These Fragile Things

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.

From http://payzle.com/for-fun-hard-unilateral-visual-neglect/

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.

Despair and Bliss

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.

Stand Alone Complex by =Lucid-Light

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.

The More Beautiful World ...

... our heart knows is possible.

Just "at the edge of your courage, but not past it."

The first will be last and the last will be first ...

I'm dreaming this morning not of a white Christmas, but of a day when those who live at the broad bottom of the pyramid scheme of today's version of life are at the top of it.  And of a day where those at the top who currently actually enjoy breathing the stultifying air of global capitalism that is making them insane and wreaking havoc on the world will be the ones who find it more difficult to breathe, because something new has come.

I can't shake that feeling that something new is coming.  I don't know if it's pie-in-the-sky dreaming. 

It seems to me that all the very, very best things that make life worth living - love, and beauty, and art, and visioning - are seen as side issues and peripheries in the current paradigm we live in.  We can live believing that the way we live now is just simply how it has evolved.  I do not believe it.  I believe that the way we live now serves not us, but those at the top of the pyramid.

We are both more in chains but freer than we could possibly imagine.  It makes you mourn to see the extent of your chains, but then, after that, it makes you more able to throw them off.  They are invisible chains, and you must know they are there before you can begin imagining that the small hopes and fancies that seem childish and naive to have are actually the heartbursting centre of something else, another way to be.  What seems almost too good to be true is perhaps just simply the tip of a rather large iceberg.

I envision a day when those peripheries of love, and beauty, and art, and visioning, and time and space and energy to do work in creative ways that buzzes with meaning, feels more than slog, is more than feeding the system ~ I envision a day when those things will be the centres.

That swells me 'eart. 

So may it be.

Vista Costera by Cristina Centenaro (CC)

Fan Mail

Dear Michael,

I was worried that if I summoned the guts to get up to ask a question at the Capitol Theatre last night I would have gone all American Awards Night and gushed, "I luuurrrve you, Mr Leunig" and then looked like a right dick afterwards. 

But it's true.  Out of all of the People That I Don't Know, I love you the very mostest.

In the best of all possible worlds, you and Helen Garner would come to me wearing giant chicken wings, and would enfold me into your collective chickeny breasts for an entire year, where I would have space and silence and write and daydream all day while the bills paid themselves.

What I love most about your work is the journey that it takes to get there.  And then there is a present to unwrap at the end.  I don't need to make myself shiny to start off walking.  In fact, the way into the middle of your stuff is right through the guts of the Leonard Cohen crack.  I get to bring all my shit with me, and then when I arrive, that shit is soothed.

Which is a particularly unromantic visual, really, but there you have it, that's the life mess, right? 

And so I think that's what makes experiencing your work so heartfelt to me and steers me towards the inclination to gush.  I think that whole experience might be called redemption. 

I've been struggling a lot with health issues in recent years, and combined with a personality trait that makes me a thinker who wants to see and not be asleep, staying upright in a world where a small bunch of Elite Psychopaths are in charge is a hard deal.  Your stuff heartens me and props me up.  And that's a pretty damn near amazing thing to be able to do for people.  It's just, like, the best.  I mean, what else is more important right now than giving people courage and reminding them of the humanity they have and that the feelings they have about how different the world could me (can be?  will be?) are not naivety but are visioning?

And that's all she gushed.  Thanks, Michael.  Very muchly  xoxo

Sue

Okay so yesterday's post was rather melodramatic.

But it was how I was feeling. I got swamped by this giant tsunami of fears yesterday morning. It sort of surprised me with its velocity. I read somewhere recently that 95% of our thoughts are unconscious. I don't know how you could scientifically come up with such a figure, but I wouldn't be surprised. The longer I go on, the more I grow, the more deep down I feel, the more honest I am with some of the crap that I think, the more surprised I am at some of the crap that I think (and deep-breathe at some of the beauty I think. Goes both ways).

When I am in a space like I was yesterday morning, it feels like an eternal prison, like it has always been like this and it always will be. It feels like you are destined to be forever in this particular position. There is just no hope there at all. Perspective buggers off.

While I was in that space, someone online was saying some good and wise words about the reality of things. Straightaway I could see that this was my golden thread to follow back to something like a "right mind". How I love the dispassionate part of me that sits observing my thoughts and dismisses the hopelessness that comes when my fears overwhelm me.

How I hate that dispassionate part of me when I am wrapped up in my own prison. I hate it so much that I cannot even acknowledge that it is there and I turn away to the corner like a child, dismissing the messenger as a fool. The way I react inside, when faced with the option of taking myself from out of this horrible, awful space? There is a part of me that just doesn't want to. It would rather sit in that space and wrap its fears and its pride and its giant ego around itself and rot. It doesn't want to hear any of that shit ... even though at the same time I know within myself, if honest, that shit is exactly not what it is. What a big baby I am in these spaces :)

Stuff staying there for a joke. I love the golden threads too much. They take me out to Rumi's field where I can breathe, where I can forget myself, where I can live.

Next Wednesday night maybe. We'll see. I have a newfound respect though for just how fearful I am about meeting up with people again. It is understandable, certainly. But it feels ill-founded. Like all my fears, regardless of how they came about. It's like they grow in the dark and expand beyond what they originally were. I do not want to be dictated to by them. They speak false.

Connection/Dissociation

Been listening to Counting Crows this evening. I admire Adrian Duritz's sharing about his life with dissociative disorder. I imagine that would have been particularly gut wrenching to do so. I'm glad he did.

I find it really interesting how he describes dissociative disorder and performing as a particularly ill fit:

I have a fairly severe mental illness that makes it hard to do my job -- in fact, makes me totally ill suited for my job. I have a form of dissociative disorder that makes the world seem like it's not real, as if things aren't taking place. It's hard to explain, but you feel untethered.

And because nothing seems real, it's hard to connect with the world or the people in it because they're not there. You're not there. That's why I rarely saw my family back then: It's hard to care when everything feels as if it's taking place in your imagination. And if you're distant with people, especially women you're romantically involved with, they eventually leave.

What makes my case even worse is that every night I go out on stage and have this incredible emotional connection between me, the band, and the audience. Then, just like that, it's over. I go backstage, back to the bus, back to my hotel room, and sit there all by myself. That deep connection is yanked away in an instant. It's like breaking up with your girlfriend over and over again, every night.

Well, when you put it like that ... actually, fame has never been much of an appeal to me. I mean, sure, like most people I've indulged in fantasies about it. Especially at times when I'm feeling really bad, really raw. All that unconditional adulation - nice. At the same time, this sort of buffer between you and other people, like a mirage that sits between you, like a fur coat.

Except the emperor wears no clothes, and I think the knowledge of that would send me snorting substances up my nose to deal. That mirage would be a prison. Sitting in a prison on the shifting sands of other people's adulation and hatred - no thanks. I already have a couple of prisons of my own, thanks very much. Those will do.

My heart breaks when I think of how many people struggle with different mental illnesses. My homeless friend K suffers from some sort of undiagnosed disorder where she fades out, loses her memory. I feel some understanding of mental illness. I felt out of control in my teenage years from the things I was carrying, the deep dark hate, the covering over of it. I do not believe I had borderline personality disorder but I do believe I could have gone down that path if things had been different. Who knows? And I've got enough fuck-ups of my own to deal with, that's for sure. So many of us battle. It scares us so that we do not wish to talk about it, but humans are fragile things, and we break. I think our technology makes the situation even more dire these days.

Sometimes I wonder what things would look like if the knowledge was spread over the earth that God is a loving God, that there is wholeness in God, that there is healing and acceptance there. I think of that young bloke I saw at the train station a few months ago, screaming to the sky, "But I got nothin' to live for!" Is there something in his heart that is screaming for redemption? Something in every human heart that beats so tenderly but seems too good to be true.

I do think the reality of God is good enough to be true. Like a fairytale. I don't know know how my mental state would be if I hadn't fallen across God. Even just the concept of God, of redemption, of a pressure valve release. Hopefully I would have fallen across Buddhism instead. Otherwise I do not know, for me, how I would have coped.

My heart cries to God tonight for how hard this world is, and how much we despair, and how little hope there is and I wish God would wake us up. I wish the knowledge of God would fill the earth like water. It would wipe away our tears, swimming in God. It would heal our hearts and heal our minds. It would fill us so that we would be able to be god to each other, unhidden, naked, and unashamed.

It would be heaven.

You can read the rest of Adam's article here.

Pic: http://mavrixonline.com

The Mystery of the Cross

Jesus on the cross identifies with the human problem, the sin, the darkness. He refuses to stand above or outside the human dilemma. Further, he refuses to be the scapegoater, and instead becomes the scapegoat personified.

In Paul’s language, “Christ redeemed us from the curse…by being cursed himself” (Galatians 3:13); or “God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him [together with him!], we might become the very goodness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Wow! Just gaze upon that mystery for a few years!

Evil is not overcome by attack or even avoidance, but by union at a higher level. It is overcome not by fight or flight, but rather by “fusion”!

Richard Rohr from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 189

God became human so the human can become a god. Noice work :)

I had some vague experience of this when I was talking last night about ... oh, to me, the worst thing about myself ever, the thing that creeps me out the most, the failure of leaving my marriage. I was talking with Mark a little about why I was, as he put it, "stymied", why I felt stifled and unable to pursue the things I wanted to pursue while being married to him.

We didn't talk too long about it because I don't understand it. It upsets me and it scares me. It is a blindness in my soul and it scares me that it will always be there, this giant numb hole. But to even be able to talk about this thing I have been so so ashamed and embarrassed about - there is healing simply in the talking.

But today I feel hopeful for this ... monster part of me (this is how it feels like). Not that it is going to go away in one fell swoop, obviously. Everything is tediously processural. But just that there is the chance that it might.

That hope comes from putting it out there in the open. The world doesn't collapse in on itself when you do. It makes me understand from experience how it is that hiding my bad behaviour is to do more evil to myself on top of that which originated my bad behaviour in the first place. And I don't want to hate Susie that I'll keep treating her like that.

It's much easier to discuss it these days. Mark has a new life, with a new girlfriend, and he is happy. But it is still painful for him - I can see it in his eyes - and for me too, and so there is great poignancy to the discussion. But you can't discuss your evildoing without forgiveness being asked for and forgiveness granted. This is surely the way giant chasms form in relationships, big enough so that trust and the kitchen table fall down the middle, when people refuse to admit the damage they do to each other.

It deprives you of the honey that flows from the forgiveness once granted, and the grace and dignity that is attached to this holy ground of confession and absolution. And the way that the bad behaviour floats down to smaller sizes when it happens. And then suddenly you can see a bit further than you could before. This is healing. Of the incremental variety.

I am grateful to be on the receiving end of forgiveness granted. It explodes the hope out, like seed pods on the wind.

Beer Budget, Champagne Taste

It's going to be a minimum tonight of 29 degrees (84 F) and a top tomorrow of 43 (109 F). Repeat for Friday.

Now, there is no denying it - when it's this hot, it gets in the way of basically everything. It makes 35 degrees look like you should take a cardigan with you just in case you get a bit of a chill. Me, personally I'm a bit partial to 35 degrees. There's something about the dry heat that makes me go all mystical. I feel free in this sort of weather.

Maybe that's why I stood out at North Melbourne station late this afternoon, waiting for a train 30 minutes overdue, listening to Sergei (that's my new/old iRiver) and just feeling wonderful. I kept looking at people and situations and finding them sort of amusing and getting interesting opening lines for stories and blog posts that have long since vanished. I love how expansive I feel sometimes in hot weather.

The only downside is my house is so horrendously hot, with no insulation in its flat roof. And I was concerned about the vegetables I have planted recently, that they would have withered in the furnace. I was concerned that my dog would be dead. I was worried the oldish airconditioner, which I left running all day, had packed it in from the exertion and Lester had expired in the corner of the room into a burnt-up husk for me to cry over upon my return.

He came bounding to the door when I got home, reinforcing for the 89 billionth time the futility of future tripping into what-if scenarios, and exulted in my dousing him in water. He even wanted to play with the ball, in this heat. He is as stupid as I.

I am feeling so much more hopeful these last few days than I have for months and months and months. It's not that anything has really changed except perhaps a small hitch inside of me that thinks that maybe paths are opening up for me that I shall be able to walk down. They have been dark and closed off for so long, I am not quite sure how it feels to have a full sort of a life, a life where things are happening that make you bounce.

The hope and dreaminess comes from the firm and excited conviction of my art therapist a few weeks ago when I told her about my gallery idea. She thinks it's a good enough idea that I shouldn't go blurting it about. It is an idea that is stealable. I feel very chuffed indeed that I have an idea that's stealable :) So Maggie had a bit of a talk to someone who knows about such things, and they are of the belief that funding would be something possible for this endeavour. Maggie's email was full of good advice and there were a few suggestions in there that I am going to begin to take a look at. So yeah, I'm excited. And enjoying the feeling of rolling this idea around in my head, weighing it up in my hands, aware that I don't have a first clue about anything. Maybe it would be to my advantage. "I can so see you there," Maggie said to me, all flushed with pleasure as if she thought it was something that could be done. The gutsy courage of the artist :)

It's not even about the realisation of dreams for me right now, this bubbling excitement (although how amazing to see concretely in front of you something which first appeared as a bubble in your head. There's been rather a dearth of that sort of thing lately, considering my inability to finish a short story. But that's another story). This bubbling excitement is really just all about being reminded of the latent possibilities that sit out there like big bubbles of something, leading who knows where. It's like the possibilities of people transcending space and time in weird ways. It's not the actual doing of that which excites me. It's the possibility that someone could. And the exciting thing for me these days is that I feel like I have developed the capacity to maybe have a bit of an idea of how to hold those bubbles lightly, so that they don't get encrusted with my gigantic ego and pop. And maybe then they would become something concrete in front of me. Who knows? This is a wondrous sort of thing.

Another interesting tidbit. I had an email the other day from Wayne Jacobsen, one of the people involved with The Shack. He'd had an email from someone wanting to get in touch with the Australia Sue in the credits of the book. Way back when, I was one of the people along with a whole stack of others who did several read-throughs of the book, when Paul was considering actually publishing it, and anally pointed out some grammatical inconsistencies (many of which, I was grieved in my anality to see, made it through to at least the printing of the book that I have read. But anyway, I again digress).

So this woman is self-publishing a book and wants to get a team of people on board with her. She is giving me a call tonight and we are going to have a chat and maybe see if there is any way I could give her a hand.

And just this small little thing is a reminder of how these interesting little ideas and people and circumstances just pop out of the blue when you're least expecting it and fill you again with the shy hope that maybe, just maybe, there are things out there for you to do that will fill you up with bubbles, the sorts of things that you see happening to other people sometimes, where the right people and the right circumstances conspire and there is something like a whiff of kingdom and freedom and life and sharing and commonality about it all, the heady excitement of dreams and visions, headier than any sort of champagne.

But the best bit of all is, even if neither of these things come to anything, the main thing still is, and always has been, the knowing that they could. That's what gives the bubbles their fizz :)