I'm feeling angry this morning. So beware, if you have a desire to condemn me in the comments section, because this morning I might just damn well bite back.
Such a massive amount of grief porn in my social media feed yesterday, one thing after the other. I was really saddened to hear that Robin Williams gave in to the whisper. I get those whispers. I've had them often in the last decade.
You know what? There was a part of me yesterday that was jealous of Robin Williams because for him it's over. The battle is over. It's not the life that people who feel suicidal want to be over. It's the constant battle, wearing you down. It's the constant battle that gets in the way of being able to live life.
And so with these outpourings of grief yesterday, on the one hand I got it, but on the other it creeped me out and even angered me a little.
What gets me about article after article about poor Robin Williams is
that nobody was thinking about him last week. This is where this feels
creepy to me. This giant outpouring of grief isn't about Robin Williams
the man, I don't think. It's about how as a celebrity he is representational. He is someone safely enough away from us that he is able to become a safe container in which to
pour the massive amounts of grief we carry in our own life.
Sometimes, we can't see our own pain until situations like these.
If we weren't a culture in tatters, we would have, like all good cultures do, dances and stories and embodied ways of helping us navigate through life. But we are at the end of one thing and the beginning of another, and so stuff lies in tatters. We don't have a public square anymore. Somehow, we have allowed our
culture to be taken over and turned into a giant warehouse for our
stomachs that actually really only benefits a small group of people. So what better stand-in than celebrities, right? Robin
Williams has become our stand-in, an
icon. What better symbol of our own hidden pain than the guy who many
still can't quite believe could battle such dark demons rearing out of
the shadows when he was so good at making us laugh. As if every single person on the planet isn't so multi-faceted.
How about the people in our midst who are suffering as much as Robin Williams? I used to talk daily with one who suffered like him. She made the most awesome art. Beautiful, intricate drawings that she would sell to the very, very few who walked past her on the street and actually saw her every single fucking day. I am drawn to the weak ones, because I feel so fucking weak myself, and so I did stop. We'd talk to each other every day. Because I felt so weak, she was actually the safest person on the street to talk to. She felt so much more human than the suits going to work at the bank, believe me.
Most people who are struggling like Robin Williams probably don't have the creative platform that he did to be able to demonstrate that they have valuables hidden in the folds of their jackets just because they're struggling with depression, or anxiety, or some other mental illness. They're probably the same people we generally ignore unless we're forced to have to deal with them, or that we despise on some level because we sense their pain and it triggers our fear. Because fuck me if we aren't stuffed up to the brim with fear. Or we've tried to help them and they didn't respond in the way we expected and now we feel rejected.
Maybe some of the grief that we are pouring into the safe container that Robin Williams represents is about that as well. Maybe we're grieving for ourselves, too, for what we have lost and what we don't even know we have lost.
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
Sometimes it feels like time has run out anywhere other than via Facebook graphics for public discussions about the importance of nurturing things that are fragile, like beauty and hope and imagination and meaning-making.
These fragile things, they are things that scarily feel culturally strange and pointless. They are for hippies, scientific illiterates. We are ambivalent - we crave those fragile things while at the same time they can make us feel a little ill, somehow, in some indefinable dark way that we don't even begin to understand. They can make us feel prickled in our sides, pushed in our buttons. They are things that do not feel allowable in this time. Look at how scarce money is, we say. It doesn’t stretch to encompass frivolity. Those things are frivolous fancy, we are busy and frazzled, and there is not enough money to go around for them, we say, through gurgling stomachs.
But beauty and imagination and hope and creativity are the other side of the bigger picture. We know this, when we’re not stressed and distracted off our dials. We go on holiday for these things. They are what makes life meaningful. They cannot easily be commodified, broken down into a spreadsheet, extrapolated out into data analysis. And, as truly important as left-brain analysis is, it is only one side of the story.
The bigger picture reminds us that money is a construct that we invented, as a means of energy exchange, as an easier alternative to bartering, but fast forward hundreds of years and it has been flat-packed down into a ridiculously complicated means of restriction, of gain at others' expense. On this other side of the picture, we can change how we “do” money so that it is retrieved from greed, fear and competition and restored once again to its rightful position. As will we be. And from there, beauty, imagination and hope aren’t optional extras for a people who are more than consumers, but are the beginning of something new.
These ideas seem pie in the sky, do they not? Hopelessly naive. It’s easy to fall into black despair that maybe we are a species watching ourselves see ourselves out. But maybe the biggest part of the problem is not that it’s not possible to change, but that we think it’s not. And maybe another part of the problem is that we're trying to use the wrong kind of thinking to get there – supposing that we can estimate change, predict our future only by how economically viable it is, while considerations of how we wish to live and how that could be meaninful remain on the sidelines, slightly embarrassing and irrational. How different really are we from ages past that relied on scriptures to guide their living? We like to rely on externals as well, like economic forecasts, missing entirely the fact that these are all just a different type of prognostication, and one that keeps us as small and sidelined as the Old Testament texts that painted God as a ravaging, nasty monster, coldly inconsiderate of the shape and size and weft of those who he'd formed.
Too much left-hemisphere thinking (unlike too much left wing politics) seems to make us smaller, less humane, and I don’t like it – not just simply because I float in dreamland and have crappy time-management skills, but because it will be to our literal destruction if we can’t rebalance.
But also because it makes us miserable.
Note I didn't say no left-hemisphere thinking but too much. Imbalance can create havoc and I do believe that we can see the evidence of that in the destruction of the world around us.
“The [brain's] left hemisphere tells us that the quest for meaning is meaningless, because it is not equipped to deal in meaning or understanding, but manipulating and processing,” says Ian McGilchrist. Meaning, he says, “emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.” The left hemisphere of our brains is biased towards seeing the parts; the right towards seeing the whole picture. It is that greater expansion of the view which we need more than anything right now.
A drawing better illustrates this example. A person who has suffered a right-hemisphere stroke and who therefore is more dependent upon the left hemisphere of the brain sees and draws only the right-hand side of things – half a cat, half a house, half a tree. A person entirely dependent on the left hemisphere of the brain to make their way through the world fails to see the left-hand side of things. They have disappeared from their view as emphatically as if they weren’t there at all.
The Tao views the proper handling of life as a balanced understanding of yin and yang, of action and inaction. The inaction is hard for us and seems useless. According to the Tao, action can be disastrous; sometimes it’s better to retreat to an inaction – which is not passive but an active inaction, a space that is empty but full at the same time. It is a silence that is full. It is a rest that we pant for but can miss realising we need. It is so hard to be balanced in such a topsy turvy place as this.
We could think of a family that may or may not have lived next door to us. When we remember them, we feel equal amounts of attraction and repulsion. They were imperfect like us, but there was a collectiveness about them. They all smelled the same, like warmth, but looked different, like themselves. They did things together that were playful. They seemed, from our baleful longing, to be somewhat naive. They did things that were a little uncool, things that were pointless and playful, and it seemed to make them happy. It made us sad, those things – some of us thought they were dumb but some felt our hackles rise and we had no idea why. We did not understand the language of games, rituals, rites, dance. It all looked like a cult. How could we evaluate what these things actually were and what their point was without reference back to hard squares and boxes? Those games were like a different language and those people stupid and naive. They made us feel contemptuous and at the same time inferior, scared even. They made us feel like we were stoppered, that big wads of ourselves we didn’t even know existed were off flying in the atmosphere when they should have been here with us. They make us remember what we’ve forgotten we forgot.
So this is the time we are in – in a culture which has had a right-hemisphere stroke and it is up to us, as individual cells, to restore the balance. That probably begins with doing the things that we secretly yearn for, the things that feel too luxurious, that we don’t have time for. This breeds more of that thinking that Einstein talked about, the sort that’s different from the kind that got us into this environmental pickle in the first place.
The times call for people who have come alive, and who aren’t afraid to express and to do what’s right. No matter how naive that might seem, even to ourselves.
These fragile things, they are things that scarily feel culturally strange and pointless. They are for hippies, scientific illiterates. We are ambivalent - we crave those fragile things while at the same time they can make us feel a little ill, somehow, in some indefinable dark way that we don't even begin to understand. They can make us feel prickled in our sides, pushed in our buttons. They are things that do not feel allowable in this time. Look at how scarce money is, we say. It doesn’t stretch to encompass frivolity. Those things are frivolous fancy, we are busy and frazzled, and there is not enough money to go around for them, we say, through gurgling stomachs.
But beauty and imagination and hope and creativity are the other side of the bigger picture. We know this, when we’re not stressed and distracted off our dials. We go on holiday for these things. They are what makes life meaningful. They cannot easily be commodified, broken down into a spreadsheet, extrapolated out into data analysis. And, as truly important as left-brain analysis is, it is only one side of the story.
The bigger picture reminds us that money is a construct that we invented, as a means of energy exchange, as an easier alternative to bartering, but fast forward hundreds of years and it has been flat-packed down into a ridiculously complicated means of restriction, of gain at others' expense. On this other side of the picture, we can change how we “do” money so that it is retrieved from greed, fear and competition and restored once again to its rightful position. As will we be. And from there, beauty, imagination and hope aren’t optional extras for a people who are more than consumers, but are the beginning of something new.
These ideas seem pie in the sky, do they not? Hopelessly naive. It’s easy to fall into black despair that maybe we are a species watching ourselves see ourselves out. But maybe the biggest part of the problem is not that it’s not possible to change, but that we think it’s not. And maybe another part of the problem is that we're trying to use the wrong kind of thinking to get there – supposing that we can estimate change, predict our future only by how economically viable it is, while considerations of how we wish to live and how that could be meaninful remain on the sidelines, slightly embarrassing and irrational. How different really are we from ages past that relied on scriptures to guide their living? We like to rely on externals as well, like economic forecasts, missing entirely the fact that these are all just a different type of prognostication, and one that keeps us as small and sidelined as the Old Testament texts that painted God as a ravaging, nasty monster, coldly inconsiderate of the shape and size and weft of those who he'd formed.
Too much left-hemisphere thinking (unlike too much left wing politics) seems to make us smaller, less humane, and I don’t like it – not just simply because I float in dreamland and have crappy time-management skills, but because it will be to our literal destruction if we can’t rebalance.
But also because it makes us miserable.
Note I didn't say no left-hemisphere thinking but too much. Imbalance can create havoc and I do believe that we can see the evidence of that in the destruction of the world around us.
“The [brain's] left hemisphere tells us that the quest for meaning is meaningless, because it is not equipped to deal in meaning or understanding, but manipulating and processing,” says Ian McGilchrist. Meaning, he says, “emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.” The left hemisphere of our brains is biased towards seeing the parts; the right towards seeing the whole picture. It is that greater expansion of the view which we need more than anything right now.
 |
| From http://payzle.com/for-fun-hard-unilateral-visual-neglect/ |
The Tao views the proper handling of life as a balanced understanding of yin and yang, of action and inaction. The inaction is hard for us and seems useless. According to the Tao, action can be disastrous; sometimes it’s better to retreat to an inaction – which is not passive but an active inaction, a space that is empty but full at the same time. It is a silence that is full. It is a rest that we pant for but can miss realising we need. It is so hard to be balanced in such a topsy turvy place as this.
We could think of a family that may or may not have lived next door to us. When we remember them, we feel equal amounts of attraction and repulsion. They were imperfect like us, but there was a collectiveness about them. They all smelled the same, like warmth, but looked different, like themselves. They did things together that were playful. They seemed, from our baleful longing, to be somewhat naive. They did things that were a little uncool, things that were pointless and playful, and it seemed to make them happy. It made us sad, those things – some of us thought they were dumb but some felt our hackles rise and we had no idea why. We did not understand the language of games, rituals, rites, dance. It all looked like a cult. How could we evaluate what these things actually were and what their point was without reference back to hard squares and boxes? Those games were like a different language and those people stupid and naive. They made us feel contemptuous and at the same time inferior, scared even. They made us feel like we were stoppered, that big wads of ourselves we didn’t even know existed were off flying in the atmosphere when they should have been here with us. They make us remember what we’ve forgotten we forgot.
So this is the time we are in – in a culture which has had a right-hemisphere stroke and it is up to us, as individual cells, to restore the balance. That probably begins with doing the things that we secretly yearn for, the things that feel too luxurious, that we don’t have time for. This breeds more of that thinking that Einstein talked about, the sort that’s different from the kind that got us into this environmental pickle in the first place.
The times call for people who have come alive, and who aren’t afraid to express and to do what’s right. No matter how naive that might seem, even to ourselves.
The Sinusitis Blues.
Today, it is almost-midsummer and
I feel as dry as a leaf at the end of autumn and
As dead as the midst of winter and
As fragile as a spring shoot.
Today, I feel like I have lost myself again. I lose myself every day and then find myself again. Reborn every day. Today, I feel the monster reaching out his claw from the green murk to clutch my ankle.
I look back on things that I have written in previous years and they sparkle in a way that I feel like I have lost, at least for the moment. Today, I am beaten down. Perhaps it's just simply the fact that I am in the midst of yet another sinus-related thing, and I feel bad because I feel useless. I feel like I want to be a hermit and never go anywhere and yet I feel guilty about that too. I do not feel like I will be able to sparkle anymore. But then I look at something I wrote two weeks ago and there it is again, the sparkle. And tomorrow or the day after or the week or month after I will be back in that space again, actually walking around in it, all three dimensional.
Time is becoming stranger to me as I go on. And I know that it is a false conception to think I sparkled in previous years more than I do now because I wasn't sparkling then, any more than I am sparkling now. It's just the benefit of hindsight, the safety that comes from the past that is sealed, combined with reading the things that come from the writing space where I feel more myself and safer than the me who walks around bumbling.
Some days, I feel so exposed, like other people are tsunamis and I am a baby beech. Some days, I feel like the stuff that is in me, the good and sweet and lovely, is not for any of you to see because how could I trust anyone with that?
I know what this is. This is trauma. This is limbic and wordless.
I have gained some traction with this space, believe it or not. I will tell you about it sometime soon.
But today, I feel so beaten down by the world, by everything, by the spaces that I love and which for today at least are lost. I have lost the Godspace. Which probably means it's closer than ever before. Sometimes when you feel like you are losing something, what is actually happening is that you are gaining something new. Transmutation. My word for the year. Sometimes the monster swims up from the depths into the space where you can see him. He's been there all along, under the conscious sea. But when he comes up, though he is you and he has lived within you perhaps for your whole life, you recoil from him in horror.
But perhaps he is a monster only by dint of him being the Other within your own body. You react the way all humans react when they are scared and something other than them is facing them: you feel an antipathy, a horror. Sometimes the horror is in direct correlation to the things that are stored without your knowing in the undersea of your own self. And then someone out there pops up and presses buttons you don't even know you have and would be horrified to know that you did.
We are a deeper sea than we like to think.
But it's not all clunking chains and dead carcasses and hairy monsters down there. There are the most beautiful schools of fish, made of gossamer. There are laboratories of alchemy down there, sealed from the water and hidden from sight. The You that you don't know very well is cooking up things and while S/he does, it feels like it is some sort of evil. It feels like you are dying. But sometimes hairy monsters do not stay hairy monsters forever. That's why stories exist about frogs and princes.
I feel today like I am dying. But everyone who swims in these waters knows, that's not the end of the story.
And yet even so, I feel like help!, like I have lost myself again, and that feels very unsafe. Even while I know it's not the whole of the matter or the end of it either.
Today, it is almost-midsummer and
I feel as dry as a leaf at the end of autumn and
As dead as the midst of winter and
As fragile as a spring shoot.
Today, I feel like I have lost myself again. I lose myself every day and then find myself again. Reborn every day. Today, I feel the monster reaching out his claw from the green murk to clutch my ankle.
I look back on things that I have written in previous years and they sparkle in a way that I feel like I have lost, at least for the moment. Today, I am beaten down. Perhaps it's just simply the fact that I am in the midst of yet another sinus-related thing, and I feel bad because I feel useless. I feel like I want to be a hermit and never go anywhere and yet I feel guilty about that too. I do not feel like I will be able to sparkle anymore. But then I look at something I wrote two weeks ago and there it is again, the sparkle. And tomorrow or the day after or the week or month after I will be back in that space again, actually walking around in it, all three dimensional.
Time is becoming stranger to me as I go on. And I know that it is a false conception to think I sparkled in previous years more than I do now because I wasn't sparkling then, any more than I am sparkling now. It's just the benefit of hindsight, the safety that comes from the past that is sealed, combined with reading the things that come from the writing space where I feel more myself and safer than the me who walks around bumbling.
Some days, I feel so exposed, like other people are tsunamis and I am a baby beech. Some days, I feel like the stuff that is in me, the good and sweet and lovely, is not for any of you to see because how could I trust anyone with that?
I know what this is. This is trauma. This is limbic and wordless.
I have gained some traction with this space, believe it or not. I will tell you about it sometime soon.
But today, I feel so beaten down by the world, by everything, by the spaces that I love and which for today at least are lost. I have lost the Godspace. Which probably means it's closer than ever before. Sometimes when you feel like you are losing something, what is actually happening is that you are gaining something new. Transmutation. My word for the year. Sometimes the monster swims up from the depths into the space where you can see him. He's been there all along, under the conscious sea. But when he comes up, though he is you and he has lived within you perhaps for your whole life, you recoil from him in horror.
But perhaps he is a monster only by dint of him being the Other within your own body. You react the way all humans react when they are scared and something other than them is facing them: you feel an antipathy, a horror. Sometimes the horror is in direct correlation to the things that are stored without your knowing in the undersea of your own self. And then someone out there pops up and presses buttons you don't even know you have and would be horrified to know that you did.
We are a deeper sea than we like to think.
But it's not all clunking chains and dead carcasses and hairy monsters down there. There are the most beautiful schools of fish, made of gossamer. There are laboratories of alchemy down there, sealed from the water and hidden from sight. The You that you don't know very well is cooking up things and while S/he does, it feels like it is some sort of evil. It feels like you are dying. But sometimes hairy monsters do not stay hairy monsters forever. That's why stories exist about frogs and princes.
I feel today like I am dying. But everyone who swims in these waters knows, that's not the end of the story.
And yet even so, I feel like help!, like I have lost myself again, and that feels very unsafe. Even while I know it's not the whole of the matter or the end of it either.
 |
| Pic by David Sky under creative commons licence |
| To live among objects that are not cheap, but made with consummate
skill, attention and care, would be true material wealth. Can you
imagine a society where each person's talents and gifts were fully
expressed in their work, and not suppressed in the interests of machine
life? Charles Eisenstein, The Age of Reunion:Work and Art United from the book Ascent of Humanity, a pondering of how the future will look, (available for free or for a fee) |
Dear Michael Leunig,
I have fanblogged you more than once on this blog. I don't write these posts in the hope that you will read them. I just like to voice my appreciation sometimes. It's difficult to write about, because what your stuff evokes in me is the space inside that I need to protect. It's childlike, and paper-thin. It can be laughed at as naive by cynical people who are very rational and very grown up. I think it's something like hope and belief in a better future worldview, with a slice of mysticism thrown in.
I guess it's pretty obvious that we can do something better than the paradigmatic shit we're currently sewering in. I s'pose it's the particular viewpoint you come from, but to me our hope lies in the fact that the us living under this destructive rampant capitalistic shit are much bigger than the them for who it is in their best interests to keep facilitating it, even if they're killing their own grandchildren's nest. Not that I like fostering any more extra separation than we're already living under, but in this instance it's helpful.
Lots of people have given up hope. I give up hope regularly, too, but then I tire of the ridiculousness of being caught up in such a 2x2 paradigm so I go searching for a bigger turning circle again. Your work never fails to bring me there.
So when I write to you, it's hard to harness the bubbling joy that sprites up my guts. I can't help it. Even when you draw or talk about the things that make me want to impale my eyeballs down hard on two metal spikes so that my brain spurts out my ears and ends my place in this current insane sphere of inhumanity and returns me to my cosmic swamp, you are like medicine. Especially there.
Which is the best medicine, of course. You spill out your guts and make something beautiful of it. You shine starlight on my dark, Mr Leunig. You're a fucking marvel.
Yes, yes, I know, I'm platforming you. I'm Mandelaing you, as an Australian Living Treasure, into the schmaltzosphere and into something evil. Or am I? It's not you that makes me feel like that, after all. It's your words and pictures. I'm sure you're a pain in the arse at times, a fearful, hating mess, who leaves his jocks on the floor and doesn't pay his bills on time, who's made dreadful mistakes and royally let people down. Who poos.
I still have this thing about how weird it is that everyone poos. Like, even the queen, and stuff. (I will not capitalise the name of someone who inherited their great riches on the back of sweet fuck all. But I digress).
This human human compulsion to venerate the good takes the good away from us. Vaunts doing good stuff into the stratosphere inhabited by People Not Me. It's just one more case of slicing and dicing ourselves up into dissociated bits. And I've had quite enough of that, thanks. The reality is that even mofos make good and make art.
Not that I'm saying you're a mofo so much as I'm saying we're all mofos, beautiful mofos. And even though we're all beautiful mofos we can still do awesome stuff. The stuff we share as common ground is more than a beginning.
I started writing this post by pen, sitting outside in the grass and the sun of greenly Belgrave. I have begun writing morning pages again, and this morning I chose as my writing tray of choice The Essential Leunig. A perfect choice, really, though a little hefty in the weight department, it is a lovely hardback 7/8 A4 size, a size which often seems to be used by books that inspire me in some way. Of course, it's a perfect size for reproducing cartoons.
So I flipped it open to a random page. One of them was of a man standing outside with a piano, and atop it a telescope. One eye was trained through the telescope at the stars while one hand tinkled the keys and the other hand wrote down the music he was seeing. That made me very happy.
The other side of the page was an interaction between two people. A Bunnings employee and a customer, maybe, if Bunnings had a New Paradigms aisle.
"I'm looking for life's precious little golden thread," the customer says, having crawled into the store in abject exhaustion from the dispiriting version of 'reality' outside.
"We've got the rusty chain, the tangled wire and the thick rope, but we can't help you with the golden thread I'm afraid. What do you want it for?"
"I want to just see it. I want to smile at it. I want to tell life's precious little golden thread that I love it. That's all I want."
The employee responds to his consumer, both of them made much smaller by the paradigm of the world in which they live which turns them to turds and turns off the stars, a world which has been largely manipulated by a small percentage of the whole but which is not in fact the last word on the matter.
"We've got the ball of string, the reel of packaging tape and the optic fibre cable but I'm sorry, we don't have the golden thread any more," he says sadly to the sad consumer.
No, we don't have much of anything any more in this dying paradigm, Mr Leunig. But I suspect you feel the golden thread just as much as I do. It's because of this you feel like a safe space to me, someone who has a vision that extends beyond the current limitations. And so even when you point out the foibles of life, the things that make me want to impale my eyeballs in a dramatic death scene, you remind me of what I value most of all and what is there, beyond the aisles of dead consumerist culture.
Thank you for that, you beautiful motherfucker.
I have fanblogged you more than once on this blog. I don't write these posts in the hope that you will read them. I just like to voice my appreciation sometimes. It's difficult to write about, because what your stuff evokes in me is the space inside that I need to protect. It's childlike, and paper-thin. It can be laughed at as naive by cynical people who are very rational and very grown up. I think it's something like hope and belief in a better future worldview, with a slice of mysticism thrown in.
I guess it's pretty obvious that we can do something better than the paradigmatic shit we're currently sewering in. I s'pose it's the particular viewpoint you come from, but to me our hope lies in the fact that the us living under this destructive rampant capitalistic shit are much bigger than the them for who it is in their best interests to keep facilitating it, even if they're killing their own grandchildren's nest. Not that I like fostering any more extra separation than we're already living under, but in this instance it's helpful.
Lots of people have given up hope. I give up hope regularly, too, but then I tire of the ridiculousness of being caught up in such a 2x2 paradigm so I go searching for a bigger turning circle again. Your work never fails to bring me there.
So when I write to you, it's hard to harness the bubbling joy that sprites up my guts. I can't help it. Even when you draw or talk about the things that make me want to impale my eyeballs down hard on two metal spikes so that my brain spurts out my ears and ends my place in this current insane sphere of inhumanity and returns me to my cosmic swamp, you are like medicine. Especially there.
Which is the best medicine, of course. You spill out your guts and make something beautiful of it. You shine starlight on my dark, Mr Leunig. You're a fucking marvel.
Yes, yes, I know, I'm platforming you. I'm Mandelaing you, as an Australian Living Treasure, into the schmaltzosphere and into something evil. Or am I? It's not you that makes me feel like that, after all. It's your words and pictures. I'm sure you're a pain in the arse at times, a fearful, hating mess, who leaves his jocks on the floor and doesn't pay his bills on time, who's made dreadful mistakes and royally let people down. Who poos.
I still have this thing about how weird it is that everyone poos. Like, even the queen, and stuff. (I will not capitalise the name of someone who inherited their great riches on the back of sweet fuck all. But I digress).
This human human compulsion to venerate the good takes the good away from us. Vaunts doing good stuff into the stratosphere inhabited by People Not Me. It's just one more case of slicing and dicing ourselves up into dissociated bits. And I've had quite enough of that, thanks. The reality is that even mofos make good and make art.
Not that I'm saying you're a mofo so much as I'm saying we're all mofos, beautiful mofos. And even though we're all beautiful mofos we can still do awesome stuff. The stuff we share as common ground is more than a beginning.
I started writing this post by pen, sitting outside in the grass and the sun of greenly Belgrave. I have begun writing morning pages again, and this morning I chose as my writing tray of choice The Essential Leunig. A perfect choice, really, though a little hefty in the weight department, it is a lovely hardback 7/8 A4 size, a size which often seems to be used by books that inspire me in some way. Of course, it's a perfect size for reproducing cartoons.
So I flipped it open to a random page. One of them was of a man standing outside with a piano, and atop it a telescope. One eye was trained through the telescope at the stars while one hand tinkled the keys and the other hand wrote down the music he was seeing. That made me very happy.
The other side of the page was an interaction between two people. A Bunnings employee and a customer, maybe, if Bunnings had a New Paradigms aisle.
"I'm looking for life's precious little golden thread," the customer says, having crawled into the store in abject exhaustion from the dispiriting version of 'reality' outside.
"We've got the rusty chain, the tangled wire and the thick rope, but we can't help you with the golden thread I'm afraid. What do you want it for?"
"I want to just see it. I want to smile at it. I want to tell life's precious little golden thread that I love it. That's all I want."
The employee responds to his consumer, both of them made much smaller by the paradigm of the world in which they live which turns them to turds and turns off the stars, a world which has been largely manipulated by a small percentage of the whole but which is not in fact the last word on the matter.
"We've got the ball of string, the reel of packaging tape and the optic fibre cable but I'm sorry, we don't have the golden thread any more," he says sadly to the sad consumer.
No, we don't have much of anything any more in this dying paradigm, Mr Leunig. But I suspect you feel the golden thread just as much as I do. It's because of this you feel like a safe space to me, someone who has a vision that extends beyond the current limitations. And so even when you point out the foibles of life, the things that make me want to impale my eyeballs in a dramatic death scene, you remind me of what I value most of all and what is there, beyond the aisles of dead consumerist culture.
Thank you for that, you beautiful motherfucker.
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| Pic by Carlo Mirante |
don’t drum up the men to gather wood,
divide the work, and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn
for the vast and endless sea.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
'Tis a strange confluence that in a world of 7 billion people, the life I live ~ and, strangely to me, possibly most likely you also ~ is one whose emotional reality feels more like living more in a world of one.
This particular point in time is more lonely for more of us than it has been for most humans in history. In a world where we can barely stop being connected. Where we're drowning in it.
But there are many levels of connection. A pixellated one, where we control and stylise, edit and present ourselves as reality to those who are doing the same, is perfectly fine within its place.
But we are going too far with this at the moment. We know that, right? We're like the guy who finds himself stoned for the third time this week when it's only Wednesday and he said it was gonna be a once in a while thing. And a part of him is scrabbling at his insides saying, "Hey, um, this is getting out of hand" but he's having too much fun and anyway, life is way more awesome stoned than it is straight. He listens to more music. He's not seeing his friends, and he's not getting much shit done, but man, as soon as he has that first bong, the pain fades away and everything seems more beautiful.
It's awfully easy to become addicted to the virtual level of connection. It's very safe. I need safe, because I don't feel safe, and when I am out walking the streets you are not safe, because you are so used now to connecting virtually that when we come face to face it's like you don't even recognise that I am standing in front of you, or walking towards you in the street. We ignore each other. It is an insult to us both.
"Technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable," Sherry Turkle says (see Ted talk below). "We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy." We are afraid that no one is listening to us. We are afraid that no one really sees us. And so going online seems to help alleviate that. But really, it's just a panacea. I feel like I am seeing right in front of my eyes how it's making things worse. And I'm seeing it in myself too.
Online connection is sometimes a chocolate bar when what our bodies are craving for is nourishing vegetable soup. We really, desperately want to be seen and loved warts and all. To be accepted in our totality. And yet our technology is creating a group of teenagers who are not developing the skills in the art of real-life communication with real people that will enable them to be the sort of person who is able to love someone else warts and all, and love themselves warts and all. Real life is messy, and it is not a series of browser pages, and it runs slower, and we occasionally get bored with each other, and we are not in control because the person in front of us is not a pixel whose avatar we can shut away with a mouseclick when they become too much or too little.
"I'd rather text than talk," Sherry Turkle reports hearing over and over again from teenagers. One teenage boy, who does the majority of his communication by texting, tells her that he'd like to some day learn the art of conversation, but just not now, just not yet.
It is easy to forget that we are at the beginning of the internet age. It doesn't feel like it to us, immersed as we are within it so that what happened two weeks ago feels like it happened six months ago. But it is still an infant. And it's delightful, and it's enriching our lives, and it's what we have desired. But we are its 7 billion-strong parents, and it's a colicky infant. It's affecting our lives so that when we go out on a picnic to the park without the baby, we feel sorta exposed talking to each other, and we're jagged with distraction about what the baby's doing. Communicating with each other without this thing between us all feels so fucking raw and uncontrollable. And the trees in the park are getting some weird disease and the grass is asking us to take off our shoes and stick our feet in but it's weird and we don't. The park and the experience will feel more real once it's controllable and in the past and we have upload it to Flickr.
It's funny, you know - all these years with chronic illness have made me feel so on the fringes of the world that it took me a while to realise that you're all out there on the fringes as well. With or without without chronic illness. Yearning for the sea.
You fall into the vat into the vat into the vat into the vat and
time-past freezes into time-present
But not in a nice way. Not in a Live In The Moment kind of way but a
kind of way where you're walking along in the moment in 2013 and then
wham!
you fall into a ditch from 1982
or 1977
or 1975
and you feel the terror wash over you again.
It's a terror whose depths have taken you years to realise.
And no one but you knows that you're not in 2013 anymore Dorothy.
And you become repulsive
and you feel completely alone and
upset because no one comes to help but
no one knows you're not here and
no one ever did come to help in this particular way because
no one knew you were in the vat and
when it comes to this sort of thing
no one can help except you.
Ahh.
Now, the problem with that is that
whenever you fall into the vat from 1982
or 1977 or 1975
what comes with you is exactly not what you need
But there's nothing else here that is easily seen.
Nothing else but the terror and that voice
The one that says stuff about you that in daylight hours
you do not believe. Stuff about how you're the shittest piece of shit that
ever did live and how completely pathetic you are and seriously
you wouldn't talk to a moldy sock like that.
Or your worst enemy.
Your task, should you choose to accept it
is to find the good voice in that space
the real one not the shit one that is itself shit but says it's you who are shit.
And you do accept that task and
you take it on and
some days are better than others and
others are really just shot to the shit.
time-past freezes into time-present
But not in a nice way. Not in a Live In The Moment kind of way but a
kind of way where you're walking along in the moment in 2013 and then
wham!
you fall into a ditch from 1982
or 1977
or 1975
and you feel the terror wash over you again.
It's a terror whose depths have taken you years to realise.
And no one but you knows that you're not in 2013 anymore Dorothy.
And you become repulsive
and you feel completely alone and
upset because no one comes to help but
no one knows you're not here and
no one ever did come to help in this particular way because
no one knew you were in the vat and
when it comes to this sort of thing
no one can help except you.
Ahh.
Now, the problem with that is that
whenever you fall into the vat from 1982
or 1977 or 1975
what comes with you is exactly not what you need
But there's nothing else here that is easily seen.
Nothing else but the terror and that voice
The one that says stuff about you that in daylight hours
you do not believe. Stuff about how you're the shittest piece of shit that
ever did live and how completely pathetic you are and seriously
you wouldn't talk to a moldy sock like that.
Or your worst enemy.
Your task, should you choose to accept it
is to find the good voice in that space
the real one not the shit one that is itself shit but says it's you who are shit.
And you do accept that task and
you take it on and
some days are better than others and
others are really just shot to the shit.
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| Pic Deeo-Eleclaire |
 | |
| Pic by Darren Wyn Rees under a CC attrib/sharealike licence) |
Some days, it feels like we're a giant old-fashioned kettle, about to start squealing
I guess humans at the end of an empire really don't have a whole lot of turning circles within which to be comfortable and expansive and giving to others, do they? In an environment like this one, you gotta shore up yo shit for yoself.
Which is probably partly the reason why we're in the pickle we're in.
Birthing new ways of doing things is hard. Even when it feels awfully natural, and you're coming from an unnatural space. Even then it feels scary, like you're walking without seeing where you're going. Which we are.
But still, every time I get despondent that the very worst of human nature - the greed and the nastiness of small-minded people who give not a fuck for the earth they live on when it's profits they need, or the closed-mindedness of people who should know better - I remember what I keep forgetting: that the aim isn't probably so much to be fighting what is already established. That is crumbling to dust before our eyes. The real aim, the real creative bearing-down, is in working out what's gonna come next when the dust of that shit clears and we're left just with each other. If we are lucky. And when I remember that, I turn and look at those who are already practising alternatives. They're everywhere. Often in non-Western countries. We are as poor and blind and deaf as can be culturally speaking when it comes to wisdom. Sometimes I get the feeling that we are almost ashamed and embarrassed to talk about such childish notions as beauty, or of justice, or of freedom. It feels almost like we are so far gone down the jaundiced road of cynicism that to speak of those things is some sort of blasphemy.
Fuck that. Those things be where it's at. Where we're going. Maybe, if we're lucky.
The jaundice is what happens when you're on the rat race wheel too much. It's a symptom, that's all.
Here's to new paradigms as old certainties and status quos crumble. Here's to spaces where beauty, justice and freedom are not naive pie-in-the-sky ideals but qualities we are able to practice more and more, as the time goes on. Here's to a space where our fragilities and vulnerabilities are shared, not shored away because the space where everyone was a danger, and to be hated, and threatening, has passed, and we have moved on to something more sustainable in every possible way.
Here's to a space where those who are first will then be last and those who are last will then be first.
Sophisticated thinkers often work equally well in the realms of high-order analysis and speculation and across a range of feelings with their varying degrees of intensity. A mind with that virtuosity seeks the contexts and creates the possibilities necessary for its own nurture and fulfillment. It becomes a self-generating organism. Not necessarily one which is independent of others nor or enabling contexts, but one which knows how to seek, find and transform experiences.~ Roslyn Arnold, from the second edition of New Philosopher, a quarterly print magazine exploring ways to live a more fulfilling life. I would highly recommended it even if it hadn't become a bit of a warm and fuzzy thing by virtue of the fact that when these guys were searching for potential crowdfunders and I told them that I love the concept of the mag and that it is necessary to fill a niche, but that being broke I could not afford to give them any dosh, they gave me a free subscription.
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| Pic by Jessie Romaneix under a creative commons attribution/noncommercial/no derivatives licence |
Goodness me, this post from Michele Rosenthal at Heal My PTSD could have been written for me. One of the biggest challenges of my entire life is about this ~ about getting past pain and allowing myself to experience pleasure.
This seems to be a rather common occurrence among some of us - we do not feel that we are allowed somehow to experience pleasure. And by pleasure I don't mean flopping ourselves in front of the TV. I mean doing those things that really bring us joy in some way. Why is it so? Don't we all experience suffering in some form? If the answer is yes - and it's always yes; even charmed lives have their share of suffering - then why do we not comfort ourselves with pleasure? Where does this puritanical tiresomeness come from?
I have a friend who does not seem to have this battle as much as I do. She allows herself to experience pleasure whenever she wants, and her life, as a result, even though filled with suffering, also has a certain kind of ease that is awfully attractive, not least because I feel like my life does not have that ease. And it seems to come easy to her, but when I talk to her about it, really, what the difference is between she and I is that she has the same sorts of thoughts and feelings I have around letting go and doing things that give us pleasure. It's just that she ignores those thoughts when they come, whereas I treat them as if they are some great god thundering from a mountain.
Enoughness.
I think, if I am really very honest, that so many of my struggles to sit down and write - and pretty much all of my struggles to sit down and play with clay - are because somewhere in my mind, and somewhere very obviously in my culture, I don't feel like I am allowed to do these things. I'm not allowed to do them because I enjoy them too much, and because I'm not working enough, and until I spend enough time each week working at a stultifying soul-destroying job in some capacity, I have not earned the right to do those things. Because everyone knows you have to eat your meat before you have your pudding. How can you have any pudding if you haven't eaten your meat?
What would happen if what the world needs most was a whole bunch of people all eating their pudding at once?
That walk from the TV to the clay, from the TV to the computer to sit down and waste time writing stuff - or whatever your personal bliss is that you don't feel you have the time for - is the single most challenging and enlightening walk that you can take. One of the most important ones, but the absolutely hardest one because it is a walk you need to take alone while the internal voices shouting that you don't have time and haven't earned this are completely meshed with the outside societal voices that are in total agreement. And too often we listen to those voices.
How very strange, to be in a situation where the most courageous acts I can do are to do things that bring me intense pleasure. How very, very strange.
But not uncommon at all, I don't think. When life is pulling us in directions that distress and/or depress us, our first instinct is to try harder. When in fact, what we really need to do to rest, and recuperate, and recreate ~ in the very best sense of that word, re-create ~ is to stop trying so hard, let loose, loosen our hair, take off our glasses, pick up that guitar, have a shag, listen inside for some whispered secrets that may well surprise us about what we really want to do that would give us joy, because even though L'Oreal has co-opted the saying, we really are very much worth it.
Let us all eat pudding.
This seems to be a rather common occurrence among some of us - we do not feel that we are allowed somehow to experience pleasure. And by pleasure I don't mean flopping ourselves in front of the TV. I mean doing those things that really bring us joy in some way. Why is it so? Don't we all experience suffering in some form? If the answer is yes - and it's always yes; even charmed lives have their share of suffering - then why do we not comfort ourselves with pleasure? Where does this puritanical tiresomeness come from?
I have a friend who does not seem to have this battle as much as I do. She allows herself to experience pleasure whenever she wants, and her life, as a result, even though filled with suffering, also has a certain kind of ease that is awfully attractive, not least because I feel like my life does not have that ease. And it seems to come easy to her, but when I talk to her about it, really, what the difference is between she and I is that she has the same sorts of thoughts and feelings I have around letting go and doing things that give us pleasure. It's just that she ignores those thoughts when they come, whereas I treat them as if they are some great god thundering from a mountain.
Enoughness.
I think, if I am really very honest, that so many of my struggles to sit down and write - and pretty much all of my struggles to sit down and play with clay - are because somewhere in my mind, and somewhere very obviously in my culture, I don't feel like I am allowed to do these things. I'm not allowed to do them because I enjoy them too much, and because I'm not working enough, and until I spend enough time each week working at a stultifying soul-destroying job in some capacity, I have not earned the right to do those things. Because everyone knows you have to eat your meat before you have your pudding. How can you have any pudding if you haven't eaten your meat?
What would happen if what the world needs most was a whole bunch of people all eating their pudding at once?
That walk from the TV to the clay, from the TV to the computer to sit down and waste time writing stuff - or whatever your personal bliss is that you don't feel you have the time for - is the single most challenging and enlightening walk that you can take. One of the most important ones, but the absolutely hardest one because it is a walk you need to take alone while the internal voices shouting that you don't have time and haven't earned this are completely meshed with the outside societal voices that are in total agreement. And too often we listen to those voices.
How very strange, to be in a situation where the most courageous acts I can do are to do things that bring me intense pleasure. How very, very strange.
But not uncommon at all, I don't think. When life is pulling us in directions that distress and/or depress us, our first instinct is to try harder. When in fact, what we really need to do to rest, and recuperate, and recreate ~ in the very best sense of that word, re-create ~ is to stop trying so hard, let loose, loosen our hair, take off our glasses, pick up that guitar, have a shag, listen inside for some whispered secrets that may well surprise us about what we really want to do that would give us joy, because even though L'Oreal has co-opted the saying, we really are very much worth it.
Let us all eat pudding.
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| Pic by Ucumari (under a creative commons attribution/no derivs/noncommerical licence) |
Do not, when people tell you they are depressed and wish to die, regale them with reasons why the world is so beautiful that it is simply wrong for them to think that way. It is true that the world is so beautiful, but the world is also brutal, nasty and despairingly flawed. Try to resist propelling any repulsion you feel outwards but instead remember that you too will one day die, and that unless you are extremely lucky you too will one day feel this way.
If you tell them that they must stop feeling this way, it denies the black moon beauty that is found even within those spaces where we wish to be no more. It denies the golden thread that runs through everything. Leonard Cohen's crack runs very deep, right to the core.
:P
Which is a tragedy, and an opportunity for Kelvin Cunnington, and also a fine, fine beauty. Depending on what world you find yourself in.
The world to you bares her beauty. You roll in her mists, and so you should. The world to them is a differently made-up composition of chemicals and genetic mutations that make what you are saying not just a farce, but the fact that you would deny their experience to their face a slap and a travesty.
When people tell you they are depressed and wish to die, take the beauty that you swim in in the world and try and creatively package it. Not a mass-produced item, but instead take her moonlight and her sun and if you can, help them find out what it is that they love, what it is that they crave, what it is that they need so badly that it has pulled itself completely inside out and become its own opposite. And if you can at all possibly do it, package it up into something just for them, and give it to them. You may not be able to. But if you can, do not expect the sort of response that you would receive if they were bathed themselves in moonlight.
You cannot fix anybody at all. But you can accept them. Acceptance of them may just help in some very small way for them to find acceptance of their own in being in this space, to see the deep beauty that exists even here.
It is a paradox that making yourself at home in any space helps you to stop embedding yourself so hard into it, and might help you, in whatever way is required and possible in your situation, to begin the climb out again.
If you tell them that they must stop feeling this way, it denies the black moon beauty that is found even within those spaces where we wish to be no more. It denies the golden thread that runs through everything. Leonard Cohen's crack runs very deep, right to the core.
:P
Which is a tragedy, and an opportunity for Kelvin Cunnington, and also a fine, fine beauty. Depending on what world you find yourself in.
The world to you bares her beauty. You roll in her mists, and so you should. The world to them is a differently made-up composition of chemicals and genetic mutations that make what you are saying not just a farce, but the fact that you would deny their experience to their face a slap and a travesty.
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| Stand Alone Complex by =Lucid-Light |
You cannot fix anybody at all. But you can accept them. Acceptance of them may just help in some very small way for them to find acceptance of their own in being in this space, to see the deep beauty that exists even here.
It is a paradox that making yourself at home in any space helps you to stop embedding yourself so hard into it, and might help you, in whatever way is required and possible in your situation, to begin the climb out again.
I’m sitting on the fourth floor of a hospital, in the
waiting room with Andrea. Not quite what
Australian Crawl had in mind, though whenever someone opens the stairwell door at
the end of the hallway a flood of sunlight pours in. Outside is a golden May day of blue skies and
autumnal-turning trees. Inside, this
waiting room is filling with women, most of whom are carrying large envelopes
with x-rays inside of them.
“Don’t mind me if I go quiet,” Andrea says. “I feel like talking at times, but then I
drift off.” It’s okay; I understand.
I’m a bit of a drifter myself after all, even without sitting here
waiting for a doctor to look at the lump I’ve discovered only two weeks prior. And anyway, it’s before 9 am and neither of
us have been morning people for a long time.
Not like when we were kids, and we got out of bed one hot summer morning
and jumped into the swimming pool in our nighties. I am still harbouring the hope that her lump
is as benign as the sun coming through the stairwell door.
One by one they are called – Anita, Barbara, Li. I know Barbara’s name is Barbara because it
is written on the side of her white envelope.
She has pink streaks in her hair to match her pink top. When they call Andrea’s name the surreality
goes up a couple of notches to 11. What
on earth is my cousin’s name doing, being called to go into that room? She doesn’t have cancer, for fuck’s sake. She
can’t have. It’s not fair. But then when is it ever fair? But both of her parents were claimed by it,
and she has two kids and a husband and I don’t want her going anywhere for a
very long time.
She disappears into one of the doctor’s rooms, and is being
told as we speak that yes, she does have cancer (she knew from the start), that
it hasn’t spread, that she will need to go for a biopsy next week to determine
what sort of cancer it is – slow-growing or aggressive. We’ve known each other all our lives. Our friendship has been solid since we were
eight – the same age as her youngest son is now. Her name just does not compute with people
who have cancer.
Across from me in the waiting room is a nervous lady with
grey hair speckled with brown and sadness spilling out her eyes. When she opens her wallet I see a picture of
two cats. She has a scarf round her neck
and a nice shade of plummy lipstick on.
She looks scared. She has frown
lines and a big blue bag that she keeps shuffling through. I wonder if her bag is as chaotic and
disgusting as mine, with its bits of raggedy paper and random empty packets of
things and crumbs lining the bottom. She
too gets out pen and paper from her bag and begins writing notes. We are a couple of old-fashioned writers in a
sea of smart phones. Later, she examines
the pictures on her hankie. It is the
same hankie I had as a child, with Australian flowers and their botanical names
on it. She looks so scared that I try to
catch her eye to smile at her, but then I lose heart when she doesn’t look at
me straightaway and I take to examining people’s shoes instead.
There is a plethora of coloured shoes going on at the
moment. Ballet flats that were last fashionable
to wear back in the 80’s. Still black
predominates. I count a tan pair, an
orange pair, a pink pair, a yellow pair.
There is a TV on the wall which is broadcasting the usual
muck and slime of morning commercial television – either fearmongering or
saccharine sweet but little that has any relevancy for any day I ever
live. The Pick A Part ad comes on. I was wondering where it had gone. I know every word to that ad but I can’t
remember what I walked into the room for three seconds ago. It would be very nice to be able to take some
parts of your brain that are holding useless information and transfer those
bytes over into the short-term memory compartment.
An older woman comes in, accompanied by a couple steering a
pram. The older woman carries a bag that
has a reproduction of Bieres de la Meuse, a print from the late 1800’s. It is Art Nouveau and all curves and flowers and
pretty women, and I wonder if her x-ray envelope is hidden inside that bag, or
if she is a pro, who has been initiated already into the clan and doesn’t need
to bring her x-rays along anymore.
The couple with their baby take centre stage. I look at the worried woman across from me. Her face has softened and she smiles, like
many other people, at this squalling little thing, who we were all like
once. Somewhere around four to six weeks
old, I’d guess, she is wearing pink mittens to stop her scratching her face and
matching pink booties. She’s making
snuffly mewling noises. “Shhh,” her dad
says. “Shhh.”
I wonder whether the woman who is here for her appointment
is the mother of the woman or of the man.
I take a guess and say the man. The
baby cries. The mother of the baby, who
is wearing red and black, moves into the most inconspicuous corner of the
waiting room to feed her baby. The
woman, the mother and the father all watch.
This small little creature has them all tired and captivated. “She’s on there. She just doesn’t want to feed,” I hear the
mother say, and she takes her baby out when she keeps crying. Such a little thing, so dependent on them for
her every need.
Everyone is on their phones.
I feel sick. Different people get
up and go into different rooms when their names are called. Nadia, Anastasia, Marjorie. The woman next to me is looking at pants on
her mobile. Row after row of disembodied
legs sporting red, yellow, teal, black pants.
A woman in a mustard top receives a visit in the chair next
to me from one of the hospital workers.
“Agnes is in Korea for four weeks, so I’ll be looking after you today,”
the worker says. “Yep, I’m still here! How long’s it been since you were last here? Three years?”
I was wrong. The woman
is related to the baby’s mother, not the father. The mother and the woman speak to each other
in a Eastern European dialect. The woman
hands the baby to her husband. “Shhh,”
he says to his baby, multitasking on his phone while she sleeps in his
arms. “Shhh.”
Out in the hallway there is a woman on a gurney, swaddled in
white sheets and blankets and black straps, whether to restrain her or stop her
falling off I’m not quite sure. But she
doesn’t look like she’s capable of doing much fighting to me. The straps aside, she looks very cosy and
comfy in her bed.
Most of the other women here probably have breast
cancer. They’ve been sent as a matter of
urgency by their doctors – well, as urgently as the public hospital system
allows for, anyway.
It’s the waiting that does your head in, Andrea says, when
we are out of the hospital and in the car on the way home, out again in the sun
and under the sky. When you know what
you’re up against, at least you can do something about it. She’s been reading online, accounts of fellow
sufferers who found the experience of treatment easier, when there was
something they were doing about it. Once
you have beaten the cancer, sometimes the depression can set in because you’re
back again, waiting.
That’s understandable to me.
We need to frame our journeys, make a story of what is going on in our
lives. It’s why I’ve sat in this waiting
room writing about the people in it.
When you are actively fight against something, like any captivating
story it’s one that’s sharp, with contrasts, with heightened emotion. When you’ve come down on the other side (if
you’re lucky enough to have an other side), and you’re waiting for something to
not return, that makes it a little
bit more difficult. Many
people who have beaten cancer are surprised at the emotions that come out
the other end. How do you frame waiting
in a captivating narrative?
It’s a problem I wish upon her, a waiting that is hopefully
one of the extremely long variety.
We're all in the process of giving birth.
The pain is high but there is no epidural.
The baby we are giving birth to
is a golden child who has
enough teats for us all to suckle.
Sometimes, everything collapsing is not a bad thing.
especially when you have prior warning.
The new to come will be so much better and simpler
than the beast we are now used to,
which alienates everything in its path
us from each other,
us from our best,
us from the earth,
the poor from their share.
There is no epidural, but the clear-headed pethidine
is hope. Its bubbles are so wide I can lie flat out and fly
right up to the ceiling and see
the whole of the world.
~ ~ ~
(Inspired by Ted Trainer's The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World)
The pain is high but there is no epidural.
The baby we are giving birth to
is a golden child who has
enough teats for us all to suckle.
Sometimes, everything collapsing is not a bad thing.
especially when you have prior warning.
The new to come will be so much better and simpler
than the beast we are now used to,
which alienates everything in its path
us from each other,
us from our best,
us from the earth,
the poor from their share.
There is no epidural, but the clear-headed pethidine
is hope. Its bubbles are so wide I can lie flat out and fly
right up to the ceiling and see
the whole of the world.
~ ~ ~
(Inspired by Ted Trainer's The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World)
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| Espiritu de Mexico by Alberto Thirion (CC) |
The case for death (and the case against performing animals):
When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them. Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwillingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them. The performing wild animals in a circus go through their programme, I believe, in that same way. Those who have been through such events can, in a way, say that they have been through death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
Karen Blixen - Out of Africa
There is much to be said for learning to die well while you live. You can go kicking and screaming all the way down, if you want, even if you know that life tends to lie out the other side of all of those deaths. Even if they are not what you want, or maybe even not what you can see for months or years. The possibilities that lie within one small seed, maybe they lie too in all our deaths. Maybe even most in our most meaningless ones.
So you kick and scream all the way down even if you do feel life lying just beyond death because while you know that, you also don't know that, or you forget, because in those perpetual death places you can't for the life of you remember being anywhere else ever. And then the life breaks in once more and again, you remember the meaning of perspective.
So you kick and scream all the way down even if you do feel life lying just beyond death because while you know that, you also don't know that, or you forget, because in those perpetual death places you can't for the life of you remember being anywhere else ever. And then the life breaks in once more and again, you remember the meaning of perspective.
Learning to die to live feels part of the great circle. Not a line, to me. Not something linear that ends at some point (even though it will - or will it?) Yes, a circle, a spiral. Coming round and round back to the same places again, feeling like a breath of some sort of grace, the different angle examined, the new puzzle piece learned.
And you come up over the hill and it all breaks open before you for the millionth time, like sparks, and you remember what you have always known, and have forgotten again: it's love. Love holds it all together.
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
~ Mary Oliver
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
~ Mary Oliver
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