Slowly, Slowly

Bruno's, Marysville (pre-fire)  Pic mine - free to use but please link back

Yesterday, I took the next few steps towards seeing if this creative space idea of mine - Liminal - is viable.

I created a survey (which I would love for you to fill in, if you could be ever so kind, especially if you live in Australia).  I created a Facebook page.  I already have a Twitter account.  And I sent out the first newsletter.

After all of that effort, Speedy Snail is a little exhausted today!

Unable to identify image creator - apologies

This is so how I felt this morning.

My hope was that I would at least try to do some basic yoga stretching,  some breathing, and some meditation, to start off the day right.

It's hard to do that when you can't get yourself out of bed, though, so I did the next best thing - I just stayed in bed and did it all.  Sure bed yoga entails reduced poses but it's not like I would be doing downward dog first thing in the morning anyway, so it's all good.

Starting something new - or at least dipping your toe into the idea of starting something new - is terrifying, isn't it?  It feels daunting because it's big and it's changey and we aren't very good at change.  But still, right next to the terror is excitement.  It reminds me of how often this state felt as a child and a teenager, and how as we get older it's easier to sequester ourselves away from new experiences.

Especially true for me after 15 years of chronic illness.

But the good thing about having a chronic illness is that it has forced me to confront my limitations.  I'm not very good at managing them, even after all this time.  Sometimes, if I'm extra ultra anxious, I can easily feel like pacing myself is simply not allowed, as if something outside says it is not permissible to do things your way, in your time, at your pace.

It's the insides that are making me feel like that, and what is inside is anxiety.  It's been probably the hardest symptom for me to manage in recent years and I only now feel like I'm getting on top of it again.    This racing mind has thoughts rushing through like traffic, in combination with a fatigued body, so I end up feeling sorta somethin' like this:

CC pic by Andrew

But of course, there is also something outside my own body that says that I can't go at my own pace and neither can you.  It's this stupid, childish, ridiculous, amateur culture we're all stuck with while we slowly realise we can change it.  The one that tells us to conform to it, not the other way around.  The one that does not fit us right.  Our culture is like a one-size-fits-none jumper made of scratchy wool that's 11 sizes too small that we have to wear all summer, and which has too many holes to keep us warm in winter.

Stepping outside of what you've been born into is the equivalent of that saucepan frog jumping out.  It's scary and hard to see what one day ends up being so clear.  But it's doable.  Being aware of our culture's stupidity, and that your desires to do things your way are perfectly acceptable - sane, even - makes it just that much easier.

And so the fears I have about starting up something like this with limited stamina are not so surprising in the light of the inside and the outside.  I can't start up something like this.  Why not?  Because I don't have the energy.  Well start it part-time.  But you can't start up a business part-time!  Why not?  Because it doesn't look professional.  Who says?

Good point.    But I can't do it by myself.  Then get other people on board.  I don't know where to start with that.  Well, just start.  Build it and they will come.  Was it really necessary for you to insert a corny film line?  Yes.

There are so many ways we can limit ourselves.  I'm a hardcore mistress at it.  But to be honest with you, I have absolutely NOTHING to lose in pushing to see what happens with this idea, and everything to gain.

At the very least, I will be able to say I tried.  And that's something.  

Public domain

Snails have been featuring prominently for me lately.  I wrote a short story a few weeks ago for a competition.  The winning story goes onto a wine label, which is all kinds of cool.  My story involved a woman at her daughter's wedding who is voyeuristically watching a couple of snails having sex.  Can say I don't write about the important stuff, now, can we?

Throwing Copper and other Schizo-Affective Happenings

Well.  Let me just say that dealing with the high levels of copper you discover you're carrying in your body is only a tad more fun than impaling yourself on a bunch of freshly sharpened knives or being eaten alive by a plague of tarantulas.

Because hey, I like nothing better than walking around on my own personal rollercoaster.  Rather unlike Queensland, I've been beautiful one minute and suicidal the next.  I have had paranoia, anger and suspicion settle over me like a mantle since I have started detoxing this stuff, like the fine cloud of dust that settled over everything in our house during the Ash Wednesday fires several decades ago.  It's waxed and waned and I've had to remind myself over and over again that it's simply a physical reaction of this copper - called "the emotional mineral" - leaving my body.  And despairing about that.  Reading things into what everyone is saying that aren't there.  A feeling of hopelessness and depression.  Something that I really cannot explain to you.  The most strangest feeling.  I imagine it must be something like when people develop schizophrenia.

Indeed, high levels of copper have been reported in over 50% of schizophrenia cases.  I understand, just a little better, simply from doing this copper detox, a tiny little something of how that might feel.  I have wondered over the past few weeks if maybe I really am going crazy, even while knowing, in that small little watcher part of my brain that no, this is just detoxing.  I've been here before.  Just not quite as mental as this.  But I concede defeat - I can't continue on at the levels I've been doing this one.  The levels which are a one-size-fits-all on the bottle are too much, apparently, for me.  It takes a friend with CFS on the phone to convince me finally of this.

So I have cut my detoxing levels back to half the recommended levels. Because apart from having to deal with the psychological effects, this whole experience is taxing my already-depleted adrenal glands too, and so I am feeling like a car with too little oil - every little thing in my environment that changes, I feel the gears crunch and grind.  My adrenal glands are not properly manufacturing those beautiful, beautiful hormones, the ones which you don't even think about until they're not readily there.  The ones that enable you to float through your day, dealing with things in their proper context.  Not stressing out because you have to go to the supermarket.

I have found out that there is such a thing as a high copper personality.  Someone who tends to retain high levels of copper.  And that I pretty much fit the bill.  This feels like it's maybe one one of those big jigsaw puzzle pieces as to why I have not been able to regain enough energy post-CFS.  The at-home test for copper showed quite conclusively that I have high levels.  The other day I had a hair mineral analysis done, a  much more in-depth check to determine my copper levels.  I would bet a whole stack of money that the test will come back confirming what I have been experiencing as I have been detoxing.  This is a description of a high copper personality:

Positive traits include a warm, caring, sensitive, emotional nature, often with artistic orientation and a child-like quality. Often high-copper people are young-looking. Many traditionally feminine traits are associated with copper such as softness, gentleness and intuitiveness. This may relate to the qualities of metallic copper, which include softness, malleability and an excellent conductor of electricity.

When the personality is not fully integrated or the copper becomes too high, negative traits show up. These include spaciness, racing thoughts, living in a dream world and naiveté. Other qualities include childishness, excessive emotions, sentimentality, a tendency to depression, fearfulness, hidden anger and resentments, phobias, psychosis and violence. Artists, inventors and other high-copper types often "live on the edge", in part due to their high copper level.

The copper personality tends to accumulate copper easily. Copper can function as a psychological defense mechanism. It causes one to detach slightly from reality. This provides relief from stress for the sensitive individual. It works well as long as the copper does not become too high. Very high copper can cause a psychotic break from reality, a type of schizophrenia.

From DrWilson.com 

So, that's what I've been doing lately.  Struggling through this latest hellish thing which I know is going to help me in the long run.  But realising, finally, that it's just too much.  That I need to gear it down.  I have gained a respect for this damn mineral and just how destructive it can be to your psychological health.  Appreciative of how much better I am feeling after having a break from the whole thing yesterday (a birthday present for me).

I don't think you can really appreciate anything until you've lived on the underside of its tapestry.  I tell you what:  I appreciate mental health and a well-functioning body.  They are difficult things to maintain in this plastic-soaked world.  I appreciate knowledge and wisdom.  I appreciate extra pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. I appreciate peace.  I appreciate feeling up to writing here today.  I appreciate coming out the other side :)

Cuando el alma esta podrida by ekanss9 nebadon

Wheat and Weeds

I was standing pondering at the traffic lights the other day how it is that we are herds of sheep if we are asleep, and how easy it would be for some sheep to get themselves run over. People regularly cross against the lights if there is a break in traffic. Some I see just walk out behind the gaggle already crossing and come perilously close to getting themselves skittled.

I sat with my friend Jane yesterday feeling strangely emotional as she told me about the advances happening in terms of understanding the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. Twenty five years ago it was called the yuppie flu and even when I first contracted it 10 years ago it was still a thing maligned and barely believed amongst the medical profession and therefore amongst the public. Now the snowball is beginning to roll after some evidence has been found linking a retrovirus found in 95% of CFS patients tested. The people at the forefront of the testing are a virologist whose career was basically ruined a couple of decades ago by the powerful who refused to believe what she was saying back then. It wasn't until she was tending bar and came by chance across a millionaire whose daughter had been sick with CFS for a couple of decades, and who funded the set-up of the institute she now is a part of that headway has begun to be made. So now maybe the ones who were far less lucky than me, who have been ill for longer than my scanty six years without seeing health on the other side, will now be enjoying renewed hope.

It's always small groups of individual people who are not blinded and made thick by the system and what power they have to lose, and who have learnt in some measure to refuse to live in their superiority and great ego, who are able to see what is often in plain view.

It is unfortunate isn't it that the people still want a king. We do; it seems to be some sort of element of our makeup that many of us are too fearful to question and instead want to be led. And of course Christianism-as-empire-religion-of-the-powerful has perpetuated that down through the centuries. What easier way to put people in fear and subjugation than to dangle them over the eternal hellpit? To teach them that they cannot learn for themselves but must be taught by those with greater authority?

We want someone to tell us what to do, what is good, what is bad if we do not trust that the kingdom is within. We have been taught over and over that the heart is deceitful above all things. But I believe that our hearts have been made good. That we can trust our hearts. That it is where God speaks.

These days the king is seeming more like the great structure itself than a person, but it still stands. We don't want to question the structure of the giant thing grown up around us because it would make us feel unsafe. We do not want to probe into the beginnings of things - for example, the police force, off the top of my head, or the law system - to find that they grow up all higgledy piggledy, created here and created there in response to needs of a particular age and then incarcerated into the system where they are carved in stone.

How squashed down humanity is under these things, the kingdoms of this world.

I understand how and why these structures come up. It's not like they spring up overnight, and it's not like you can really blame any one particular person; they just grow. But to stay safely ensconced in them out of fear is to blind yourself. The only real safety is in the freedom of people relating to people. The system kills in us the knowledge of what a powerful thing that is, but it remains so.

I saw a cool series of artworks a few weeks ago. All were composed of large architectural drawings of cities, in pencil, precise, clean lines. On top of each drawing was imposed something else, in but not of, full of colour and life. I can only remember one of them now because my memory is like unto a fish, but it was rows of buildings, and up on the roofs green grass and gardens, all connected to each other by walkways high above the traffic.

CFS Awareness Day

I get fed up with the crazy amount of awareness days the world has but this one, CFS Awareness Day, is closest to my own heart. I suffered from this illness for six years and it changed my life forever.

I prefer the other term for CFS: myalgic encephalomyelitis. Gives it that extra weighty bite of seriousness :)

Richard Stubbs interviewed Marg Purcell today on radio 774. She contracted CFS two months before I did, in April 1999, and is still sick. She was an athlete before she fell ill. Me, I'm one of the lucky ones. My CFS started around June 1999, when I contracted glandular fever which just never really went away. From memory (hilarious in-joke) it took me a couple of years to get a diagnosis. CFS is a bit of an empty diagnosis to have though. And that's if you can get one in the first place. Unless you hit upon a good doctor, you will have to go through the hell of trying to work out what is wrong with you while the GP who sits across the desk from you quite possibly believes there is nothing wrong with you that an antidepressant and a trip to the psychiatrist cannot fix.

This is where my extreme mislike for the medical profession began :) Doctors are as caught up in the system as anyone. To think that there are still GPs out there with this view after all this time shows how elephantine the system is when it comes to changing perceptions and keeping up, chaps.

In the interview above, one caller said they worked in a 12-doctor clinic where none of the doctors believed CFS was real. Well, I can tell you that the fatigue, muscle aches, flu-like feelings, brainfog, memory lapses, immune system suppression (but in my case, elevation, which meant continual painful golf balls on the side of my neck, ouch), nervous system disorders, autonomic nervous system stuff-ups (causing things like inability to regulate body temperature), adrenal overload, spending all the next day on the couch because you walked for half an hour today, anxiety, digestive problems (causing bloating), regular rapid heart beat and light sensitivity are very real, thank you very much.

The CFS Awareness Day I remember was where I agreed to help man (woman) a stall in a shopping centre. One woman bobbed up to me, listened to me talking about what CFS was, and then trippingly and gaily said, "Oh, I think I might have CFS. I'm so tired all the time!" After which she flubbered off for a bout of shopping.

Which left me feeling pretty good because hey, feeling tired is actually a pleasant, relaxing feeling. But the tiredness that accompanied CFS, at its worst, felt like the marrow was leaching out of my bones. At my very worst, having a shower tired me out for a whole afternoon.

I am so grateful that I recovered. It takes an iron will and determination to keep trying that extra thing. I was one of the lucky ones whose CFS was most likely precipitated by bacterial/viral infections (like rickettsia, for example). It took me a year of rather psychologically hellish ongoing antibiotic treatment to clear those infections up, and then once I did, my body was able to slowly begin healing itself (along with squillions of bucks' worth of nutrition and supplements and stuff once my body began being able to absorb them properly).

I can't believe that people still trot out the line that CFS sufferers are malingerers. I understand the misunderstanding. I don't understand why it still exists. For one, it is often the go-getter types who contract CFS to start off with. Marg Purcell was an athlete before one day she suddenly felt unwell. From there on, she has never regained her health.

I am of the foolhardy and pigheadedly stubborn belief that many people are able to recover from CFS. There must be a stubborn insistence on trying new things, new areas, in learning to listen to what your body is telling you it needs. It is like a full-time job with no accolades. It is difficult to tune into our bodies in this society when we are healthy. We are trained in many ways to switch off. Many healthy people are unable to discern even what their guts are telling them, and often we treat the symptoms instead of the underlying concerns.

To tune into a body whose brain function is causing you to feel as if you are constantly in an out of body state is extremely difficult. Many people give up on a cure when they have been ill for so long and seen so little results. Most realise that they must learn to accept their condition - which feels like accepting the unacceptable. It took me years to learn to accept. I strongly believe that acceptance of the illness is a necessary road toward health. There is no way of living with CFS aside from living in the reality of the present, of the good, small things, as Margaret mentions - the great cup of coffee. This is how the approach must be made toward getting well, also. The small, slow, tiny steps.

Perhaps CFS really is a life sentence for some people. Whichever way it is, it would be a hell of a lot easier if you broke out in spots on your really bad days, like Richard Stubbs said, if it would garner a bit more compassion. Because you can't see how people crash the rest of the day after they have mustered up the adrenaline to talk to you. You can look at them and think they are looking good. I do it now with my friend who is still ill. If I didn't know from inside experience how unwell she is, I would probably forget that she is sick. But I do, and I know this - you gotta take our word for it. If I could bottle up how it feels and give you a dose, you really would help people out with this condition, and with compassion. But I can't. You have to just take our word for it.

Memory, dogs, sculptures and chainsaws

Ever since I was ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, my memory hasn't been so good. Now, my memory has never been all that great, and I suppose five years of smoking 10 bongs a week may have contributed to its worsening. But it's been markedly worse since the whole CFS deal. This doesn't make much sense when you call what I had chronic fatigue syndrome (that is the stupidest, most insulting name ever invented). If you call it myalgic encephalomyelitis, however, it sounds much more likely that a condition involving years of brain inflammation, and neurological messings, will have contributed somehow to this problem. Or maybe I'm just getting older :)

This ponderance about short-term memory makes me think. (Which is good, as long as I realise I'm going to forget that I did, heh :) In some ways, a not-so-great short term memory is a good thing for someone who still harbours hopes that she will actually write and complete something at some point in her life that is not a blog post (nothing personal, darlings :) I remember reading a quote somewhere about writers and compost, about how all the stuff that moves out of our direct memory goes down into that compost and becomes writing fertilizer. My inner Grandma really likes that - what a practical way of recycling my thoughts into something creative :) Coolies :)

Yesterday I took myself off for an artist date. I have begun reading Julia Cameron's successor to The Artist's Way. It's called Walking in this World. I really enjoy her style. One of the things I am agreeing to do while reading this book is to have a weekly artist date. An hour-long date alone, to do things that are festive or that feed my creativity. Because sheesh, the well has been feeling bone dry of recent weeks; it needs refilling. These artist dates are something I struggle with massively. I feel so resistant towards them, which is such a strange thing. Why feel resistant at something that feeds me, that drips down into my days ahead, that renews my focus? I was thinking maybe it was just me that had such major problems with this set playtime, but there must have been a lot of feedback for Julia to write about these dates that their importance should not be denied even though the resistance flourishes. "Resist your resistance," she advises. The ways I will try to sabotage my own creativity never cease to amaze me. What is it? Is it a fear of creativity's power? Or is it, as Cameron suggests, that not facing our creativity means that we don't have to face ourselves? Perhaps that is all it comes down to, and perhaps that is why there must be some sort of ebb and flow in a creative life. I have been facing so much of my own stuff of recent times, there must be days and weeks where the inward gaze stops, or I shall go mad. Or perhaps not even so much the inward gaze - how do you live a life without being aware of what is going on inside you? That's abdication - but more the inward discovery, the realisation of certain unattractive proclivities you have. That is a wonderful thing to have happen, but it is exhausting, and I think there has to be wisdom in the looking and the timing. Like I mentioned at Kent's place yesterday, the ways the Great Creator unravels our stuff is an art form in itself. It's just exhausting, that's all. There needs to be breaks inbetween for rejuvenation.

And so yesterday I took myself off to Gasworks Art Park, after being reminded of it on the telly the other night. This place has been converted from an old gasworks site into a bit of a creative hub. The old buildings have been recreated into about 12 different studios that sit around the outside. Nice red brick buildings they are. Kind of look like stables. On the inside of the site is an off-leash dog park. This place combines two of my favourite things, creativity and dogs, and the combination - even without any directly observed creativity, except the sounds of some sort of chainsaw or such tool from the sculptor's studio - was enough to put a bit of a spring in my step. Creativity fosters creativity the way yeast fosters yeast or hate fosters hate. What organic creatures we are.

I was thinking whilst driving to the park (thank you, Graeme, for changing my tyre) about an idea for a new blog I've got swirling around. Thought I could loosely document different dog-friendly places I visit around Melbourne. The name came to me, seemingly out of the blue: Not Without Lester. Yeah, that sounds alright. Might try that.

Got to the park and began walking and came upon the sculpture that graces the eastern side of the park. Lester barked at it, as he usually does, but it was pretty much bluster, as it often is. Took some happy snaps of the sculpture, thinking that it would be nice for my new blog. Then looked at the name. The sculpture is called Not Without Chomley.

Obviously I remembered that somehow, from last year when I visited this park and read the scupture's name then, while Lester barked at it. But I'd forgotten it, at least in my conscious memory.

Which is kinda cool, I guess. I ... what was I saying?

Timing

Last Sunday I sat and listened to my friend Jane and her friend Nerida discussing coping with CFS, and was shocked to realise that what I was feeling was ... well, it wasn't envy, but it was something in the same vague vicinity. It was a recognition that I had lost my CFS identity, and in many ways that I am only beginning to understand, I have not managed to replace it with something else.

Which is ironic, considering when I was sick with CFS I felt like I had no identity at all. I used to wonder why Jesus asked the man at the pool, "Do you want to be well?" I wondered if perhaps it was just some sort of social nicety. But the thing is, us humans want to stay where we're comfortable. Even if that's a horrible place. We gain our identity from our experiences and giving that up does not always come without a fight, even if it's a great evil. I don't understand it entirely, I must say. It seems ... well, crazy. But it's true. He knows how hard it is for the rut of suffering to give way to the horizon of possibility, of anticipation, of change. We have no idea how we're going to get there. I don't think we're meant to. Do I want to be well? Oh, yeah, I do. I hope.

Timing is everything. When I knew that I had tried, with all of my might and for over two years, to stay in my marriage but I just couldn't do it, I strongly sensed God, or maybe my own inner great wisdom (or maybe they're just the same thing), saying, "Not yet. Wait." It was so strong, it was something I just hung onto. And it was proved right. When I did finally leave, the most terrified I've ever been in my life, the reverb still enough to easily bring tears to my eyes two years later, it was the most seamless, least messy breakup I've ever seen, really. Which is a great consolation. As is the fact that I can say that my mate Mocca has picked himself up and moved on. He is actually happy. It makes me happy to see him happy. In some ways I have been more concerned that he regain himself than I regain myself. Which is not an entirely healthy thing, I suppose. But I felt like I was lost anyway, you know? I felt (stupidly so, according to him) so responsible for this marriage break-up, and was in so many pieces myself anyway, that to see him go under as a result of my actions (and he did, for a little bit) was more than I could bear, really.

So Mocca has moved on. I am happy. I think now it's time for me to do the same. He was quite flabbergasted about my insistence on claiming that this was all my fault. What is the point of blame, he asks? And indeed, he is correct. Blame is a pointless egoic exercise. It feeds bitterness. Which is something I seem to have carried from the past 10 years. Surprisingly. How surprising to discover these things about ourselves. It is a brave enterprise to venture forth into the discovery of ourselves. It's why many people refuse to, unwilling to look, happy instead to live in the land of unreality, the most unsafe place that ever did be.

Blame and self-punishment. Both pointless enterprises. But I have done both, these two things operating out of such deep roots that I have hardly been able to really recognise it for a while there.

Yes, blame is pointless. But examining oneself is not, and perhaps it is because I am the one who has to pick up and move on with myself that examining the part I may have played in the breakup of my marriage is a necessary and useful thing for me. At least examining your part to play in painful enterprises redeems them somehow, me thinks. The most painful situations drag up subconscious stuff, and when it's dragged up it is of the utmost benefit to take, and look, and drag it into the light. As painful as that is, God is there. As painful as that is, it leads somewhere. It opens up new rooms, new continents, and the reverb extends down through your life into the future. A good reverb, opening things up, revealing a bit more of the mystery that is yourself.

I have been making noises for the past several months to myself, slowly getting louder, that it is coming time for me to move out into some sort of community. Not anything major. Like everything, very small steps lead to long miles walked if you just walk small steps at a time. This is something I need to remind myself. The following verse by Julia Cameron is the way I desire to walk in my life and in my artmaking:

Instead of thinking about conquering an art form, think instead of kissing it hello, wooing it, exploring it in small, enticing steps. How many of us have burned through promising relationships by moving too swiftly? How many of us have burned out in new creative ventures by setting goals too high? Most of us.

~ Julia Cameron, Walking in the World

I desire to share, on a semi-regular basis, my life and spiritual journey with a few likeminded people. I think I am ready. It is never going to not feel scary. Interaction with others is always a vulnerablefying experience. I remember when I stepped out of the whole church building deal over 7 years ago, I wondered if I would ever find people who were looking at things the way I was. These days, they seem to be everywhere. I feel comfortable now within myself about my faith, my God, and what it feels and looks like to be led by God. I know how he talks to me. I don't want sermons on five-step plans to accomplish my goals; I wanna hang and share hearts with some people. As scary as that is.

I don't need to be led. Never have. But I need to share. And it's taken me a long time but I think the shards are stuck together in some sort of vague coherency now that sharing can be some sort of a two-way street. And maybe, like that elderly woman on the bus last night whose beauty shone out through her facial lines, maybe being a blob of shards stuck together will involve some sort of light refraction. Here's hoping.

There is a Christian meditation group that meets on a Monday evening a suburb away from mine. I'm planning on giving them a call over the next few days. God has been saying 'Wait' to me in some fashion or other the entire time I have been a believer. I don't think there will ever be a time where 'Wait' is not occurring in some part of our lives. And it's okay. That word 'Wait' contains promise. It is a risky word, too, because it can feel perilously like, 'No,' or maybe sometimes like, 'Never, you silly moron,' or even, 'Never. Don't look at me. I am a small god and I am not interested in fulfilling any of your desires,' depending on which version of life we are clouding our lenses with at the time. God is the ultimate risk-taker, the ultimate vulnerable lover. And just because we are living in an age of smallness, of greyness, of clamour and unease, maybe we need to remind ourselves that God is love and life and colour and movement and the 'Waits' s/he says to us are for very, very good reasons. But God's heart is always 'Yes.'


Image: Tree of Wisdom by Emin Sinanyan

Voices Inside My Head

When I was a kid, I was a bit of a daydreamer. I spent a fair bit of time staring into space. For a man who was feeling driven by many things and who expressed himself by doing, this kid must have been some sort of weird anomaly to my Dad. Surely she didn't come from his loins.

And so I copped a fair dose of "You're lazy" throughout my young years. I don't have any sharp conscious memories of being told that, but I know I did because it's become one of those tapes we play inside our heads, that remain there unnoticed until we cast our gaze on them and root their messages out.

I was talking to my friend on the phone the other day about this very thing. I felt like a hypocrite at the advice I was giving to her, considering I haven't learnt all the lessons myself yet (but maybe a hypocrite on the road to recovery is the best type of person to give advice). She was bemoaning how she felt like she was being lazy if she considered giving up the voluntary work she's doing for an hour a week, helping a Burmese woman learn English. This is a friend who is ill, unable to work even part-time at this point of time, who is on a shitload of antibiotics to kill off the things that have been keeping her sick, and there is no way known laziness is coming into the equation.

But logic is overridden by those voices inside our heads. I have become much more intimately acquainted with the tenor of that lazy voice, grappling with it when I was ill for those 6+ years with CFS, fighting it like it was a tiger. I had to. It was a big step towards my recovery - or at the very least, made my recovery a much more relaxing process where I could even enjoy some things.

It seems patently ridiculous now, but entirely obvious given those tapes that my father carelessly put in there, that when I was at my most ill I would, even while I was dragging myself out of bed to have a shower, dragging myself back to bed to recover from the ordeal of that before dragging myself out again to make myself something to eat, at the same time be dealing with a low-level, vague underlying feeling that maybe I just wasn't trying hard enough. Maybe I was being lazy.

How ridiculous is that? But still, maybe no more ridiculous than the tapes playing inside your head :). We all do it to varying degrees.

That CFS lesson was a big one. I did grapple that tiger to a large extent, forced it to the ground. By the tail end of my illness I was beginning to revel in the delightfully cosy feeling that occurred when I would walk myself through the logic of why it was that I wasn't lazy, but was ill, and that the best thing I could do for myself and my health was to lie on the couch all afternoon, despite what the internal tape message whispered. This was an ongoing process for me. I basically had to do it every day, this conscious reminding myself, going through the steps of why it was that I was on the couch, and how it was that I needed to rest.

The tiger is still there. It's been grappled, and it's toothless and made of paper, but it still exists in the ruts of my mind. Maybe one day it will disappear in a cloud of tigerish smoke, but for now, the best thing is to be aware that it is still there, informing my emotions. Sometimes I forget.

I am on week 9 of The Artist's Way. One of the tasks for this week is to read back over my morning pages - the three pages of longhand I do upon wakening first thing in the morning. They are quite invaluable for insight, these pages, even though they are quite boring. Much of what I write in there is surface level urgency, blathering, getting stuff off my chest, the stuff that is uppermost in my mind, often the negative stuff. What I noticed in there that I complained about the most was that over the past two months I have consistently not been doing enough centreing prayer and I have consistently not been having enough sleep. I have also been consistently fighting off ill health in one shape or another. Except that's been going on for six months.

Looking back, I have realised that since September I have battled tracheitis (the asthmatic after effects which still linger in occasion), followed by colon cleansing and parasite cleansing, followed by a month-long low-level virus. So much for being well :) This girl who has recovered from CFS apparently still has a fair way to go to get to good health. But I forget this.

And so yesterday, when I lay down to watch a movie (Paris, Texas, a Wim Wenders movie, Kentster - t'was good) I had to go through the rigmarole again of telling myself that I wasn't lying down in the middle of the day to watch a movie because I'm lazy and inherently morally deficient. I was lying down in the middle of the day because my body was telling me to, because it is recovering from basically six months of being tossed to and fro, whether by external viral forces or by my own detoxing forces. And it's feeling weak. (Our society does not teach us to listen to our bodies, nosiree. It teaches us to ignore them. Dangerous place to be).

Last night I started feeling better. Maybe it's the vitamin C I've been taking - 4 grams a day for the past 2 days - but last night I got a bit of a giddy-up of energy. And what did I do? I got up, cleaned up the house, did some more filing, cleaned up the absolutely ginormous pile of clothes sitting in my bedroom threatening to topple on me in the night, asphyxiation by cotton. And as I was doing all of these things, it was like one more repudiation to the toothless paper tiger that
I am so certainly not lazy. I'm a pondering mystical meditative, but just 'cause you're sitting on the couch staring into space ... that is work of a different kind to the physical - but by God, it's still work!

The tiger still roars, though. Just not as loudly. I recognise it earlier as something separate to me. It does, however, share my living space. I have got used to that. It's a long-term visitor but it isn't, after all, a permanent resident :)

Happy Sunday, bloggers :)

Streams of water in the desert, part 96

When I was ill with CFS, oftentimes alongside my various bodily dysfunctions, aches, pains and tremors would be an accompanying anxiety. Like a low voltage electrical charge, it pulsed through my body. Sometimes it was so strong that it was all I could do to not go a bit mad, being stuck on the couch, fatigued, while at the same time my exhausted adrenal glands tried to cope with this relentless buzzing throughout my body. Sometimes it kept me awake at night, so real that it felt like I should be able to hear it, that it should be keeping everyone else awake. It's very difficult to explain how that felt; it was like a physical manifestation of a body out of kilter, an immune system malfunctioning. It was terrible.

Perhaps it's the reason why I find even generalised ill health to be so unbearable these days. It's like having been made allergic to any kind of bodily dysfunction so that even having a cold feels worse than it used to before I got sick. Funny, when I was in the throes of my illness, I would have given anything to just have a common cold and have that to deal with. Now I'm well, even having a common cold feels like falling back into the CFS abyss. Illogical, yes.

Good things always come out of bad things, however, and the good thing I gained from those horrible years is a deeper root system. It was necessary. I had no choice but to delve down deeper, a stretching further down of the roots, like a stretching on the rack, a desperate search for water. But I found it.

And I'm finding it again today. My body doesn't want to work very much today, and the insistent clamour of anxiety that accompanies toxic die-off is a much louder voice than the one of my body that says "rest". I have had several years' experience, however, of learning to listen to the stiller, smaller body voice and to not give so much weight and power to the strong insistence of the clamouring anxiety, difficult as it is to do. Sometimes, I have to return over and over again, to tell myself yet again, that it is okay for my body to rest when it is in a detoxing state. You would think it would be logical, but there has always been this accompanying anxious insistence that I do something other than rest, whenever any form of ill health is in the room. Self-nurturing is a powerful weapon of defusement in this situation. Today that has come through my morning pages; this afternoon it shall come through an adjournment to the couch, with blanket, books, a cup of tea and the TV remote, into solitude, peace, centering prayer and communion. Even everyday moments are holy.

Finding peace in the midst of the clamour is always surprising. Oh! Peace is here! Even though you know this and believe this, that peace lies buried beneath the desert floor, and encourage others to go searching for themselves, there is still a part of you that doesn't believe it, that is shocked when peace and love and truth and beauty come and kiss you on the lips. Even though you are cut from the same cloth, the apple of Peace/Love/Truth/Beauty's eye (despite everything), you are still surprised when they turn up. Sometimes you wonder if, in an age still yet future, when in some inexplicable way you and Peace/Love/Truth/Beauty are wedded, webbed, welded more closely, face-to-face in dimensions yet unknown, if all of life, each moment, will not be a delicious delight at their presence even while they have absorbed you and you see them and are changed. Maybe that's how you could go on and on and on forever, if that's how it is going to be, living in this but never, in some lovely childlike way, coming to terms with it, as if we are perpetually six years old on Christmas morning. Or always in love, the heady first moments. Always at the brink of orgasm and always with our noses buried deep in a recently-rained-upon earth.

The Wastefulness of Life

When a tree has barely enough life to keep itself going, it looks sickly; it's leaves become yellow or spotted, lacklustre. If it has enough life to keep itself alive and healthy, it will produce lovely leaves but no fruit. The fruit only comes when there is over and above what the tree needs itself to survive. Fruit is produced by pure excess of energy. Such excessive wastefulness. That's what makes the fruit.

Coming off two months of illness where getting myself through the day has been just about the extent of it, there has been no fruit for me. No creativity, no extra love or care for anyone else. It's been maintenance mode. I forgot how lonely it is in here. (But still, even in this aridity things take root, in the dark. Nothing is wasted. Nothing).

I have been re-experiencing a reprise of how it felt to have CFS. It's been almost unbearable returning back to the land of illness, a desert of the waste howling kind.

But still, it was much worse back in CFS land. As if it's not bad enough to experience the physical effects of being ill, you have to deal with the psychological effects of very few people understanding or giving any kind of validation for the horror you are experiencing. At least coughing up my own lungs with great regularity has produced an abundance of sympathy from horrified onlookers. If only there was some kind of outward expression like this for CFS patients. It is an invisible illness in so many ways.

The physical aridity of illness stretches its fingers inwards. Everything that makes life pleasurable becomes out of reach, like the fruit at the top of the tree that is too far away to reach. How juicy it looks. How pleasurable far horizons seem, and how impossible to gain them just when you need them most. This is where the evil is at its worst. To rest - spiritually, emotionally, mentally - when you are sick is almost impossible. At least, it is for me. It requires conscious effort and excess energy. I never really did learn to rest while I was ill. That has come when I have been well.

When I regained my health, being well felt like some kind of crazy cosmic high. It was the simplicity of life that took my breath away. How easy life is when it's been taken away from you and then returned! When you have died and been reborn, everything is a bonus and from that vantage point it becomes very apparent that the world is made out of the kind of playfulness that children live in instinctively and that we lose when we become way too serious and fearful and logical and analytical and Western about everything. We think that we have to strive and strain to reach the things which lie inside quietly, waiting for us to slow down to the "unforced rhythms of grace". It is all so so simple. So very, very simple. So simple, even a child can understand it. That's what's so frustrating. Because simple doesn't mean easy to reach.

The buds are unfurling. Very slowly. I feel like a creaky old chair that's been out in the rain for a decade or so. My thinking is as crusty as my body and my mind, too, must unfurl. Yesterday afternoon I came home from uni and took myself to bed. It felt way too luxurious a thing to do, which is exactly why I did it. The walls had closed in around me as soon as I walked in the door. The house, reflecting its owner's two-month low-energy status, cried out to me to pay it some attention. The bathroom has been overtaken by about 13 loads of undone washing festooned all over the floor. There are dishes everywhere, papers, dust, dirt, letters that haven't been opened for a month (my landline got cut off for a few days because the bill got stuck under pile number 17 in the loungeroom).

I felt my usual overwhelm at the amount of stuff there was to do around this place. That familiar sinking feeling of despair, of claustrophobia. So I did the best thing - I didn't do anything. I took myself off with my dog, and lay on my bed and read. And slept for about three hours. And when I did it felt good, and the leathery surface of my mind smoothed out again, and I could breathe. And everything became more manageable.

I needed to do this kind of thinking regularly when I was ill. But I couldn't. Or wouldn't. I couldn't see that there was a way out, a way to rest while I was sick. The violent stress of needing to control everything burst its banks and flooded my mind. How unattractive the land of control is. But the perspective is just not there when I am ill.

I think, why do I ever try to do anything when my mind is turmoiling like a washing machine? Of course, that's the time when the need to do just that is at its most screaming and desperate. Funny, isn't it, how when you are the most strung out it seems to be the time when you must, must, must solve all of your problems, and the Middle East crisis to boot. When I have a measure of health, the ridiculousness is apparent to me. As soon as I recognise my flustery thinking, the opportunity to escape presents itself alongside the recognition. The recognition and the ability to find the escape hatch has become a more automatic process since I have been well. But when I was sick, once again it completely flew out the window.

But yesterday, I managed to ignore the turmoil. And got the benefit last night by feeling like I had space enough to do something vaguely creative. And oh, how nice it felt :) I got to write some crap poetry. Felt the leathery surface smoothing out a little bit more. And I thought, here is that wastefulness again. It feels too extravagant somehow, living in the rhythm of life. There is an ease, a luxury, to it. All of the good things, creativity, love, music, reading, relationships, change, they all need to grow in this rich soil of extravagant wastefulness. The West has lost its sense of dreaming, and so we forget this. But our hearts don't.

Sometimes I think that we have been told so often that we are spotted yellow and diseased that we don't think that we deserve to have any fruit, or that it's unobtainable, or that it's tied up in how rich we are or successful or whatever. We become so tied up in striving outwardly that we become fearful of the silences within and so we cut ourselves off from our own fruitfulness. Yet even when the tree is spotted yellow and diseased, it still contains all of the potential for fruit within it. Even when it looks like it's dead. The sting is out of death's tail, swallowed up in life.

Wastefulness is seen as excessive, wrong. But it's not always so. Not when those things are good things, life things, like love, kindness, patience etc. The fruit of life. They live in the unforced rhythms of grace. The speed of life. God is wasteful. Terribly terribly wasteful in every direction. It's enough to make me laugh out loud.