Panty Pad

I’m wearing a panty pad in my bra. This is not, I hasten to assure you, a sign of advancing senility. No, indeed. I do know where panty pads are supposed to be applied (I understand the clue in the name), but this was an inspired improvisation. Where the wound and the bra strap have been coming into contact, it has left small bloodstains on the fabric. I was reluctant to apply an adhesive dressing, so I turned the problem around and applied the adhesive panty pad to the bra instead. It is, after all, hygienic and fit for purpose. Errr… apologies to anyone if this happens by chance to be the very first entry you read in this blog … this subject matter isn’t fully representative of the whole. At least, I don’t think so. Nor am I proposing to post a photo to support this entry. Moving swiftly on…

A friend once shared that lack of feedback was her reason for giving up blogging – she felt that had she received some evidence that her words were being read and appreciated by a wider audience than the two of us, she would have been encouraged to continue. Sometimes when I feel discouraged, her comment comes back to me. When I’m feeling insignificant, when I’m not receiving the affirmations I crave, when it feels like I’m giving and giving and not receiving, I question again my own motives in writing.

Recently I’ve either read or heard it said that when we are at peace with ourselves, there is silence; it is when we lack peace within that we begin to emit sound. If I could find where I came across that, I’d like to check it out again, to hold my own thoughts on the subject up against it and see how they compare. I wonder how writing fits in – I have to admit that sometimes I prefer to write first drafts with a pen on paper, that intimate acquaintance with the words somehow creating the relationship that enables the writing to flow.

If the world exists to help us recognise who we are … as I try to finish that sentence, follow that train of thought, it pulls out of the station and chugs gently away from me leaving me to try and pull the threads together and create some kind of article that isn’t rags and tatters. What exactly am I trying to say, and to whom? Answers on a panty pad, if you like.

Getting back to my friend's comment, it would have been easy to feel discounted by her remark. I was reading and commenting on her blog entries – was that not enough? Were my words insufficient encouragement? Instead I recognised that she was unconsciously offering me an honest mirror in which I was able to check my own attitude and if I didn’t like what I saw, to find the greater truth that would be more beautiful to behold. I come back and re-read my own words from time to time. Perhaps it reassures me in some way, tells me like the L’Oreal advert, “You’re worth it!” Maybe that’s what this is about.

In ‘A Course in Miracles’ which I’ve been working my way through, I’ve reached Part II which begins with the sentence: ‘Words will mean little now.’ It goes on to explain that from now we will be looking for the periods of wordless deep experience that will follow our waiting in quiet expectation of encountering truth.