Miscellany

It is my day off and I'd like to be outside in the park, but my joints are playing up and I'm not really walking well enough to go traipsing around on my own. So I'm catching up on bits of non-work computer stuff, instead.

I was going to post something serious, going to work on something from the placeholder post I wrote a few weeks ago now, or maybe a post on economics and spirituality and abundance and my take on these, but I've used up all my concentration for today so you get miscellany instead.

Had a lovely chat with Sweetie this morning about the future. Lovely lovely. Nothing we didn't already know, nothing we hadn't touched on before, but it was good to reaffirm that our plans for our lives are compatible.

On Wednesday we have a meeting with Potential Future Housemate to talk about house-sharing stuff. I am hoping it goes well. If not, I need to have a good re-think about some of the shorter-term future. I certainly can't afford to live alone and have the space I need to do the work I want to do.

This week I e-mailed the chaplain at Academic Institution to ask about... well, I'm not sure all of what I'm asking about, which was why writing the e-mail was difficult. Some of it is a matter of specific advice on a particular project of mine, but that overlaps with some major gaps in my understanding and faith. It's all a bit tangly. I'm not sure whether to point him at this blog or not. For now I will wait.

Yesterday I sang in a choral concert at fairly short notice. I have Lauridsen's setting of "O Magnum Mysterium" stuck in my head now. There are worse earworms.

Earlier this week I was feeling quite twitchy. This happens from time to time and usually passes in 2-3 days, and this time was no different in that respect. The worst of it is something I call the "what-ifs", not positive, expansive what-ifs like the ones Graham posts but more ominous and fearful. What if all my students quit? What if I fail my exams? What if I hurt those I care about, what if I alienate those I love, what if I miss everything important in life, what if I fail, what if I cause harm? It's a sort of litany of all the ways I could be unlovable, all the ways I could err, all the ways I could mess things up. It's part of the way my brain works: I have a lot of ideas, they all branch off of one another like a tree and I have trouble following only one branch. Sometimes this is an advantage, in that I have some pretty good ideas. Sometimes it's a hindrance, trying to decide which limb I can rest on, which bit of the tree to climb next. This was a particularly damaged limb, a blackened and diseased piece of wood, not safe to sit on for any length of time, but try telling my brain that!

On Monday I took this to my paper journal, where I don't worry about anonymity or what people might think. I wanted a quick answer to the what-if gremlins, a short and memorable rebuttal. And I got one, in the phrase "God will still love you." I hadn't expected that.

I would love to say that this drove the what-ifs away, that I felt better instantly, that I slept without nightmares that night. It didn't have anything like that sort of effect. I kept feeling anxious and twitchy. Whatever weird brain chemistry thing was happening had to run its course. But I think it helped, in that the twitchiness was a little easier to bear. That in itself is a mercy.

Placeholder post

Too many things to think about, let alone to post about! My brain, at the moment, is all about big ideas, general concepts, broad careless strokes of a chunky brush dipped in searingly bright colours. It's in my practising, my teaching, even composing (such as it is) is coming at me in big forms and harmonic structure rather than melodic line and fine nuance.

Typical, then, that this week in my academic work I need to write a report on Big Project, a meticulously detailed report of what I learned and how I learned it, complete with appendices, tables and charts. As someone who normally does that sort of learning in a more organic and intuitive way, I'm struggling a little to identify these things, but as a teacher and a musician I can do self-scrutiny well enough; as someone who thinks the structure of the assignment is not actually that helpful to the learning process I'm resentful of having to jump through the hoop. But the biggest problem is really that I keep getting distracted by big ideas.

The way I usually work through ideas is to talk about them or write about them.

Things I would like to write about, right here and right now, but for which I really haven't got the spare brain cycles:

-How my spirituality/beliefs relate to teaching music; how I can be more generally supportive of the families I work with, through music teaching and not in any overtly religious framework; how to pray about teaching
-I've touched on it a bit before, but more on music performance and spirituality and my current understanding of the relationship between the two
-Chronic pain and how I deal with that and various other physical and mental health difficulties. I'm not actually sure I can do this without turning it into a whinge-fest or completely destroying the fragile anonymity I'm trying to maintain here.
-Words and meaning; images and meaning; sounds and meaning. In the beginning there was the Word, we're told--but do we mean the word, or do we mean meaning itself? And how does this relate to our being made in God's image, and being creators of meaning ourselves?
-Psalmody and how/why it seems to work so much better for me when chanted or sung; the line between speaking and chanting, and between chanting and singing. I'd quite like to do lots of research into chanted/sung psalmody in the Jewish tradition and how that relates to the worship patterns of the early Church. And I'd like to get to know it all so much better, and find or help create an authentic, aesthetic and accessible sung/chanted Psalmody for English translations. Yes, lots of work is being done on this already; I'm essentially playing catch-up, in an academic sense. Meanwhile I keep singing them in Morning Prayer, and one day indeed pours out its song to another as in Psalm 19 this morning.
-Material poverty (of others) and asceticism (the temptation to it in myself, and a certain pointlessness). I really haven't ironed out my thoughts on this.
-FaceBook, Twitter, blogging, other ways of keeping in touch and building communities online and how I see (and how I use) these various tools.
-Food and prayer and (especially shared) meals, and an assortment of thoughts I've been having on these recently; Eucharist and sacrament within and without standard liturgy; this also relates to creating a welcoming home, and to being spiritual/religious in a pluralist/secular society, creating rituals that can be shared and meaningful without excluding anyone or making them feel uncomfortable.

The assignment will have to come first, I'm afraid. And I've got a busy week in other terms as well, so need to be careful not to commit to too much yet. But I might be able to write about one of these by Saturday-ish. Which would you like to read?