Living in the Moment

It is not long till midnight. I am typing in the dark, the deep dark outside a chink in the curtain, the screen illuminating enough for me to see the papers on the grotty desk in front of me, the outline of that cool porcelain sculpture I did quite a few years ago now, the still-unfired one, which makes me happy when I look at it and reminds me that I really need to go and buy another bag of clay and start doing something more now I have some extra bouts of energy in which to do so.

Oh, man, I love that sentence.

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There is something to be said, I suppose, for health issues that force you to see how you're always walking on the edge of where the ocean meets the land just like you're walking on a wire in a circus (thank you, Adam Duritz). That line that is invisible but weaves its way through every single day. For a long time it's been a particularly drab and shabby line, like it's made out of old wool that's got balls on it like an old jumper that's been around too long, and it would lead from the bed to the couch and to the kitchen and the bathroom and often back to the couch.  Other times, like recently, it's been a line that's opened up forests on one side that I can trip off into.  Nothing major or extraordinary for anyone but me. Going to the supermarket and going for a walk in one day.

Other days I walk along that thread and fall into the sea.  Sometimes it's a bit heartbreaking. I never know when I've overdone it.  I'm asked again to give up what I've been given.  Which is the whole of life but with so many couch-filled days in recent years I have a tanty and lose perspective when I fall back into the fog again.  Even if I know that these days it's not going to be a life sentence, that I will climb back out at some point.

On Sunday things were good enough that I went with my mum to see a local Aussie muso, Billy Miller, play live at the Caravan Club. We stood for about three hours. That's nothing to people who do that every day but for me it was a really big deal. There was no way I would have been able to replicate it the next day.  My feet were so fucking sore.

The recplication the next day is the biggest test of CFS. The point isn't so much whether you see me today, walking in Belgrave, coming from the doctor's, into the Book Barn to buy pens, to the library to drop off a book and pick up a new one, to the post office. Doing chores. Flittering.  I would have seen quite chipper to you, I'm sure. But you see the adrenalised version, not the ATP-deprived one the next day who spends more time on the couch.

Still, I've had lucky days recently where I've done something like that and had No Payback The Next Day.  That feels miraculous but really it's just functioning mitochondria.

It's not what happened on Monday though. The day after Sunday's three-hour-standfest the world had that greyness to it unrelated to the sky.  As did Tuesday.  Feeling the anxiety running through my body, different from a mind-manufactured sort.  A buzzing kind that at the same time puts a sense of doomish urgency into everything.  Why are you sitting on this couch?  You need to be not sitting on this couch, or else if you just sit here like this that will be a terribly wrong thing to do and something bad will happen.

This kind of anxious body-fuelled thinking is problematic at any time, and I can generally take steps to ease off its push.  But Tuesday it was difficult because the next day was the funeral of my ex-father-in-law, which I very much wanted to attend. We still kept in touch from time to time. The last time we spoke was via email a few weeks before.  We had great conversations when he lived in the granny flat and Mark and I lived in the house.  He was a gentle man, a kind one too, and I wished to go and pay my respects not only to those who are living, but to him.

I don't believe that we are gone from the earth when we are gone from our bodies.  In our age of one-size-fits-all knowledge, the sort that is peer reviewed, double-blind, placebo controlled, many have little time for the perceptions that come from the subjective space.  That sort of knowledge is good but it brings with it hubris if it's the only kind you ascribe to.  It upsets me, really, this disrespect for our subjective life.  It's my life in here.  It's just as real as the life that is out there.  It can't be branded, it can't be monetised, it can't be shared, it can't have its privacy taken away from it, and I won't allow its dignity to be annulled by those who claim the experience in here is inconsequential just because they cannot measure it with a measuring device.

My ex-father-in-law is gone, but I don't think or feel that he is gone. Even anxious, fatigued, inflamed, the strange toxicity that comes when these fatigue situations happen, as if something in my body is struggling to work and instead is spinning its wheels, splattering genetically dysfunctional mud all over me.  I wanted to be there.  Even though I began worrying about what other people would think.  Paranoid things.  Like, would my ex's sister glare at me at the funeral and refuse to say hello?  Would they all think I was a freak, in my childless, cloistered life?  Would I drive off the road halfway there and cause a multi-car pile-up because I was spacey?  Would people believe me, if I didn't go, that I wasn't pikeing out because funerals are difficult but because I actually didn't physically believe I could get there?

7am is not so much of an issue for some people. For me it's been one for more decades than I care to count. Perhaps this was one harbinger of the CFS that would come in my late 20's, the endocrinal dysfunction that made getting up such a holy horror. 7am for me feels maybe like what 3am feels for some other people if they've got drunk the night before. I dunno. Maybe. How can we compare our own internal experiences to each other?

What happens when you know you have to get up at 7am and you're worried how you'll feel? You wake up at 5.30 and don't go back to sleep.  And so I finally conceded that this wasn't going to happen for me.  That to drive when I felt like that was an irresponsibility.  I would have had to leave home by 8am, drive for two hours in peak-hour traffic, and then turn around and drive back again a few hours later.

And so I just had to be there in spirit instead.  I guess if I'd died and some people couldn't make it to my funeral but were willing themselves there in spirit, that would be fine with me.   Maybe I'd see their colours anyway, flowing out like ribbon, connected to everybody and everything wherever they happened to be.  Time and space not always so constraining.  Do we sense people after they have gone? I feel like I had some kind of communion with Mike in the days after I learned he died. (How lovely of Mark to let me know. He didn't need to). How can we tease out the strands of what we wish to be true about life continuing after life, what we may be inventing, or what we may be perceiving on a plane that's not visible to us, not parked at any airport, not existing at all according to many and yet which many others claim to swim in their whole lives?

These kinds of experiences are between you and yourself.  They are the last bastions of privacy in an internet age :)  Nothing to be proven.  Nothing able to be proven, just felt, or sensed, and wondered at.  A space, like the negative space between two objects that you are taught to see when you are drawing.  Once you see it, you can't not.  You draw better when you draw the shape of the space in-between.  That nifty little technique brings all of the world into the fore.  All the empty spaces fill.

Shallows Breathing

You feel tonight like a tiny pebble. A tiny pebble on the sand. Surrounding you, ripples of water. Radiating out far beyond your vision. The golden ball has begun its dance underneath your feet into someone else's sunrise; yet in your mind, these ripples all have golden edges though the moon casts silver.

Grounded into this small space you occupy on this earth, feeling your smallness, it makes you vast. Always biggest when you are smallest, always fullest when you are empty handed. You are like one of those rippling waves in the ocean.

So often you feel like a chafing horse, sweating your flanks, chewing your bit. Eager for life, thirsty for it, so thirsty it's aching your bones, yearning for more of what your life is to grow into. Pregnant with the feel of that so that sometimes your back aches and your head droops and you don't believe it even though it's growing in your belly and heaving you down.

But tonight you sit grounded into the sand with the water rippling. No yearning can grip you for long with the gentle pull and push of the tide to bring you back to here. Deep down the very end of your spine, like the tail of a fish, outstretches from your body like red ripple roots, holding you fast to your seat on this chair in front of this computer writing these words spreading you out into the ocean.

You yearn but it is not - at least tonight - a frantic grasp for more, more more. It does come from a deep, deep thirst. Sometimes you grasp because of the gasp, because of the thirst encircled right in the centre of your bones. And anyway, the grasping is what you have learnt to do. From the fear.

But you go with the tide. You do not want to lurch out on your own onto the waves. You sit here in the shallows. You see the ripple curves on the sand underneath you. You do not need to grasp. The universe is contained in any of these grains of sand.

You mark in the darkness above you the position the sun will take when it arches itself up close to the centre of the sky tomorrow. The moon, recently full, its tidal pull on these waters surrounding you, its tidal pool in you, from within your own womb, drawing you forth by its rhythms. This brother moon, this sister sun. Where is there to go but here?

Where else shall we go? You alone have the words of life.

You have so many thoughts and ideas and feelings in your head and heart about things you would like to do - intentional community ideas, moving to the Dandenongs ideas, the ever-present delight of your writing practice and exploring the boundaries of your creativity, the desire for more friendships, for companionship, opening yourself up to the thought of opening yourself up to the idea of opening yourself up to an other (like a multi-faceted rather complex flower, after being so closed down).

And so you hope. So many of your attempts to move out into the wider ripples have fallen somewhat flat. But right now, tonight, you just are. You're here and you are. You feel it on the night air, a breath, so imperceptible that you wonder if you imagined it up out of your own head or heart. "Wait." The gentle Otherness about it, that ethereal beauty that is so close to you that you cannot always tell whether it is you or he/she. "Watch." You like these times best when it is a merging of the disctinctions between thee and thou. "Expectancy." The words are not necessary, at least now, and you put them down for a time, to be picked up tomorrow to lament or praise, to say "thank you" with, to place into juxtapositions on the paper, to be typed into a pay cheque.

But for now, now, the gentle ripple and really, now, this is all there is. Now is all there is.

There is nowhere to run ahead of things because there is nowhere but now. Not for you. Only for you Today. And you remember tonight what you sometimes forget, that you do not want to run ahead of things, not when you know the small experiences of delicious unfoldings, those little coincidences and promptings whispering approaches to take. You feel that a life lived loved by God begins taking on the quality of a story you are in, your own story, his/story, your story unpetaling. You do not want to make it grander than it is. You do not want to cast aside the lepers in yourself in favour of a Disney version. You do not want to cast aside anything and all you want to hold is what you can fit now, in your hands. Your hands open and flooding through your fingers, grains of sand.

Pic: obviouslysubtle

In and Out

I started writing a short story the other day. The usual trick - got to a certain spot and then stopped. I usually start writing from a scenario that paints itself into my head. The scenarios, though, are not joining themselves together with other scenarios, making something bigger than themselves. They just sit there, like scenes, in a small pocket world of their own, five second flickers that don't end up containing life to breathe in and out and make more of themselves.

I have fully formed pictures appear in my head sometimes. Two nights ago it was an image, in oranges and reds and blacks, of two sparsely drawn people walking past me on my right and then out of vision behind me. I do not know what it was. It lasted for a flinching second and it made me physically jolt, there on my bed. I do not know what it was.

There are many steps to go to finish a story. I will, again, one day. It's trusting that there are things I need to learn, or relearn, to unblock the blockage. The best sorts of learnings happen without words. This is one of them, when I'm not even sure that I'm learning anything at all.

When I woke up this morning, the flywire screen had been removed from the window in the middle of the night. I was sure it wasn't like that when I got home last night. Someone must have tried to break in, in the night, while I was asleep. It made me happy seeing that flywire screen sitting there like that because it proved that when people try to break into my house, they can't.

I watched a movie this evening and was struck anew by the special art of the screenwriter. They write bubbles, it seems to me. A special kind of art that writes spaces and nuances for other people to fill. I think that screenwriters must be especially giving and generous sorts of people, loving gods of their domains. The best kinds of bubbles are the ones that stretch away for miles, so that you have to put them aside to take out later to reexamine them again.

Often I say or write things, and I am doing them on the fly. It's not that I'm making it up as I go. I already know everything that I am saying. It is coming from a deep well of knowing and intuition, but I haven't put words to it yet, and so I don't really quite know it in this particular way until ooh, look, there it is before me. I knew all of this, and yet I have also learnt something new. Sometimes, when I am putting my own ego aside and swimming in the stream, the words come flowing out my mouth like water from that stream, and what I really feel like is that art is coming out of my mouth.

+++++++

Which is pretty funny when you consider how potty-mouthed I am. One of life's little quirks, I guess ;)

Half empty or half full?

In the case of life, I guess I would say I'm a glass half-full kinda girl. I've always thought I was a reasonably positive person who has forays into moodiness of every conceivable variety (except there was this guy I worked with years ago who said I was the most negative person he'd ever met in his life. Which was kinda weird, but I wonder if his perception was skewed by the fact that I wouldn't sleep with him. But see, I was kinda put off a bit by the fact that he had a fiancee - who worked at the same place - he'd neglected to tell me about).

I've got this bottle of coleus extract I'm taking to help with a health issue of almost two decades' duration. So after that long, you'll be prepared to do whatever it takes to get the issue sorted, right? Well, dammit if this stuff isn't just the foulest, most disgusting stuff I've ever had the misfortune to have to have 2 teaspoonfuls of, 1 morning, 1 evening, until said bottle is finished. It better damn well work, that's all I can say, because looking down the neck of this particular bottle, my view is always a half full one. In fact, this bottle will still be 1/269th full when I have one more teaspoon to go. Some bottles are only good when they're completely, entirely empty.

Speaking of completely, entirely empty, my angst-ometer is sitting at empty. Dunno if it's this burst of barometrically static weather we're having, the Indian summer that is making up for the pissy real one that's gone before. Probably, it's most likely because this last two weeks is the best health I have experienced in about 10 years. I feel good. I do a whole wad of stuff, go to bed, get up, and have energy to do a whole wad of stuff. I can't begin to explain how that feels. I don't think it can be appreciated until it is taken away from you. And so now I find myself sounding like an 85 year old, saying, "If you don't have your health, you have nothing" and such nuggety bits of wisdom. 'Cause they're true.

And so with the health - thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God - comes this peace and contentment. Didn't that Paul dude say something that contentment with Godliness is great gain? Well, I don't know about the godly part, but I feel like a cat in a dairy. Paul also said to be content with a quiet life, and that thought used to make me sigh and think how boring - but right now, from where I've been, a quiet life of creativity and nature immersion sounds just ... well, kinda divine.

I don't want what I haven't got. I don't know how long it's been since I could say that. I don't know what my life holds in the future. I don't know if I'm gonna have to move house sometime soon. I don't know what my life holds for me workwise, romantically, creatively. And none of it concerns me in the slightest. Today, with the sun shining, even knee-deep in more housework, I can say ... bring it on, whatever it is. But whatever it may be, right now, I'm living today. Even if it's staring down the neck of a bottle that's still half bloody full :)

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.