I got married so that it would be legal to iron  a man’s underpants weekly.
I got married so I could pick cake crumbs out of the carpet as free exercise .
I only got married for sex as the forbidden would be a duty then.Still it felt very sinful so that was ok.
I was so shy my husband thought I was dumb until I cried,Do it again,Sam.Alas he is called John.Still I was a very technical virgin who loved pulling the gas stove to pieces  to see how it worked.One day I shall mend it but for now we live on fish and chips.
When you think about it,getting to know the opposite sex is very dangerous.Getting to know anybody is dangerous but women don’t usually rape you while you are drunk or while you are sober either.Still ,worse than rape is emotional betrayal or spiritual invasion.
The only safe way to live is to commit suicide then noone can hurt you any more.Is there a logical error there somewhere?
I think,take a cat or two to bed, have a baby by artifical means and have hundreds of friends.Why limit yourself? I do and look where it’s got me!

short-eared durham owl
meditating over the dale’s edge,
shadows the fields and folds
in elegant diurnal flight.

on windside,careful sight
may swoop to prey
and away.

your yellow broad-eyed look,
at once both sharp and distant,
holds me.
oh,silence,
oh ,wind on green,
oh. earth,
sky.

immense your held vision,
sphere without centre,
pied geometer of flight,
sketch your descent and ascent.trees bunched by dry stone wall
call heart home.

Anguish is a word I don’t hear very often.Today I saw a synopsis of a biography of Henri Nouwens,a Dutch Canadian priest and writer of many much loved spiritual writing.Yet the title included the word,anguish.
I wonder if nowdays we are allowed to be anguished.First of all,it’s very painful and we ,ourselves ,may try to obliterate it and if we don’t friends may advise us to see a doctor as if all anguish,grief and woe are a mental disorder.Yet surely being humans leading a puzzling fragmented life in a strange consumerist society where death is hidden and illness blamed on the sufferer for being obese,drunk,lazy,manic,frantic,stupid,oversensitive then it’s not an easy task to allow our anguish to have its time and to convey to us and maybe others that something is going on in us that is important.Of course,taking time off work is frowned up on and sitting idly all day is thought lazy.But work may be going on in our psyche/soul which matters. Many people now deny the existence of a soul but we do need a name for the unknown self within which may try to reach us in our night time dreams.

But to label all our inner pain as a mental illness is a mistake,I feel.Indeed the term mental illness can be misused or may be a metaphor.
Suffering is going on all the time as we walk down the street and through the city.We may be wrapped in grief like mantle or if we know the signs we can read the faces of others around us and see the eyes and the lines of anguish mapped on their pale faces.And do we accept this in our friends or do we push them away? We may not need to speak,just to be present.