Pilgrimage Or Quest?

I really do think that sometimes the unconscious mind is working away behind the scenes and sorting things out.

The first time I really experienced this at work was when, sometime in my mid 20s, I just suddenly found the solution to a nightmare that I had on a recurring basis during my childhood.

Every night, I used to imagine that a Wolf would creep into my room, and lie at the end of my bed. Of course, meaning that I spent many nights only half asleep in fear of the creature at the end of my bed.

For apparently no reason, I suddenly realized one day what had been happening.

My mother, out of motherly concern for me, had been checking on me when she thought I was asleep, and during the winter had often placed a blanket folded at the end of my bed.

What she has never realized, because I never told her about my dream, is that she had unwittingly been the cause of this childhood nightmare.

When I realized what had been taking place, nothing magical happened. But I suddenly realized how powerful is the unconscious mind. And how easily suggestible it can be. Of course, I have not continued to have this nightmare into adulthood, but solving this mysterious and quite innocent (on my mother’s part) issue, has given me an insight into myself.

Just recently, something similar has happened. For some time, at the deeper recesses of my mind, I have had a rather hazy notion of something that I might have been asked to do. Almost commissioned to do.

Just last night, in my dreams I did some research, and looked up what this particular commission might mean, and even the name of it has now disappeared from my grasp.

But I have awoken remembering what I looked up. In other words, I know what this thing was that I might have been asked to complete, or commissioned to do.

It is to keep a kind of a diary, but more specifically, what in the dictionary or encyclopaedia that I found the definition in was described as an Ordinary Book Of Hours. One of my carers has just recently attended an exhibition in London of quite extraordinary manuscripts, some of the great treasures of the British Library. This included books of hours created by monks and illuminated in gold leaf and with the most extraordinary illustrations, of course all hand written on Vellum, prepared goatskin, in the days before paper had made its way from China to be manufactured in Britain.

And so, I feel as if I have had revealed to me, something that will be the framework for my blog writing for the future. I shall compile a Book Of Hours, an insight into my life, inner and outer, that may be an insight into the life I lead, restricted as it is by my disability. But a reminder if one is needed that restriction only gives greater purpose.

So that I can include within it some of the experiences that I have which may be of interest to people that do not know me, as well as a document of the way in which my creative life is progressing.

I do not know much about what a Book Of Hours might once have really consisted, except that they are almost always works of great beauty. Containing both spiritual and temporal entries, hence the title I have given to this piece.

And so another insight into myself, perhaps to give me more direction for my creativity, and more excuses for exploring the contacts that I make in the wider world, as I contribute the experience that I have as somebody in receipt of social care. And more than happy to talk about it.

This has meant speaking at conferences and often very much in public about my experiences, and because of my work before I became disabled, in the professional arts. I have no fear of speaking in public to large groups of people, and this perhaps makes me somewhat different to many people. And perhaps by compiling my Book Of Hours, I will have something to remind me of the person that I am and remain, as well as the person that I once was, and what I wish to become.

For what is certainly the case is that I still have ambitions, dreams, and desires. Perhaps the limitations placed upon them only make me more focused. To quote myself in one of the short articles that I have written, I may be damaged goods, but I am certainly not lost property.