the last burnt sienna crayon

It’s amazing how when the penny drops and we realise that her behaviour is stemming from fear and abject terror at the prospect of losing someone/everything again (as she did when she was only 18 mo old), how much easier it is to bear that behaviour from her, how much easier it is to keep cool. It’s frustrating feeling so thick sometimes and thinking back on all the times I have lost my temper with her, if I could just remember, if I could just hold on to the fact that in all of her willfulness, in all of her stubborn, selfish, sometimes seemingly nasty outbursts, that she is just a scared little girl who needs me to stay calm and reliable, more than anything.

And that I love her more than she could ever imagine.

So now I have a new companion and a constant friend.

Solitude.

My companion is not yet often an easy one, nor one that I have always wanted or desired to be with, but I am told that the relationship will be worthwhile, that it will be something rewarded if worked at. And if I learn to accept my friend, that I will find richness in the world and the life around me.

Solitude.

Solitude is now to be my companion, not my loneliness, which should be displaced in time. I am told that Solitude is not an absence of friendship, but the very core of the abundance of Things. I think I did accept it once. . . but as I have said, I have forgotten and need to be reminded how.

I have returned to the Old Places (those words, those thoughts that manifesto that I told you about) that I left and forsook so long ago. I returned to to an ideal, an essence, an emotion to look for my Solitude, to see if they could still hold any affinity for me. And I see it; those sparks of life, of love, of creativity, of abundance; I do. . . but only yet for a moment here, or a reverie there.

I am still learning how to be patient.

How is it, that we learn things, yet so easily forget? How is it that something becomes a part of us, how we think, how we grow, what we believe, what we feel, how we live. . . and yet, we forget? Does it happen at the point of some trauma, that we throw out all of that which has gone before? Or is it simply carelessness, the dropping of our manifesto into the crowds and busyness of daily life?

And am I just assuming that it happens to more than just myself? Is this collective “we” accurate, or is it just me who is the forgetful one?

Recently I saw that an old friend had posted a quote, something written by Rilke, and something in me leaped. “You know Rilke!” I said to him, excited to find that my old friend shared some kind of sensibility of mine.

“Yes,” he replied, “You were the one who introduced me to him.”

Oh. I had forgotten. So many years ago. How could I have forgotten? There was a time when I was practically evangelistic about the German language poet/author. I carried a pocket sized copy of Letters to a Young Poet with me everywhere like a tract or a Bible for several years. I discovered his Letters first (where anyone should start with Rilke) and reading them felt like the first time anyone had ever truly understood me. For the first time, someone was telling me what to do, how to live, in a way that seemed strangely comforting, helpful and relevant. (Does it reflect badly on me that that was something I felt that I could gain from a dead Bohemian poet and not from the Church or from my own parents?)

I moved on from his Letters to his other (dense, but beautiful) prose, then his poetry (both certainly a development in the relationship), and even though I have to admit to struggling through the density of reading German in English translation (and in various levels of success of the translations), for the first time I felt that I had encountered another human being who felt things quite like I did, as strongly, as intensely, a bit of an alien in this world, and who struggled through his life because of it.

It felt like being understood.

The encouragement, was that he always said that life was worth it. Difficulties, and particularly the difficulty of solitude (which at the time I felt that I knew so well), were to be sought out instead of avoided. There was something I could accept in that. I heard him say:

“It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

and I took comfort. I was told:

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things”

and I believed him enough to get onto an airplane and leave my country and look for life. In all that confused me about my life I heard:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”

and I no longer cared for security. In those days, I lived, I mean I really lived. Because someone who felt and failed and hurt like I did told me that it was still worth it.

Any easiness in life was worth risking, for the attempt at something better. Life was worth living at all, because of its wealth and intensity. But I’ve forgotten. My fear and pains smothered that hope and joy, my failures crawled on top of me and wrenched the manifesto out of my hands.

Like Leonard said, “We’ve got to remind them how good it is.” Wouldn’t it be nice, to try to remember again? Difficult. . . but perhaps worth it.

A lot of people believe there is “a way” to do things.

A lot of people are afraid that they haven’t found that “way” and are afraid that something bad will happen if they have done something “wrong”.

A lot of people are afraid to follow their own instincts and so look to others to “show them the way”, and eventually feel trapped between choices that they are not happy making and a feeling of helplessness in the face of some fatalistic dictum. It causes an awful lot of people an awful lot of anxiety.

Of course, I’m talking about me here and assuming it applies more widely. I write that from my own experience, not really from observation. For, I have most frequently been one of those people. In fact, I believe that I have probably most often been [allowed myself to be] subject to the feeling that my role on this planet was was simply to carry out someone else’s orders, not to make my own. So far I have always been the vassal, not the master. I think I was always waiting for that mythical time when having paid my dues, that I would get my reward and gain some kind of power, and suddenly be respected and listened to.

But to be quite honest with you, I’m not really feeling like waiting patiently for something that probably isn’t going to happen naturally in response to any kind of dutifulness on my part. I’m not in that kind of mood at the moment. I feel more like throwing out the rule book because I’m starting to realise that there was never an agreed contractual end to my serfdom. So I’m going to institute my own little personal peasant’s revolt, and see how it goes in maybe doing things my own way for a little bit.

One of the most helpful things someone said to me recently (besides all of your lovely and supportive comments here, that is. thank you!) was to remember that this is all just “trial and error”. The topic of discussion was MS, living with MS, treatments for MS, and “the way” that you are maybe “supposed” to do things. He just said “remember, no one actually knows anything for definite about this bloody illness anyway, or about most of the drugs used to treat it for that matter. You just have to try things, come up with your own thoughts and adjust accordingly.”

There was a lot of freedom in that idea. If I “do it wrong”, what does it actually matter anyway?

Who am I?

You tell me, because I’m not sure anymore.

I’ve tried to collect together all of the things which I’ve known myself by over the years, but it just doesn’t seem to make a coherent whole. It doesn’t make any sense. And then I try to collect together all of the things that have influenced or even directly caused those things which I have known myself by and I realise that for a large percentage of my life, I have come up with some excuse or other for “not being myself today/this week/month/year/decade/etc”. And if percentage wise I’m spending more time making excuses than actually ‘being myself’, then how can I really claim that the me that I am less of the time is the ‘real’ me?

For a large percentage of the time, I have always felt that my life has taken ‘time outs’ and I, the ‘real me’, was just sitting in waiting for whatever influencing factor that was masking me to go away, or for me to finally achieve the back to the real me’ state.

But I must have been mistaken. Because the mask never comes off. It only seems to change. It changes from day to day and year by year. And saying that makes it sound like it really must just be that ‘changing thing’ that we’re all supposed to do as we go through life anyway, but for some reason it doesn’t quite feel like that. It doesn’t quite feel authentic. It doesn’t feel like a natural evolution.

My striving has always been to be my most authentic and honest self, like some mythical, unblemished, Platonic Form or something, to all and particularly to me. However, whereas I used to think I knew who or what that authentic Form was and what she liked and how she thought and how she acted, I’m just not so sure anymore. When do the blemishes become no longer something to sweep away and make excuse for, but become the thing itself? What if all my blemishes aren’t something added to cover up me, but are actually now me?

If you start with a table and break off one of it’s legs, you can probably fix it back on, with the right glue and nails. No harm done in the end, it’s still a table. But once you start to take a chisel to the table and gouge out some big gaping holes, it starts to become something a bit different. And you no longer wait for it to be fixed back to its ideal state, you have to accept that it is now either a sculpture or junk, and not useful as a table any longer.

And lately I’m starting to feel a bit like that chiseled table, starting to accept that there is no ideal Form for me to become anymore. And I’m wondering how much I get to control what the finished sculpture of me will look like. Or do I simply call it junk, throw it all out and start from scratch? But if that were the case, what do I do with all the stuff left over, from everything that has gone before, the thought patterns, the beliefs, the dis/likes, the behaviours?

I think in the end I just have to keep chiseling. But without my Platonic Form to model myself after, how do I know what my eventual goal is anymore?

“I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw”

Words are sticking in my fingers this evening. And a lump forms out of the weight of everything that I am trying to carry on my own, rising from the middle of my chest to my throat. . . and stops there. Stifling.

These are the images that I am told can make great poetry, great photographs, great music. But I am not enough of an artist to bring forth any riches there.

So I sit and stare at the blank page, writing wordless poetry. Only feeling, not articulating, the verse pouring out of a locked up chamber, too full to be still, yet silent, by consequence and necessity.

It’s perhaps ironic that the subject that I have been chewing over in my head for awhile now (to speak or not to speak/the nature of talking and vulnerability) is beginning to “take voice” at the same time as my decision to give in and make an appointment with the speech therapist.

I lost my ability to speak once in an MS relapse. I mean that I lost the ability to control and use the muscles around my mouth and throat, not my will to. The only person who could understand what I was trying to say was my husband, and that took a little while. The sudden removal of my ability to communicate verbally with others left me a bit shell shocked and terribly frustrated and it left the others i tried to speak to simply stunned, sad and not knowing how to respond to me. I will always now have the possibility of problems with the muscles in this area as there is now scar tissue/inflammation in that area of my brain. (My current decision to refer myself back to the speech therapist is because of the number of times I find myself choking on my food and drink recently. Had a particularly frightening episode last night.)

But that’s not exactly what I’ve been thinking about on the subject of ‘talking’. I’m a pretty chatty girl, and in many ways, I wish I weren’t. I really wish I didn’t feel such a need to express what goes on in my head to people, mostly as I’m convinced that people don’t really want to know (which is perhaps why I blog it instead, if you didn’t want to know, you wouldn’t click! And besides, it keeps me quieter in ‘the real world’, therefore avoiding that whole “did I just offend you? What did I say wrong?” feeling that I’m so good at creating).

I wonder how I would adapt if I lost my ability to speak again, I rely on my words so.

I remember deciding to go to my weekly Bible study one week during that relapse, even though I knew I would not be able to contribute in any useful way. Unfortunately, that evening the study dissolved into argument and bad feeling around a particularly heated discussion on the Pauline teaching on women and I felt completely helpless. I watched my friends saying things that upset each other and upset me terribly and I felt completely helpless, both in my ability to express my thoughts/feelings and to wade my way through the murky waters. I felt out of control of my relationships in the midst of bad feelings, and I didn’t like it one bit!

I rely on my voice to ask questions, to discuss and to understand the people and the world around me. I rely on my voice to try and make other people understand me. Without my voice there would be a barrier between you and me.

Silence generally makes me uncomfortable, visible and vulnerable (although talking makes me feel pretty vulnerable too, so I guess I can’t win). I feel a perpetual need to fill the gaps when the conversation stops. I often feel a great responsibility to carry the conversation, to be interesting or funny or witty (which has been more difficult lately with my aforementioned cognitive issues). And I have an inordinate fear of being misunderstood, so I say as much as I can to explain myself, as I have learned over the years that words and actions that seem completely natural and normal to me, aren’t natural or normal to most everyone else in this New World. So I talk, perhaps more than most, to attempt to explain, excuse and exonerate myself, to prevent such possible misunderstandings (I am still floundering in my “two countries separated by a common language” cultural divide).

And besides all of that, I love conversation. I love connecting with other people and finding out about them and sharing something of myself, and I can just never figure out when that happens to be a welcome thing to others and when it happens to be annoying. I just don’t love being dissolute, obtuse and irksome.

I guess I feel if I’m uncomfortable in the silence, then whoever I am with must be uncomfortable too.

Apparently, that is not true. Apparently, there are people, who find silence a normal and ok thing. I guess I didn’t grow up that way. So I am trying to curb this need to speak. Apparently it’s not always polite, where I live now. I don’t like to annoy people and like Eliza Doolittle taking lessons in how to be “a lady”, perhaps I should try a bit harder not to say so much. Perhaps only speak when I am spoken to??

But on the flip side, and perhaps from a more positive perspective on the subject, isn’t silence between friends an indication of security and to be valued? Yes, I am certain that and a balance between the speaking and the silence is the ideal and to be sought after. This will come, perhaps slowly but surely as I learn to relax into my life more.

However, for now, the thought continues to occur to me that I have not been able to find that balance yet. The thought continues to occur to me that I had better work harder at not saying so much, for I would rather be heard through my silence than ignored through my words; I would rather be conspicuous by my absence than invisible by my ubiquity.

I rely on people. Often.

I always liked the idea, as I have said before, of being a hermit. Of self reliance. Of being a wholly capable woman.

But that’s not how my world works. And I suspect yours doesn’t either. People need people. People need other people, and many times, we don’t even realise how much we may need the people who are already there, in our lives, until they are gone. There is a kind of loss, a gap, an emptiness when other people, even the “unimportant” or distant ones disappear out of their lives. As human beings we are built for homeostasis, and when something happens to change that stability in our lives, to any degree, particularly by subtraction (although addition can often throw us too), we can be left a bit in the lurch.

Often even when a minor cast member of our lives leaves by stage left just when we didn’t expect them to, right at a point that we hadn’t rehearsed, we become a bit flustered, like a director who can’t control his players and doesn’t know what to do.

When I was very little, my mother took me for my first haircut. About 12 or 13 years later, the same woman was still cutting both of our hair. Then, one day, we came to an appointment and were told that she was leaving her job to go back to college and retrain. She gave us a book entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. The Inscription she wrote inside the front cover was: “To ____ and ____. With special attention to pages 76 -78. Fondly, Donna. (the following quotes are taken from this)

Hair grows at the rate of about half an inch a month. . . That means that about eight feet of hair had been cut off my head and face in the last sixteen years by my barber. I hadn’t thought much about it until I called to make my usual appointment and found that my barber had left to go into building maintenance. What? How could he do this? It felt like a death in the family. There was so much more to our relationship than sartorial statistics. We started out as categories to each other: “barber” and “customer.” Then we became “redneck ignorant barber” and “pinko egghead minister.” Once a month we reviewed the world and our lives and explored our positions. We sparred over civil rights and Vietnam and a lot of elections. We became mirrors, confidants, confessors, therapists and companions in an odd sort of way.

February 2002, I was in a bit of a state. I was back in hospital again. I was back in physio and psycho therapies again. I was back on crutches and sometimes in a wheelchair again. Someone, probably against his better professional judgement but in an “I haven’t got anything else to offer you, so I’m going to make a personal suggestion” moment, suggested that I see this acupuncturist that he knew, and he handed me her card. I was in an “I’ll try anything once” kind of place and booked an appointment.

7 years and 8 months later I am still continuing to see her on a frequent and regular basis. In that time I can count the number of MS relapses that I have had on one hand (as opposed to nearly the same number per year before) and have not sat in a wheelchair since. And whereas any medical relationship really needs to stay that much more distant than that of hairdresser/customer, she has become a “mirror[], confidant[], confessor[], therapist[] and companion[] in an odd sort of way.” She has been there through ups and downs, griefs and joys of the last 7 years of my often soap operaish life. She has supported me through things that no one else knew about. She has always listened and never judged.

Last Monday she told me she was leaving to set up a practice in another town. Not an impossible distance away, and if I could travel, then I could continue to see her, but I wonder in all practicality if I will be able to do that. I haven’t completely decided what I will do yet, but I always knew that professional relationships can’t last forever. I have enough of them to know. But it always leaves me feeling just a little sad when I lose one. Then not knowing how to feel, because I’m self aware enough to acknowledge the feeling of loss, but mature enough to be sensible about keeping a healthy personal distance from my professionals.

My neurologist left in July and didn’t even tell me. (I’m talking about the good one who supported me in everything from my illness to bureaucratic nightmares to managing my daily ups and downs to being able to become a mum. Not the earlier bad neurologist who should have been struck off and lost his licence to practice if he hadn’t already been retired, for those who know the story.) When I found out, I was left sitting in his nurse’s office feeling crushed and open mouthed and wanting to say “B…b… but he didn’t even say good-bye!”

I was even a bit thrown when the nice lady with the spiky hair at the local pharmacy I always used to chat to seemed to have left that job. We get used to people, and at least I like a kind of homeostasis about my life. The reality is that nothing really ever stays the same.

Without realizing it we fill important places in each other’s lives. It’s that way with a minister and congregation. Or with the guy at the corner grocery, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, co-workers. Good people, who are always “there,” who can be relied upon in small, important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us uplift us in the dailiness of life. We never tell them. I don’t know why, but we don’t.

And of course we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend of us, watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know. Don’t sell yourself short. You are more important than you think.

Well, the orange/yellow leaves have mostly blown off of the trees across the street now and the view out my window gets decidedly darker earlier and earlier in the day now. The view will hold considerably less interest very soon, so i turn to sounds instead. The purring cat beside me, the whir of a motor, the fireworks popping in the distance, my daughter laughing. Now is the time for hibernation, the time to burrow down and pull up the covers and clasp a mug of hot chocolate between my cold hands.

I used to be more hardened in this kind of weather and would simply wrap up and go outside anyway. But now, more things start to go wrong in my body at this time of year, not big things, just more things, and I’ve learned that any energy spent unnecessarily is energy wasted. I’m tired and fatigued, I do less, I enjoy less, I smile less. The seasons of my life are changing and I realise how unappreciative I have been of the time past that I shall have no more.

Of course along with that knowledge comes the knowledge that I am not appreciating my time here at the moment either, and that I will soon look back and wish I had spent it and cared for it better. It all seems such a hopeless cycle from this stage in the year. Unrelenting cold and dark and the endless replay of the same themes again and again. All I can do from this point in the year, is keep warm and wait for spring. I always do, and spring always comes. . . but it looks such a long way to there from the beginning of the winter.

Yes, I realise that winter is not really here until mid December, and now we are only beginning November. But in my chosenland, as I have said so often before, I feel as if I have been robbed of my seasons. They blend together for me now because of where I came from. What was once four, for me, is now only two. And both of them grey and rainy. Only one is colder. And I know you will find my viewpoint a bit unkind and unforgiving, but the truth of it is how I feel and how I see it. And I can’t be any more honest than that.

Because I remember younger days in the homeland over summertime nights, in green country fields with friends, lying on our backs, the fresh fragrance of hay and grasses in my nose, looking up at the stars in a pitch black sky and watching meteor showers, listening to crickets and watching fireflies. I remember winter snow days off from school, building snow forts and tobogganing down the steep hill behind the cemetery by my friend’s house, and trudging back up again, knee deep in crisp white snow that would last for days. I remember mountainsides hemming in the river valley, completely covered with autumn colored trees, a delicious quilted carpet of red and orange and yellow and brown. I remember the spring flowers, the sweet smell of lilacs most of all, and my mother’s crocus that would greet me by the front door in March and tell me that things were moving on and it was time.

Moving on was exciting to me then. And now I resist it, I push back and bolt the door to keep it out, along with the cold of a new season. I don’t look for new seasons now, in the trees and in my life both. And I can see myself sitting here wrapped in this warm fluffy blanket with this hot mug of chocolate for quite some time, and not noticing the crocuses when they reach out of the ground to point me where I am to go next. Maybe I missed them already?

The fireworks sound louder through my curtained window, and I realise that I left my attic window viewpoint too soon. . . It’s too late now to see them. By the time you hear the bang, the pretty sparks are gone.

I tried to run away once.

I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going and I didn’t take anything with me, I just ended up under the bridge over the old creek bed behind the school and cried and didn’t know what to do.

I was probably about 10 or 11, and I failed miserably in my attempt to run. In fact, each time, still, I fail in my attempts to run.

But actually, I was certain I had it all worked out a long time ago, and my failure to carry it out has not put a stop to it once and for all.

I’ve known the answer of how to live without feeling sad or troubled or sorry or judged or hurt or worried or. . . well, add your favourite negative emotion.

I realised when I was about 9 that my friends could make me feel sad because they were mean and disloyal and that they said things behind my back and excluded me from things. I realised when I was about 12 that I was a sponge and I could feel the sad of others. Then I started realising that bad things happened to other people too and it made them sad and so I would feel sad because I didn’t want them to be sad and I was helpless to change it. When I was about 16, I thought that I finaly realised that all of that was probably more likely than not, my fault.

It took me a bit longer to realise that there was probably only one option left.

I was going to become a hermit.

Absolutely, that was the best way to live, I decided, being alone I could do and be whatever and whoever I wanted and no one would make me sad because no one else would be there. I wouldn’t be sad because of something they had done to me nor sad for them becasue of something somebody/something else had done to them. I would choose not to care about anybody, be nothing but a bit lump of introspection and no one else had to get involved.

When I ruled out a mountain cave in Tibet, I decided that I would never get married, never have any close friends, never talk to anyone, I would have an apartment full of cats and floor to ceiling books and would earn my living by being an anonymous author with some cryptic but vaguely mysterious and intriguing pseudonym. Me, myself, and I. . . and the cats. Yes, I had always known that running away was the answer.

And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out

Well, so much for my grand plan at life. I joined a church and settled in a community at 20, got married at 21 and now have a daughter at 33. And although I do have two cats and a lot of books, I have never been published under a false name (other than this blog) nor have I ever succeeded at locking myself away from other people. When it comes down to it, I’m a bit of a people addict.

So I have lots of people in my life and I get it wrong. . . and they get it wrong and other people get it wrong and all the things we can’t control or stop from happening so often make it wrong and I have spent a lot of time sad. Because in this world nothing seems to work the way it should, and like I’ve said before, my storybooks said that there would be happy endings galore. And there aren’t. There just aren’t. I don’t like that.

On top of that, people hurt other people and there’s nothing you can do about it. And even when you’re not hurting there is probably someone that you love, or at least care a lot about, hurting which invariably makes you sad because you really don’t want them to hurt and there’s nothing you can do about it. When it comes down to it we all just want to be happy and want everyone else to be happy and for fortune to smile and be fair and for all of our stories to have happy endings.

There’s a part of me that has given up the happy ending, but there’s a bigger part that keeps waiting for the surprise ending where everything is happycheesyok.

But it’s that first part of me that every so often still toys with running away. It’s toys with that mountain cave in Tibet or even better that cat and book filled apartment in another place or a busy buzzing city where no one would ever find me through all the people.

And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out

It’s the part of me that rails against the tragedy of life, the part that wakes up in the morning and says “No, No, NO!” to everything that isn’t happy, the part of me that is all too aware that as long as I have friends and family and care for anyone else, that I’m going to be unhappy, regardless. My personal sense of denial is big enough to fantasise about being able to run away and not accept this vision of life, but not big enough to ever actually do it.

So instead I try to keep to myself for awhile. I try to run away. Mentally far away while being bodily present. I try to step out of the bustle and the ties and the responsibilities and don my invisibility cloak, because in my woeful, selfish, vanity and pessimism I know no one will notice.

But every time I try to shut everyone out, I tend to get lonely. It never works, I go looking for where everyone has gone, then realise that it was probably me that shut them out, and I couldn’t really expect anyone to come looking for me, as I’m not 10 anymore. So, I always fail in my attempts to run, just like I did when I was 10. Then they looked for me. Now, I always end up looking for everyone else.

I’ll ply the fire with kindling now,
I’ll pull the blankets up to my chin
I’ll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in…
When the sun turns traitor cold
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row

I get the urge for going but I never seem to go.

I generally try not to make a habit of taking my clothes off in public. But that’s what seems to have happened yesterday.

I mean, swimming was bad enough on Saturday (I said to some friends afterwords, “So why is it that if we dressed like this in any other public venue in any other context we would most definitely be deemed as, at least vaguely, offensive, but put a huge vat of water in the middle of us and push us in, and suddenly it’s ok??), and I at least try to forget when my skirt fell off during coffee time after church a few weeks ago, but bursting into tears in front of a large group of people from my church yesterday was not in my plan. It feels a bit like taking one’s clothes off to testify to something personal.

It was actually a beautiful communion service. And I suppose, I was the one who said:

I heard or was told somewhere along the line that there can be no true communication between two people, no real friendship, no love, familial or otherwise, no meaningful interaction with God, and no honesty without mutual vulnerability that stems from trust.

but in a way I’d made myself really very vulnerable over the last week, and I had been feeling it since then. When becoming vulnerable, I usually get scared of ending with the consequence of regret, loss, offense and error.

What I said that made me cry was very short, very simple and didn’t nearly express what I wanted to say (I still can’t seem to do that). I said, to a group of people from my church who contained some of my dearest friends, some slightly less close friends, some complete strangers, and some empty spaces where other people who could/should have been there but weren’t, “I lost my first family. But God brought me here and gave me you. You are my family.”

I didn’t get to say why that meant so much or how it happened, and I don’t know whether or not I feel better for saying it, but I was surprised by the response. Two friends approached to put their arms around me as I cried, a man I am not close to gave me a hug after the service, a woman I had never spoken to before told me that I was very brave, another friend kissed me on the forehead and served me the communion glass, and one of my oldest friends put a hand on my arm and said something I can’t quite remember except that it touched me.

I’ve made pretty clear that to me family is a bigger thing than the one that lives and moves inside the four walls we inhabit. It overwhelms me that after nearly 15 years, I still have this second family and they haven’t kicked me out yet. I need my family.

And I’m so afraid of losing it again.

I just wanted to point you all to a link to a friend’s blog. Although, in many ways, our families are very different, I couldn’t express these particular sentiments better myself.

I worry a lot about my Flower and her frustrations and what she may have to go through in her life and how I will manage to go through them with her. Her uncertainties are my uncertainties. Her future is my future. And likewise, my struggles are hers.

So like my friend’s little boy, I know Flower needs me to hope. She can’t do it for herself. Not without me. Not yet anyway.

click here (oh, and by the way, she said I could link her.)

Sometimes, just sometimes, mind you, I begin to suspect, only slightly, that it might be ok, just ok, you understand, not desirable or right or rewarding, and certainly not auspicious, but just simply ok. . .

. . . to stop trying so hard.

At least for a few minutes, anyway.

Ok, I realise that I was begging the Nirvana question, and I’m awfully pleased that you didn’t let me down. I’ll fess up, I was just waiting for someone to make that comment.

However, I had to rush the ending of that post because I got a phone call while finishing up the post and had to leave straight away. So, in the end, I never did really explain why I titled the post Nirvana.

I mentioned the whole “freedom from suffering, craving, anger and other afflicted states” thing, briefly, but didn’t get a chance to explain what it had to do with playing the hammered dulcimer, for me.

It’s the same thing I got from playing Bach (either on flute or piano). In Bach (or any baroque music for that matter, but particularly Bach) and in much of the note patterning on the hammered dulcimer, you get patterns that repeat themselves over and over again in different sequences and starting on different notes and changing between major and minor keys, but still based on the same pattern. This is one reason why people can play some of these sequences so quickly. If you master the first pattern and repeat it, then you just need to get yourself “ticking over” so to speak, and the momentum carries itself.

I find this kind of playing wonderfully meditative. It takes up all of my head space and I don’t have any room left to be worried or anxious or angry or afflicted.

The problem is, that it’s always a chicken and egg debate. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last decade or so of my life in some kind of ‘afflicted state’ or another, which didn’t leave any room for the music. When at the same time, if I had been able to concentrate on the music, I might have found a way out of my ‘afflicted states’.

But it’s never that simple, is it? The transition of moving oneself from afflicted state to being lost in the music is a difficult leap to make, which I believe is why I stopped being able to make it.

However, I think if I can just find that window of head space that allows me to jump into the music, then all of those meditative, repetitive patterns can take over and do their job. At least, I’m finding a way to crawl through that little window opening in the big wall of afflicted states at the moment. And hopefully, having done so to begin with, will keep me there for longer.

Does that make any sense?

Many of my friends have spoken whistfully over the years about that ‘great time in their youth’ when they had the time and energy to sit and practice _______ [fill in the blank with appropriate instrument] for hours on end.

I never relished that time.

I always tried to make myself practice, I did. But I was young and, like most young people, more concerned about my social development than my musical one. I wanted it, I really did, I dreamed about it, planned for it, and chased after it. . . but the only thing that was going to get it for me, was the one thing I wasn’t doing and no one was making me do: Practice!

I began to learn piano when I was 8, flute when I was 10 (both of which I completely botched up the opportunity to perfect through such practice times) and started studying serious classical vocal music when I was 13. I took every oportunity to audition for whatever stage show/play/musical/choral/competition that I could get myself into, and had some fantastic experiences. I spent long hours rehearsing with my fellow performers. I began a degree at my first University in Vocal Music Education (which I also botched up mainly through lack of practice and an aversion to Theory homework) when I was 18/19, at which point I emigrated and changed to a university who had no musical or vocal programme. Then at 20, I got MS and my priorities changed. Then even more so when I got married at 21.

And there went a lifetime of music.

I occasionally tried to find a window to open to crawl through back into it all (voice/flute/piano teachers, amateur stage groups, choirs, church music) but nothing seemed to ever legitamise the former levels to which it all used to mean to me.

Then, for barely any reason at all, I bought a hammered dulcimer. An instrument I had learned about in my music classes at school and always liked the look/sound/thought of, but wasn’t an instrument anybody would really consider learning how to play, would they? Students chose pianos, trumpets, and flutes where I went to school. In my school, violin and stringed instruments weren’t even an option! So once a violin becomes an exotic instrument, you don’t seriously consider a hammered dulcimer!

So after all of these years I found myself at a bit of a loose end. Unemployed due mainly to medical reasons for five years, increasingly ill due mainly to stress for the last three, and determined to rebuild something through some kind of convelescence. Enter the hammered dulcimer.

Why on earth would anybody chose the hammered dulcimer? Why not?

So now that my daughter is being looked after most days by a playgroup and the school system (at the moment anyway… we’ll see) I have found it wonderful, as my more accomplished musical friends have already attested, to throw myself into several hours of practice a day.

The Wikipedia article on Nirvana describes it as “the state of being free from suffering” or “the perfect peace of the state of mind that is free from craving, anger and other afflictive states.”

Now, I’m really not a Buddhist, and I wouldn’t make a terribly good one at all, but I’m starting to wonder whether that’s what my friends were talking about.

the one I’m working on at the moment:

It’s almost comedy these days to have a ‘therapist’.

Two friends came to take me strawberry picking, when the phone rang and held us up.

“Who was that on the phone? ”
“Oh, just my therapist.”

I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to be embarrassed or not. I was honest about it, eventually, but I had the feeling like you weren’t supposed to admit to something like that. It seems that it places you firmly as someone who’s watched one too many Woody Allen films and took them to heart. You look into the mirror of your self assessments and the caricature emerges with half a bottle of red wine, or something vaguely worse, droning on with a long drawn out and overwrought monologue on anxiety and/or religious persecution.

“I don’t go to therapy to find out if I’m a freak
I go and I find the one and only answer every week
And it’s just me and all the memories that follow
Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour
And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent
When I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent
And shes so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,
But she knows that its much better if I get it for myself…”

I am very aware how easy it is to become a caricature, and I both shudder at the thought and relish my uniqueness, if indeed unique I am. Maybe all of my friends actually have therapists, but feel that they’re not supposed to admit to it. I felt once that I wasn’t meant to. I don’t know why I actually fessed up in the end, but I did.

Like I said, I’m no good at hiding.

I’ve had them before, ‘therapists’ and I used to feel guilty or wrong or broken. The leaflets in the reception area of x, y, or z venue always say something like “A typical course of treatment is usually 4 to 6 sessions.” So always sometime after my 4th or 6th month or so, I start to think “What’s wrong with me?! Not only am I broken, but I can’t even get fixed in the same length of time as everyone else!”

I had to try all kinds before I actually had a positive experience. I don’t know what kept me somehow convinced that someday it might pay off.

I’ve tried Christian counsellors who would smile and give me a platitude and a Bible verse. I’ve had self important new agey types tell me to close my eyes and breathe deeply and imagine that I control the universe. I’ve been told by institutionally clinical CBTers to write down all of my wrong thoughts and change them into something that I clearly didn’t believe but something that would clearly be more acceptable to everybody else. I’ve been long suffering with volunteers who thought that the answer to an anxiety disorder was the added pressure of an action plan every week (because that’s what their training course taught them to do) and then got clearly frustrated and annoyed with me when I wasn’t making any progress. Why did I keep trying? I guess, a person just gets to a point where they’re willing to try anything. I guess I just had.

And as I’ve said before, I obviously have a brick wall in my front room that needs using for banging my head against, or it will be wasted.

I’ve found two good therapists out of many more I could have done without. My last successful ’stint’ (before my current one) was between September 2001 and May 2002, and was the first time I had found any help from a saint who let me talk and talk and talk and talk and. . .

“And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think,
That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink.
But oh how I loved everybody else
when I finally got to talk so much about myself. . .”

This time I’ve been warming the proverbial couch since May 2007 and I don’t really feel bad about it anymore. I stopped worrying about going past my six sessions somewhere back in 2008 when I realised that all of that ‘unconditional positive regard’ stuff was one little thing that helped keep me going for another ‘one day at a time’. I thought I’d ‘come out’ in a bid to try and just accept who I am, where I’ve been and how I got here. I thought that I’d stop trying to squeeze myself in the box of people who pray every night “Dear God, thank you that I’m not Woody Allen,” who probably don’t actually exist, but that we all tell ourselves do.

I don’t feel bad about it anymore. . . but I do still often wonder if I’m supposed to.

So why did I post that poem?

It had been posted a time ago on somebody else’s blog (because they actually liked it), but I had it taken down and thought that it made more sense to have it on my own, but more than that, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about vulnerability.

An old friend (we met at university when I was still living in the Homeland about 15 years ago) called me the other evening. We hadn’t actually spoken (other than e-mails) in a long time, hadn’t seen each other in about 5 years, so we talked for an hour and a half. . . internationally. We talked about some difficult things, and it surprised me how easy it was to confide. When I hung up I briefly worried that I shouldn’t have been so honest, I mean, at least here on the blog, I know that if people didn’t want to know, then they wouldn’t bother clicking, but on the phone. . . well, you know how the ‘worst case scenario’ thought process works.

But my concerns were soon alleviated when I quickly received an e-mail from my friend saying that it had been good to talk and a very kind and empathetic comment on some things I had said. Acceptance from my friend, and relief from me.

I don’t lose friends easily or lightly.

You see, a very long time ago (shortly before I met my friend who phoned me, actually) I had another friend, this time from as far back as childhood, who I had thought would ’stick around’. But when our lives travelled different paths, the communication stopped, though I tried to reestablish it many times. No responses. None. I had thought that whereas you could ‘dump’ a boy/girlfriend, that you couldn’t dump a ‘friend.’

I was wrong.

I had, in the distant past, confided many things to this childhood friend, but when life changed, when we suddenly were no longer children or even ‘youth’, those confidences didn’t seem to matter anymore. Perhaps he needed to sweep the past away. Perhaps I have been unfair to not understand my old friend’s side.

I saw this earlier friend when I recently travelled back to the homeland. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in over 15 years and it surprised me how easily we slipped back into conversation. We talked for 3 hours over lunch about many things, about music, about our marriages, about mutual friends, about the old days. Almost like neither of us had ever left home or lost touch. . . but I have had no communication or replies since, and again I have tried.

No contact. None.

I heard or was told somewhere along the line that there can be no true communication between two people, no real friendship, no love, familial or otherwise, no meaningful interaction with God, and no honesty without mutual vulnerability that stems from trust.

On the whole, I agree with that. You, reader, of all people, if you visit here regularly, know that I can be quick to risk vulnerability, and I’m sure I do it for that reason. And generally I have trusted you with that vulnerability, though I may not even know you. Perhaps too quick to trust in strangers, too quick to establish impossible relationships between writer and reader. But for the most part I have found that in doing so, I have been greatly rewarded with the friendships that I have both reinforced and have found. By friends that see my blemishes, and ’stick around’. I’d rather show those blemishes, as I’ve never been any good at hiding. I’m always found out.

But where there is trust, there is vulnerability and where there is vulnerability there is a risk of rejection, like with my earlier friend, and where there is rejection, there is hurt. I guess I got my hopes up after the reconnection.

There’s a part of me, actually, that doesn’t mind being rejected, as long as it’s early on in getting to know someone, as long as it happens before I have made myself too fragile in the face of the prospect of that rejection. If I say “this is who I really am” and you reject me, before I have a chance to lose too much, that’s ok. I can accept that. But if I spend years establishing a friendship, I will feel like my vulnerability has been trampled on under foot if they suddenly turn and walk the other way. (Thus an old, perhaps bitter, poem, written to an old friend, who didn’t ’stick around’.)

So why do I put myself out there? I guess, because I think that if I do, put myself out there, warts and all, and you keep coming back to read, or to speak to me, or to waste/spend your time with me, then perhaps you won’t reject me. But there’s always a chance with friends who aren’t honest with each other that the secret of warts will be found out and the rejection is sure to follow. That kind of rejection hurts because it is never expected. So, I guess I’d rather show my warts. Because I know they’ll be found out anyway.

I write all of that because I was reassured by my university friend after our phone call the other evening, that my warts aren’t so repugnant and there would be no rejection today. I write this, not to mourn a lost friendship, but to celebrate a good one. When I wrote that poem so many years ago, a rejection was fresh and raw, and I was still willing to reestablish a friendship. But after talking to and being reassured by my other friend, it has reinforced the idea that I think I’ll just concentrate on the friends who ’stick around’.

—————————————————-
“Time it was and what a time it was it was,
A time of innocence a time of confidences.

Long ago it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they’re all thats left you.”

A friend charged me recently with being cryptic in this blog. I know that his accusation was just, and thus the grin to myself as I recall it. So why should I write at all, if I’m not going to tell the whole story?

Memory is fickle and understanding is unreliable. If these memories read as a fiction to you, then I look forward to the day that they will also look so to me.

This chapter to my story is coming, perhaps even has come, to a close, yet my naivety is not grand enough to be fooled into thinking that the book will be shelved and forgotten for all time. That is not how the book of life works, but then, I know now that I never did know how life works.

At all.

I have discovered fatal flaws in the memories that I had once believed that I had. And strange to find that I’m not that bothered to have been wrong. For when everything had looked so bleak, to have the slate wiped clean can be a relief.

I had not known that the bags I had been carrying had never been mine to carry, and that I had never been meant to lift them onto my shoulders.

It is all a bit lighter now. And starting the journey over, though daunting, is ok.

I feel like i’ve been gone a long time. I feel that I have not spoken to you in an age, dear reader, though it has been only days, not even a week. Though when so much can happen in one afternoon (not today, nor yesterday, but not long ago), it feels that you have not seen others in a long, long time. if ever before. and it will require new eyes, in both directions, to see at all.

I think that I have been gone longer than anyone could have known. For 17 years, I have been gone, but just as the wrongly accused is released from prison late in life, one can not walk free as the same person who was arrested in their youth.

It is good to be back, to be here. . . and to know the place for the first time.

. . . through the unknown remembered gate
when the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning. . .

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.”

t.s. eliot

I feel your pain.

No, actually, I do.

Let me explain. How many times have you said that? Most often, in my experience it is often said, if not in jest, but with a tinged, edgy sarcasm. But what if it was real? What if someone really meant it? How could someone live with it? How could a person deal with not only their own emotions, but try to deal with everyone else’s as well. We can’t, not really. Our own collection of pains, issues, excitements and worries are just about enough for any one person. It drives us into ourselves, and takes us away from the rest of the world.

When I was studying philosophy at university, we often discussed a problem which I’m sure had a proper philisophical name, but I left that dicipline so long ago that I can’t remember what it’s called. Anyway, the discussion was as to whether or not any particular person can ever truly know another person and what they experience. I seem to remember that the most accepted argument leant towards “no, no one can truly know another person.”

I’m not sure I ever really came to my own personal conclusion, I just know that I’m quite sensitive, and sensitive to what other people are going through. I realised recently that when my friends and family hurt, or are frustrated, or are annoyed, or are disappointed, or are nervous that I am hurt or frustrated or annoyed or disappointed or nervous. (yes, sometimes it works with positive emotions too, but not as often. )

My therapist would say “Do you think that in some way that actually helps them?” and of course the answer is “no, of course not.” But for some reason it’s not something so easily rationalised out of. Basicly, when other people hurt, I hurt. And I think, essentially, it was the way I was brought up. We should bear one another’s burdens. Somewhere along the line that got translated into “we should experience one another’s burdens instead of them,” as if that were possible and all of my vicarious hurting for everyone else will somehow lift someone else out, save the world, stop all the wars and seal up the hole in the ozone layer! Somewhere along the line I became responsible for the smooth runnng of the planet.

Which, if I’m honest, and I’m too often not honest enough about it, I’m not really strong enough to handle. But truly, old habits are hard to break, and I’m still trying.

This morning, the sky outside was completely black with clouds and the rain drove itself hard into my window. Yet, somehow there was yellow sunlight reflecting on the trees in the park. Where does that come from? it seems to happen a lot in this part of the country. black sky, sunlit trees. The dichotomy suits me.

A few months ago now the phone rang. “Ro died yesterday.” it wasn’t a shock, she was 93 and had been poorly for a while. But the familiar sinking feeling that comes along with the death of a friend was inevitable. I guess, when a person dies, sometimes it’s a sinking feeling, and sometimes it’s an implosive collapse. Sinking doesn’t last as long and is more easily recovered from. I’ve experienced both. I am sure it makes no comment on the worth of a life how the living react to their death.

I found out a while ago that TL died. She was 29 and died in a car accident. I didn’t really know her very well, and had never been in touch since school, but had volunteered working in summer camps with her when we were in high school. Again, that sinking feeling. Our lives had brushed against each other enough to have torn something out of me when she was gone from this sphere.

Two and a half years ago, my friend M was killed. he was 23 and had his young life forcibly taken from him while working with displaced children and communities in northern India. We don’t know who we don’t know why and even the mere mention of his first inital will cause so many who read here to recall that implosive collapse so I will say no more.

Oliver Postgate died recently. He will live on in his creations that meant so much to so many children (and adults). Michael Jackson? His body gave up the fight. The list of celebrities stretches on. We didn’t know them. We thought we did, but we didn’t. We thought that they had given something to us, and perhaps they did. Perhaps enough so that we felt the rip of something being gone.

My grandmother died 10 years ago, my father, 12. My aunts and uncles, I’ve lost count of the number and of the years and the ages. I am certain that it makes no comment on the worth of a life to us if we can no longer, nor any longer do we try to, remember the history or the particulars.

Ro went to my church and was a stallwart member of my community. I looked up to her and can not forget her.

In fact, I don’t think I even would have rememberd TL but for a photograph that i have in my albums. But as her image is in my book, I will never forget her.

M was my friend and a friend of my friends. He ate at my table and played my piano. We talked about photography and when I see his face in snapshots from parties, I always feel slapped. That face does not inhabit this earth any longer.

We are not allowed to forget celebrity. It isn’t that we ever knew them, but we did know something of them. They were a part of the jigsaw we have appropriated into our lives and is now missing a piece.

Then most recently there was Ra. Ra was in her early 30s and the mother of three young children, one of whom was newborn. Ra was a part of my life, and now she isn’t. I didn’t often see Ra and now I will never see her again. Only weeks before she died, I was posting baby congratulations onto her photos online. Only weeks before she died I was thinking of her, of her family. Now I think of them for different reasons.

Thinking of Ra reminds me, more than the others, more than I am comfortable with, that someday I too will not inhabit this earth, none of us will. That someday, as I can no longer talk to or see or touch my own father, my daughter will no longer have me.

I wonder about you, dear reader, and whether when I am gone too you will still remember me? Did you know me well, did we speak, do you remember? Have you seen my picture, or something I have created and did either stay with you? Was it discarded or held onto by you? Are my words remembered, or will they die with you too? What will my legacy be, or will it be wasted? What have I done that will touch those who come after? And on the last day of the world, would things have looked at all different if I had never been here, and what does it matter? If a butterfly flaps its wings in the 21st century, will the world look different in mellenia hence?

Am I only flirting with an unobtainable immortality by bringing my life near to anyone else’s, in the fruitless hope that my memory will live when I do not? Is that why I write here, is that why I take my photographs, is that why I allow my life to brush with anybody? And in that meeting am I passing on anything real or true or worth saving? Is that even possible, or will it all disappear and die? It is a mystery too big for me.

Every day a little death in each of us, that’s the way we were created, though we live for so many years not knowing or realising it. Something is torn out of us when we confront it, when too many people are no longer with us to go on pretending that there is any kind of earthly permanance. We clutch onto our photographs hoping in someway that it can put something back that is now gone, we write down our memories hoping for these changes to halt themselves through our rememberance and our stories.

The fragility of life is entrusted to the living, in the words and memories and photographs that remain. Though words will be forgotten and photographs will eventually be turned to ash. At least presently, I know that the butterflies who have flapped their wings in the midst of my own life, have made this world a very different place.

Selfishly, and vainly, I find myself wondering about my own wings and of their ability to imprint a picture on the world, from any angle or any distance.

I’ve had insomnia since I was 18. It’s been much better this past year, but worse in the mornings lately, and so this morning. I’ve been waking up at sometime between 3.30 and 4.30, lying awake worrying about my role in all of the calamaties of the universe until about 6.45, then falling asleep and being woken up by the alarm at 7, then lying in bed, sometimes falling back to sleep again until 8 or 8.15, by which time, I really should have been awake.

Anyway, in one of those falling asleep bits this morning I dreamed bitty dreams. I don’t often dream. It takes deep sleep to dream, which I don’t often manage. But usually when I have a dream, it’s longish, and with some kind of scenerio, as I assume most people’s dream’s are. But this morning, I just remember seeing my mother who pointed and said, more or less,

“Act your age! You’re not 3, you’re 33!”

And that was it. I woke up and needed a cup of tea.

But she’s right, you know? And I think it sunk in. I’ll try harder, mom. . . and the rest of you. Sorry.

I never thought that I would do that. I never thought that I would stop appriciating what I had. But perhaps one only knows exactly what they have when it begins to fade.

I know now that I never fully appriciated my first family until it began to die, disappear and break apart.

Then, I chose a new family. A new family, not of blood, and not of marriage, and not of relation. It was bigger than any of those. Family was suddenly wider and all emcompassing. Bigger than a surname, than even a way of life. It was extended family in the truest sense. How could I have found a new family so large without those natural ties? I took for granted that it could stay the same forever, and I would never lose that again.

I know now that I never fully appriciated them.

My first family used to gather, and tomorrow would have been one of those significant dates to gather. Gathering was a way to reaffirm that family is family, blood is thicker than water, that despite the rest of the year, at least we still gather on this day and ‘do this’, because we are family and this is what we do and this is who we are, whether we like it or not. It wasn’t always pleasant (because family isn’t easy), but it was affirming.

My second, chosenfamily, as well, used to gather. Again, it wasn’t always pleasant, but to me, it was reaffirming, a way to define ‘this is who we are’ and who I am. I knew who I was in the midst of them. But now the whole looks a lot smaller to me, a bit more fragmented.

And rationally, I know that’s ok, and I know that moving on is a normal and grown up thing to do. But emotionally I fear the segmentation. The move from defining that ‘we are we’ to ‘I am me’ looks scary from this angle, because suddenly there are fewer landmarks, fewer guideposts. And I continue to try to find a cord to tie the parcel back together again. Whether it’s the right thing to do, or not.

It may be the grown up thing to do, but for this disabled woman, who has spent so many years leaning on the crutch of her new family, going out into the big wide world looks a bit scary and I simply want to have some chicken soup and go back to bed where it’s safe.

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?

But, again, rationally, I know that the best families help their children to stand on their own two feet. To leave their father and mother and do their own thing instead.

Thing is, when I left my father and mother, the thing I chose to do. . . was to form a new family.

So now what do I do?