Day 82: A Better Class Of Day

Regents Park Liriodendron Tulipifera

A blank canvas of sleep held me steady and restful, while the flotsam and jetsam of yesterday floated away.  A beautiful sunny day and Jimney Cricket is back at my shoulder.  With the help of an early morning bizz on the buzzer from the postman I hit the day at 7.30am.  The pleasure of time to land back in life lifted and carried me in plenty of time to the RIBA – that’s the R-I-B-A rather than riba which has the tinge of a passing reference to a multinational transport company or a Spanish call to arms.  The Florence Hall, on the first floor is a stunning piece of art deco architecture, peaceful and magnificnet, was my suggestion for my meeting with Suzanne Gowler of The Great Generation.

Suzanne was delighted with the choice of location which was the ball that got us rolling on the possibilities as well as logistics of my contribution to the future of the organisation.  Moving from a charity to a social enterprise the vision is to integrate experiential learning programmes that bring best of corporate brains to experience and serve in the creation of sustainable projects in developing economies.  There are an abundance of demand on the ground in countries like Africa, India and Sri Lanka among others and the next challenge is establishing the corporate partnerships and customising the programmes.  It ticks alot of my boxes.  The next step is to get to Uganda to become orientated around the projects on the ground at the end of July.

With plenty of food for thought I moved on to lunch with Liam Cullinane, over from Galway to visit his NUCCA chiropractor.  NUCCA  is a unique chiropractic technique that involves aligning the top bone in the neck, the atlas, or C1, to allow the rest of the spine and nervous system to function at its optimal potential – literally ‘puts the head back on straight’.   21 years ago Liam was seriously disabled by meningitis.  He is insistent on pushing his capabilities and sets the bar high for himself.  He has just returned from a trip to the North Pole as an observer at the world’s coolest marathon and is getting ready to return to Atlanta to visit the Carrick Brain Centre an advanced centre for brain repair and rehabilitiation.  Liam couldn’t speak highly enough of the work that is done there and the impact it has had on him.  What I love about Liam is he believes, he has vision.

I was so glad that I had allowed an open afternoon for a casual open ended catch up with my friend Barbara.  Barbara lives in Fitzrovia, just off Oxford Street.  It seems so posh and upper crust but Barbara is wonderful, normal and down to earth.  My neighbourhood park is Little Wormwood Scrubs her’s is a royal park The Regent’s Park – covering 410 hectares, with a rose garden of over 30,000 roses of 400 varieties, the largest grass sport’s area in London, an open air  the London Zoo and carefully cultivated gardens, an open air theatre and a great range of exotic (to me) trees and shrubs.  I got particularly excited about the tulip tree not just because of the wonderous flower but because I love the obviousness of it’s common name.  A tree with tulips growing in it.  All in all a better class of day.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 78: Buttercup Sunday

I recognise the slow, sludgy energy of my resistance to completions coming on.  It has been creeping up on me over the past couple of weeks.  The more I ignore it the more the power of it’s grimy grip claws into my heart clogging the portals of awe and wonder.  There are only twenty two days left to do; I have already done seventy seven entries well over the half way hump, I have navigated training immersions, a malfunctioning phone battery, loosing my phone and being offline.  The end is in sight and I am on my knees.  I am blinded to awesomeness, I struggle to hitch my heart to the joy of discovery and serendipty.  Yes there is stuff going on, chores to do and a preoccupation with my first interview in 3 years on Tuesday but the weight of the resistance is disproportionate.  This is the snatching of failure from the jaws of success, the unconscious chaffing of self doubt and unrelenting focus on proving my incapability.

Opening to awe is simple.  I can do it effortlessly.  The minute I surrender the need to know and declutter the now wonder is there; it has a personal flavour, lots of nature and sky, funny combinations of colours and things that tickle my fancy.  Mostly they cause me to be wide-eyed and smiling, sometimes sad and contemplative.  It is an act of will to drag myself out into the muggy day and up to Little Wormwood Scrubs, in between the fluffy edges of the flocking clouds there was warm, warm sun.  The park is alive and smiling, the green carpet dotted with clover, daisies and buttercups; brighter than brightest yellow buttercups; oh so cute but believe it or not toxic to cattle, horses and other livestock.  Who would guess.  I linger to soak up the sinking rays.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 59: Tree Lime FluffThere is a tree in Little Wormwood Scrubs that stands in a carpet of the softest of cashmerey fluff.  Creme caramel cotton wool it is a divil to photograph; invisible but not invisible, substantial but insubstantial, amorphous yet a plethora of individual fine fibres.  An etheral substance, an angel’s blanket, fairy fur, stuffing for the cushy settees of elfin living rooms, the raw material of ear muffs and bed socks, the fleece inner lining of pajamas and hooded capes, the angora rabbit of the Woodland World the Spring time bounty for trolls and goblins.  This stuff, this fluff, is so wonderful I am sure it would have been written about.  I was sure that the internet would be awash with the folklore of it, the multiplicty of uses from magic potions to well – upholstery.  I have worked out the tree in question is a Lime Tree, Tilia x Vulgaris according to the Little Wormwood Scrubs (West London) management plan.  Not of the citrus fruit kind mind, but of the sticky bane of urban motorists as Tilia attracts aphids that gorge and then excrete the sap from the tree as a sticky mess that hardens like shellac on anything underneath it.  In the park there is not hide nor hair of aphids or their excreta.  Just the soft cashmerey blanket which I could find nothing about not even when I typed in ‘Tree Lime Fluff’.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 47: Up, Up & Away

Helicopter Seeds in Little Wormwood Scrubs

Thursday was a strange day; weird strange not funny strange.  I was in hospital the day before for a benchmark ultrasound before starting HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) treatment. but when I arrived the ultrasonographer (isnt that a mouthful?) first of all said ‘We are going to look at your baby”…..”oops”.  Great to look young enough to be pregnant or then again perhaps she wasn’t looking?  But equally poignant as this is an experience I have not had but had never consciously realised, until this moment, that I would like to have had and most likely will never have.  Inadvertently digging her hole a little deeper she then asked ‘What is wrong with you?” before seeing eventually the detail on the appointment card identifying my visit as a benchmark scan.

A tiny and completely harmless exchange but my unconscious mind when into overdrive.  Like a meerkat kicking up the dirt of thoughts and feelings of fear and death and drama into my self-conscious mind.  Since I attended Alchemy 4 Success last month with William Whitecloud I have been working my new talisman overtime – as long as I am observing what is going on I have the power.  I was observing and I knew that it was the little part of me that was kicking and screaming to survive, burning the rubber of worry to distract me from the real work of being a creative spirit.  Knowing this was one thing but with the best will in the world I found myself resisting the sting of those pebbles of thoughts and stuck like glue into the deep throaty vibration of it all.

Slowly but surely I am realising the power of nature as a structure to bring me back to my heart, to the space and silence of innocence and not knowing so despite the wet wipes of cloying mists I headed up to Little Wormwood Shrubs where I seem to find a synchronistic gems whatever my mood.  Yesterday this was the only picture I took, smudged by the cloying mists (ok ok unfocused) a clutch of winged helicopter seeds (probably a sycamore maple though the leaves look more like those of a London plane) designed for flight.  It reminded me that I may not be flying high at the moment but I have the tools to create structures that are designed to propel me to higher vibrations. A good old chin wag with a girlfriend and pondering this picture I took brought me back to a sufficient equilibrium to ride the rest of the day – even the late night drama of the violent death of a key character in The Good Wife!

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app.

Day 44: Nature’s Candelebra

Little Wormwood Horse Chestnut Candles

Thank God we didnt have the Ryanair On-Time fanfair on Sunday night.  The downside was that the flight was late getting in which compounded homeward bound travel plans.  It took me longer to get from Gatwick to West London than it did from Cork to Gatwick.  By the time I got in I was ready for popcorn and caramel fudge chocolates that had been intended for a friend.  No surprise I was still awake at 2am.  Wide awake.

Although my diary was clear on Monday the irritation of not being able to get to sleep chewed at me like a dog on a bone.  Bleary-eyed I let my 10.30am pilates class slide and eventually rose to meet the day as it started its slide from its zenith and I tumbled with it; letting time tumble like rushing water through my fingers, focused on the frustration of failing to catch and hold it and make it productive, missing out on the tickle of its joyful falling.  Eventually as the light began to fade I huddled myself out the door and up to Little Wormwood Scrubs, the knobble of a park at the top of my street separated from its big brother scrubs by Scrubs Lane a gash of tarmacadam running a rivulet of traffic from North to South.

I knew I was irritable.  I was struck by how the big letters of irritablity, frustration scratched like a briar across my frontal lobe consciousness tearing up my emotions and fanning the fires of dissatisfaction.  I knew I had the power to shift and that is why I had to take each leaden step to somewhere green, somewhere I could be surrounded by nature doing its thing, where anything my small mind could latch on to would be so irrelevant as to be laughable.  I wasnt sure that nature would be enough, this park is a familar place, I love its pretend wildness in this rather sedate of neighbourhoods but I wasnt expecting too much awesomeness.  I definitely wasnt expecting the rush of joy I experienced when I saw the avenue of Horse Chestnut candles – a breeze of kisses on the wind to blow my cobwebs away and nourish my heart.  When I got home I was inspired to check out if the horse chestnut, Aesculus Hippocastanum, has any medicinal properties.  It turns out that the chestnut bud Bach Flower remedy is prescribed for those who fail to learn the lessons of life, who find themselves repeating the same mistakes over again.  That is a sobering thought but it leaves me grateful for my heart that ensured that I received the remedy.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo iPHone app.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.

Day 28: Anthromorphic Resonance

Little Wormwood Scrubs, London, UK

I went for a walk yesterday and I saw this tree; its gnarled, carbuncular trunk capitvatingly ugly, repelling and visceral.  Like the stripped back view of skeletal musculature.  Fixed and solid yet equally flowing and alive with cellular energy pushing out its imprint into the world.  My heart feels raw and vulnerable.

100 Days of Awe is a playful project I set up to bring my attention to awe in my daily life. I see awe as wonder, a mixture of amazement and respect.  I expect the experience of awe to be about perception shifting awareness and that demands a reframing of some sort.  I am excited to see what will awe me on this journey.

Anne K. Scott is an imagination technologist, her work to teach, facilitate and deliver innovation for individuals and business.  She is the creator of FindYourMojo a FREE iPHone productivity app. If you are interested in what intuitive coaching can do for you please do contact me.  I support clients all over the world.