Written on Monday September 15, 2014… That date means a lot: in Mexico, my native
country, it's the Independence Day celebrations... for me here in the UK, my
adopted country, it was the day of my rebirth (or regeneration if I must)... as
a writer, as a healer... my first visit to the Isle of Avalon...
I went to
Glastonbury for the first time this weekend, and I worked harder than I have
possibly ever worked in my life! Before you jump into any sort of wacky
conclusions (especially because this was particularly intended to be posted on
the Friday after the YouTube upload of The Glastonbury Mystery, it does not
mean that our Renaissance-Man Director Mani Navasothy overworked us… well, yes,
he did, a little bit, but that is not the point… hehehe). Kidding, so before you jump into any sort of
conclusion then, let me tell you this: I
have talked about my path, about my process of healing and creativity, in many
previous posts, and by this time I should have my Healer blog all pretty and
set up, so in this post I’m going to go no-boundaries and delve deep into the
four pillars that constitute me: I am firstly and foremost a creator, and even
after the disappointment of knowing certain dark truths about one of my
favourite authors from my teens, I still have a poignant love for everything
that revolves around Morgaine and the Mists of Avalon. Certainly, everything
related to King Arthur, Excalibur and the Round Table will always mean a great inspiration
source for my own Lady Rhiannon and Sir Orlando… You will have to wait until
Tuath, the second book in my Pentacle series to read about that ;) although I
am giving many hints constantly!
So, that’s
the first “Me” pillar: the Writer. And I
must say, it has struggled to stay up for quite a while now. It’s difficult, more than even those people
that tell me to “think realistically” imagine.
Everyone tends to think that just because I am a dreamer it means that I
don’t know the real price of things, but it’s the other way around… See, I have
decided to become a full-time optimist because it’s the only way that I don't
want to die every single day I feel I’m a living failure… Now, most people would want to jump in and
reassure me here, but I’m not saying this to look for pity, I’m saying this
because it is the truth: I found my best medicine against depression ever, and
it turns out that I had it with me all along, I just hadn’t really been using
it until I had to leave England last January… that was the only thing I could
cling to, my optimism! And I haven’t let
go since, because it is the only thing that helped me realise that things have
been moving all along, even though I was too blind to see it before; also that
there was something very real to learn from every single one of my failures,
not just the “love yourself” type of thing that everyone kept hitting me with
because they couldn’t see that that was never the problem… When I found *that*
out, believe you all me, my life changed so amazingly that I was not even
prepared to receive the amount of choices I was going to be delivered. And now I can safely say that no one can wipe
the smile from my face that easily… What
does any of this have to do with my writing? Everything! Because, like I’ve said before, Pentacle came
to be because of my need to hide from the real world because of my social
failure. So, now that my life has finally
started to settle, I can finally also sort that one out, and magic is ensuing
from my fingers by itself, because of the amazing power of optimism. I will say this: it’s not a matter of not
wanting to see reality, it’s a matter of choice. Yeah, you don’t like what you see? What are
you going to do about it? Are you going
to get angry and stressed? Or are you
going to take the best things from it to make your present moment a bit better
and use everything around you to keep going in the direction you actually want
to go? Ahh, you’re going with the second
choice? There you go, you’re an
optimist! See? It wasn’t so hard!
(Editing note from January 2016: I am at that
bend in the labyrinth when I needed to learn that lesson once more! I was temporarily caught by my fears and my
optimism faltered, but I was able to look back on my life and the blockages
faded as I recognized the old patterns).
Now we can
move on to my second “Me” pillar, the Healer… I have to admit that there was a
point in my life when I could not bring myself to believe my abilities in this
profession, mostly because I felt I was so behind everyone else, and my own
healing most of all, that there was no way I could even think I could manage…
And then magic started! I decided to
heal because there was no way I could carry on with my life if I didn’t! There were many things holding me back, mostly
that I constantly found myself unable to say that I am a writer because I had
nothing to prove that I was, you know what I mean? And ironically, now that I’ve become the
Doctor it’s the same story. Many of my
friends kept telling me that I had to *believe* it when I told people, that I
had to own it and then people would stop going “Yeah… ok, change of subject…”,
but both things are one and the same: what did I have that I could use to prove
it? To others, I am mostly a girl in
funky cosplay trying to be funny in London and Glastonbury with Tennant’s Sonic
Screwdriver in my hand. It kept running
through my mind that had it been Joe there instead of me, then the reaction of
people to the two Doctors would have been totally different, because nothing
would have been funnier than two boys quipping about who was “Who” and so on
and so forth, but a girl? There is a lot
more than “owning it” to that part, and possibly someone with an acting career
(OR a published book or two!) would have pulled it off tremendously, but not
when the story repeats itself on itself and folds over twice more... That’s when it hit me, up at the Tor: I had always known how I felt about this, I
was just using the wrong words to explain it… My whole life has been about the
challenge of proving WHO I am (pun partially intended); I thought it was about
justifying myself to people, but it is more than that, it’s about letting them *know*,
and making sure they never forget! So
that’s why I kept running into walls!
They don’t have to understand me, they just have to know I’m there, and
for that my presence and my actions are what count… and that was my goal of
healing right then and there… That’s not to say that I was not healing
everything else as well, because, phew, I have to say, that whole
naked-under-the-blanket-in-the-middle-of-the-street thing? Doesn’t get any more healing than that!
(Editing note on January 2016: the original
storyline included another Doctor, Joe Teulon, but he had to drop out due to
personal reasons, leaving Stephen Cole and me to lead the series, that’s why
there are a few mentions of another male Doctor on this and other entries of
those weeks).
Yeah, I’m
probably disclosing secret production details here, but the peak of it all is,
once you’re able to heal yourself you’re then able to heal others, so it was a
pretty brilliant graduation for me…
which brings me to my third “Me” pillar…
The Beauty “Me”. Not that I
believe I am better than anyone else, please stop calling me arrogant and
whatnot, we already talked about this months ago! As a result of strange happenings and
dishappenings during my childhood and early teens, my whole belief in myself in
a physical sphere had flopped and just dragged me down for ages… truly ages… thing is, people tend to tell me
I’m beautiful as if they couldn’t understand why I am single (variations of
this depending on gender, age, marital status, gender preference,
family/friendship relation to me, and also city, country and world that it is
being said in… but that’s the common
gist of it), and I didn’t understand either.
Somewhere back in my past, people also spoke about my beauty in a “look
at yourself and love yourself” kind of way.
Today sometimes they speak of it in a stop-being-so-arrogant sort of way,
so I guess I took the first advice too far? Haha. I do admit that I am the Queen of Vanity,
what with being so in love with myself and all, but I think that by now we all
agree that it was Mani Navasothy’s doing, right? If he hadn’t dragged me into this project the
world would not be in so much danger of a paradox… hehehe. Aside from that, I had to do that bit of
healing: I had to look at myself as a woman for the first time, feel that fear,
like it or hate it, accept it and take charge…
It had to be done. It had to mean
something; otherwise, what’d be the point of going through such great lengths
with the healing, the arts, the creativity and the traveling miles? It’s not every day that an opportunity such
as that arrives, and I really wanted the next guy that I approached to have sex
with not to yell at me “Are you crazy?” (God and the Goddess, I hope I am in a
committed, sweet, mature relationship by now, eek? Will that be too much asking? Hm, I’ll make a
side-note here to make a side-note and tell whether I’m still single or not in
this bit…) (Side note here, on January
2016: I am actually married! Huzza!). After we shot the regeneration scene, Stephen
came up to show his admiration, and say that he hadn’t thought I would be brave
enough to do the blanket thing… yeah, well him and everyone else! It’s the
story of my life: no one ever believes that I am brave enough to do anything. Some people say that I’m brave for trying my
luck in London, but that’s about it… This time it was about more than just showing
everyone that I could be brave at something, because probably only the people
reading this entry will know the truth about that scene, and probably *most* of
those people already know I’m somewhat brave, so it’s not about impressing the
world, but about showing *myself* that I could brave the actual recognition of
myself as a lovable woman without any fear…
All right, I was afraid to be arrested for indecent exposure, but
everybody did a fine job with the blanket handling, so I was covered on that
part (ha! See what I did there?). (Editing
note in January 2016: The Glastonbury Mystery aired on YouTube in Autumn 2015, followed
by Spears of Destiny and Ceremony of Souls, the storyline becoming three-parter.)
That pillar
was all about the acceptance issue, which goes hand in hand with the fourth
pillar, my Intelligent “Me”… I have sort
of left this one behind a bit… half on
purpose, half because I was hurrying forward other things I thought were more
important… but I have always been a
brainy child, and there is no reason to pull away from that, especially because
I had the most annoying reason anyone can ever have! I did it for the men, all right? I’d stopped
being “serious” for a while, since I’d noticed that the more I seemed to know,
the more men would turn away from me and go for the bimbos… it kept happening in Durango and it kept
happening in Newcastle… the moment it
started happening in London I said to my brain that it should take a little
vacation… so it went ahead of me for a little while, learned a whole bunch of
new things and then came back some time ago and asked me if I wanted to bring
it back to London with me, because it likes the city so, so much, you
know? So I said yes, what’s the harm it
could do? And now I am as opinionated as
I’ve ever been, only with more determination, and some of the most gorgeous men
I’ve met here have disliked it greatly, and some others (gorgeous or not) have
absolutely loved it and fallen for me because according to them it adds to my
beauty, so that’s cool… (Side note on
January 2016: and the most gorgeous of them all has become my husband two
months ago, so I win!). But the important thing I’ve learned here is that I
simply don’t care how people judge me anymore, and I think it is because when I
sent it to its vacation, some of the things that my brain learned was to bring
empathy back, both for people who have different opinions from mine, and for
those that have not been as lucky as I have to find the path of optimism… Which means, I have to apologize for swearing
a bit in front of my friends when I lost it for a few minutes on account of
someone complaining about something that to me was way too simple back in
Glastonbury… I think there is nothing
wrong with swearing, but when it’s done with a touch of acidity toward someone,
even if for a short moment, is a kind of hurtfulness that I don’t want to
repeat, no matter how low-intensity or short the moment could have been or was… Yep, so my brain went searching for the place
where I’d left my empathy a few years back, brilliant, no? I mean, a woman cannot live on beauty alone,
so I have to use my mind, right? Make my own decisions and use my own power;
this I’m saying because I was literally told the other morning that I was
insanely hot but that he could not find me attractive because I was not willing
to be overpowered by a man… this after he spent a great deal of the night
texting me what I can only assume were bits and pieces of Fifty Shades of Gray,
and I *kindly* told him he was way off the mark… Where do I even find these guys? I’ve got use
the rest of my Glastonbury water to clear that up, because there is no way I’m
willing to spend any time around that lunacy!
I told him, “Hey to each their own and who am I to judge, but me no
more!” That’s the bit I was saying I was
worried about months ago, remember?
Dating today seems to be more about the sex than it is about actually
connecting, and forgive me for repeating myself, but every time I find someone
fabulous, they already have someone fabulous by their side! Heck, all my friends are fabulous (and I
don’t go to any lengths whatsoever to hide the fact that I think so, you
amazing boys!), and often they are all very lucky to have fabulous girls by
their side! It’s only been those few times, a handful maybe, that I’ve thought
that I’m going to be one of the fabulous girls by their side and they go Nah… (Side note on January 2016: Stephen Cole
proved me wrong! Our story in short is
that we already fancied each other by our online conversations, and once we met
in person over the glorious weekend I’m editing about we knew we had to be
together always... It’s brilliant to be able to look back on our story this
way, because I am learning so much of my own path as I edit, and because he has
been the most amazing partner ever, and it’s beautiful to look back at both
processes and how they intertwined until one became part of the other).
Now you see
why it’s been so important for me to do this healing? All of it, for years and years, not just
Glastonbury… it may be that at some point I will not be writing this blog
anymore because the need for catharsis is over and then I focus only on the
serious blogs; but in the meantime, if this catharsis helps others as much as
it’s helped me, I’m glad I’m doing it. (Side
note on January 2016: I stopped for a few months, but only to realise that it
is always healing to look back and that every catharsis means a serious blog,
because every catharsis means healing for the writer and for the reader, so I shall
carry on).
So, that’s
my account, and it only could have been done this way: write it down today and
post it in a few months time, when it is all done and shown… I loved
Glastonbury for all it was, all it is, and all it will always be: a doorway for
all to reach higher grounds of spirituality…
I was the luckiest woman in the world to have gone with such an amazing
group of people, and to do such an amazing project as well! From the streets and The Cat and the
Cauldron, to the handmade Mexican butterfly that you can spot now inside my
TARDIS; to the Chalice Well and the White Spring to the Tor, everything was
magical and beneficial… not to mention all my little late-generation jokes (or
foreignerisms, however you wish to call them…) about having jelly babies with
Stephen, or how when you go to the doctor they often prescribe you to have a
jelly baby, or how I felt like a changed man, or how the Doctors spooned for
the very first time in history – across the table at the George and Pilgrim – and
so on and so forth, up to the point of walking up to Lesley and asking her “Are
you my mummy?” (oh, how we laughed at that one)… Some people did laugh a lot,
some rolled their eyes; at one point Mani and Stephen looked at me and I could
just see the little dialogue globes pop up from their heads and read “She’s funny
and sweet and I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but can’t she see that we’re trying
to concentrate here??”… Learning
reassessed: there is always someone who’s going be new at something, hehehe.
So, in short and after five pages of non-stop joyful writing, I loved every bit
and every minute of Glastonbury, best experience ever to combine my four pretty
pillars, yay!
Here
finishes the original blog – along with my editorial notes!
Have a
wonderful week everyone, keep enjoying the Doctor Who London episodes (Imaginarium
Fan Productions), keep enjoying my entries every first of the month, and do
check out my short story collection and novels at Amazon Kindle :)
Love and
blessings!
Sandra Cole
≈ Writer, dreamer, healer, lover
To find my
Amazon novels and short stories, please visit:
To read my writer’s blog, please visit:
To access
my healer website, please visit:
And to
watch our Doctor Who London (Imaginarium Fan Productions), please visit:
