Can I indulge myself in beauty, or am I still stuck in flight mode?

My inner fire longs to burn once more...

Does the ruffled Silken Flyer
Pause to recall how She - began-
Her soft cramped crawling Origins -
Does man

In all his puffed and sparking Glory
Cast back a Thought
To the Speck of Flesh the Story
Began with, from Naught?

But both, in their Creator’s terrible keen sight
Lay curled and known through timeless Day and Night
He Form and Life at once and always - Gave
Is still their Animator and their Grave -

Christabel LaMotte a.k.a A.S. Byatt
from the book, Possession

Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen. (c. 1788) By Henry Fuseli.

The Sardinian sun is low in the sky, warm on my skin with a light breeze blowing up from the sea as I write. It’s the longest day of the year and I’m sitting out on the balcony of my summer rental. It has been so long since we spent a decent amount of time outside of Ireland somewhere sunny. It’s 2024, but of course you know that. It doesn’t feel like it though, not to me. Where have the last 4 years gone?

I bought the book, Possession, by A.S. Byatt, back in 2019. I like to hold onto books for a while before I open them, creating a luscious anticipation. I don’t remember ever opening it. If I did, I know that a part of me would have frozen up, me not realising that I was in fright mode. I certainly did not have the concentration span nor the capacity for A.S.Byatt’s spinning of language into art just as Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold.

For how could I indulge myself in the pleasure of literature when some part of me thought my life, and the life of my children, was at risk? I did think that for a while, and I possibly prolonged the agony by becoming a sort of an activist, casting the large net of my energetic field over several key players in order to protect, and manifest the best possible outcome for all. Which is still in the offering. We plough along together, more of us taking turns to turn the field. I can afford to take some time off and have an actual holiday in the sun.

I am having trouble unwinding I will admit, but I am more in the moment with my family now than I have been over the past year and I am determined to relax at a deeper level, and to spend time doing what it is that I love. For we need to bring in more love, and this is a key time to do it.

I can’t tell people to make the effort to relax and open to love if I don’t do it for myself.

“But,” you say, “you are writing! What are you talking about?” And yes, I finished the most amazing book with Mark Attwood - it’s out there in the world, straight in as a number 1 hot new release. Amazing dream-come-true stuff that you just couldn’t make happen if you wanted to. 🙏🏻

I’ve just finished the first draft of my 2025 Diary. (No wonder I don’t know what year it is!) Today a friend texted me asking where to buy the third book of my trilogy. It’s been 100 years since I wrote The Inner Compass. Well, it feels like it.

I want to re-kindle a spark of desire within, to go back to writing for the love of it. I have a few more novels in me, I have not finished expressing myself through character and adventures just yet. This desire must have been simmering for a while as before we came to Sardinia as I looked for a book that would open that door in me once more.

It’s not that I have not been writing - I wrote several short stories for a competition - Zero and One, and Lohirtak’s Big Night. I was angry when I wrote them, however. Perhaps it shows as they were not widely received. The writing was fun, but the feedback from the judges came from that same planet that mostly everyone I lost over the last 4 years comes from. Suddenly, on this realisation, I became burnt out.

One planet, many worlds. Which one do you choose to live in?

I tried again.

I read an ‘Irish bestseller’ which slowly infuriated me as I read because she had all the ingredients of a remarkable story, yet she didn’t put them together well. She just chickened out when it came to the mystical and the paranormal. She wasn’t up to it. This author was, of course, celebrated by that planet, winning an award, and giving a talk during the Irish Literature Festival only last month. I couldn’t bring myself to go to any of their talks. Have I alienated myself? Is this world I am in that different to theirs? Or is it that I simply will never forget how we were treated by these same people that give each other accolades for, well, pushing a narrative that I have been trying so hard to push back against?

I left a review for her book on Goodreads where I basically rewrote the plot of her book. I admit it - it was a cheeky thing to do. It was in a way, my creativity crying out to me, wanting to come and play. Looking back on it I see I was frustrated because I did not give myself an outlet to write. I would have done a damn fine job with her ingredients. I need to write another novel, there is no two ways about it. Not someone else’s novel. My own. I need some new inspiration.

So here I am, on a family getaway on the sunny island of Sardinia. Well, the idea was to go somewhere sunny. The first day we arrived they were spraying. Oh give me respite from the rabbit holes I have been down, under, in and through. Once you see you cannot unsee.

I was so disheartened. And felt the anger rising again. There was so much crap in the sky we had a halo around the sun.

Nobody can tell me this is a natural sky. It has been overcast for the best part of a week. Am I just more easily inflamed? Short on temper? Where is the love? The open heart? The bottle of vodka??

Today is the first day I can see some form of blue up there. Oh sweet relief. But I don’t want to get my hopes up. Anyway - my point is, I am on holiday and I need to read something that I consider indulgent and take a break from X, Telegram, Facebook and Instagram, and the likes. I tied a hair bobbin around my phone. I put it on flight mode. But I think I may still be in flight mode too.

I decided to read Possession by A.S. Byatt. I had forgotten that I already had bought it, oh sweet joy to make the time to enjoy something that I had already planned to enjoy! Finally. Time for a book filled with poetry and prose, academics exalting over flourishes of language. A detail here, a refinement there, it seems so, well, irrelevant. Placing so much energy into the smallest detail of language. I understand why it’s a book I’ve not been able to read these last 4 years. But I’m slowly coming around to it. It’s everything the last few years were not. Grace-filled and thoughtful. Yes, plodding at times, but genius. Inspiring. And the language - delightful.

My flight mode is slowly melting. I will give myself more time, as long as it takes. Delicately, I find my desire to create for creations sake once more. I will let the sun warm my skin, let language into my bones, and I shall, as I am doing now, put pen to paper, or, should I say, fingertips to plastic keys, to ascribe my thoughts onto electric paper, just for the sake of it.

I hope you make time to find your joy, just as I am making the time to find my own.