Inanna

I’m not really in a blogging state of mind. Have been feeling a bit flat. Not quite depressed but just a little sunken, shall we say. Not sure why. Maybe it’s the total lack of any perceptible movement on the move - silence reigns from all quarters apart from our mortgage company who are inundating us with bits of paper telling us of another fee or a further insurance we don’t need. Maybe it’s the fact that my new computer is languishing upstairs – large and gleaming and totally out of touch with the larger world (hence pretty much unusable). Maybe it’s because my ‘author’ has taken off to Moscow leaving me drumming my fingers and hacked off as, if I’d known, I could have planned nice things to do with James (but instead he’s booked up in the way of all eight-year olds nowadays). Or maybe it’s because I’ve just heard of another friend with a serious life-threatening condition.

Or, then again, maybe it’s just one of the down times. I truly believe that it’s impossible and not even really desirable to be totally UP all the time. It’s the main gripe I have with the New Age movement – the insistence on relentless positivity at all costs. You cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought and all that. Yes, I do think it’s good to keep positive on the whole and that our thoughts can and do affect our reality but (and it’s a bit but) I don’t think anyone should expect to be on a permanent high all the time. It’s not natural. Nature has its highs and lows, and its sort of in the middles too.

When I was doing art therapy I became fascinated with the myth of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess who was one heck of a feisty woman. She loved life big-time, juggling the roles of queen, mother and red-hot lover with all the ease in the world. But she realised that there has to be balance; she felt the need to descend, to go down into the underworld to meet her sister Erishkegal, queen of the dead. As she went down, she was divested of all her earthly glamour and glory. When she finally met her sister she wasn’t exactly greeted with open arms and a cream tea – she was slung up on a meat hook and left to rot for three days. Psychologists looking at the myth often say it’s a vital process, this going within, this going down, this putrefaction.

Spring, of course, should be an up time. When everything is going bonkers outside, it feels like being a bit of a party-pooper not to join in. But it’s hard to feel totally joyful at an overly warm dry spring when the spectre of climate change is whispering over our shoulders. The house martins have arrived but, as Adrian pointed out, how will they repair their homes under the eaves without any mud?
But over and above all at the moment I keep noticing the blackthorn – frothy flurries of white, like bridal veils all over the hedgerows. And, as all country-dwellers know, the pretty dainty flowers hide a nasty crop of thorns – scratch yourself on blackthorn and the cut will frequently go septic. So up and down, sweet and sour, pretty and putrifying go hand in glove. I’ll probably be right as rain (yes please) tomorrow.