|
Newsletter Archive: June & July 2007
July 2007
(please scroll down the page for the June edition, if you wish to read earlier or later editions please go to the Newsletter page and follow the links there)
Welcome to the Dare to Blossom newsletter.
To sign up for your own copy direct by email every month click here. If you do not wish to receive future editions, please email me to unsubscribe. Everyone who is on the mailing list will be entered into a draw twice a year (at the end of June and the end of December) with a chance to win a prize of six free life coaching sessions.
- June prize draw winner - Seeing with new eyes
June Prize draw winner: Stephanie Butterworth of Little Trekkers
I am delighted to announce that Stephanie Butterworth has won the June draw from members of the mailing list and now has the chance to take up six free telephone life coaching sessions over the next six months.
Steph runs a fantastic business providing children’s outdoor clothing – ideal for making the best of the school holidays in uncertain weather. Here is what she says about her service:
“Little Trekkers specialises in outdoor and active lifestyle clothing and equipment for babies and children via the internet, mail order and showroom premises. We are based in Millhouse Green in Sheffield, but dispatch orders countrywide and overseas. Our range includes anything that you can think of to help families get out and about, regardless of the weather conditions.
Stephanie Butterworth Managing Director Tel: 01226 767321 e-mail: info@littletrekkers.co.uk
If you are reading this on my website or forwarded by a friend, do sign up for direct mailings so I can put your name in the next draw in December. Congratulations Steph, I will look forward to working with you.
Seeing with new eyes I have recently returned from ten days holiday travelling around Ireland. The usual quote is ‘travel broadens the mind’ – I am sure it does. I also think that how it does this is by enabling us to see with new eyes. It was only after beginning to write this that I was flicking through a book of quotes and saw this one that I was not consciously aware of having read before: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” (Marcel Proust) This is exactly the thought that I was beginning to articulate above. This article is written in two parts in the moments of observing and reflecting, while I was in Ireland, and on my return home. In Ireland I feel that I am seeing myself afresh as well as everything around me. Much is in a way similar to my home in Cornwall, in other respects very different. Food – lots of different variations on the soda bread recipe, wonderful local carrots. Currency – euros instead of pounds. Voices – a range of Irish accents. I begin to distinguish the range from the local very strong but soft accent to the slightly harsher and very quickly spoken voice of the Dubliners, and including the Gaelic still spoken in this area. Sometimes the accent is so strong that it sounds like a different language to my ears even when it is English that is being spoken. Fuel - the peat cuttings and stacks of peat ‘bricks’ beside the roads, alongside the intriguing shapes of ‘bog oak’ dug out from the peat. There are even peat-burning power stations. We are self-catering and have little interaction with other people, except in shops and along the way. The people are very friendly and seem to like the ‘Celtic’ connection, when we say we come from Cornwall. I have a conversation through the car window with a man holding the ‘stop/go’ board at some road works. He tells me about the high death rate on Irish roads – ‘down to the speed, it is’. There are shrines at the top of every pass to Mother Mary, to give thanks for safe arrival and to pray for the journey onwards? I feel suspended in time, in a bubble, mostly doing and observing, not thinking much. Partly because I am in company with my husband all the time, and he is active person, always wanting to be doing something – fishing, surfing, netting for shrimps around the rocks. We know that here we are the tourists, visitors, outsiders – and that helps me see myself with new eyes. The other side of the travel experience is seeing again that people are the same where ever you go in the world. So I feel this duality, being different, the stranger, and being the same, a human being with the same range of feelings and emotions. Later, in Cornwall Seeing with new eyes has continued on my return home, everything is familiar but seen afresh having become accustomed to the sights and sounds of another place. As we drive in our gate the garden is lush and green from all the rain that has been falling. The house smells a little musty from being shut up. Going out the next day, it is good to see people I recognise. Sad to realise that people are less friendly to strangers here, I have become used to exchanging a cheery wave with people I pass on the road. I decide to carry on waving anyway! Being away has created a distance from my normal life. For the first day back I am caught up in catching up with emails, bills, phone calls. A session with my life coach that afternoon reminds me to take the opportunity to use the distance, the shift of perspective, to reorder my priorities and reaffirm my intentions.
Can you step back and see yourself and your surroundings with new eyes? Do you feel you would like to re-examine your priorities? Maybe things have changed within and/or around you, but you are still dancing to an old tune? What would it feel like to find a new one?
June 2007
Welcome to the Dare to Blossom newsletter.
To sign up for your own copy direct by email every month click here. If you do not wish to receive future editions, please email me to unsubscribe. Everyone who is on the mailing list will be entered into a draw twice a year (at the end of June and the end of December) with a chance to win a prize of six free life coaching sessions.
In this issue:
- Nurturing our tender plants - In memory of Michele Petrone, a wonderful man
Nurturing our tender plants Today I have spent the afternoon planting up hanging baskets and pots, rather late in the summer. The weather has been so variable, from hot in April to cold in May, and we have been so busy, that I haven’t found time before.
Naturally, the name of my business being ‘Dare to Blossom’, I am drawn to metaphors of organic growth and renewal. I often find them useful for myself. Today’s gardening work has brought forth some thoughts about my writing work on the Dare to Blossom book.
This book has been germinating quietly in a rather dark and shady place for a while. My little bedding plants for the baskets were in a small greenhouse that protected them from the cold earlier in the year, but with the rampant summer growth of a clematis above has become too shaded. Due to the delay in planting out some of the seedlings have become rather leggy, others a bit stunted and some were beginning to die off.
The pieces of writing I have been doing for my book are like these slightly neglected seedlings. They are hidden away in the dark corners of various notebooks and jottings on the computer. It is now the time to bring them all together in a bright sunny place in the full light of midsummer to grow and blossom into a wonderful vibrant colourful display that will bring pleasure to myself and others.
My aim has always been to publish the book in the autumn – the time of maturing fruit, harvest and fulfilment. I will have to give my ideas/plants lots of attention, watering, care and fertiliser to achieve this!
What projects or ideas have you been keeping hidden away in the dark? Maybe this place provided protection while they were germinating and putting down roots, but is it now stunting their growth? Are you ready to bring them out into the sunlight to blossom? Are there some best consigned to the ‘compost heap’ to make way for new shoots in different directions? What would you like to be able to harvest in the autumn?
In memory of Michele Petrone, a wonderful man I have recently heard news of the death of a dear friend, Michele Petrone. I can’t say I knew him well, but he had a way of connecting with people he met in a special way so I am sure many of us thought of him as a friend. He was diagnosed with cancer in the same year as I was, 1994, though I did not know him then. Unlike me, he had several recurrences and other health problems over the years.
Michele dealt with his experiences and feelings about his cancer through his work as a professional artist, later setting up the MAP Foundation. To quote from the Foundation’s website (http://www.mapfoundation.org/):
“Michele had lived with cancer since 1994, and he painted his experiences of illness in a series of exhibitions starting with the Emotional Cancer Journey, which became a catalyst to inspire many to express their feelings of living and working with life-threatening illness.
In 2002, Michele founded the MAP Foundation to promote expression, communication and understanding of the emotional aspect of serious illness and dying. He gave workshops and presentations nationally and internationally, helping countless patients, their families, friends, and medical professionals, working tirelessly, even at times when he was unwell, for a cause he passionately believed in. His aim was that this work, should inspire and support people in similarly frightening situations, and enlighten and guide others to a different and better understanding. Michele's work - books, exhibitions and talks - inspired thousands, helping to bridge medical treatment and the human experience.
The MAP Foundation will continue to build upon the immense body of work generated by Michele since his first illness.”
I first met Michele when I attended a workshop based around the ‘Soul Bird’ by Michael Snunit. Michele used the story to encourage the group to use art to express feelings that are hard to put into words. It was a moving and releasing experience for me, and the group shared stories, tears and laughter (and lots of hugs).
After that Michele and I met two or three times a year at various conferences and kept in touch occasionally by email. The last communication from him was on 15 April, a month before he died, and he said: “Hopefully this mad bad period will be over soon, I hope
I wrote a long emotional piece in my journal when I heard he had died, ending with a thank you:
For Michele:
Thank you For sharing tears and laughter and so much of yourself For helping us open the closed boxes within ourselves and express our emotions For spreading the joy of art to so many people
We will miss you and will never lose the feeling of having touched souls with you.
|
