Sticky things

This weekend, my husband and I managed a walk together, just the two of us, to celebrate 11 years of being married. It was a gloriously bright May day, clear blue skies, with a chilly wind. This time of year is so spectacular! You can almost feel the intense energy bursting forth out of the trees, hedges and land. It’s a great time of year to forage too. Over the past decade or so, I have been learning and picking up bits and pieces about the land and wild foods. I try not to put myself under pressure as it can feel overwhelming at times, but if I figure that if I can learn a couple of new things every season, I will gradually and easily start to build up an internal bank of wisdom, and that feels good an manageable.

This Spring, a new friend who is very knowledgeable about plants told me about the cleansing properties of clivers, (the plant we called ‘sticky willy’ at my school when we pulled it up and stuck it to each others’ jumpers!). It works on the watery aspects of our body and is wonderful as a lymphatic drainage tool. Simply breaking off a few stems and, after washing, placing it in a glass bottle of water overnight yields a cucumber-y drink which tastes and feels good to drink. (Don’t leave it for more than a day or two though as it starts to ferment!)

On the walk with my husband, there were great banks of clivers mixed in with the stinging nettles (amazing anti-histamine properties there! and as often happens when I get out into the open space, ideas flowed and the topic of sticky things emerged.

In the body, when we don’t move enough or move too repetitively, things get sticky - there is less space for fluid movement, things rub against each other that shouldn’t and we get stiffness and pain. (There is a wonderfully quirky scientist, Gil Hedley who talks about the ‘fuzz’ that builds up around our joints when we don’t move enough and there is a slightly grisly video here that shows the fuzz in situ on a cadaver if that’s your thing!)

Emotions are also sticky. Some years ago, when I was having a course of CBT, my therapist talked to me about how anxiety is sticky. She said that it can start with one thing and then before we know it, we are anxious about something else, and something else. It gathers other things, situations, possibilities towards it, making that ball of anxiety bigger and stickier.

Other emotions can be like that too and, unfortunately, it’s usually the negative ones. We might start out angry at how someone has treated us, but over time, we can become more angry generally. The traffic, the changes in our community, the world. That sticky anger gathers more towards it, and before we know it, we can find ourselves operating from that place more and more. And, if we don’r do something with that anger - stand up for something, expell it in some way, make our own changes, we find ourselves stewing in it.

Fear is also sticky. We can start to layer up all the reasons to be afraid, and oh boy there are SO many reasons to be afraid at the moment. Fear can be more slippery than anger and can show up in so many ways, but again, it never leads to feeling good. We might be ‘safe’/’prepared’/’informed’ but happiness, contentment and relaxation become harder to find.

So my wanderings led me to ponder if I could consciously start making more strengthening and enjoyable feelings sticky too. Can I make wonder or awe or gratitude or honesty sticky for myself? Can I even visualise a gloopy, joyful ball of playfulness rolling its way through my day, gathering situations to it that might otherwise be serious and heavy? Can a drudgey task be infused with that gungey brightness.

Honestly, even thinking about it is making my mind work in a different way!

There is so much that is out of our control right now, but not everything. We do have the choice to direct our thinking differently. And our thinking becomes our actions. Our actions impact those around us and beyond. It might seem small, not enough, but it is SOMETHING. And if we all did SOMETHING..well…