Am I Still Ill?

My guests are stars. Yesterday they set to and ‘winter-cleaned’ my kitchen for about sx or eight hours on the trot. It doesn’t know itself. Never been so clean and shiny.

Just like all ‘mums’ I’m a bit of a worrier. I fuss over them just a little. Like, today, I have a feeling they’re worried about money and getting jobs. I know I would be. At the same time all three of us are ‘in flow’ most of the time. Which means that we have faith that ‘something will always turn up’. Provided we all just keep ‘doing the next right thing’.

Last night I cooked an impromptu veggie meal for all of us (linguine with a tomato and mushroom sauce and a few trimmings). And D commented that ‘you don’t really need meat if you know how to cook veggies’. He’s a fast learner! Bless.

I’ve also already started worrying about when they will have to move on. Cos right now, I honestly don’t know how I’d cope without them! And that’s just a few days in. People who get close to me often have a way of  ‘making themselves indispensable’. Richard did it for years. I have a certain amount of ‘learned helplessness’ in my make-up! Certain things I’m just no good at, and which the very thought of doing creates ongoing anxiety!

‘Doing the garden’ is one. ‘Fixing the computer’ another. All sorted for the time being!

They share their music with me and vice versa. And that’s great too. In fact, I want to run a ‘creative space’ workshop at Polar Bear on ‘The Music and the Message’. We all have certain tracks that mean a lot to us, and sharing them with others and talking about what they mean to us can be a great way of ‘expressing our lived experience’ in a really enjoyable way.

I do a lot of this with A and P, my ‘Shadow Coaches’ who I am currently seeing once a week. It’s an absolute delight to have a space to do whatever I want and have a captive audience who are skilled in attentive listening and awareness! If I’m playing a hip hop track and want to start rapping along with it, or getting up and dancing like a lunatic, they will not only encourage me, they will even get up and dance with me! It’s called ‘mirroring’.

So far this ‘programme’, plus having L and D living with me, has had a notably healing effect on my state of mind. To the degree that I have been able to manage on a fraction of the night medication I was taking, and look forward confidently to being able to manage with none at all.

It’s also interesting how many male-female couples I’m attracting into my life. Now that I myself am single! But these aren’t just any pairings. I’ve got at least three wonderful couples in my life that have massively impressed me with the quality of their relationship. It’s like God is putting a role model in front of me. Going, ‘Zoe, it’s time to up your game with the relationship thing. Here’s how it should be done!’

Listening to The Streets ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’. Hip hop with a massive difference. Self-deprecating instead of posturing. British to the core! It’s great when we Brits manage to take a concept and sort of subvert it…using humour and a tongue in cheek approach.

And reading Martin Buber ‘I and Thou’. He was the originator of the concept of ‘Living Dialogue’. It’s very dense. He doesn’t waste words. Not something you can skim read. Something to imbibe paragraph by paragraph, like medicine. It has the feel of divine revelation.

DRA later, and it’s a beautiful sunny day. Love you lots folks. Z XXX