Time and motion study

This week ( 30th September to 6th October ) I have been in Greece. This was a family holiday booked much earlier in the year for the benefit of my lovely husband who is Rather An Active Sort. We are at a Nielson Resort which means there are A Lot of Healthy Things To Do laid on.

This suits him enormously but I had my concerns. I have been rather pleasantly surprised. By the time that you read this I will have :

  • written 3k+ more of Georgiana & The Municipal Moon
  • read and reviewed one middle grade girls’ fantasy
  • read and reviewed a huge YA fantasy ( with demons!)
  • read three more books on my Kindle
  • written two articles for the #seamagic project
  • posted at least five #seamagic links on Facebook & Twitter
  • done four sessions each of yoga, zumba, aqua-aerobics and stretch & relax
  • walked, swam, snorkelled – and ate too much
  • written this post – obviously

Not the only fantasy reader…

Now it has to be said that I haven’t had to cook or clean this week (huzzah!) but I have socialised more than I would normally. My intention here is not to boast ( well, perhaps a little) but to show myself that I can do all sorts of different things and still find time to write & other authorly stuff.

Some things just keep going, no matter what.

I rather hope you might have read an earlier post about using your core – I’d like to add that this is not a contradiction. I don’t actually find I can multi-task much. I can do things in sequence, not parallel.

I believe that this week has worked best when I have thrown myself whole-heartedly into exploring a half-submerged cave, dancing like a loon or writing about Regency Selchester. I can’t do two things at once very well – but I can do them one after the other – even in, say, twenty minutes.

Close of play – even for Lovely Husband.

 How do you fit your many tasks in during the week? 

The Heart of Lightness

(dedicated to the Music Room Poets and all my other creative friends)

Image courtesy of Futurity.com

In the last week I’ve been think about the core of things a great deal.

My friend Kathryn Evans.

I thoroughly enjoy my belly-dancing classes and here we work on our cores so that we can do two contrasting things at once. It’s a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. We might do snake arms as a slow and sinuous pace whilst shimmying our hips fast enough to make the coins on our hip-scarves jingle. Lots of concentration involved for me.

I also go to yoga – and core strength is central here too (pun intended).  By engaging the core, you can develop flexibility, say, in bridge pose to loosen the spine safely – but you can also use it to increase your focus in a balance like tree pose. The key is not to force but to allow a posture to come.

This last weekend I was at West Dean for a magical poetry workshop led by Philip Wells. One of the themes I picked up on was the core of engagement with each other and our creativity. On one hand, I need to open up, allow myself to be vulnerable – but on the other hand, I have to respect my own truth as I do that of others. Somehow I want to show sensitivity to others without that horrible inhibiting self-censorship: that’s me back to doing two opposing things at once.

In my understanding , the physical core and the creative are intimately connected. It doesn’t matter if it’s dance, painting or writing novels. By sloughing off my outward shy and sometimes cynical outer shell, I can let something new, trembling but truthful emerge. It takes courage – ‘coreness’ – to do that ( I think of Chaucer and hir corages ).

How do you centre yourself?

Dragonfly image by Eduardo Terrazas

Dragonfly

I crack my sternum:

The imago pulses,

A skin sinks in the pond.

                                       K. M. Lockwood September 2012