Solutions

I wrote yesterday that I had 'a bit of a problem' at work - well, now that problem (in fact a grotesquely rotten one) is sorted, and sorted to a far better outcome than was initially in view, although it's going to be a mad scramble now to swing operations around very quickly. It will be worth all the scrambling however. I owe my director lunch, not only for getting us to this solution but also for taking on the chin the email I sent her this morning stating that I thought a very bad decision had been made by our big-boss and that I did not intend to carry the can for it in the many discussions entailed for me in disseminating the problematic decision. I think I wrote not long ago that she's very good to work for and she demonstrated that again today, vividly. If I can book a table at the gardens cafe for Thursday then it will be my very real pleasure to show her some appreciation. (is this getting creepy? I guess things might be edging in that direction. It's been/being a long year.)

Well, this afternoon I removed three of the drawings on the wall and took them to the framer. They're going to be Christmas presents.

Sometimes the giving of Christmas presents is a minefield of drab emotions. Resentment of consumerism goes head to head with the desire to try to at least do it well if it has to be done at all, and if it's not done, then what is Christmas for the irreligious?* Eating? 

These three gifts won't be like that. They mean a lot to me: the pleasure and the healing of the doing, the circumstances of the doing, the sitting with them every day in this room, the thinking for a long time about what they mean, the thinking for quite a while about not keeping them and what I can be going on with once they're not around, and finally now the giving away. I'm giving them to people I love, people who can receive and carry all that loadedness, or alternatively not carry it and just let it be, as the circumstances of our lives require. 

I'm keeping the one I like best; also the one I fought with the longest and am still not sure whether I got the better of it in the end; and the one that is definitely a failure; and there are two unfinished drawings which will stay up on the wall until they get finished, and they will get finished. One is the start of a bigger project which I'm uncertain I found the right form for, and finishing the drawing will help me make a decision about that. 

The small drawing in this post, I would like to give to my analyst, but I have a feeling it's not done to give your analyst a gift. Imagine how I'm going to feel when I google that question after I publish this post and it turns out that aaaaactually, patients are supposed to give their analysts presents and I am therefore nine years behind. I often have a suspicion that psychoanalysis is over when the patient can do the things she thinks she might not be allowed to do, like give the analyst a present or tell her she doesn't want to be psychoanalysed any more. But I would like her to have this small bright image of people connecting in the dark masked solitariness of midwinter lockdown. Raw and unframed. I haven't seen her since March except through the computer.

Well what can I be going on with when these drawings are not around? I have a couple of ideas about that, but (I think I told you this already) as my previous director used to say, sort of crossly, 'anyone can have a good idea.'** So I'm thinking. This post is part of the thinking. I continue to be excited by the beauty of the physical world and could happily keep on responding to it in pencil on paper. But you know, I think they were actually right at VCA, if they were really saying what I now take them to have been saying; you don't have to mirror the world to appreciate it, you can just see it and that's enough. But you might want to find out why you appreciate what you see.

* The thought of belonging to some form of spiritual tradition is just an unsolvable paradox, or maybe just a mess not a paradox; the nourishing and humanly necessary element but also the vulnerabilities to perversions and predators. When I was about nineteen or twenty I shared a house with a man called Andrew, and once he was sitting in the kitchen listlessly strumming his nylon-string guitar and he said, 'I envy the Aboriginals. We'll never belong here the way they do.' This was a radically new idea to me; I'm not saying it's a good one.  

** one of my ideas is to do something with a list of the things people have said to me that I've thought about again and again. Is that what 'resonating' is? I'm thinking not just of Deep stuff like Andrew's comment about 'the Aboriginals' and J's inarguably true remark which was also a way of not letting anyone else in the team have an idea without it being shot down, but also of the teacher at VCA who said I had a bad-shaped head and my first yoga teacher who told me my arms are like a gorilla's.