Climbing Mountains – January blues and 31 days of madness!

As we start February I look back at the madness that was January. From the world being plunged into the realities and dangers of Trumpland to the usual January blues. At this dull time of year, after the festivities and fun of the festive period I always think of CS Lewis’s words:

“I’ve always found this a trying time of the year.  The leaves not yet out, mud everywhere you go.  Frosty mornings gone.  Sunny mornings not yet come.  Give me blizzards and frozen pipes, but not this nothing time, not this waiting room of the world.”

January inevitably, is always a pensive time, a time of anti-climax, of looking back at the past year and looking to the future – sometimes in hope, sometimes in anxiety. I suppose now with the turmeric turd (as I call him) ensconced in the White House, there is more reason than any to be anxious about what the future may bring. For me personally, being such a lover of nature, a conservationist and environmentalist at heart, I worry about his ignorant, unsubstantiated (and quite possibly insane) views and denial of climate change as merely a ‘Chinese hoax’. That instead of listening to the independent views of thousands of scientists and climate experts around the world, of proven facts about climate change resulting from human activity, that Trump’s ego and his love of money and power could easily cause unparalleled environmental damage that may take years to reverse, if it can be at all. We don’t own this world, we are merely custodians, another animal species that rely on it for life itself. This world is such a precious place, its eco systems so fragile, its wildlife under so much threat from humanity already, that 4 years or dare I say it, 8 years of Trump insanity, of arctic drilling, fracking, extra oil, gas and coal exploration and pollution, may well be too much to recover from. Only time will tell.

January is also about setting goals especially life goals which are always tricky, the positive vibes of saying to yourself that THIS year will be different, this year you will lose those annoying pounds (or stones), achieve those long held goals and dreams, that this will be YOUR year.

It’s a double-edged sword. Yes you should have aspirations, goals, dreams, things that make you happy, but the reality of not achieving them can be dreadful. January is also a time of year that I often find myself falling back into bad habits and bad thinking – the time when depression often rears its ugly head.

So, as a way to combat those feelings and that awful January inertia, back in November I had an utterly mad idea…

Being Facebook friends with the lovely Children’s Laureate, illustrator extraordinaire Chris Riddell, I’ve been watching his posts all through the year. Every day Chris draws or sketches in what he calls his ‘Laureate Log’, a wonderful visual diary of creativity. Well, as Picasso himself said “The best ideas are stolen!”, I decided to do my own daily art record – what I call ‘The Artmaniac Challenge’!

So I set up a friendly inclusive group on Facebook – the Artmaniacs – open to anyone to draw, sketch, paint, sculpt, create a new artwork EVERY DAY for 365 days, starting from January 1st 2017 – January 1st 2018 and post it online in the group and anywhere else they fancy! It was a way for focusing the mind, being productive and a way of forcing you to be creative every day, even on days when all you want is a cuppa and a duvet to hide under.

I had no idea if it would work, but it has, we already have 27 members and growing! It’s been a wonderfully positive thing, a great way of driving out those damn January blues and giving a real sense of achievement to those participating. So in the mad 31 days of January, I and others have 31 pieces of art to show for it, an ever-growing portfolio – and the lovely thing is that it doesn’t matter if they are rough sketches, finished drawings, doodles, paintings, experiments, photography, anything goes! 😀

For someone like me, who has found it so hard to put pen to paper in regards to writing, doing this daily challenge has actually helped me in my writing too, because, if I can spare a few minutes to draw every day, if I can force myself to create something every day, then I can do the same for writing! WE CAN DO THIS!!!

So, here is the gallery of my first month of art, some good, lol, some not so good! 😀 xxxx

Well that’s it – the good, the bad and the ugly! Let’s see what the next month brings. 🙂

N.B. I will also let slip, that a couple of weeks ago, I had some VERY good news involving HarperCollins… I’ll let you all know once everything is signed and sealed. Watch this space…! 😉 xxx

April Bloom

Got home after work, rather knackered, and spent the next few hours outside in the glorious sunshine with my dogs, watching the wondrous display of daffodils and primroses swaying in the wind…sheer bliss!

So, here’s a little ditty…

*

The blushing brides of peach and buttery gold

Blow upon the breeze as memories forgot,

The loves and lives of times gone by

In Spring’s embrace…forget-me-not.

 

The wings of warmer air descends

Bursting with humming lives,

Our fears and thoughts of months ago

Fizzle under sweltering skies.

*

Sophie E Tallis  © 2015

Perseids and the pursuit of time.

So, September has drawn to a close and with it, the last glimpse of hazy summer days of green, full of the flutter of butterflies and the promise of warmth, long before the trees shed their leaves in time for the frosts of dark winter, I find myself pondering the meaning of time.

I find myself staring at the calendar, October…really? Where did the year go?

The grass will only need another cut, maybe two before it’s growth stops for the season. Mushrooms and toadstools sprout like Autumn flowers from every nook and cranny, pushing their heads through the thick carpets of acorn and horse-chestnuts that seem to litter our garden. I’ve managed to pick a few highly exotic looking pink toadstools which I can’t identify in any of my nature books, with billowing tops like frilly edged bolero skirts!

A few fleeting Speckled Wood and Small White butterflies still linger in the margins, their brief lives coming to a close soon, but delighting in the odd sunny day we still have and the harvest of Autumn fruits to feed upon. Only a few blooms still remain, the odd rose, some Michaelmas daisies, but mostly the garden looks barren now compared to the riotous colour that has dazzled us through spring and summer. Now the golden hues of Autumn are the palette of the day, beautiful in their own right, but a reminder that winter is coming. Time is passing.

I’m not just thinking of the literal meaning of passing time – minutes, hours, years of our lives ticking away as surely as those grains of sand in an hour glass, grey hairs appearing, wrinkles creeping or deepening, a paling of the skin, a yellowing of the eyes, spots on hands, or gravity working it’s inevitable magic. But the abstract form of time as well. Is time our friend or our enemy? A steady hand who guides and follows us through the ups and downs of our life? Enriches us with the experiences we share, that shape who we are? Or a nasty bully snidely reminding us how short our brief lives actually are, no more than a fleeting spec in the cosmic soup of the universe and how many precious years we have wasted…and how few we have left in which to achieve our dreams/goals? Time – friend or foe? I’m not sure where I fall on this one.

Certainly, like so many of us, I’ve always felt myself doggedly pursuing time, much like a hamster stuck on a spinning wheel, trying to cram far too much into every 24 hours and cursing myself when I couldn’t achieve the impossible. Most of our lives are spent in this endless juggling game – juggling jobs, families, life, and the stresses and workloads inherent with them, then trying to squeeze anything else in the few hours left, such as writing, creating or …er…breathing!

My reason for this ‘timely preoccupation’ is simple. Not only was last year the first time I unexpectedly found myself with nothing but time on my hands, and it was not been a welcome companion (thankfully I am VERY busy now and manically juggling things again), but this year is proving to be a pendulum of highs and lows.

From working a very full-time and responsible job, which certainly clocked in excess of 50 hours a week, not counting work on weekends and evenings, after 16 years of juggling my job and constantly chasing time, my body suddenly said, “NO!”. Yes, there were a lot of factors involved in it, and yes, I should have received support and didn’t, especially when I asked for it. Stress and overwork can have devastating results if left unchecked, a year later and I am still struggling to regain my health fully. The last two years have undoubtedly been the strangest and most traumatic years of my life, but as I was looking back over this lovely summer I remembered an event I witnessed nearly two months ago that kind of put things in perspective for me, as well as bringing as smile to my face.

I was fortunate to see one of nature’s true spectacles, through my own somewhat scratched and blurry glasses. I speak of course, of the annual event of the Perseid meteor shower which hurls its cascade of dust and small rocky particles across our atmosphere every summer (July 23rd – August 20th 2014), with the peak usually falling around August 11-13th. The Perseids are named after the Greek deity, Perseus, whose constellation they appear to come from.

I’d been having serious insomnia problems again, and ended up going downstairs. It was August the 12th and I remembered the Perseids were happening, so with my white wolves and a warm fleece, I snuggled in a chair and gazed up at the clear heavens. Living out in the sticks has its definite advantages, no light pollution. Not only do we have the most amazing sunsets here, uninterrupted across the fields, but the skies here are the clearest I’ve seen for miles around. Seeing as my wobbly legs and dizzy head prevent me from standing and gazing up without toppling over, the chair was a great idea. Wow! Apart from the few faint streaks I saw whizzing through the sky, I was amazed by three blazing fireballs, really bright, and only forty minutes or so apart. Truly spectacular!!!

It just reminded me how small my problems are, how vast and beautiful the universe is, how we never truly know what is out there or what life will throw our way and how precious time is…every single second of it. As precious as air, as rare as love, and totally priceless. Every second counts. It doesn’t matter if you think you’ve messed up the last few years, or want to re-run the last fifty years, it’s never too late to make the most of the time you have, every day, every moment of it.

Life is beautiful, don’t let worries or the daily grind make you forget it.

😀

http://youtu.be/KQlOAXF4T60

http://youtu.be/vTXA5gYWtXs

For more meteor showers coming your way, here are some dates for the next of nature’s spectacles! 😀 xxxx

Thanks to Meteor Watch for this: http://www.meteorwatch.org/

A pinch and a punch for the first of the month…a slap and a kick for being so quick!

December! Really? How the hell did that happen? Only a blink ago it was the summer, then Autumn turned our gardens to a deeper shade of gold, now shop windows are frosted with aerosols, lights dangle overhead, brightly coloured trees sprout up like iced gems all around us…Chritsmas is upon us!

Wow…

Well, although like most of us, the thought of another year passing, another year older, sends a slight shudder down my spine, I do LOVE Christmas. I love everything about it, it’s ridiculous optimism, that childish sense of magic in the air, over indulgent cupboards and fridges bursting at the seams, all those naughty treats you deprive yourself of, now suddenly tangible…you have the best excuse in the world for nibbling those crisps, those heavy fudge cakes, or sugary treats, hey it’s Christmas! Forget the diets, guys!

I find myself being a child again at this time of year. Yes, for me I HAVE to get my tree up on the 1st December, decorated and glowing and green…and although it’s branches are less green now and more than a little crispy, I adore every moment. LOVE IT!!!!

So, in the chilly air, we got our Christmas trees, one enormous 7ft 6″ leviathan for the living room, the bushiest tree I have ever seen – so bushy in fact it that it got stuck in the netting machine gizmo, where it took three of the tree guys to force it through! Then we have a smaller tree for the hall, looking cheerily out of the window to welcome all.

Then it’s the yearly struggle to remember which ‘safe place’ we’ve snaffled the Christmas boxes in, messily taped up to try to contain the copious amounts of decorations in. It is true that I cannot throw ANY Christmas decorations away and for the last twenty years I’ve had a tradition where I buy one new Christmas decoration every year, so now I have loads!

After fiddling with stands and buckets, trimming tree-tops, pruning trunks, we had the trees up and looking proud.

Lol, okay, I admit to a slight idiot move on my part…er…namely cutting too much off the top of our perfect tree so I kind of ruined the look of it, but, I’m nothing if not creative, so some wire, superglue & sticky tape later, and I’d reattached the top & stuck the star on to cover up my cock-up. Looks beautiful now!

Then it’s the usual tangle of fairy lights…it doesn’t matter how carefully you put them away, the little buggers will tangle themselves involuntarily! Amazing all lights were working…ahem, after a sale last year, I found myself facing over 800 fairy lights! 400 on each tree would look ridiculous, right? Amazingly we could have used more, they just seemed to disappear in the branches!

Oh, but what lovely festive fun! For the first time in months I actually found myself laughing, an amazing feat given that I was so ill through November. But like a tonic, the Christmas spirit is definitely rubbing off on me and all those around. An easing of the spirit. Somehow, the challenges and difficulties of 2013, a year I shall never forget though I’d like to, seem to dissolve against such magical optimism. Problems may be large or small, but they CAN be overcome, they CAN be solved!

Positive thinking, right? Yes, yes, YES! 😀

Anyway, advent calendar windows opened, dangling Father Christmas decorations up, decorations on doors, garlands over mantlepiece and up the stairs rails, and cheesy baubles on trees. LOVE it!

One other lovely thing, that I will definitely make a Tallis tradition, is going around the garden with a pair of secateurs, taking branches of fir, spruce and holly. Why pay for a Holly wreath or bow, when you can make one?! SOOOO simple and satisfying to do, just a little wire to hold the branches together and a red bow, viola! One instant door decoration and so special as it’s from your own garden!

If you don’t have fir, spruce or holly available, confer branches would work just as well.

Then, of course, it’s the long process of Christmas card writing – which depending on your mood, can either be a gloriously relaxing affair, or a stressful nightmare! The worst, is drawing up your list, desperately wracking your brain over your second cousin removed and her new hubby whose name you can’t remember, hoping you haven’t forgotten anyone, grumbling over the cost of stamps as they increase every year, finding too many cards and not enough envelopes and writing the wrong addresses on the wrong cards, before rushing off to make sure you’ve posted all your overseas ones before the cut off! Manic? yes, but still lovely! 🙂

Luckily managed to do all mine this year, including the overseas ones, with time to spare! Wow, that’s a first!

Yes…December has arrived in all its glittering shinyness and though I may miss the blissful heat of summer, nothing beats a crackling log fire and some hearty cheer!

So whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re plans, wherever you are, here’s wishing you all a wonderfully happy, magical and glorious Christmas and festive season!

😀 xxxxxxx

Merry Christmas Everyone! 😀 xxxx

My Own Silver Linings PlayBook – The Road to Recovery and ReadWave.

Firstly, I’m so pleased that after weeks of having blog technical problems, everything is sorted. So, hello again my lovelies! 😀 xx

Secondly, I simply cannot get my brain to accept that it is November already. All Hallows Eve has passed in a haze of heightened sugar and badly written hammy horror and suddenly the nights are full of smoke from blazing bonfires and the familiar shrill whizz of fireworks.

We’ve had a mild Autumn, a thankful tiding given the rare and gloriously sun-drenched Summer we enjoyed this year, with its bounty of flowers, butterflies and bees, its azure skies and hard-baked earth. Ah…what bliss!

But, as the clocks have now gone back, reminding us that Winter is truly at our doorstep, and the dull days linger less and less, with darkness descending earlier each day, there is no escaping that yet another year is drawing to a close.

So, where has it gone?

Have you achieved the goals you set yourself at the beginning of the year? – in those heady moments of New Year’s Eve, when everything is exciting and fresh and the year ahead seems like an endless Pandora’s box of possibilities and opportunities? Or, has the year passed you by in a blur?

For me, it’s definitely been the latter, but I have optimism for the next year, after all, 13 has never been a lucky number for me, so 2014 should be fine, eh?

But, there have been some good things this year, apart from the lovely Summer, and the support of family and friends (you know who you are!) and my adorable white wolves… earlier in the year, while on Goodreads, I was contacted by a rather nice chap called Rob Tucker. He had just co-founded a new website, ReadWave, http://www.readwave.com/ dedicated to showcasing new writers and the best short stories for readers to enjoy and share. He kindly invited me to join ReadWave as he liked my work and asked me to spread the word, which I did, diligently telling all my mates about this amazing new site which many of them have now also joined.

The beauty of ReadWave, unlike other writing sites, is that there are no forums to get embroiled in petty arguments with infantile minded trolls cruising the net to pick a fight because they have nothing better to do. It’s just all about the stories. Read what you want, comment if you want, like and share if you want, it’s entirely up to you. They have some truly great stuff on there. I’m thrilled and rather humbled that all my work seems to be popular and is well received, http://www.readwave.com/sophie.e.tallis/ and I’ve even had the honour of having a piece ‘Staff Picked’, they now call it the ‘Editor’s Choice’, reserved for the very best work. Woo hoo!

This has been a particular solace to me this year, as due to this damn illness and the strange mental effects it has, my short-term memory and concentration are totally shot to hell, which means that I really am incapable at the moment of being able to focus on anything long enough to sustain a thought through to its conclusion. (I won’t tell you how long it takes me to do each one of these posts, it’s truly embarrassing).

In other words, novel-writing is totally IMPOSSIBLE. The plain truth is, that since I got sick back in Jan/February, I haven’t been able to touch any of my book projects. As weeks became months, I stopped crucifying myself over it and just had to let the frustration and anger go, I could no sooner do it than fly to the moon. My physiotherapist told me to take things slowly, in my stride, that part of my re-cooperation after such a huge vestibular collapse, was to do small things. Try to read. Try to write a sentence. To take the mental challenges as slowly as the physical rehabilitation. Walk before you can run kind of thing.

Reading was impossible for the first couple of months due to swirling text, then I simply kept zoning out, reading the same page over and over like some zombie or a toy whose battery had stopped. Over the summer though, I had a breakthrough, I was able to read my first book since February, it took me a LONG time, but I did it and I retained what I read…well, most of it. Then I read another book, and another, and another, all great mental exercises (also my friend Lindsey Parsons fantastic debut novel, Vortex, was such a pleasure to re-read). Again, over the summer I tried writing and kept zoning out again. A simple thing like writing a letter, would take hours and hours of stopping and starting and resting. But weirdly, one thing I found I was able to do, as I had done before I got ill, that somehow didn’t require that heightened level of concentration but just simply flowed naturally out of me, was write poetry and short stories!

And so, after the frustration and failures of not being able to do anything, I found after many long months, that I could still do one thing and do it well. So, I have a HUGE thank you to say to Rob Tucker. That unexpected encounter on Goodreads gave me a creative life-line, like this blog, which in turn has helped me in my recovery. Rob doesn’t know any of this, but if he reads this and I hope he does, THANK YOU!

The icing on the cake, was when he recently asked me to become a Staff Reviewer on ReadWave, which I gladly accepted. Then finding out that another short story I’ve written is going to be published next year by a lovely UK-based publisher (unlike my last one!) and that I’ve been asked by several authors to provide illustrations for them for their books, all wonderful small things I can do!

All this has taught me, that although times can get very tough and bleak, there is always a silver lining out there, you’ve just got to keep going and look for it!

😀 xxxx

A C.S. Lewis kind of a day…

It’s amazing what a little sunshine can do to lift our spirits, awaken our senses and inspire us…

Sophie E Tallis - Author/Illustrator

We herald the coming of spring with welcome arms and lifted hearts.

The crisp coldness of winter has passed, so to has the drab nothingness of January as described by C.S Lewis, that anti-climax after the festivities and over indulgencies of Christmas – “I’ve always found this a trying time of the year.  The leaves not yet out, mud everywhere you go.  Frosty mornings gone.  Sunny mornings not yet come.  Give me blizzards and frozen pipes, but not this nothing time, not this waiting room of the world.”

So I sit here on an uncharacteristically warm March morning with the sun upon my face. The first bees have awoken from their winter slumber. All around is a soft cacophony of birdsong. Finches and sparrows welcome the sun as I do and the collared doves declare their love in echoed coos amongst the tree tops. Banks of wild daffodils sway in the…

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Winter haze, snow days…life goes on!

It’s been a little while since I last posted, sorry folks for the delay, just a few unforeseen bumps along the road of life, but hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?

Just over a couple of weeks ago I was staring out of my window at a scene of almost indescribable beauty.

Everything lay shrouded under a mantle of magical white. Landscapes I knew so well, were suddenly alien. Formless lumps and bumps smothered beneath snow. The trees and thickets, so stark and mournful in winter, had grown frosty fruits of their own over night. Icicles adorned gutters and everywhere lay a stillness and silence so strange to behold in a garden which usually resembles an aviary.

Little three-pronged footprints skitted across the lawn, looking this way and that in the hope of food. Deeper imprints from the various wild creatures that frequent our wooded garden, could be seen gathering round the feeders we put out.

The pond had frozen solid and there, as reminder of the beauty and cruelty of life, was a track, leading from the edge of the pond across the frozen water to the little island where the moorhens live. A mink.

A creature never intended to be on this little sceptred isle of ours, not indigenous but introduced, brought over here for the cruelest of reasons, to farm them not for meat, for us to live from, but for the vanity of fashion – for fur to adorn the wealthy and arrogant. And why was this mink suddenly roaming our countryside? Because it’s freedom had been given by those who oppose the fur trade. A noble endeavour, but of course a short-sighted one, and our indigenous wildlife has paid the price. Much like our poor English crayfish, on the brink of extinction from introduced foreign invaders, our otters struggle against the competition and our birds fall prey.

And so, in this scene of snowy loveliness I was reminded of the arrogance of man, the ‘great interferer’, who has through ignorance, apathy or intention caused the suffering of so much of our planet’s wildlife – species that were here long before us but whose lives now hang in the balance on the most tenuous of threads because of us.

The moorhens, a breeding pair who had mated for life, had been living on the little island in my pond for longer than I have been living in this house. Last year with utter delight, we saw them raise three broods of chicks – little black balls of fluff with outsized feet, 18 chicks in total! We put out corn for them daily in addition to the wild bird seed mixes, peanut feeders, vegetable suet and dried fruit we put out daily for all the garden birds. Helping nature where we can. Anyway, there was the track of this mink, heading straight for where the moorhens have their permanent home. No, I didn’t see any blood, just a few brown black feathers. But unmistakably, there will be no moorhen chicks this year.  Only a single moorhen remains, the male, left alone nervously swimming the pond as it thawed, running and flying at the first sign of danger, seeming to look for its lost partner.

A sad tale to be sure…but it got me thinking about life, about all those calamities that befall us, those obstacles we have to overcome, those hoops we jump through, those times of strife.

Certainly for me, tough times are when I “go to the mattresses”, I’ve been through enough really tough times to recognise when something truly qualifies as a major disaster or simply another pot hole in the journey we all find ourselves on. That’s not to minimise anyone’s ‘bad time’, we all have days even weeks when we just shouldn’t have crept out from under the duvet, when everything we touch turns to pig slop, but you do find a perspective in life when you’ve really had struggles. As a result, you are able to deal with the odd crisis or recognise simply when things aren’t as bad as they seem – a lucky escape wrapped in a drama!

For me, everything is a matter of perspective. Everything I have and have achieved has been through damn hard work, sweat, blood, tears and persistence – no fickle luck, no easy hand outs or rich family members, just slog, but that does build character.

So, when the dust settles and you’ve picked yourself up. Look around. Smell the air, breathe deep and realise that things always happen for a reason. That you may just have had a lucky escape from a bad situation that could, and probably would, have become a lot worse. See those silver linings? They’re for you.

So, the next time something ‘bad’ or unexpected happens to you, take the time to reflect, look up from your duvet and simply breathe and you may just find that a new door opens up for you and a new horizon brighter than any you could have imagined!

As for my lonely moorhen, I cannot promise that he will find another partner, that life will get any easier for him, despite my efforts, but life does go on. Within days a pair of wild ducks arrived and a couple of pheasant have been taking up residence…life goes on.

So good luck to you all, my friends, my supporters, my family, life IS a wondrous and beautiful trip, make sure you don’t miss it!  😀 xx

Magical memories are made of this…

We may not have the frozen pipes, blankets of white or the crisp beauty of frost on windows, crunch of grass under foot or the gasp of cold air…but this has been a wonderful Christmas full of magic and beauty.

Although the incessant drip drip of rain-soaked days threaten to dampen spirits, the whole mystique of Christmas remains the same as it did when I was a child.

Fridges and freezers groaning with food, fires blazing, candles lit, presents nestling like small children beneath laden Christmas tree boughs. The whole twinkling wonderment of it. Then the intoxicating smells – roasting chestnuts, spruce, the sweet zestiness of clementines, the smoke of coal and seasoned logs, the heady scent of Christmas itself…pure joy!

So, despite the downpours, wellies caked in mud, garden perpetually waterlogged, the drabness all around, the spirit of Christmas is well and truly alive. Family, friends, loved ones and the unmistakable air of magic…what more could anyone wish for? 😀

Hoping you all had a fabulous Christmas too! xx

Snow today, gone tomorrow…

Well, the snow has receded leaving the cold behind.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

There is something so magical about snow, something that touches us in such a profound manner, that taps not only into our childhood but our memories of fairy tales, of snowy landscapes where great deeds are done or monsters lurk…

I always remember reading passages from The Snow Queen (see my illustration), or the ‘ever Winter’ of Narnia.

Even the snowy scenes at the beginning of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (the best of the Star Wars films in my opinion). There is such a potency to snow and harsh wintry landscapes, that wonderful mix of magic, menace and mystery…the purity of white, covering…who knows? what hidden dangers lurk beneath it? Beauty and the harsh realities of survival. Air, so crisp and arctic, it takes your breath away. It’s all a heady mix for the senses.

So, if we are to have this deep freeze, this cold, then let us have the snow as well and not this soggy drabness!

😀