Uncategorized Archives ~ Jude Mills

The Day When Things Can Start

Posted on February 1, 2022February 1, 2022 by Jude Mills

I have been resisting… or waiting… the waiting feels like something sacred. Maybe because it is. It is the first of February. In my body’s calendar, this is the date I have been waiting for. It is when things can start. The crows – who caw noisily from the trees behind me – know, too. They are telling each other, and me, and anyone else who will listen – it is time to shift these winter bones.

Other calendars agree with me (and the crows) It is also the Lunar (Chinese, Tibetan, East Asian) New Year. And in the Celtic Calendar – that guides my own heart – the beginning of Imbolc, Saint Brigid’s Day, and the (sort of) end of winter. Tomorrow is the Christian feast of Candlemas: an ending – of the season of Epiphany; and a beginning – of ‘Ordinary’ time (before the Lenten fast makes it special all over again)

If I was a conspiracy theorist (and I am not) I might imagine it to be some sort of test: who can override their internal body clock enough to ‘succeed’ in the system?

Imbolc sends impulses to my dormant winter cells throughout January, simultaneously poking me to wake up…and urging me to wait. My yearly last-minute tax return – filed just in time for the Jan 31st deadline – shouldn’t be a surprise by now. Nor should it be a source of personal beratement. If I was a conspiracy theorist (and I am not) I might imagine it to be some sort of test: who can override their internal body clock enough to ‘succeed’ in the system?

In the deeper sense of the word, it is a ‘conspiracy’, in that it is something that we all tacitly, collectively, culturally, agree to go along with.

Con Spirare: To breathe together; To agree.

We are compelled to imagine ourselves to be something other than organisms that respond to light and dark and seasonal shifts. Just as do the crows, and the trees that they call from, and the snowdrops just beginning to poke their heads from the soil beneath. When the snowdrops come then we know for sure that Spring is coming too. Sometimes, the snowdrops are ‘early’ and sometimes they are ‘late’. Stately homes and gardens advertise their displays well in advance, knowing that the flowers will surely appear, but not entirely certain that they will do so on the ‘right’ date.

The inner knowledge that there is a time to step back into the world speaks from deep down as ‘not now’.

Waiting is inner, seasonal wisdom. It is sometimes – but not always- calendrical. There is, for the snowdrops, and the crows, a ‘right’ moment. A knowing. For me, waiting – or rather the resistance of it – shows up as procrastination, as exhaustion, as doubt. Sometimes as fear. The inner knowledge that there is a time to step back into the world speaks from deep down as ‘not now’.

These past two winters have allowed me to practice sinking into this ‘not nowness’ rather than struggling to understand, forcing myself to analyse it, or trying to overcome it. What has happened is that the moment of ‘yes, now’ is much more apparent than it ever has been before.

Although you could have been reading this yesterday, or tomorrow. For me, today is when Things Can Start.

With every blessing for Imbolc, for the Lunar New Year, for Saint Brigid’s Day, and (tomorrow) for Candlemas

Jude xxx

The Crow photo is by Mark Timberlake on Unsplash
The snowdrops photo is by Yoksel 🌿 Zok on Unsplash

Things that don’t matter

Posted on November 23, 2021November 23, 2021 by Jude Mills

Words dance in my head, occasionally assembling themselves into momentary coherences, only to scatter when I sit and open the laptop to write. Can I call myself a writer with such little commitment to giving the words time to properly coalesce on a page? As for poetry, not one stanza has made it onto a page since… before lockdown. The poetry is there, in my head. I can almost see it, hiding somewhere up behind my right temple (the place where poetry hides)

It’s not that I don’t write. I regularly submit 3000 words of carefully referenced Theological argument to generous tutors who confirm that, yes, I am really quite good at this. But, there are only so many hours of staring at a screen and moving sentences around and inserting footnotes that one can do. When there are dogs to be walked and dinners to be eaten, and even a job to go to, the time and the energy left are more often given to Netflix and wine and remembering to cut my toenails, than to the business of creativity.

Like many of us, I am exhausted. These past two years have been deeply challenging, in so many ways. For everyone. Last year was probably the hardest working year of my life, and it changed me. It changed everything, in ways that I am only now beginning to recognise and integrate. At some point, I developed a weary, cynical, and radical loss of patience for things that don’t matter.

The things that don’t matter are numerous. Of course, this is utterly and wholeheartedly subjective. What matters is what matters, I suppose. I think what I am saying, is that maybe I got it into my world-worn head and heart that writing half-arsed poetry, and blogs that nobody reads (Or any of the other ways that creativity is expressed) don’t matter. That all of … this… is a distraction from what is really important.

I’m wrong, of course. I want to be wrong.

But I am also right. Because there are things that don’t matter. Facebook… Shopping… Opinions… 🎶‘These are a few of my (least) favourite things’ 🎶

What happened was that my gaining of perspective took on a skewed, hard-edged startle, before a more integrated settling of the dust. It had the shape – but not quite – of disillusionment. I have come to ground in words once again, and in the process, some things – things that I once thought mattered – have gone.

And among the things that have gone – for reasons I do and do not understand – are some people. Two beloved animals. As I have found myself professionally navigating the themes of death, and loss, and grief, my own losses are inevitable, necessary punctuation. It isn’t something any of us get away with.

Yes, some things have gone. Some things have deepened. Some have softened.

I have softened, into a much deeper well of grace and compassion. I am reminded here, of a song I used to play (A LOT) I haven’t played it for some time, but as I write this, it is asking to be played, and quoted here.

To give my life beyond each death
From a deeper well of trust
To know that when there's nothing left
You will always have what you gave to love

From 'Deeper Still' by Beth Nielsen Chapman and David Wilcox

All photos from Pixabay

Into the Wealden Clay

Posted on August 9, 2021August 24, 2021 by Jude Mills

Life provides some deep layers of synchronistic irony. In this case, alongside grief and shock and a deep, deep well of loss.

On Saturday 10th July, I posted some photos of a blood-red stream on the Ashdown Forest, and about the rich seam of iron- ore that runs through the Wealden clay. Amongst the photos on my phone, is a video of our dog Ralph, playing joyfully in the water. His favourite walking spot.

At 6 am on 12th July, we were scooping handfuls of the same, sticky Wealden clay, in the rain, making a hole big enough for Ralph’s little body. Our spades and shovels barely shifted it, and we resorted to moving it with our hands. The poetry of his last walk and his final resting place, and the clay and the blood all running through my mind, as the fat raindrops merged with spasms of tears.

My boy.

Ralph died. I still can’t quite believe it. As I watch the video, he is so… alive. So… there. And he didn’t just die. He was killed. I will spare you the details but a Rottweiler got a hold of him. He was in surgery for seven hours on Sunday. It didn’t work, and we had to decide to let him go. All of that is a blur of waiting, and nausea, and me having to pay the £4000 veterinary bill on a credit card, praying that I had enough credit. In my mind, Richard is holding Ralph’s blanket-wrapped body at this point, but that might’ve come afterwards. The vet was kind.

And then there was the interminable drive home. Me, driving, trying not to be sick, and Richard in the passenger seat, cradling Ralph. Silent. Unbelieving. We lay our boy in his bed, tucking him in with his toy, ‘Mr. Fish’. We slept, fitfully, waking up in that shocked way you do when something Very Bad has happened. At 4 a.m. we gave in to the not sleeping and got up and made tea, stroking Ralph’s cold little head. We decided to bury him as soon as it was light.

Chris came. A dear, dear friend who knew and loved Ralph as much as we did. She held the space of reverence and ritual and holding that we needed. She knew just what to do and what to say. We lit candles and incense and laid flower petals. She sang to him. ‘May The Long Time Sun, shine upon you, Ralphie, All Love surround you.’

A good funeral for a Good Boy.

If you’ve loved and lost a dog you will know the pain of the days and weeks that follow. Everything is a reminder that my best friend is gone. His empty food bowl, his empty bed, dinner time, bedtime, walkies (I haven’t been on any kind of walk since) I haven’t wanted to wash anything that he lay on (Including our own bedsheets) to preserve his smell. His harness and a blood-stained blanket are still in the back of my car. I look at his photos every day, trying to preserve his image, the realness of him.

It’s softer now. The sobbing panic of those first few days has melted into all the stages of grief, sometimes, it seems, all the same time! It’s far from a cycle. Too neat. It’s all over the place. If you’ve grieved, you know this.

And no, he wasn’t ‘just’ a dog. Ralph was a best friend, an ally and a companion. He gave – as dogs do – his complete and unconditional love. He was a healer and a comforter. He was funny and fun, and joyful. He was sensitive and gentle. And we loved him. We don’t have a different or lesser kind of love reserved for ‘just dogs’.

Ralph is gone. We shared the most delightful three years with him (he was only seven) We adopted him from Raystede, which is the most amazing place. A friend sent me a lovely message to say that she had donated money to Raystede in Ralph’s memory. A beautiful gesture, that (naturally) brought on more tears. If you feel moved to, you might do the same… https://www.raystede.org/support-us/donate

I know there will be another dog. But I will never forget, or stop loving, the ‘Best Dog In The World’.

The Magi and the ‘bad’ year

Posted on January 3, 2021January 3, 2021 by Jude Mills

Today is Epiphany, The date when Christians in the Western Church celebrate the arrival of the Magi, and with them the manifestation and revelation of The Christ – the Light of the World – to the whole world. Who doesn’t know and love that story of ‘wise men’ and their gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh?

It is also a New Year, and a time for reflection. Although there are other transitional times throughout the year that lead us to reflect on what has happened, New Year feels, for reasons of new calendars and psychological blank slates, more significant. It is especially true this year, following the year that will forever (or for a long time at least) be synonymous with the lockdown. It was, in many minds, a ‘bad year.’

And yet, three days into 2021, not much has changed. In terms of the Covid situation, it is actually much worse. Does that mean 2021 is a ‘bad’ year too? When it’s only January 3rd? Or does more of it have to be bad? A relatively arbitrary historical imposition of a twelve-month pattern aligns with a strange notion that moving from one day to the next will somehow make things different, better. Why is a year deemed good or bad depending on specific events that have happened during the past twelve months?

Of course, this is mostly subjective. Individual experiences in any given year are all very different. There are other calendars – Chinese, Hebrew, Islamic, Ethiopian, Persian – which have different ‘New Years’. Not only that, ‘bad’ things happen to people all the time, all year round. All sorts of terrible individual, social and geographical traumas. There are people in war zones, in refugee camps, in situations of domestic violence. The difference I suppose, is that Covid is happening to all of us. And in the year where a bad thing happened to all of us, it is tempting to think that 2020 was the culprit. In reality, it was the Covid that was bad, not the year.

As a child, I remember adult family members toasting New Year with a unanimous agreement that the current year had been tragic/depressing/full of disaster/maligned with bad luck and that they hoped the coming year would be better than the last one. I found it strange and troubling, thinking of all the other – good or just neutral – things that had happened and wondering why it was the bad thing that had made the year what it was.

I have since discovered that this is what human beings do. We have the cerebral wiring that anchors negative events – an ancient survival mechanism. We are more likely to recall and focus on the bad stuff, therefore, and rather forget that there were also many moments of happiness. There are good evolutionary reasons for this, but whilst we have rather moved on from the need to avoid that place where the sabre-toothed cat ate our uncle, our brains still work that way. Our desire to make sense of this creates patterns, meanings, stories. ‘It has been a bad year’ and not, ‘some things happened and some other things happened, some were good, some were bad, some were neutral,’ creates a meaning-full narrative. If bad things are the things that defined the period, then a new period gives us hope that things will be better ‘this year’ or ‘next week’ or ‘tomorrow’.

Hope is a deeply human and necessary thing. In the darkness, we choose to see light. Indeed, it is in the darkness perhaps that the light is more visible. Hope is a particular feature of faith, but those without faith see it and desire it too. As a chaplain it is a question I ask often, and maybe moreso of people who don’t have any religious beliefs: What gives you hope? Maybe this is one reason the story of the Magi is so compelling, even for non-Christians. A bunch (maybe three, maybe many more) of astrologers, ‘foreigners’ from ‘The East’ choosing to follow a strange bright new star towards an unknown goal, and finding in that very lowly place, the Light of the World? It’s probably the best metaphor for the unversality of hope that I can think of!

We look forward to a ‘better’ 2021, even though we don’t know what will happen, except that it might be good. And some of it will be. There will most definitely be moments of darkness, of uncertainty, of loss. The reality is that the challenges of Covid, of climate change, of war and natural disaster, of political upheaval, and all the private and personal traumas are not suddenly going to go away. But there will also be joy, wonder, laughter, love, hope. All of it is real, and all of it is what it means to be human and to be alive.

The Magi didn’t know where they were going, but they went anyway. Because the beckoning light of Hope was too much, too big, too important to ignore, or to simply watch from afar.

With the brightest of blessings of love and hope for this year and all years.

Jude x

Your Ultimate Guide to Building Your Personal Brand…

Posted on November 23, 2020April 10, 2022 by Jude Mills

This really isn’t that… sorry. It’s a headline I read on the internet.

I don’t have a personal brand. Or if I do, it is accidental. It has been bubbling around in my mind for a while, all this branding stuff. I deactivated Facebook recently, for wellbeing and self-preservation reasons, but as I was in bed this past week with Covid (yes I succumbed, I’m fine) I did still find myself doom-scrolling through Instagram. What I realised very quickly, amidst all the just-so curated feeds (how many people in the word keep pet squirrels?!?) that somewhere along the way, I have not only lost the knack, I have entirely lost the desire to have the knack.

Successful?

There may have been a time where I was encouraged – by those who think this stuff is important – to think that having a brand was the thing to do to be ‘successful.’ There was a time when I thought that being ‘successful’ was a thing that was important too. There are so many ways that success might be defined of course. But in this culture, we rather universally attribute it to money, status, and recognition. Bigger, better, more. It’s the basis of our economy and it is what drives our social media interactions. Whether we like it, or not.

I don’t ever remember being taught – not in any formal context – that real success was being happy, or fulfilled, or having good relationships, or having a supportive community, or loving and being loved. Someone I know who is good at marketing and considers themselves ‘successful’ ( in the money/status/recognition sense) once said to me that they would never let their relationship get in the way of work. I suppose it confirmed what I already knew…that I would never be successful in that way and that I didn’t want to be. I’m fine with that.

Real Ducks Shit

We all know that branding isn’t real, especially if we have engaged with it in any serious way ourselves. For example, I follow some ducks on Instagram who (appear to) live in a pen with pristine wood shavings and a pond full of crystal clear water and eat beautiful bowls of prepared vegetables every day. It’s all very pretty, and the ducks are funny and entertaining, as ducks are.

Now, I keep ducks. They are noisy and messy and muddy and they shit everywhere. It is almost impossible to keep a duck pen clean. Ducks do this filtering thing with their beaks, and literally everything gets a layer of aspirated mud on it. Everything! I know, in reality, that the pristine duck pen is entirely curated for the internet. But I still feel little pangs of stress and shame that my duck’s pen is muddy. As if I am somehow failing, because look, it is entirely possible to keep mud-free ducks! (it isn’t)

I know all that, and I still feel stressed by it. THIS is how it works. It is difficult to communicate this in a way that doesn’t sound preachy. I always sound preachy, which I suppose is ironically on-brand! (hashtag authentic) But I really want to heavily extoll the liberating virtues of not having a brand. I would love to encourage you to not feel that you need to sell yourself, your image, your pet squirrel*, or your lifestyle in any way whatsoever. Show me your mud, and know that you are loved!

*In fact, please don’t keep wild squirrels as pets to make an Instagram feed out of them! That really would be the best thing.