Category: Mental Health
-
Storm at Sea
So the SongWave Choir have finished their weekend series of concerts, Singing up a Storm, and we exhausted but energised singers are recuperating. After presenting a huge accumulation of metaphors, relating to sea and sand, water and nurture, hearth and home and shelter from the storm, we’ve sung ourselves hoarse. I believe the concerts, which…
-
Compartmentalisation: co-existence of deep sorrow and cheerful joy
I’m holding a few emotions, thought processes, musings and bewilderments, in separate compartments of my mind, just at the moment. On the one hand, deep sorrow, but in another compartment joy bubbles up. Sometimes the compartments feel like they’re mirroring each other, only upside down and backwards. Frank laziness in one cupboard while persistent creativity…
-
Sometimes, only work will do . . .
The garden is beginning to burst forth with blossom on every bush. The sun is shining, and the days are long. Perhaps I should be taking pleasure in this delightful ambience, but the truth is that just now I only feel like working. There have been only a few periods in my life when work…
-
A walk in the bluebell woods is like a dip in a tranquil sea
It’s been a long time since we took ourselves out for a walk in the woods just two doors down from us. Blame health issues and renovation challenges, or just inertia, but we finally shook off these vicissitudes and ambled forth. Just in time to catch the dwindling bluebell display, to hear the birdsong deep…
-
The weekly coffee morning . . . for men
Clearly, one needs to be of a certain age to be interested in getting together with a bunch of similar-aged gentlemen of a Monday morning to discuss a panoply of topics that might concern one or another of us. Being retired helps too, of course — busy working people would not be able to spare…
-
With tidiness comes a sense that a disciplined work-life balance might be achievable
In bright sunshine, our cat lurks beside the table that we’ve strewn with breadcrumbs for the cheeky robin or two that indulge our offerings if laid out on a surface. The garden nook took a fair bit of tidying, but today our lovely neighbour has brought us over two purple pots of chives that we’ll…
-
Bright sunshiny day . . .
So Monday morning is our regular Men’s Coffee Morning at New Galloway Town Hall, and after finessing yet another file for the cheerful printer, I moseyed along down for a cup of coffee. I’d heard that the big heater in the lesser hall had been repaired (a bust fuse), and so I expected to be warmed…
-
Cleaning out the eyrie
There are two bells in the New Galloway Town Hall tower: the larger one is bonged either by a hammer engaged with the clock mechanism, or by its pendulous clapper when the stout bell-ringing rope is pulled; the smaller one, with a higher tone, which rings only when its own rope is pulled. I know…
-
Sleeping on it . . .
It’s a commonplace, isn’t it, to sleep on a problem, hoping to awaken with a solution. As we went to bed last night, I was wrestling, somewhere in my subconscious, with a poetic problem that I thought I’d resolved. My dreaming mind thought otherwise. A better resolution than I’d even considered woke up with me…
Roads to Joy 