But Where Was Me?

Grandmothers should be wise.  It’s one of those archetypal attributes of the crone, isn’t it?  So when I fall short in the wisdom department, it bothers me.  

A little over a year ago, my grandson and I were chatting about the first house he lived in – a place he dimly remembered, having moved away when he was a toddler.  His younger sister was confused.  She insisted they had never lived in a house with two huge trees in the garden.  When her brother pointed out that this was before she was born, she became almost hysterical.

“But where was ME?” she demanded, her eyes filling with tears and panic.

That was when I fell short in the wise grandmother stakes.  I knew my answer to the question, but I would have struggled – when put on the spot – to find the words to explain it to a tiny child.  Even if I had managed to leap that hurdle, I was anxious about straying into the sphere of beliefs.  I’ve spent a lifetime as a teacher carefully and meticulously respecting a wealth of different creeds and cultures.  I knew my grandchildren were being brought up with a nominally Christian belief system.  Christianity has plenty to say about an afterlife, but is curiously silent on before life.  It talks vaguely about dust and ashes, which, I felt, wouldn’t help much.  Did I have the right to impose my own beliefs on those they were being brought up with? 

So I failed.  I gave the child lots of comforting cuddles, chatted to her about how excited we’d all been when she was born, and generally distracted her without ever answering her very important question.  And it has bothered me ever since.

When I came to write my children’s novel this year, I decided it would give me the opportunity to revisit the events of that day and to provide Ruby Rose, my fictional toddler heroine, with a fearless crone figure who is more than happy to address her question head on and provide a suitable response.

It was one of those parts of the book that quite happily wrote itself, while I obediently pressed the keys.  Interestingly, Misty often took control of me, as well as the situations in the story, when she appeared in the pages!

Misty waited for the girl to settle down and for the pounding of her heart to slow.  “Now,”  she began, finally.  “That was a very sensible question you asked, my dear.  I’m going to answer it for you, but you will need to listen very hard.  Can you do that?”

Ruby nodded miserably and Stellan sat on the grass at Misty’s feet, because it had never occurred to him that there could be an answer to that question.

“Before you were your mama’s little girl and Stellan’s little sister, Ruby, you were living in the Dreaming Place.”

“What’s the Dreaming Place?” Ruby asked, sitting up.

“It’s a place you know very well.  Why, you go there every night, while your body is in bed, having a rest,” Misty replied.

“You mean when we have dreams?” asked Stellan.

“Exactly.  Haven’t you ever thought how odd it is that your body stays in bed, fast asleep, while you are off doing all sorts of other things?” …

“That is strange,” agreed Stellan, who had never really considered it before.

“So,”  continued Misty, in the same calm, gentle voice, “while we have bodies like these,” she tickled Ruby Rose gently on her arm and the child giggled, “we live in them for most of the time and just put them down to rest at bedtime.  Before we are born, though, and after we have died, we spend all our time in the Dreaming Place.  That’s where you were when Stellan was a little boy and Bella the cat lived with him.”

Both children were silent for a moment, while they considered that.

“Weren’t I lonely without my ma and my pa and my brother?” Ruby wanted to know.

“Not at all,”  Misty replied.  “You were having too much fun!  You see in the Dreaming Place, you can be whatever you want and go anywhere you like.  You might have tried being a fairy or a brave explorer or even a dog or a cat.  What do you think you would have been?”

“A fairy who could fly in the air and do wishes!” Ruby announced.

“Well that would be quite splendid, wouldn’t it?”  Misty smiled.  “But after loads and loads of dreaming, you decided that what would be even more fun would be to become a little girl with a body.  You see, in the Dreaming Place there are things we can’t do.  We can’t feel happiness or pain or full up with delicious food or the softness of an animal’s fur when we stroke it.  You decided to find yourself the most perfect family for your new body to live with.”

“How did she find us?” asked Stellan. 

He couldn’t decide whether this was some kind of made-up tale to calm his sister and cheer her up or whether Misty believed all she was saying.

She smiled at him.  It was a serious smile, not the sort of winking smile grown-ups give when you and they both know they are pretending.

“As I said, in the Dreaming Place, you can go anywhere you want just by thinking about it.  Once Ruby Rose had decided she wanted to slip into a body and find a family in this – Waking Place, she travelled all around the world, deciding which would be the very best family for her to live with.  Eventually, she chose the family she wanted and when your new little sister was born, here she was!”

“I was very clever to choose my nice family, weren’t I, Misty?” Ruby smiled.

My grandson is reading The Glassmaker’s Children at the moment and maybe, when she’s a few years older, his sister will do the same and find a belated answer to her question.  

 

The Art of Magic (and the magic of art)

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso

That from the artist who also claimed that it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.  It’s a perspective that interests me.

About thirty years ago I recall a family picnic on the banks of the River Stour on the Essex-Suffolk border.  My 18 month old son (now a professional graphic artist and illustrator) seized his father’s sketchbook and pencil, stared intently at the reeds and bull rushes growing at the water’s edge, then proceeded to draw a series of vertical and near-vertical lines on the paper.  It took him seconds.  His first representational landscape drawing!  The child moved on to other ways of exploring the environment immediately.  It was as if the drawing was some kind of instinctive yet fleeting need to capture the 3D world in just two dimensions.  He didn’t, as his older siblings might have done, compare it to his father’s sketches or seek anyone’s approval or praise.  In fact he was confused by our excitement and delight.

A tiny child will not seek out the ‘right’ colours or consider shapes and ratios.  What they do, though, when you think about it, is pure magic.  They use their crayons to create the significant people and objects around them at that moment in time.  Their art freezes an aspect of the swirl of life and movement and emotion they find themselves in and places it on a flat sheet of paper.   How very different that is from our own self-conscious attempts to draw a representational image.  We are hung up on how realistic it looks, whether our lines are straight or whether the perspective is right.  Most of all, we are worried about how others will judge it.  That, I suspect, is the ‘problem’ Picasso was referring to.

“That’s a lovely picture.  Would you like to tell me about it?” we were taught to say when I was training to be a teacher.  It avoided the problems of, “What a beautiful picture of Mummy!  Oh, I see – it’s a green tractor with lots of mud, is it?  Right.”

Gradually we ‘help’ the child to fit their depictions to the conventions of art in our world.  In medieval times, drawing the mother or self far larger than other people would have been quite acceptable.  The convention was ‘important people are shown larger than less significant people’.  In our modern world the convention is photographic, so a person shown large is closer in physical space to the artist’s viewpoint than those standing further away.

And what of magic?  I would argue that this, too, is something a small child experiences and responds to in a very natural, comfortable way and trying to regain that instinctive connection to the magic inherent in their lives takes many years, once the child has been trained to put it aside.

We allow – even encourage – small children to fill their lives with magic.  We tell them of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and read them stories or show them videos of unicorns and dragons, magicians and heroes with fantastic powers.

At some point, though – perhaps around the same time we start insisting that humans should be drawn with bodies, not just a circular head with legs and arms – we begin to teach them what is ‘real’ and what is ‘pretend’.  What many of us don’t recognise is that this is just as arbitrary and incomplete a world view as the one we are asking them to leave behind.

Magic has a strong similarity to art.  When painting and drawing we encapsulate three dimensions in two.  With magic, we bring multiple dimensions into the three that form what current convention sees as our world.  (Again, I suspect our ancestors would have viewed it quite differently.)

In the children’s story book I’ve just published, I made sure enough magic was embedded within it to at least allow my 8-12 year old audience to keep wondering.  My metaphysician (yes, of course there had to be one!) observes three members of a family who find themselves confronted with a magical ‘coincidence’ as follows:

The lady in the blue dress looked from one to the other of them – the mother, who was slowly shaking her head and muttering, “Extraordinary…”, the boy who was now clutching his cheeks and laughing with amazement and pure delight, and the small child beside her who was still young enough to understand how real magic was and therefore not surprised at all.

I’d love to think that a few children reading The Glassmaker’s Children will recognise the magic my young hero Stellan rediscovers and notice how, by using attention and intention, both he and they can find way of surviving and thriving, despite the setbacks and challenges they encounter.

Small note:  I originally set up this blog (back in 2012) as a vehicle for my metaphysical ramblings, and I’d like it to stay that way.  For that reason, I’m placing most of my posts about The Glassmaker’s Children on my Open the Box blog.  This one, for example, explains the particular challenges my two young characters face as they battle to cope with a narcissistic parent.

Always End With a Story

As a parent and as a teacher, I ended every day with a story.  It felt the right way to finish things off and send my own children off to their dreams or my pupils off to their homes.

As I await the artwork for the cover of my own new story book, I thought I’d share some of my favourite children’s books – the ones that most intrigued and inspired those children I read to.

I grew up reading and adoring the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons tales.  However by the time I’d reached adulthood, having a major character called Titty was a barrier to reading it aloud to kids!  I did try once to read it to a class – attempting to substitute the name with ‘Tammy’, but it didn’t end well.  56 eyes watching intently and 28 mouths sniggering each time I fluffed it or (worse) forgot…  I gave up.

Lewis Carroll was one of my favourites to read aloud, due to the sheer brilliance, audacity and anarchy of his stories and poems, while Philip Pullman’s range and scope always left me and my listeners gasping for more.

I lost count of the times I read Michael Morpurgo’s Kensuke’s Kingdom aloud to classes of 10 and 11 year olds and I still can’t read the final chapter without shedding a few tears.

Some of my favourite children’s books fall into the genre of ‘issues’ stories.  I suppose mine does as well.

On more than one occasion I would hand a copy of Jacqueline Wilson’s The Suitcase Kid to some poor child whose parents had separated and decided it suited them best if their offspring spent a week at a time in each home.  The issues affecting step families were also deftly dealt with by Anne Fine in her wonderfully balanced series of short stories published as Step by Wicked Step.  Both these authors have produced a range of carefully crafted stories to fit many of the challenging issues besetting children and I’ve read many of their tales to those in my care.

Perhaps my favourite – if I had to choose one – though, is not an ‘issues’ book series at all but a set of comedy tales called The Bagthorpe Saga by the brilliant Helen Cresswell.

I adored everything this lady wrote, but was surprised and delighted to discover how the series affected my middle child.

‘Ordinary Jack’ is a thoroughly charming but – as the title suggests – very normal boy who has been born into a family of hilariously dysfunctional, but high-achieving oddballs.  He yearns to have many ‘strings to his bow’, like his siblings and parents.

My son was the only one in our family with dyslexia – a way of being that has served him very well in adulthood, in his profession as a data analyst, but one which caused him huge problems as a schoolboy.  Despite our best efforts, he suffered with a lack of self-esteem, so finding Jack in these stories was, for him, like discovering a soulmate.  He longed for his nightly story session and we worked our way through the entire series.

I suppose if there is one thing I could wish for my book – The Glassmaker’s Children – it is that some child somewhere will discover my Stellan and relate to him, his personality or his situation, so that his or her own life is positively affected.

 

 

The Glassmaker’s Children is available on Amazon at this link for the USA

The Glassmaker’s Children

Yes – apologies.  This blog has been very quiet in the past few months.  There’s a reason for that, which I’m about to share with you.

Life during lockdown was very different, obviously.  One of the most positive and welcome changes during that time was the opportunity to chat via video link with my grandchildren every day.  Their mother works from home, so I agreed to do some home learning with them each weekday morning, to give her some time to herself.

Every ‘lesson’ ended with a story session and we got through a fair few books during that time – Tales of Mystery and Imagination (my favourite picture book ever), The Arabian Nights, The Firework Maker’s Daughter, Stig of the Dump and much more.  The five year old – quite understandably – drifted away unless there were plenty of pictures, but the eight year old sat and soaked in every word, day after day.

When the summer holidays started, lockdown eased and the lessons ceased, I found that my love of children’s literature had been rekindled (unintentional pun there!)

As a parent, teacher and mentor, I’d often been able to find the perfect book to help a child dealing with family or personal issues – low self-esteem, bullying, family splits and so forth.  The book I’d never been able to find was one that explained – in a child-friendly storybook format – why, if we do indeed at some level choose the family we are born into, this child chose the parents or siblings they did.

That’s why I decided to write it.

I hadn’t been prepared for how much it would consume my life – waking and dreaming.  Stellan and Ruby Rose, my main characters, became utterly real to me.  Perhaps, since they’ve now been created, they really live in some other reality.  I’d like to think so.  At any rate, one night, during a particularly vivid dream, Ruby and I headed off on an adventure quite unrelated to the story I was writing.

Often I suddenly ‘knew’ what would happen to them next, without consciously planning it.  I caught myself thinking, “Oh, yes, clever!  That links well to chapter 14,” although the new idea had suddenly appeared unbidden in my mind.  Maybe I was being helped…

I did become rather obsessed.  There was the day the doorbell rang when I was in full creative flow and I found myself answering the door to the courier there in a Welsh accent, since I’d been writing dialogue between characters in a Welsh village at the time!

It’s only available on Kindle so far, but I’m hoping to get it into paperback within the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, if you know any 8-12 year olds who might enjoy a story about sorcery, self-discovery, adventure and the magical chemistry that permeates all of our lives, do send them to hunt it out on Amazon Kindle, where the first few chapters are free to read.

Subtle energies

Every so often, my psychically gifted young friend William sends me another article he has written.  Recently, there has been one about the possible effects of electromagnetic radiation from phones, wi-fi etc. on subtle energies, such as telepathy and psychic skills.  In a second, he was trying to unravel the optimum conditions for successful remote viewing.  At some point, when I have enough, I’ll put his new articles together in Volume 2 of The Words of William.  (Volume 1 is still available in Kindle or paperback here.)

I can only think that the Universe had conspired to give us the answer to both of these lines of enquiry, using something along the lines of the law of attraction.

Last Sunday I was sitting, in the early spring sunshine, in a little courtyard within the Chalice Well Gardens, just along the road from my house.  We’d viewed in the grounds before, but never in this part of the gardens.  Will has never been there.  He was aware of the name of the place I’d be in, but nothing more.  He was, as always, in his home in London.  We’d arranged that at 2pm I would be in position and he would ‘tune in’ and try to pick up details of the place.  Fifteen minutes later, I would take a few photos and head home.  Meanwhile, he would be texting me whatever he had been able to view.

When I returned to the cottage, his words and a drawing were waiting for me.  Once they were received, I sent him the photos and some feedback.  Even by the standards of our most successful viewings, this one was remarkable.

He described features in great detail: A round central concrete structure with patterns carved around the sides, containing plants and probably water.  A green gateway or arch.  A large slab of concrete where he felt I was sitting. Two raised containers or flower pots full of plants.  Many overhanging branches.  The ground was tiled.  His sketch of the site showed all these items in relation to each other.  It was drawn from exactly the spot I’d been sitting in.

My photos showed the round well, surrounded by carved spirals and containing ferns and tiny damp-loving plants.  Water from the red spring trickled gently into it from an underground source.

The green metal archway and gate leading into this part of the garden was clearly visible from where I was sitting.  In this photo, too, the raised beds (his ‘concrete containers of plants’) and stone tiled ground can also be seen, along with the overhanging trees.

Set into the wall right beside my bench there was a large stone slab, drilled with holes for tea lights.  It’s an unusual feature, sticking out into the courtyard like a table.  Will’s ‘concrete slab’ was in exactly the correct position.

So why, I asked, had this worked so well?  He thought it could be because he’s known the name of the location and – even though he hadn’t ever seen the place – that helped him to home in.

Later in the week, though, I had another thought.  Usually we text when we’re ready, keep our phones handy and he texts as soon as he has all the information he can get.  The Chalice Well Garden is a phone-free zone, so we’d pre-arranged the time and there had been no messaging while I was at the site.  I wondered if that might have allowed us to focus better.

William had a further thought.  Perhaps, he said, the signals from our phones interfered with the subtle information passing between us.  Maybe the range of electrical devices in my home, for example, had been responsible for some of the fuzzy, less convincing viewings of objects done indoors over the winter months.

It was an intriguing thought.  I asked Koimul, my spirit guide, for some clarification.

I was told that everything – ourselves included –  has its own electromagnetic energy field.  These are very subtle.  Man-made devices, though, give off a far stronger – coarser – energy.  Koimul asked me to think of the difficulty we have trying to view the night skies with light pollution from street lamps.  The delicate twinkling of far off stars is concealed from us.  Once we are free of artificial light sources, though, the true radiance of the night sky can be seen.  The same is true, apparently, in our viewings.  We are attempting to focus on the subtlest of energies, and a blast of EM radiation from a mobile phone can easily mask almost all the signals.

It’s an intriguing thought.  Perhaps it goes some way to explaining how our ancestors were able to tune in so much better to the subtle energies of Nature.  I wonder if everything we make – not just the electronic devices, but man-made fabrics, buildings or vehicles – is to some extent masking our true ability to link to our planet, and even to one another.

Thinner than Blood 2: Waiting for Proof

That’s what I’m doing – right now.

I’m sitting in my little cottage in sleepy Somerset, waiting for the proof to arrive.

The proof I speak of is a slim, modest paperback proof-copy of William’s words.  It’s travelling from the United States and should – the publishers assure me – be here today.

I’m excited – quite stupidly so.  I know The Words almost by heart now, having formatted and reformatted them so many times.  They are words I collected and saved over nearly twenty years – childhood scribblings and conversations, strange visions and apparent prophecies delivered by a puzzled adolescent boy, emailed articles and comments sent by a young man cut off from most other contact by the anxiety that now surrounds his life.

Formatting

As explained in a previous post, I had the idea of collating many of his words and presenting them to him as a birthday present.  Then I asked if he’d like them turned into an e-book and made available to others.  He wasn’t sure.  He needed to think that through.  Did the most private person you can imagine want other eyes poring over his thoughts and ideas?  After what felt to me like an eternity, he decided.  Yes.

Thus the Kindle edition of The Words of William was born.  To begin with, he was cautious about the whole enterprise.  Within a few days, though, my texts telling him another copy or two had sold received an instant response:

“Where?  Which country?”

He became fascinated by the thought that people were buying and borrowing his little book around the world.  He started to keep a tally.
“So that’s 1 in Spain, 4 in the UK, 6 in the US, 1 in Canada..?” he would text.  “Have I got all those right?”  and eventually, “I’m certainly happy with it and thank you for my birthday present.”

Every kind comment and wish from readers of this blog, the five star review on Amazon’s Spanish site, the messages from friends who had enjoyed it were duly passed on to him, and I could feel his confidence, self-esteem and trust in others growing by the day.

Result!

Now how on Earth was I going to match that success with a Christmas gift?

Then it came to me.  “Would you like your book turned into a paperback for your Christmas present?” I asked.  “Several people have said they’d rather buy it like that than as an e-book.”
The reply was instant: “Yes please.”

Sorted.  I emailed a friend in the States who had recently published a book with Amazon’s Create Space service.  She came back with a host of useful hints and tips.

I can’t pretend it was easy.  The formatting and cover had to be totally redone and there were contentious bits like the ‘About the Author’ page.  William strongly disliked my first attempt at that, but then amazed me by re-drafting much of it himself.

So now, I sit and wait.  Within the next few hours, the proof will arrive – proof that The Words of William are out there in print, and I simply couldn’t be more proud 🙂

 

 

Hopefully, within the next week or so, the paperback edition of The Words of William – Volume One will be available here and on Amazon in the US, UK and Europe.

Accessing the Cloud

I love reading.  Will hates it.  I only recall him ever reading a handful of books in his life, and there are not many books in a handful.

We’d been on one of our train rides together.  He must have been about 14.  He was patiently trailing around a bookshop after me.
“What subject are you looking for?”
“Something about time,” I replied.
He grinned slightly. “Good, that’s relevant.”
“And God.”
“Even more relevant.”

We used to have these rambling discussions as we sat in train carriages, you see, heading off on long journeys to nowhere-in-particular.  He’d been my pupil until a few years before, but I always felt I was lagging behind in our philosophical and metaphysical ponderings.  He knew things I didn’t.  I needed some reading matter which would help me to catch up with him.

The book I selected was called something like ‘Travelling through Four Dimensions’.  He nodded approvingly and glanced with interest at the cover.
“You’re welcome to borrow it when I’ve finished,” I offered, helpfully.
“Nah,” he said, backing away fast.

A month or so later, we were on another journey.  It was a warm, summer’s day and we were wandering through Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, heading for the train station – obviously.
“Remember that book I bought?” I asked.
“The one about dimensions?”
“Yeah. It’s hard going in places but really interesting. It says-”
Head down, a private smile playing around his face, he interrupted me. He started to describe – clearly and in considerable detail – the main points of the book I’d been wading through. It was a masterful summary. He actually made some points clearer than the author had.

I stopped walking and stared at him.  “How do you DO that?  Do you own a copy of the book or something?  Have you read a review of it?  WHAT?”
He looked amused at my reaction, but slightly embarrassed.
“I don’t really know how I do it. I just knew the sort of stuff that would be in a book like that, I suppose.”

Needless to say, he hadn’t read a word of the book, or any similar volume.  He didn’t need to.  His ability to ‘just know’ has been with him for as long as I’ve known him.  There’s a cloud – a place where all knowing, all information is stored – and he has access to it.  It’s as simple and as incomprehensible as that.

Last week it happened again.  I read an article about a ‘new’ theory, called the ‘Many Interacting Worlds’ hypothesis.  I’d never heard of it.  I checked – nor had William.  Yet a year or so ago he wrote an article which covered the same ideas.

I can’t tell whether he feels vindicated or mildly irritated when science or maths catches him up.  He has no qualifications in either, having left school and all education with considerable relief at 16.

I suppose I fear that people who read our recently published Kindle book will assume he cribbed all the ideas in it from books or the Internet.

He didn’t.

His information comes from somewhere non-local, somewhere most of us don’t have access to, some sort of cosmic cloud.  Any bits of information he has gleaned from an ‘earthly’ source – articles about Einstein, for example – are always acknowledged as such.

There’s another aspect to all this, though.  Does his ‘knowing’ mean that the scientists have ‘got it right’ in this instance?  Does his ‘knowing’ hold any more or less weight than that of theoretical physicists, for example, because it comes from this cloud?  Will would argue that it doesn’t.  He doesn’t believe there are wrong or right explanations.  For him and his multiple universes, all things ARE.

A week or two ago, he sent me a carefully constructed theory describing how a crystal had suddenly appeared from nowhere in my cottage.  It was fascinating, but he prefaced his words thus:

I don’t have any evidence to support it nor do I necessarily believe it is the explanation for it. Other theories are just as plausible to me.

Click here to see The Words of William e-book on Amazon.co.uk

Click here to see it on Amazon.com

 

Free E-Book for five days

I’ve mentioned my full length book, LIFE: A PLAYER’S GUIDE, in several posts recently and sales are jogging along nicely.

But for anyone who would just like to dip a toe in the waters of my philosophies, so to speak, Amazon is giving away FREE downloads of my mini Kindle book: LIFE IS A GAME: YOU CREATED IT from Monday 1st to Friday 5th June.

Here’s the blurb:

A very short mini E-book to introduce readers to the ideas in Life: A Player’s Guide by Jan Stone.
It looks at questions about ‘Life’ such as ‘Why am I here?’ ‘What’s the point?’ and ‘Why is my life so rubbish so much of the time?’

I hope the promotion works outside of the UK – always struggle to understand the small print on Amazon deals.  If not, it would cost you $0.99 in US, or equivalent.

The price returns to normal from June 6th onwards, so grab it while you can.

If anyone who reads it would like to post a review on Amazon, that would be very welcome, as it doesn’t have any yet, although there are some lovely ones for the full length book on Amazon UK.

Click THIS LINK FOR THE FREE DOWNLOAD on Amazon.com during the next week.

Click THIS LINK FOR THE FREE DOWNLOAD on Amazon.co.uk during the next week.

Otherwise just enter the title on your local Amazon site and it should appear.

Hope you enjoy it.  🙂