Use not words to unravel; rather, use words to weave
Sometimes silence,
Let yourself be carried away
On the barely a ripple,
Wave of silence
A golden
Cool
Peaceful
Resolution
All cosied up
On a chair
Fluffy socks
Housecoat
Duvet
Not willing to incur
Heating costs
Yet still warm
Silence says
Be
Nothing more
That who
You are
There’s something special
To a solitary silence
Something nurturing
And restorative
A real present tense sense
Sense of who, what, how,
And where
You are
I have a distinct memory, of all the thing I was ever interested in (when I was much younger than I am now), being made into daily practices. Somehow, I would find a way to return to them again and again, day after day. Nowadays though, it seems like I can’t find the focus or the memory, or perhaps the executive functioning to keep up that kind of regularity apropos of no external structures.
Perhaps I tied my interests to activities I would undertake regularly. Like with writing, I regularly woke up in the middle of the nigh during my GCSE years. Looking back I think it was likely that the stress was impacting my sleep. My sleep is often quite sensitive to being influenced by stressors in my life. That said, if I woke up in the middle of the night, I would bake some cookies, them load either Julia Nunes or Taylor Swift up on YouTube, and get to writing. I woke up in the middle of the night often enough in my teens, that I had quite a regular writing practice. Or with rollerblading, it would always be on a weekend, and always along the thames pathway from Battersea to Chelsea.
I suppose there’s also something about the relatively fewer amount of responsibilities I had as a teenager than I do now. As a single mother/full time student/ trainee counsellor, there’s so many more things “to-do” that it seems like the energy for pursing things I enjoy with the regularity (probably) needed to improve, happens very sporadically- (when the kids are away, I find myself returning to journaling, and meditation, and maybe with e ought time to practice scales and chords, yet when they’re back, there’s barely enough executive functioning to go around, what with keeping track of all the things that need keeping track of when you have young children in the house.)
I have this little voice in the back of my head, that’s quite persistent in reminding me not to forget *whatever hobby/ fun interest of mine catches my attention presently. And the high I get from engaging in things I find fun, means that once I’m sat down, I tend to zone in completely, losing sense of time and place, and then I’ve spent four hours knitting something, and quite possibly have to run out of the door to pick the kids up, suddenly aware of the need to pee, and thirst wracking my throat.
My ideal would be to be able to dedicate myself a bit at a time to all of my interests every day. there would be time for painting, time for writing poetry. I would spend time writing any of the novels that I’ve left mid stories, characters on the cusp of their respective character development journeys. I’d find time to bake, and find new nutritional recipes to try out. I’d finally get round to re-learning how to sew using a sewing machine, and I’d spend time speaking to guests on my podcasts. There would also be time to play around editing videos, and polish off my website, playing with and further developing my web building skills. I’d also create time to keep going with teaching myself to code.
It is a blessing, being filled with so many things that spark my interests, being so deeply interested in many things, yet the challenges of time-blindness, and difficulties with focus, alongside the organisational requirements of ‘running a household’ as well, as the time and focus I put into parenting, talkies of learning and CPDs- I find myself mourning how quickly time passes by.
So here I am, returning to one of my early interests, blogging. I’m curious to see how long I can keep up some level of consistency with it, and I’m happy, I’ve found a few moments to return to it.
I suppose that’s why so many of my previous blog posts, are typo filled, peppered with run-on sentences, and side thoughts cosseted in parentheses. I’d aways try to get my fingers to catch up with my thoughts (always an impossible task- better informed about this now, having learned about the hyperactivity of the minds that can come alongside ADHD), and then rush to hit publish, before I forgot. Sometimes I’d schedule it to be published on a certain day, sure I’d come back and make the necessary edits in the time between when I’d written the first draft and the date I’d scheduled it to go live, and inevitably I’d forget about the post’s existence, until I got a notification from WordPress.
Something I’ve been embracing the years since I last wrote here is the idea of perfect imperfection, allowing rooms for mistakes, and the mantra “done is better than perfect” and “good enough, move on”.
Holding myself to extremely high standards, is one thing, not allowing myself to progress due to minor imperfections is quite another.
So that’s it.
I’ll end here.
If you enjoyed this, thanks you for your time, I’d love to know what stood out for you, and your thoughts and insights in the comments.
With warmth,
Fine Words Weave
Excavate this sadness
All the injustices
Not quite laid to rest
Jump in the graves of them
And exhume the body of grief
For your consumption?
Let’s be clear about what you’re asking for here
In my own time
I tend the graves
Of anguishes past experienced
You, grave robber
Desecrater
Have no right to visit here
It isn’t for me to dredge up the soil
Unearthing it all
Leaving the soil upturned
For what?
For you to confirm
That yes it is legitimate pain buried here?
I’m past that,
Way past asking for scraps
I’ve come to understand
That there’s a reason
You weren’t there for the burial
So when I tend the graves
Of all the injustices
Half buried before
Don’t turn up
In funeral blacks
Facimile fragility
Leaking from your eyes
You didn’t know the deceased
And your abject sadness
Are only theatrics
Done for the optics
More to the point
I don’t welcome it
Leave me to my grief
To the laying to rest of
Anguish and injustice
Stop demanding
That I uncover it
For your voyeurism
And vouchsafing
Be on your way
Stop not at these graves.
As a writer, I’ve decided to give myself freedom and permission to admit that I don’t exactly know how to write. I just know that I do. The rules of grammar, and story plotting often times escape me, I feel it’s why I do so well with poems, and perhaps essays, and very short stories, yet have struggled historically with longer stories. I have grand schemes and ideas, and things that I know are important in the story, like flashpoint in the history of the novel, and yet a very bumbling sort of meddling through method of conveying it all.
I’m admitting this to myself, and to all of you, in the hopes that pulling down the walls of perfection that entrap my writing, will allow me to be more open to learning, and perhaps improving.
The fear of not getting things right, I’ve allowed that fear to prevent me from writing longer stories, or at least getting to the end of one, for a good too many years now.
I’m doing away with that now, and pivoting. I’ve decided to begin sharing (and complete the writing of) a novel that I started to create in 2016. It has been languishing on my desktop for a long while now because I don’t know how to bring it all together in the perfect way. I have accepted that it will not be perfect, it will be messy, and perhaps it won’t make as much sense as I would like, there may be potholes, and things won’t go exactly how I wish, and that is okay. (So far it’s been a daily practice of reminding myself this.)
If you wish to read the story you can read it here. Perhaps you could encourage me, and join me in this journey as i go from a very unpolished yet meaningful novel, to something slightly more polished.
Take care,
Fine Words Weave
One of my amazing and brilliant friends had the bold and visionary idea to start a money mastermind group. It was an inspired idea to get our respective finances and money mindsets in order and we’re a couple weeks in and going strong.
Something that someone said on one of our group calls really impacted me, you know those moments where you hear something and you have to stop because the words resonate so much that it feels like they’ve physically taken hold of you and changed your perspective? So in that moment you’re silently re-examining everything you’ve ever experienced with this new possibility in mind. It was a big moment.
On the topic of something that scared us/dragged us far out of our comfort zone, I mentioned that spoken word definitely feels a whole word of scary to me, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, on a tangent it’s interesting to me how many of my friends are “private poets” let’s call it (expressing the feelings through poetry in a very personal and not for public consumption kind of way).
The thing that blew me away? To paraphrase: “poetry is a means of you expressing how you feel, there’s no need for you to be comparing your poetry to anyone else’s, the thing that you really have to ask yourself is whether you believe your feelings matter.”
.
.
.
Wow!
Just wow. Even writing this out again from memory i’m still taken aback by it, their is so much truth in this statement, and when I ask myself, I know that on some level along the way I did learn or take on board the messaging that my feelings weren’t important.
I felt the words in my chest. Naturally I had to write about it. I’ve got some idea of where some of this messaging came from, certain life experiences etc. Saying that I also think that’s a large part of the messaging of our society, at least historically, I think things are starting to change, (though the pendulum effect might be taking place and it seems to be overcompensating and swinging really far in the direction of “my feelings matter more than anyone else’s”) .
Even still it’s such an important thing to consider whether on some level you hold a limiting belief to that effect, then having identified that, what will you do about that?
Take care
Find Words Weave
(Current background on all my devices courtesy of Knit picks with slight modification by me)
So I finally met my deadline. Yay I got my two thousand word essay submitted on time, just barely.
When coming up to a deadline does anyone else feel the pressure building and building and building… no one? Just me? *flops down with a dramatic sigh*
In a way I think I normally thrive on that pressure. The tension builds up, and I bolster myself by looking forward to that feeling of relief and joy that I usually get as soon as the essay has been submitted. However today that feeling was nowhere to be found, I submitted my paper in turnitin and I just felt like okay. That’s good. You got it done… okay.
Things just rang a bit hollow. You know? I talked myself into doing a little happy dance, just because one of my commitments to myself is to celebrate milestones along the way.
I’m wondering if the recent chapter in my life’s story book beginning its conclusion overshadowed my joy. Im not sure because in terms of that I feel very much at peace and have a deep sense of clarity and acceptance.
Maybe I pushed myself too hard towards the end and my brain just needs a reset. That happens quite often. I mean as much effort as I put into the planning, and as much as that made theessay writing easier, I did still end up writing up about one thousand eight hundred of those words between the hours of 1pm and 3:52 pm this afternoon. That’s pretty radical when i think about it.
Hmm, okay I’ve got it now. Writing is such an illuminating process. My conclusion and introduction were both very rushed, and I have a sense that they may bring my grade down, however a late submission would mean an automatic 5% deduction of my mark. So I chose to submit on time. My takeaway? Even if you have a great planning strategy, you still need to factor in time to write, proofread, and submit your essay.
Ah it’s good to have gotten a handle on my internal thouggt process through writing this. .
All day I just noticed myself being a bit slower, slightly more thoughtful, so very aware of my need in front of my Rabb, and grateful for the small things. Whilst these are all good things not being able to put my finger on why was sloghtly agitating.
Now I can happily get bavk to be grateful for things like taking my kids to nursery and not needing to lug the buggy up and down three flights of stairs, my youngest bubba is getting to be a big boy 😭😭Alhamdulillah
Take care
Azeezat Adeola,
Fine words weave
P.s. another commitment to myself is to get some writing on this blog once a week. At the very least.
Week 1 ✅
One more round with the tempest.
She stands,
arms outstretched
in a daring embrace,
as she locks gaze with the eye of the storm.
Energy jitters up her spine,
and her tongue is dry.
She’s danced this whirl wind before.
Spun out over and over,
leaving breathless and dizzy,
that’s if she even leaves at all.
The tempest calls her name,
blowing temptingly in her ears.
Drawing her in just a bit.
One foot forward,
without conscious thought,
she’s already in forward motion,
Pulled in by the deceptive calm.
Still the weathered shawl of foreboding
settles on her shoulders,
and her skin pinpricks with that quiet
un-nameable sense,
that something is just out of step here.
She’s been around this tempest before,
this isn’t her first spin,
and lately she’s tired
of letting herself be reeled back in.
Emotionally battered,
mind windswept,
she’s intimately familiar
with the post-storm landscape.
The tempest howls,
the wind buffets at her mind,
the noise is reaching crescendo.
She turns inwards to the quiet within.
And asks a single question.
The answer makes steel rods of her legs
and she is at a stand still.
The question?
Is this, what you want, for your life?
Lightning fizzles
from within the tempest,
aiming at her stock still legs.
There is pain and tingling,
and the metal taste of hot electricity.
As the bolt hits at where she is grounded.
Is this what you want for your life?
Honestly,
the answer is so quiet,
it’s hard to hear it
beneath the roar of the storm.
Still it matters not,
because the answer becomes her vision.
She feels it right in the gaps.
She unstormably knows the answer
in every fiber of her.
She is steady as the tempest rolls over.
It flails and roars,
wails and hails.
Steadily drags at her core.
It comes with dark
and thunder and shuddering.
Shaky teeth,
and the shivering.
The storm is a mighty thing.
The knowing within is mightier still,
and she does not let the storm in.
She draws deep from within herself,
The strength to weather it.
At moments her legs falter,
and at times she is almost carried away
by the force of the storm,
still the unstormable knowing is her steadying.
The storm does its worst.
The knowing is unstormable.
The tempest passes.
She stands, still.
Her arms outstretched in an open embrace.
The storm has subsided.
And faintly in the post-storm ozone
she hears a new question.
What do you want for your life?
Hey loves,
It has been such wild twelve week ride. I’ve finished my first term of university, and it has been quite a journey.
I was wild with excitement at the beginning, buzzing and full of fuel, and so excited to get underway with my course. I had a beautiful moment of running up the stairs in our empty lecture theatre and calling out loudly “Counselling degree here we come” or word to that effect in my very first week. I literally could not wait to get started.
Then the work began, the assignments, and group projects, and reflective journals, coupled with family drama, and the usual parenting work, by week six, I’d gotten to a real low point. Just then the whole family caught the flu, at one point I was physically too sick to look after my boys.
Still eventually I regrouped, and out of the valley, I decided to start a youtube channel . Gradually I started to get back on course, digging deep to rekindle the passion for my degree programme. I kept working, and stumbled on some study methods that worked for me, pomodoro being chief amongst them, along side study vlogs and study with me’s on youtube to help me stay motivated.
And now here I am already in the winter break, and awaiting my results for some of my modules, and a 2000 word essay due for january 6.
Still, I want to document all of these feelings, I know I’ll look back on them someday as fond memories.
How are you all doing?
Did I tell you I’m recommitting to writing? Too long I let this limiting belief around my writing take root, that two year bout of writers block really took the wind out of my sails. I am embracing the wordsmith within once more, and I want to return to my first love. Novels, and short stories.
Watch this space.
2020 is a year of taking action for me bi’ithni’llah.
See you on the flipside
Take care,
Fine Words Weave
One of the things that sometimes hinders my writing is, I want my writing to be honest. I am aware that my truth may not hold true for someone else, and it’s in that difference that learning and interchange can happen. Why am I writing about this?
There’s been a topic that keeps coming back to my mind, and I guess in some ways I’m afraid to write about it, publicly at least.
When I think about the reasons why, I think a lot of it is due to the fact that as a child I was repeatedly taught that “it’s not everything, that you tell to everyone”, said differently, ‘keep your business your business.’ As a child how do you judge that? How do you know what are the things you share, and what aren’t? Sometimes you choose to follow the example of the adults/ caretakers who gave you that advice. Other times you become paralysed by the indecision and decide it’s safer to not share anything with anyone.
The thing is it that by the time you become an adult with the capacity to re-examine things and make those decisions according to your judgement, you have already formed the habit of a lifetime, and might not even consider re-examining the decisions that you made as a child, that likely no longer fit your current circumstances, or perhaps even work against the life that you desperately want to lead.
I recently finished reading (listening to the audiobook ) “Maybe you should talk to someone” by Lori Gottlieb, there were so many insights and lessons within it, and days later, I feel I’m still absorbing some of the gems of it. One such point of interest was when the author mentioned her therapists use of something I had come across before but inevitably fell out of practice with. Allowing for space between an action and your response, means you can intentionally choose what that response will be, as opposed to a reaction, (which from my view is more about neurological pathways that have been so travelled that they automatically come in to effect).
Sometimes it is okay to delay your response, sometimes it is okay for your response to be, I don’t know, or ‘I’ll take some time to think about that’.
So currently I’m not completely sure when or if I will write about this topic which is weighted, and emotional and really important to me. I’m going to allow myself to sit with that uncertainty no matter how uncomfortable a feeling that is (which i could write a whole other post about) and, not let it be a driver of my decision i.e. deciding never to write about the topic, or just put it all out there just to be rid of the feeling. I’m going to give myself time to formulate a response, and then take action accordingly, and also remember that if at a later date that decision isn’t working I can re-examine it and change my course of action.
Do you have lessons from your childhood that could use some re-examining? Have you done any un-learing? What was that process like for you? Do you make space between an action and your response? How have you found that practice? Do you have different thoughts to me?
I really love thoughtful conversations, please leave your thoughts in the comments, if you’re reading this.
Take care,
Fine Words Weave
Leave yourself.
On the pages
the words
and stories,
They matter.
Breathe ink,
write out;
lived experience,
weave. Tales
use words.
You matter.
Fine words
don’t produce
food; Butter
no parsnips.
Hungry for
more, hungry
for truth.
We matter.
Fine Words Weave 
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