Animal Connection

If you want to see something lovely, and sad, with a dose of synchronicity thrown in, go see Vicki.  If only more people revered animals in this way, there wouldn't be any in the shelter to start off with.

Zoe dog - her eyes remind me of Lester

Spirit and Matter

I'm trying to understand just what is is about a certain group of people that terrifies me so.  They feel like a certain kind of extremist to me, and I'm trying to understand what part of that may be correct and what part is projecting from my own flabby innards the fears that I'm still in the process of letting go of.

I think ultimately my fear is really about how terrifyingly destructive people can be at certain ends of extremes - at what they can do in the name of their own rightness.  It's an ongoing source of unfunny amusement to me that though the ends of the particular spectrum I'm thinking of contain people almost diametrically opposed to each other, people at extremes end up sounding and acting remarkably alike in their ugliness and narrowing of insight in defense of their space. 

Which of course both would take umbrage at, their tiny lens on proceedings apparently being the kind that enables them to know the whole world.  That is the way of these things, isn't it - we find truth in one area and insist on smearing it over everything.

I love science.  I don't love religion.  I'm amenable and open and experienced in the realm of life packaged up as "the spiritual".  And yet though I love science, love exploring the wonders of the beautiful world, scientific materialists stink up my corner.  They seem to carry behind them a large suitcase of preconceptions about how the world is and how it isn't, which is not very scientific;  it's the same surety that is displayed just as creepily in their opposing fundamentalist Christian counterparts. 

This part of human nature more than anything makes me wish to run away from this world and live on Pluto.

So I'm trying to understand why I react so hard to those who occupy the scientific materialist space - the idea that there is nothing beyond the physical or the measurable.  Their end of the spectrum is a complete flipside to those waaaaaaay up the other end, who tend to view the physical being on its way out and the spiritual being where it's at.  (The spiritual, however, in the fundamentalist paradigm does not give any kind of human-sized easy turning circle to a person.  It is a space full of restriction, of laws, of regulations, of fear). 


Do I somehow link that expanded side of living that some criticise and even refuse to acknowledge as existing with opening, growth, awakening in myself of the most beautiful, and so therefore if someone criticises that aspect of life as being unscientific and therefore not to be contemplated, I automatically fear them as potentially evil?  It seems so, though I feel a bit embarrassed writing that word "evil". 

It is hard to not look at both fundamentalist Christians and scientific materialists in their narrow rooms as being both fear-ridden and fear-mongering.  And yet my view of them is also fear-ridden and fear-mongering, isn't it?  All of this narrowness just perpetuates more narrowness and fear.  And how much of reality do I then see in this instance when so much fear abounds?

And I think we have had enough of fear.  Indeed, it's what drives the status quo of the world's imbalance.  Fear.


And yet also, if I get quiet and thoughtful, I can also awaken an element of ... I dunno, what do I call that?  Love?  Well-wishing?  Whatever I call it, I can awaken it and direct it towards those people who I fear and at times hate.  It can sit alongside the fear and even dispel it.  I know, because I do it sometimes.  

Acceptance.  The carpenter said it in a way that is a radical - almost insane - level of acceptance of what is:  turn the other cheek when someone slaps the first.  There is something profound that lies underneath the initial knee-jerk reaction of this being about the awesomeness of passivity and being a doormat.  I don't reckon it's about externals;  I reckon it's about managing internals, about managing what actually happens so as to not stay caught up in it.  It's about getting past resisting the bad shit that happens to us to a monumental freedom.  So monumental that we can fly way beyond the fear that is engendered by those who are doing the slapping, who, more often than not, are perpetuating the me-win/you-lose paradigm that is so destructive to us and to our earth.  So monumental that we are freed then to act out of something other than fear.

In our conceptions, so many of us end up acting with aggression rather than love towards those who may differ, though both sides are equally as capable as cultivating openness and understanding and a refusal to belittle towards those who differ.


When I examine the knee-jerk way I react to those of the scientific materialist persuasion I think I understand partly why there is such a mass level of fear and reactivity that comes from me.  Partly it's because I have found such great awakening through the aspect of life that so many of them dismiss with criticism.  And so therefore I feel defensive that they criticise a way of being that apparently, perhaps for reasons of temperament, they do not walk in themselves.  It is this way of being that has opened up so much in me and has given me the gift of seeing both me and the world as something special.  This side of being has made me a better humanist.  It is from its perspective that I see future change and possibility of freedom.

And so that's partly why I am so knee-jerk to scientific materialists.  It's also because this particular paradigm is a powerful one, and yet it is capable of much damage.  There have been many, many cultures in the past, each with their own paradigms of viewing the world.  It can seem a little befuddling to us learning how certain people saw the world the way they did, and the actions that stemmed from those worldviews.  It is much easier to see with a long-range perspective the absurdities that come from particular paradigms than to link our own causes and effects.  Ours of course is no different.  It's hard to avoid seeing how much damage the western style of living can do to the earth (though there is much conjecture around how much we humans are contributing to it) and it's hard for me to avoid concluding that it is this narrowly focussed version of seeing - from which the scientific materialist mindset directly springs - that is the culprit.  It is a way of seeing, a mindset - a brainset, really - that has vast and great and massive benefits, but which needs to be reined in lest it becomes a tyrant.

If you don't know what you're missing and what you don't understand, will you necessarily go searching for it?  If your view is unbalanced and skewed, sometimes you can sense that, and you go stepping forward in the dark towards trying to find something that you don't even know what it is.  But then what happens if what is required to balance is located in a giant container you have named Irrelevance?  What if balance gets located for you over there to the right that you associate with those hippies and those creepy druids dancing round trees and bleating about the sanctity of stuff?  Do you walk away then because for you the labels and the categories are more important than the contents?  Do you think that if god is dead then this whole container is dead?

Of course I'm caricaturising here.  Both ways of seeing the world are absolutely compatible inside the one human being.  In fact, it's the balanced amongst us that carry my hope for the future righting of the many wrongs we see.  Somewhere in the middle of these two spectrums of being and of defending our own worldviews lie people open to both spectrums.  And it's there, with the meeting if you like of matter and spirit, that the bestest and truest examples of humanity emerge.

A Human Being

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the "Universe", a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.  Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
- Albert Einstein

~

If our ruinous civilization is built on a struggle of good versus evil, then its healing demands the opposite: self-acceptance, self-love, and self-trust. Contrary to our best intentions, we will never end the evil and violence of our civilization by trying harder to overcome, regulate, and control a human nature we deem evil, for the war on human nature, no less than the war on nature, generates only more separation, more violence, more hatred. "You can kill the haters," said Martin Luther King, "but you cannot kill the hate." The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. The same applies internally. You can go to war against parts of yourself you think are bad, but even if you win, like the Bolsheviks and the Maoists, the victors become the new villains. The separation from self that the campaign of willpower entails cannot but be projected, eventually, in some form, onto the outside world.

Yeah, sure, self-acceptance. . . the concept is pretty much a cliché these days. In its full expression though, the path to Reunion of self-acceptance, self-love, and self-trust is utterly radical, challenging cherished doctrines of how to be a good person. Let me state it as purely as I can: the path to salvation for us as individuals and as a society lies in being more selfish, not less.
- Charles Eisenstein

~

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that someone took and sowed in their field.
It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it is grown
it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree
so that the birds of the air can come
and can make their nests in its branches
- Jesus

~

The kingdom of heaven is within you.
- Jesus

~

The most universal and uplifting prayers and teachings describe love as the power that connects us to one another and also to the Source of Love that we might call God.  Such writings exhort us to know love as the power that 'wakes us up' and moves us on from small-self feelings of isolation, hopelessness, despair.  In fact, those teachings don't just praise love.  They evoke it as the only possible salvation, not salvation for the unfathomable 'next life' but for this familiar one:  for each one of us moving through a human existence that will uniformly be marked by fear, sorrow, stupidity, ignorance, cruelty, loss and death, as well as insight, hope, grace, forgiveness and bliss.
- Stephanie Dowrick

Before or After Love by Agudelo Gungaro

The Crux

Perhaps everything terrifying is
deep down
a helpless thing that needs our help

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Secret Treasure by Lucid-Light under a creative commons atrribution/name/no commercial use or adaptation licence)

Fragile Beings

Pic by Darren Wyn Rees under a CC attrib/sharealike licence)

It's easy to think that it's just you.  That you're the only one who is paranoid/insecure/jealous/fearful/depressed/not coping/socially inept.  But really, the further on I go the more obvious it is that these aren't only things that I struggle with at various times.  Everyone else around me is struggling to one degree or another.

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.

Goodnight Puppy

Even when the end comes slowly, it still comes by surprise.

Even when you know that there's obviously something wrong - you can't be 14 1/2 doggy years and have lost a quarter of your body weight and have had a possible seizure in the last couple of years and there not be something wrong.  But still, you were okay.  You were old and slowed down, but you still loved to walk, to go in the car, to play with the ball, to cuddle.  Even though a week ago today I was sitting on the couch with you, howling because Helen Razer's cat was put to sleep, and wondering how long it was before it was your turn, I didn't think it would be before the week was out.

I mean,you'd played with the ball that day, right?  And the day after that and the day after that.  We had an episode this week of ball-playing.  And while it wasn't like the ball-playing of your youth, where your exuberance needed abating by a many-times-a-day habit of hitting the ball clear across the yard with a tennis racquet over and over again, you were still able this week to chase it, several times, down the side of a hill, and shriek-bark when you hid it somewhere and then struggled to retrieve it again.  You were still able to walk on Monday evening.

But then Thursday came and with it what we know now was another seizure.  But still, when I debated whether to go to my class on Friday, looking worriedly at your lowered countenance, I was still guessing that you'd attracted another infection, a secondary one from the licking that goes on when your body comes in contact with the wandering jew.  But then Friday night and you still weren't right.  You were spacey and vacant.  You didn't even want to eat the piece of butter chicken I offered you.  Definitely an alarm bell.  And so to the vet, and a 24-hour wait on blood tests hoping that it would be something that could be managed.

But it couldn't, she said.  Things had caught up with you.  You were anaemic to the extent that if a blood transfusion would have given you anything more than a few days, you would have been eligible for it with a couple of marker points to spare.  That was why you'd stopped eating, because it was a choice of eating or breathing, and breathing was starting to prove hard enough.

You were a tough old bugger, though.  Your body had adapted itself to a situation that the vet guessed had been going on for some time.  But then it just couldn't adapt anymore, finally.  As will happen for us all.  But still, still a shock.  Still a big gaping hole where you were.

I slept a vigil on the couch on Saturday night, while you slept on the floor beside me.  Knowing what the morning was going to bring.  Dreading it in a way that you can only dread something that you've been ... well, dreading for years.  Staying in the moment.  Wanting to just be in all the moments that I could with you until then.  And so we shared the night.  When you weren't pacing, that is.  Which was pretty much from 2 am to when you tired at around 8 am.  This sort of behaviour has been going on for quite some time, although you really ramped it up in the last couple of days.  You've been causing a great deal of sleep loss in recent months, and I think now maybe the brain tumour the vet suspects was causing the seizures and the anaemia had something to do with that.  Like an old man with dementia, come 2 am you'd get up and you'd start wandering, not realising that that is the time for sleeping.  I'm sorry for the times when my bad sleep-deprived mood got the better of me.  Of course, now you are gone, the thought that I would do that seems horrifying.  But life is messy, isn't it, and we get sick and struggle and stress, and our eyes cloud over and we find it hard to live every day loving what is in front of us. 

But I'm sorry about getting pissed off at you.  You couldn't help it.  You wouldn't do anything voluntarily to upset me, being of a species that is on a higher evolutionary plane than mine.

I watched you on Saturday night and into Sunday morning.  You were pacing like you were searching for your lost energy.  You were a little confused.  But you could be consoled and pacified by a relentless round of patting.  You would let me pat your chest for a while, and then turn around and let me scratch your back.  On and on, through the night.

I dozed off and on.  At one point I woke up and you were right there, right in my face.  Looking, searching.  You always were a smart doggy.  It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.  Thank you for that.

When you finally left us at 10.40 on Sunday morning, there were five people crowded into the vet's surgery.  That shows what sort of a dog you were.  You had a sort of quiet dignity about you, as if you were thinking about things.  You were always top dog no matter what group of dogs you were in.  The sort of innate authority that would be nice to be seen in our new Prime Minister.  You were a dog who changed us.  You did.  Like your granddaddy said, you were the one who taught us the lessons.

Oh, fuck, this hurts an awful lot.  But still, it was worth it.  And it was easy to let you go in the end because it's not like it is when you're a bounding energetic dog of four, or eight, or ten, full of vigour, where the thought of having you put to sleep is ridiculous.  The only thing that could override the dread of seeing you slip away was the desire to end your suffering.

It was easy to let you go.  It's proving a little more difficult to keep you let go.

Truly ruly, Mr Naughty, while I dozed on Saturday night, wishing for an end to this so that I could sleep, so that it would be over, but wanting it never to end, I was thinking about how I felt about us, Once in a Lifetime Dog.  And I thought that though I can't know for certain, I've got an idea that the pleasure and the love were shared equally between us.  But the honour ~ that has been all mine.

Goodnight my Puppy.  Thanks for walking the road with me for 13 1/2 years.

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.

Prayer as Secular Breath

Sometimes I think that just about everybody in the world would find some point of disagreement with everybody else on who or what God is or whether she/he/they exist at all.  Many people who do not believe in a god simply cannot ~ this is a holy unbelief.  It comes from their hearts breaking too much at the suffering of the world and the seemingly implacable lack of response from any god to that.  Unbelief made holy.

Because of all of this rolling range of difference when it comes to who or what makes up God or a god, you would think that therefore there would probably be just as many differences in opinion on what prayer is.  But I'm not so sure about that.  Regardless of who it's directed to, what drives the prayer seems to be a remarkably short range of things - gratitude, requests for help, requests for renewal, expressions of love.

I don't even think you need to believe in a personal god to pray.  Surely everybody on the planet has prayed at some point. Some see prayer as praying to that higher part of ourselves, the one that acts in our best interests and seems at times to help us respond to the lower part of ourselves, that which will keep us chained in fear.  In this sense, we all pray, and it has nothing at all to do with institutional religion and that whole bullshit arena of power and control.  In this sense it is a beautiful thing that softens my heart towards the world.

"Prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging" - John O'Donohue

Casa Tomada by Rafael Larrea Uribe

Waiting Room

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.

Outside of the Box

In here, you feel very small and very big all at the same time. It is cramped, sometimes dark, sometimes blinding.  There really isn't very good temperature control.  This box did not seem to come equipped with a thermostat - you're either sweltering and huge, so that you're crammed up against all of the walls, or else you're curled in the corner, black on black, trying to find a way to disappear inside yourself.  Either way, you're still in this box. You bang up against the top and get what you want and down against the bottom and feel the lack-rage. You feel the height and the depth of this space. It's large enough that it's easy to believe that this is all you are. In here, your ego breathes in and out and knows itself and its boundaries. There is nothing outside of this box, nothing. Outside of this box is noth--

You step outside of the box when you remember to. It's true that it becomes easier to step outside once you've done it a couple of million times. You watch yourself from your perch rolling around inside that box in your suffering and You say to yourself, "Step out then. It's out here that you want to be. All the good stuff is here. What you need to let go is here. Here, you can breathe as deeply as you want and from here you can see yourself and other people without being disgusted by either."

And though it feels like it's going to die, yourself obeys You (because You are very beautiful) and so it steps out on to the ledge, off the end of the plank, and out into freedom.

A couple more million times, perhaps, for the hesitation to grow yet smaller between the remembrance and the dive out.

Pic by Izarbeltza (CC share-alike)

All the Love in the World

I go about in search of love; and I find it in unmeasured stores in the bosoms of others.  But when I try to ask for it, this horrible shyness strangles me;  and I stand dumb, or worse than dumb, saying meaningless things - foolish lies.  And I see the affection I am longing for given to dogs and cats and pet birds, because they come and ask for it.  It must be asked for;  it is like a ghost:  it cannot speak unless it is first spoken to.  All the love in the world is longing to speak;  only it dare not because it is shy, shy, shy.  That is the world's tragedy.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

The New Birth

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)

Espiritu de Mexico by Alberto Thirion (CC)

The Brave and the Loving Mr Hemingway

The uber wonderful BrainPickings has managed in one short minute to send tears racing down my face, over my throat and into my purple scarf as I read this post here about Ernest Hemingway and his beloved cats, of which he had 23 at one stage.

When one of them was hit by a car, this is the letter he wrote to his friend:

Dear Gianfranco:

Just after I finished writing you and was putting the letter in the envelope Mary came down from the Torre and said, ‘Something terrible has happened to Willie.’ I went out and found Willie with both his right legs broken: one at the hip, the other below the knee. A car must have run over him or somebody hit him with a club. He had come all the way home on the two feet of one side. It was a multiple compound fracture with much dirt in the wound and fragments protruding. But he purred and seemed sure that I could fix it.

I had René get a bowl of milk for him and René held him and caressed him and Willie was drinking the milk while I shot him through the head. I don’t think he could have suffered and the nerves had been crushed so his legs had not begun to really hurt. Monstruo wished to shoot him for me, but I could not delegate the responsibility or leave a chance of Will knowing anybody was killing him…

Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years. Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs.

The Politics of Australia

"What does it say of a nation - what does it say to a nation - when in a time of austerity, of slashing of essential public services, that $1 billion of Australian taxpayers' money - our money - is being spent annually to persecute, damage and sometimes destroy the lives of people of whom between 80 and 95% are finally proven to be genuine refugees? That is to hurt the most powerless and helpless and deserving of help and kindness. It shames us a nation that claims to be both humane and generous, it belittles us as a people, and none of it will deter the wretched of the earth, forced to choose between despair and hope, from continuing to choose hope" - Richard Flanagan

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/richard-flanagan-on-the-decline-of-love-and-freedom/3583396#comments

I'm rather taken by the work of Carl Jung.  He's the one behind the Myers Briggs Indicator you've probably taken at some point.  He coined the idea of the collective consciosness, and of the shadow side of a personality - the place where we repress and suppress those things which we cannot consciously integrate or handle.  What lies out on Australia's shadow side - a country founded only a couple of hundred years ago on genocide and displacement of a people?  What happens if we cannot bear to think too much about that element of our history?  Does it transfer itself into paranoia that what hunted will now be hunted?

So much media space has been taken up in this country in recent years on both sides of the political spectrum fearmongering about the boat people.  Terrified we'll be overrun by the boat people, the boat people - the same people who make up just a blip on the radar of people who arrive on our shores every year.  Because of a politically-fostered myth that just continues to be perpetuated because of the stain in our psyche and the bloodstained earth, the politicians of our country persist in punishing the most vulnerable who arrive here.  How much longer do we put up with it?

They are the 99%

Valoracion by Alfonso Maggiolo Peirano

Your Scars are Beautiful

Sometimes it is a terrifying long lesson to learn to look and not look away from your own scars.  As an almost-teenager I suppressed a certain trauma so that I completely dissociated myself from it.  For five years I completely forgot all about its existence until at 16 it began coming up to my consciousness again.  Its rising had the look and feel of shards of glass, after being submerged for so long in the safety of the undergrowth.  I've never had such a repression experience again (... well, not that I know about yet, ha), and when I think back to how those memories felt after they'd come back up, there is nothing else to really compare them too.  While they felt like shards of glass, they also felt like they were covered over with moss and other damp things and had taken on some of the feel of the undergrowth they had been living in for half a decade.  Thirty years away from that, that mossiness feels like some kind of protective awesomeness.  At 16, though, I felt that if I looked at the shards, I would be cut open upon them and fall out all over the ground.  For many years just the knowledge that the shards were there was enough in terms of dealing and healing.  It needed to scab and then scar over first before I could get enough distance from it to own it (funny paradox, delightfully deep).

But you can learn to look your terrors in the face.  And you must.  That which over the ensuing decades you cannot and will not learn to have come sit and dine with you at your fireside can slither out the door when you're not looking and run amok.  

I came across this portion of a poem by Robert Bly, in a delightful blog post by Falstaff Was My Tutor on deformed beauty.

If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
Somebody has to limp it! Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

~ Robert Bly

Takes half your life to learn to hide your limp, the other half to learn to display it.

Sometimes it is easier to acknowledge that certain things have caused trauma, and harder to acknowledge that they leave scars.  You do not want this horrid thing to be a part of your forever.  But it is, and this is where you must deal with it.  Dealing brings a wise and sweet surprise out the other side into the knowledge that scars can become beautiful.  Sure, people you don't know might snigger at you in the street with your limp and your deforms, but it is only those who first love you who have the proper sight and right to be able to name the beauty in your scars.

I like to offset the deep internal scars with the ones visible on my body:  the horizontal one along my chest, the vertical three down my right hand.  When you are eight years old and in love with your cousins' half-wild farm cats, it is a courage born of delight that compels you to try to pick them up :) 

Let it Be

And when the broken-hearted people
living in the world agree
there will be an answer.

Let it be.

Pic by Mercedes Garcia Bravo under a creative commons licence .

As above, so below.  And as without, so within.

A different world, without and within, feels so believable and possible to me when I'm sitting in meditation, outside in the morning sun, with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, and I'm at peace.  Peace from whatever warring factions are scratching their nails down my damn insides at any one time.

The torment and the peace are such completely different states as to make it almost impossible to believe they can be contained within the one body.  I suppose this is partially why I still (sometimes) hold to this crazy notion that this is not the best of all possible worlds.  Sometimes I can smell the change bubbling underneath, like I can smell the yeast in the bread dough that's rising beside me on the table.

The lucky country, the land of friendly Aussies ...

... is a good selling point.  Sunlight-dappled advertisements for "where the bloody hell are ya?"  Come visit the land of the amiable, friendly Aussie.

When in reality, Australia has changed beyond recognition in the past 20 years.

You couldn't put it on a travel advertisement, but more and more often the reality resembles something more like this.

The Strange Learning

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.

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.

In Blackwater Woods

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