daunted, I went to see the estate agent and asked if it would be possible to take my friend to help me measure up for curtains.  It was the closest I could come to a legitimate reason for being allowed back inside the house.

Luckily I get along very well with the people in the estate agents’ office and one of them kindly offered to come and open up for us, so that we could do the measuring.

Having put the good lady to all that trouble, the least we could do was to take the measurements, which we duly did as my friend wandered about commenting on the potential.  I measured.  My friend made neat notes for me in my little brown notebook – the one I was going to take with me to the weekend workshop on Spiritual Practice we were due to attend.

Cut to a coffee break at said workshop the following day, when we were chatting to one of the other participants and telling her about our curtain measuring escapade.

“But do you really need new curtains?” this lady asked pointedly.

“Oh yes,” I said, failing to see the significance of her question.  “I genuinely do.  I’ve nothing that will fit those windows.”

Then I sat in total amazement as she proceeded to explain that her partner had worked for two very well known high-end upholstery manufacturers.  Both companies had allowed staff to buy old stock at heavily discounted prices, so that she now had a loft full of high quality curtains of all shapes, colours and sizes.

“Let me know your colour schemes and how many you need,” she smiled.  “I’d be more than happy to sort you some out.  They’ll be free, of course.  They’re just sitting up there.  Do you happen to have a note of the sizes with you?”

Unable to believe my luck, I tore the page from my brown notebook and handed it to her.

“Brilliant,” she said, tucking it into her bag.  “I’ll sort you some out and bring them with me when I’m back here in the summer.”

So superficially, yes, I’m lucky to be getting some curtains from this generous and thoughtful person.  But as she zipped her bag shut, she grinned and said, “Well that was meant to be, wasn’t it?”
I nodded and explained that the LIME in Lime Cottage stands for ‘Life Is Miracles Expected’.

Maybe one day I’ll get used to the extraordinary little miracles it gives me…

I do hope not.  I’m so loving the magic!

Acronym seeking the right words…

I bet someone, somewhere has identified acronym-blindness as a human dysfunction and written an academic paper on it.

For many years I suffered from the condition.

I think being dragged kicking and screaming into senior management was responsible for the onset.  SMT (acronym for Senior Management Team) meetings at our school went something like this:

One of them:                     We need to get the WTF completed by the 25th.
Me:                                        Someone remind me – WTF??
One of them (wearily): Weekly Target Forecasts
Me:                                        Oh, right… Of course.
Another of them:            So are all the LMAO forms up to date now?
Me:                                       Er, LMAO?
All of them:                      LITERACY MARKING ASSESSMENT ONLINE…

And so it went on.  LYAO?

However I’ve been in recovery for five and a half years now.  Even the home-educated kids’ facility I co-run has an acronym – one I rather like – cleverly thought up by my ex: Glastonbury Learning OtherWise = GLOW.  The initials came first and he found the words to fit.  (GLOW came from the writings of Plutarch, many centuries ago, who said that the mind was a candle to be lit, not a vessel to be filled.  It fits our educational ethos rather better than that of the state system, I feel.)

Now I feel a new acronym coming on.  It all started when I was chatting to some friends about the cottage I’m buying.

“You must give it a name,” one insisted.

‘Crumbly Cottage’ was the first that came to mind, given the sad state it’s in at the moment.  I regaled them with the long list of ‘urgent and necessary repairs’ the surveyor had given me:

• rake out and re-point chimney with lime mortar
• remove peeling wallpaper and repair lime plaster, redecorating with limewash
• remove masonry paint from stone mullion windows and repair with lime mortar…

“Maybe you should call it Lime Cottage,” another friend remarked with a grin.

I looked at her with interest.  That very morning I’d been admiring and planning to buy a beautiful lime-green sofa as a welcome-to-your-new-custodian present for the cottage…

Was this a synchronicity starting to build?

I gave the name some thought, and decided LIME was almost certainly an acronym.  I still wasn’t completely sure what it stood for, though.

The whole cottage experience has been a masterclass, delivered to me by the Universe, in creating, manifesting, or as Craig Kimbrough so eloquently put it in a recent post on his blog, ‘lightly deciding’.

So perhaps LIME stood for Lightly Into Manifesting Everything, or Letting In My Energy or even Living In Manifested Excitement…

None of those felt completely right.

And then, while wandering around a market in a nearby Somerset town a few days ago, I spotted a huge wall sign poking out of a bargain sale bin.  As you can see, it now has pride of place over my bookcase.

Now I knew Lime Cottage’s true message for me:

Life Is Miracles Expected

 

 

 

 

So who is or was Leibster?

Well how very kind.  Roma tells me she’s nominated my blog for a Leibster Award.  No idea who Leibster is or was, but I’m truly honoured.

Roma and I met on WordPress because we’re both enchanted with the idea of owning an old cottage.  She’s a lot further along on that than I am – she already owns hers and is renovating it wonderfully, while I’m still waiting for the cogs to turn and the deal to be finalised. (“By Easter,” the solicitor now says.  Hope he means the one this year…)

Having just read Roma’s ‘About’ page, I find there is another synchronicity.  She is one of those amazing people who care professionally for dementia patients.  For that she has my deepest respect and thanks.  My Mum passed over a year ago this week and her carers were the most wonderful people, helping her to retain her dignity right to the end and easing her final days.

So apparently it now falls to me to answer 11 questions set by Roma.  I’ll do my best.

1. Where would I rather live, town or country?

I grew up in the country – deep in the country.  In a good summer it was blissful.  In dull, wet, murky springs, summers and autumns it was muddy, damp and brown.  In fact brown is my most enduring memory of those years.  As I don’t drive and rural public transport in England is patchy to say the least, I’d have to say town, but a small town, within walking distance of countryside and especially hills.  In fact, just the sort of place I live in now.

2. Do I prefer Christmas or Easter?

Um, I can’t say I particularly like either.  Apologies for the Bah Humbug response, but I do my best to celebrate every day rather than saving it up for a couple of special occasions a year.

3. Where was my last day trip to?

Last weekend I went to the city of Bath to meet my youngest son and his partner for a day ambling around the lovely old Georgian buildings, rummaging through a flea market and being bought a delicious Mother’s Day lunch at a pub called The Salamander.  A delightful day.

4. Tea or coffee?

That’s easy.  Never liked coffee, although I love the smell.  I drink green or Earl Grey and vanilla tea, weak and black for preference.

5. My favourite fruit?

A ripe Cox’s Orange Pippin is hard to beat, but then there are raspberries… and apricots… and…

6. My favourite musician?

Truly impossible to say.  Anyone who rifled through the Top Rated playlist on my iPod would probably recommend me for psychiatric assessment.  I remember the look of terrified shock on the face of a young lad who passed close enough to me while getting off a bus to hear  Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell leaking from my headphones.  Obviously not what he expected this white haired lady to be listening to!  My tastes range from Amy Winehouse to Aerosmith;  The Doors to Damh the Bard and all sorts of others on the way.

7. Am I a cat or dog person?

No.  I prefer animals living in nature to the domesticated variety.

8. Am I glued to my mobile phone?

Absolutely not.  I use it for texting 3 or 4 times a week and hate being called on it.

9. What’s next on my to do list?

Buy the cottage, get the listed building consent application lodged and approved, have the building work done and – finally – move in.

10. How did I come up with the name of my blog?

It’s called janonlife because my name’s Jan and I tend to ramble on about Life in a quirky, metaphysical kind of way.  Also (quick plug) it ties in with my book LIFE: A PLAYER’S GUIDE which is also all about life, the universe and everything.

11. What do I aim to learn next?

What L I M E stands for.  See my next post for details 🙂

Thanks for the questions, Roma, and for prompting me to share some of my own favourite blogs:

My next task, you see, is to nominate 5 new Leibster Award recipients and set them my own eleven questions.  I think, as they are a very wise and eclectic mix, I will instead ask each of them to share with readers 11 of the most interesting or inspiring discoveries they have made on their journeys through Life.  If this award allows any readers to stumble upon their wonderful blogs, then it has done its work very well.

My nominations are:

thenewsageblog, a source of gentle yet deep inspiration

saara, an incredible and insightful poet

Awareness It Self, beautiful daily reflections

Goddess in the belly, a lady who exudes wisdom and care

and last but by no means least, the awesome and intuitive Craig Kimbrough.

Should any or all of them choose to accept the nomination, I look forward to reading their revelations.