Waiting

The Patience of Ordinary Things

by Pat Schneider

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

Waiting for customers at Amber Fort, Jaipur, India, (c) by Steve McCurry

It is easy to be patient today.  I have achieved that transcendent state that comes from not enough sleep but just enough so that I'm not haggard.  So that I am at rest instead of yesterday's torment storm that rattled my mind's chain.  Today, I watch the crisp winter sun burn off the last of the fog that still lingers past lunchtime.  I feel need of nothing today.  It is peace.

Everything Belongs

This weekend so far has proved to me that everything belongs. Again. Friday night I felt so incredibly sick to death of everything going on, couldn't see God working in my life, couldn't see what the hell was the point to everything. I am so tired of this portion of my life, just patently exhausted by it all, that it is no wonder I have these times of meltdown. I don't feel entirely comfortable with having them - I am tired of feeling like my vulnerabilities are hanging outside my body like a string of sausages and those times just exacerbate that feeling - but then the afterwards, the peace that descended on Saturday morning as I sat on the steps in the sun, feeling the effects of people praying for me (hello Kentster). This is the life that comes from death. It is the opposite to the reverb that I often feel, that has going on in me the past few weeks, as the things I deny come to the fore anyway and force me to look at them. That reverb is like a death that comes from death, from denial, from unconsciousness. It is why I want God to enter into all of my rooms because I will not ever be as safe as I want to be unless he does. I just wish he'd stop taking his sweet goddamn time about it all ;)

In the meantime, I am trying to sit in the midst of these things, these scary things, these little deaths living within life, to learn from them, because it feels to me like the safest thing I can actually do while they continue to exist within me. Doing otherwise feels like a form of bodily abdication. Thanks for the reminder, Mr Rohr.

Yesterday I took a mental health day for myself. Well, I didn't plan to, it's just that by the time lunchtime came and I hadn't done anything but read, I decided to just kick the ends out and let myself rest. Pour water on the expectations. We get taught in every possible way to strive, and we don't get taught the wisdom of lying down and rolling with it when we need to. That's the sort of shit they should teach in school.

So it felt good to me to yesterday allow myself to do nothing. And so I did, literally. Read two books basically all day. Got online a bit here and there. Watched television (old reruns of Fast Forward, an Australian comedy show). Ate the leftover takeaway from the night before. Didn't even bother having a shower, all day - gross :) Couldn't even be fagged going up the supermarket to get the dog's food. Instead, went to McDonald's for dinner - such a violent method of eating but I didnt care - and my dog was forced to eat a couple of burgers for dinner also :)

Still, today I have woken up and feel soothed. I think the equilibrium is returning, after a week of feeling like I am living inside the middle of a giant gong. And all I know is this. I have freewheeled from feeling like I could just throw in the towel and give it all up on Friday night, to feeling the slow return to some sort of equilibrium today. Inbetween those two states, there is always some sort of almost violent throwing myself back onto God, onto what I can see I am losing focus in. It feels wrenching and it feels like death, it really does. I can see some more areas in my life lately that I am seeing wrong. How funny that space is - seeing that you are seeing wrong, and yet not yet knowing what it is to see right. It is this continual ongoing walking the dark path, having to trust in this unseen being who you have never seen face to face before, and who is strangely silent sometimes to the point of wanting to throw things at him (and because I can't see him, what can I throw? Well, most oftentimes it's my words, my vitriole, and my anger, but he can take it. Indeed, I think he wants to take it. That has been demonstrated 2000 years ago surely. It is death to our egoes to think this way, that God wants to take all of our rage and our wounds and our fuckedupedness because we can't cope with them ourselves. We like to think that we can cope with anything and everything, even while the world reels to and fro and we bite the insides of our mouths in anxiety.

Happy solstice!

If I wasn't so self-conscious of my body (thanks, advertising, thanks past history) I would go dancing naked around a bonfire this evening. Instead, I think I will stay home and write meaningless posts about my couch.

Today is the Winter solstice. This time last year, I was scrabbling to get to this point, feeling already like I was hanging on like crazy to the notion that the days were going to get longer. This year, with better health, the lack of light isn't affecting me as much. I used to cry with the unfairness of it all that when you're sick, and you really desperately need things like good sleep, and functioning adrenal glands, and circadian rhythms that function at something like half speed to help you get better, that's the very time you don't get it. How cruel that is.

I guess one thing I've learnt out of that experience is to not judge other people when they say stuff like, "I can't get out of bed in the mornings" (seeing I still can't do that. Indeed, I slept in this morning and woke up at noon - which is late even for me). But when people say stuff about how they're really affected by certain things, and I can see other people who have blessedly had good health all their lives and who totally take it for granted, I can see the judgment in their eyes, you know? And it's just a reminder to me of how blind we all are, and how quick we are to condemn and judge and criticise those things that we don't understand or that scare us, and how it is that I'm just as quick as anybody else to do it in many areas. And yet I take solace that when it comes to health issues, I ain't gonna be doing that because I have learnt, through experience, in my own body and soul and spirit, what that "law" looks like when it gets walked out in the flesh.

We get to walk all the laws out in our flesh. When we really understand them, it's because they have smouldered themselves in, often with a sickening smell of burning flesh along the way, and it's all the difference in the world between learning and knowing it up in your head, and learning and knowing it in your entire body and soul and spirit.

Anyway, happy Saturday, bloggers. I'm just swimming in it this morning, the freedom. It feels so damn good. And happy solstice, too, Winter or Summer. I get this visual of the earth being finely and evenly balanced on the day of the solstice, the long day at one end balanced out by the long night at the other. And yet, in some way future but peeking itself into now, it's all perfect all the time. But we won't know that till we walk out into it ourselves, body, soul and spirit.

Divine discontent

I was outraged a number of years ago to read a book by an eminent Freudian analyt whose theory was that all artists are neurotic, psychotic, sadomasochists, peeping Toms; that not one is normal.

At this moment I do not know why it bothered me so. He means one thing by his labels; I would call it something quite different; but there is no denying that the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness and then rushes to canvas or paper. An artist is someone who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world. Along with Plato's divine madness there is also divine discontent, a longing to find the melody in the discords of chaos, the rhyme in the cacophony, the surprised smile in time of stress or strain.

It is not that what is is not enough, for it is; it is that what is had been disarranged and is crying out to be put in place. Perhaps the artist longs to sleep well every night, to eat anything without indigestion, to feel no moral qualms, to turn off the television news and make a bologna sandwich after seeing the devastation and death caused by famine and drought and earthquake and flood. But the artist cannot manage this normalcy. Vision keeps breaking through and must find means of expression.

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

There is no denying that I am an artist :) (But my divine discontent comes via methods other than the news; I refuse to watch or read the news except by accident). This, Kentster, is a bit more of what we were talking about earlier on your blog, this unusual life where we can rest in God while being in turmoil at the same time. It is a paradox of the highest order, but also a common occurrence in my own life and the lives of all believers I know. Divine discontentment while in the arms of the Father, El Shaddai - the Many Breasted One. Sometimes, however, I get sorely tired of my divine discontentment, this yearning and searching. I am tired from the past years, Papa. I am tired of finding myself once again back in a place where I keep hopping out of your arms and going off striving in my own strength. I am tired of looking at the worst things about myself, the areas of myself which are most broken and wanting to control. Take it, please. I'm tired of striving. (I'll take it back again, after a while, but you know the score. Some day I'll give it to you and not take it back again :) I would, however, like a greater measure of your presence in the coming days, if at all possible. I understand totally the way you remove yourself a few paces for certain seasons. It makes us come harder after you. But I miss you, Papa. I miss being in a season where your presence is so close. Hurry back now, ya hear? (I know you're here, but I need to feel it also).

I'm going to read in bed, a comforting thing. A non-striving thing. I am so bloody tired of finding myself striving. May this particular tiresom wrestling match with myself be reaching some kind of end some time soon (even if it means KO'ing myself to end the fight :). Amen.

Living the life I love ...

Womb by Snuffkin

If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.

- John O'Donohoe

I woke this morning feeling daunted at the housework I have before me this weekend. My customary habit is to write my morning pages with my first cup of tea, three pages of longhand which have become a snazzy little tool for getting out what is floating around in my head trying to stress me, get it concretised before my eyes where I can do something about it when the time is right.

The first two pages, I could feel the tension in my body. The aching shoulders that reminded me I've missed my latest chiro visit. The familiar sense of churning thoughts swirling around on a mental washing machine cycle (the washing machine agitates on that cycle, does it not?) My thoughts wandered, distracted, restless, thirsty, daunted by whether I could get done what I had set before myself.

I had decided, because housework is so tasteless to me, that I would do it all today, in one fell swoop, leaving me the rest of the weekend to "live the life I love", which involves some writing, some reading of uni stuff, catching up with friends and family, watching a movie. This was my Plan A. Plan B, if today failed, was to spread the housework out over the next three days, doing the majority of it today and Monday, with a break inbetween tomorrow to catch my cuz, her kids, and my Mum.

I guess I'm a bit of an "all or nothing" girl at times, inclined to a bit of black and white thinking, and it seemed like the right approach. And yet what seems right to me sometimes in my head, feels entirely wrong to me in my body, if I will listen ... and I tell you what, dudes, I am discovering that the more I listen to these other parts of myself, the parts I have resisted, the more they are speaking. It feels like as I am becoming a safer place for myself to inhabit, the parts of myself that are young in their years, the artistic parts, the self-nurturing parts, are increasingly growing up into themselves, speaking a bit louder, heady with the oxygen they're getting to breathe.

As soon as I decided that even though Plan A was the ideal, it wasn't achievable, my body relaxed. It was palpable. Suddenly, the rest of the day opened up to me - the visit I plan to the op-shop (I love buying secondhand clothes, and anyway, they're about all I can afford these days :), the breakfast I plan to cook, the time I am going to take to stop and have breaks and have some fun in-between the work, and writing my customary Saturday morning blog post, the one I enjoy the most.
My parents have returned from a holiday in Western Australia. My Mum mentioned the fields and fields of wheat - the main export of the state after mining, apparently - and how few trees there are in the wheat fields. Well, paddocks with no trees may be unattractive to the eye, but how can you plant and harvest seed in a time-managed way in giant machinery when there are damn trees in the way? It's just not feasible.

Problem is, it's also not feasible to have productive land without the trees that keep the ecology intact, and encourage the formation of rain clouds. I don't know how that happens exactly, but more trees produce more rain. And so productivity in the short term leads to less productivity in the long term. It's a losing deal. But it's the way our economy runs. Work harder. Yield more.
Shopping at the Victoria Market might be full of colour, sensory delight, and good produce, but it's time wasting. Shopping in the supermarket is more convenient and can be slotted in in less time. As long as I want aisle upon aisle of unfood - processed stuff that has no life. Paradoxically, even though I don't want to live out of an intensive farming paradigm, working out of my own rhythms causes a bit of inner resistance. It's those old tapes playing again, plus the culture informing me that working at this pace is not "enough". This rhythm doesn't feel like "their" way of doing things - whoever "they" are. I don't think it's coincidence that I have had floating around in my head a vague paranoid unease that my landlord will be looking over my shoulder, inspecting how much I am getting done, finding my way of doing things wanting. I think I have had this feeling in some measure for as long as I can remember, that my rhythms are not somehow "right", my way of doing things don't measure up.

Another paradox - as soon as I have acknowledged that this is the pace I need to go at, not at top speed, those insinuating inner voices making my landlord into some kind of Inspector of Housework have largely disappeared.
Here is the rub: I can see clearly the impositions the capitalist culture places on me, the rhythms it tries to force me into (which are really no rhythms at all, no ebb and flow, but clock-card punching, no light and dark but a 24 hour period lit flourescently) and I have abdicated from that way of living life imposed on me from outside. But there is also required an abdication from imposition from within. And that feels 100 times more liberating, to begin to be able to say no to the oh-so-rational-and-logical voices inside me have also been stealing my vitality, my creativity, my crafting of a life of light and shade, ebb and flow, rhythm and rest, of Saturday mornings leisurely crafting a blog post even though a busy day looms ahead. A life of paradox. The only life I really want to live. The life I love.

Happy Saturday, bloggers.