mental health – Notes from Bambi

Time to eat!

Dear Benedict

In setting down a time to eat you were concerned that people ate enough and in company and that the time together was also an important part of communal life (chapter 41). The community was governed by the natural order of day and night and being in the northern hemisphere, the way it changed during the year, so you made allowances for this. Furthermore, people worked in daylight so food needed to be available to fuel that work. It all makes good sense.

In our day time is a different thing. It rushes past or drags us down. We may have company or we may not. We may have work, too much too little or none. Thinking about a chapter like this, there are so many ways in which it addresses our lives. A rhythm to daily/yearly life is important. A good one can keep us healthy and in communion with each other.

Lockdown is not like that so it’s not surprising if some folks want to bend the regulations or use their own judgement. A TV interview with a person from China about Lockdown recently revealed the view that ‘We are used to doing what we are told, you are not’. It’s certainly food for thought.

I have found different patterns developing in Lockdown even in our small community of two.

There’s a time to walk and a time to be still, a time to work and a time to rest, a time to eat and a time to prepare for eating, a time to think and a time to pray, a time to sleep and a time to wake up. There’s a time for everything in Lockdown.

From time to time, there’s also a time to worry. This doesn’t seem to have a schedule but arrives out of nowhere almost and sows its own chaos. It may change the times we had set up for something else. It can scramble up our thinking, doing and being. Having a timetable can help with getting back on track. Each thing has it’s time and place, each activity makes a space for us to enjoy that one thing.

The local shopkeeper told me that when he first got a shop it played havoc with his eating times: he’d eat all sorts of stuff any time. I took it to indicate that the new shop was a stressful experience. I remember my great uncles, who ran the fish shop when I was a child, had strict times for eating, each one coming up for his meal at the specified time, to keep a sensible rhythm, to keep healthy habits.

The communal habit of eating in local lunch clubs is something I know some older people have missed. The rhythm of the day and time and the company was helpful and nourishing as much as the food. It’s a part of old normal that we need to rethink for new normal.

Where possible, it’s sensible to have a time to eat. If we can’t do that or it seems to elude us sometimes, we need to think why that might be and see about getting back on track if we can. We need to help each other to stay healthy clearly announcing when it’s time to eat or offering opportunities for shared eating times where possible.

From the remembered bible: There’s a time for everything under heaven.

Help me to stay healthy.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

To Benedict (3)

Dear Benedict

Even after 3 days it’s a challenge to write to you again! Developing positive habits isn’t easy for a 21st century woman. Much easier to turn over in bed again, look at my social media or eat chocolate, so it’s good to be reminded to ‘Stir yourself’.

I’ve known communities of people that didn’t seem able to stir themselves. Passionate about nothing, unengaged, going through the motions of worship and service, I found them draining me too. It didn’t seem to matter how much of my own passion and enthusiasm for the gospel I poured into such situations, it all just soaked through the cracks and disappeared. The realisation that I was gradually becoming more angry in such contexts was eventually enough to enable me to walk away.

And try again.

I remember having depression about 20 years ago and how I struggled to stir myself. A thin grey blanket shrouded me and the workings of my mind and body were gradually replaced by woolly stuffing. I struggled to connect with my family and friends and with the world around me. I shut myself away in our small house and hoped it would go away. That there was, one evening a turning point, amazes me still.

It was sunset. The sun had gone down behind the ridge line of the hill and the dark night curtain was creeping across the land, much as the darkness seemed to have crept over me. But the sun had not entirely gone. There was a line of yellow, orange and purple reaching up from where the sun had been. The vivid colours arrested me. I could only gawp at them. And then I got some pastel crayons and paper and swept those colours over it, rubbed them with my fingers and let the amazement grow.

After that, I did it again and again. More colours, more paper and ever so gradually the light came back. I had stirred myself in response to something that had stirred me.

In these COVID times often think of Julian or Norwich, agreeing to become an anchorite in a small church in East Anglia in the 14th century. After all of Europe had been decimated by the Black Death, and possibly her whole family had died, she took a vow to remain sequestered for the rest of her life. I know that you don’t promote the solitary life in your Rule (maybe it never worked out for you, maybe you were just called to a different project) but she has often inspired me, as the first recorded woman to write a book in English. I think of her in her cell and what it might have meant to stir herself as she went about her day in such a small space. Probably she had the hours of prayer and worship to give her day some structure and she had people who called to speak with her. Maybe she had a cat.

I’m not a cat person but I don’t begrudge one to Julian. And she probably had a candle. So there she was alone with cat and candle and thoughts. As the darkness came on, maybe it would be time to stir herself and light the candle, or stroke the cat.

A proverb: It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness (the origins of this proverb are uncertain).

From the Gospel: The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never extinguished it.

Stir me.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

More COVID19 prayers

The woman on the news

Squirted the table and wiped it.

She said how the death of her daughter

Had increased her anxiety

And she wiped her hands.

The writer on Twitter

Took a deep breath

And said how his stay in ICU

Had increased his anxiety:

He breathed again.

The family at the foodbank

Stood in the queue

And explained how furlough and redundancy

Meant they had nothing

But hoped soon to eat something.

I walk in the hills,

Mindful of many,

Recalling the Unsleeping One,

Who rocks us all.

JAL 29.08.2020 in Longdendale

My best friend, my Lazarus

Four days since I heard he was ill. Four days of knotting my stomach, of a disconnected head and a pounding heart. Four days of measuring each breath I take, hoping only that he is still taking them too. Four days of dry mouthed fear and crawling skin. Four days, four days.

Four days since I got the message that Lazarus was ill. Four days hoping, praying, wandering, waking in the night, sweating. Four days of indecision. Too far away to do anything.

Four days of uncertainty: should I stay, should I go. Four days with my hands shaking and no will to eat. Each night I call for peace but there is no peace.

Now I stand outside, my cheeks wet, my body trembling, my head a void. Martha worries about the smell. I am anxious about far more than that. Four days, four days.

The stale air reaches my nostrils. I scream into the abyss. ‘Come out, my best friend, my Lazarus’.

JAL 29.03.2020 during the COVID 19 Pandemic, when the lectionary remembering was the Rising of Lazarus.