May You Live in Interesting Times

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities ~ I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not ~ that one endures

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Well, then.  That's a little harsh at first glance, innit?

I can tell how much anxiety I'm bombarded with by how I respond to that above quote.

When I am feeling super-dooper ill and my anxiety has flared like it's Black Saturday, I wish to smash Mr Nietzsche right in his (rather handsome) face and then curl up in a ball and vanish into thin air.  At those times, I have gone way past the point of acceptance and I am just screaming for it all to stop.  Sometimes, anxiety overwhelms to the point where you don't feel you can climb out of anywhere.

When I am feeling better, and have, say, increased my vitamin D levels to 10,000IU a day, I believe that our dear Freidrich is quite right on this score.  I say it with some trepidation though, because I don't believe the loneliness we feel in our suffering is helped by living in a culture whose parts are so disconnected from the whole.  I don't believe that the stiff upper lip of letting people drown in their suffering without knowing you are there to assist them helps anything at all.  And so I add to Mr Nietzsche's statement - we should be ready to assist other people to endure their suffering better.

But even so, if I had a magic wand to relieve your suffering, I would wave it, because you have to have a magic wand waving experience once in your life, surely?  And because I have an overwhelming desire to be a fairy godmother.  And anyway, it's not like you're not going to have another 10,000 bouts of suffering to learn to endure under, coming right up behind today.

If there is one lesson I will learn and forget over and over again until the day I die it is possibly this.  It's not what happens to you, it's how you respond.  I seem to have, somewhere deep down in the unconscious murk, developed a resistance to life as it is presented to me.  And so for me, I'm taking a little longer than some to realise that acceptance is not weakness.  It is the most amazing, durable spiderweb strength.  Like a still pond that can turn further downstream into rushing water.

The sophisticated, classy, empathetic human who results from this lesson is worth all of the pain that goes beforehand.  I have quite a large dose of that third element, but I'm going for the first and the second :)

Endurance is a difficult beast, though.  It seems that for some of us at least, the very darkest times are those where for hours or days or months you are cut off from being able to respond appropriately to that which is tormenting you in the first place.  Your ability to respond in a way that will help your own self is for the moment defunct.  At those times, your central nervous system has gone haywire.   (And in an age where chemicals continue to be poured into our environment on a relentlessly ongoing basis, we can't expect not to be affected.  I do believe though that we are beginning to make the slow connection to the fact that we are not islands, and if the merchants amongst us can't resist defecating in their own nest for their own profit, then we must continue speaking out until they stop.  But I digress.)

Sometimes, you can't gird your loins up to even climb back on that rather delicious knife edge of life where, despite your desire for the easy ride, you receive whatever happens to you with grace, knowing that your response is terribly important.  Knowing that doorways open up from this space that you can't get to otherwise.  On the other side of that is joy and resilience, hidden right in the middle of a busy city street.

Days you've fallen off the edge of the knife and on the way through it's sliced you in half, and you're spending hours, days, weeks, trying to get back to the you that is whole (even while at the very same time it is all inside you, complete.  You know it is, because the last time you were chopped up into 19 pieces you came back again and suddenly there you were, in some faint semblance of a coherent whole).

On those days when you are sliced in half, the kindness of strangers and friends helps staunch the blood flow, helps you endure-without-enduring until you can get back to those spaces where again you can climb back up onto the edge of the knife where hardship gives birth to joy.  This, surely, is why compassionate people enjoy the virtues of universal healthcare and welfare.  Because so many of us fall down below the waterline.  A sophisticated society helps people up, resisting the urge to blame.  A person who lives in such a society receives strength at their worst times.  Such things create resilience until people can climb back onto the knife's edge once more.

May you have the strength to live well in interesting times.  And may you be held up in the times when you don't.

(Inspired by Brain Picking's post on difficulty)

Making the Shift - Pain versus Pleasure

Goodness me, this post from Michele Rosenthal at Heal My PTSD could have been written for me.  One of the biggest challenges of my entire life is about this ~ about getting past pain and allowing myself to experience pleasure.

This seems to be a rather common occurrence among some of us - we do not feel that we are allowed somehow to experience pleasure.  And by pleasure I don't mean flopping ourselves in front of the TV.  I mean doing those things that really bring us joy in some way.  Why is it so?  Don't we all experience suffering in some form?  If the answer is yes - and it's always yes; even charmed lives have their share of suffering - then why do we not comfort ourselves with pleasure?  Where does this puritanical tiresomeness come from?

I have a friend who does not seem to have this battle as much as I do.  She allows herself to experience pleasure whenever she wants, and her life, as a result, even though filled with suffering, also has a certain kind of ease that is awfully attractive, not least because I feel like my life does not have that ease. And it seems to come easy to her, but when I talk to her about it, really, what the difference is between she and I is that she has the same sorts of thoughts and feelings I have around letting go and doing things that give us pleasure.  It's just that she ignores those thoughts when they come, whereas I treat them as if they are some great god thundering from a mountain.

Enoughness.

I think, if I am really very honest, that so many of my struggles to sit down and write - and pretty much all of my struggles to sit down and play with clay - are because somewhere in my mind, and somewhere very obviously in my culture, I don't feel like I am allowed to do these things. I'm not allowed to do them because I enjoy them too much, and because I'm not working enough, and until I spend enough time each week working at a stultifying soul-destroying job in some capacity, I have not earned the right to do those things.  Because everyone knows you have to eat your meat before you have your pudding.  How can you have any pudding if you haven't eaten your meat?

What would happen if what the world needs most was a whole bunch of people all eating their pudding at once?

That walk from the TV to the clay, from the TV to the computer to sit down and waste time writing stuff - or whatever your personal bliss is that you don't feel you have the time for - is the single most challenging and enlightening walk that you can take.  One of the most important ones, but the absolutely hardest one because it is a walk you need to take alone while the internal voices shouting that you don't have time and haven't earned this are completely meshed with the outside societal voices that are in total agreement.  And too often we listen to those voices.
 
How very strange, to be in a situation where the most courageous acts I can do are to do things that bring me intense pleasure.  How very, very strange.

But not uncommon at all, I don't think.  When life is pulling us in directions that distress and/or depress us, our first instinct is to try harder.  When in fact, what we really need to do to rest, and recuperate, and recreate ~ in the very best sense of that word, re-create ~ is to stop trying so hard, let loose, loosen our hair, take off our glasses, pick up that guitar, have a shag, listen inside for some whispered secrets that may well surprise us about what we really want to do that would give us joy, because even though L'Oreal has co-opted the saying, we really are very much worth it.

Let us all eat pudding.

Pic by Ucumari (under a creative commons attribution/no derivs/noncommerical licence)

Timing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Julia Cameron, Walking in the World

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

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

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


Image: Tree of Wisdom by Emin Sinanyan

Today

Today I would like to celebrate feeling alive, though wrangled and mangled. I would like to celebrate feeling healthy in the middle of winter (it is the middle, too. Oh, boy, it’s the middle. Come to Mama, Spring, wrap me up). I’d like to celebrate that it’s Saturday, a beautiful sunny one, and I live in the middle of a country so rich we don’t know what to do with ourselves. I’d like to celebrate living in a city that is full to overflowing with creativity, and I hope to walk in the midst of some of that today. I’d like to celebrate meeting up with my mother off the train, my kind mother who has done a whole lot of washing for me and who is now going to accompany me to the football this evening. I’d like to celebrate that, even whilst a poor worker by the standards of this country, I am able to sit down and eat food prepared by someone else, in peace and comfort. I’d like to celebrate that my mother will probably foot the bill :) I’d like to celebrate that recreation in the truest sense of the word is so rich and vibrant that it surprises me anew that that is the level to which God lives. That is reality, a great macro and microcosm of colour, texture, light and shade, fun and frivolity. I would like to celebrate that that is really what it means to live, and I would like to celebrate the fact that none of us really know what it’s like to live. Isn’t that a celebration? Yeah, okay, it’s a death. But always the death first, the celebration beyond. The celebration is that these small little lives we inhabit, despite their levels of God-fill, aren’t even close to living. Not even close to it. But we shall live …

I’d like to celebrate all this stuff, and I will, and there will be (hopefully) little guilt. But still always, fluttering at the corners of my mind like tassles on the edges of a curtain, are the questions. You know, the questions. I’ve got about 10 that I imagine will remain relatively unanswered in the great scheme of things until some future age when the God-fill is overflowing and the colours are turned up. Or maybe not. Maybe some of these questions will get answered in this lifetime. It’s so hard to know whether the horizons we see are because that is all there is to see in this life, or whether it’s the prevailing culture and systems that insist that this horizon is as far as you go and no further, and in actuality we are all wandering around dazed and confused in 2 square inches of space.

One of the questions, one of the biggest of all, that I ask over and over, not sure if I am moving forward, is this: how do I get to spend three hours fashioning a clay mask, losing all sense of time because I have put on the heart of a six year old, while people starve to death somewhere else? But then, is not spending three hours fashioning faces out of clay going to stop one person dying? The question, of course, isn’t so much about me doing this particular thing while people starve to death. It’s not the fashioning of clay that is the problem here. It’s the question of how much can one person do? Is this too frivolous a pursuit to do while countryloads of people are starving? Is it? I could send money; does that do enough? And what constitutes ‘enough’? And why is the question of ‘enough’ coming up anyway? A guilt appeaser? I think a great deal of things get accomplished in the name of guilt that have no love resonance about them at all and perhaps even do more damage than good.

But even asking these kinds of question show my Western privilege. Is debating whether guilt should be an appropriate motivator just hedging around the reality? Is saying to myself, “Do I sense God asking me to go and help people who are starving to death”, and the answer, “No” – is that also just another way of hedging? Is God perhaps saying, “You’re a big girl. If you have it in your heart to go and help starving people, then of course I will be behind you. I am Love. You get to make many more of your own choices than you think you do. It’s only when you think I am a hard god and am going to take your talents away that you will bury them in the ground in response.”

Okay, then, fine. This is coming a little bit closer to the reality, maybe. Or maybe I’m just pissing in the wind. I’m really not sure. So anyway. What was I saying? Yes. So I can ask whether should I be sitting here and making clay masks as if not doing that is going to make any difference to anything. As if my tiny little life should be counted that way, as comparing itself to a worldwide problem and then saying what it does or doesn’t do is going to make a difference, or even that the two should be compared. Doesn’t that kind of thinking just throw me down in the guilt ditch and leave me there, no further ahead in working out the problem? The guilt ditch never done nothin’.

So what, is it survivor guilt? Is it saying, “They’re starving to death so I shouldn’t be doing anything life affirming”? Well, I don’t know. Maybe sometimes it is. Maybe sometimes we should be down on our faces crying before God. I don’t know. Maybe sometimes we shouldn’t. Maybe we’ll get nothing but table crumbs rolling around on the ground. I just don’t know. But it doesn’t seem to do much good to me. Again, guilt never done nothin’.

But life is life. We spend enough time in this strange little planet called the West running away from reality, our own pain and torments, our own love. What use is running away also from life and colour and joy? Maybe it’s only through those things, in living more (consuming less), allowing God into the weft and weave that love will burst its banks in such a way as to propel us forward for change, if it’s possible, for help where possible. Maybe the problem is with us, with our hearts. Maybe the problem is that we have enough compassion to feel for those brothers and sisters in the world – of course we do. Most of us do, how could we not? But a bit of compassion isn’t enough to fix anything. Making people aware of things isn’t enough to fix anything. We can have an entire year, each day full of Blah Blah Awareness Day, but it changes stuff-all. Awareness and compassion are not enough. And neither is guilt, so don’t even bother feeling that. This thing is way bigger than any of us. Maybe we don’t even get to fix it. Maybe it just is. Hell, maybe starvation is coming to a store near you sometime in the future. I don’t know.

But maybe part of the problem is that we don’t love halfway near as much as we think we do. Maybe it’s not until love explodes like a tsunami inside of us that we will have enough guts to system override, to system crash. Because maybe that’s what it’s gonna take.

Today I want to celebrate my belief that everything goes on. No matter what the world dishes up to you, no matter even if you starve to death on a dust plain, Love wins. Love wins. Love wins you and it wins them. Today I want to celebrate life and love. And Life and Love. And to celebrate that realising that I really don’t know how to do either is a good step forward, somehow, in this tiny little microcosm that is my life. I’m not sure I have ever really loved anyone in my life. Not in the way I am starting to see that love is. I want to celebrate that Life and Love cannot but burst its own banks into mine and that all of this burning, twisting and turning, this interminable kiln firing, is purposive.

I want to be shown what Love is. Luckily Someone knows. Maybe, as puny as our love is, maybe every one of us is capable of loving so to overflowing. Maybe that’s what all of this is about. Bring it on, Vine.

Dancing in the Fog

I have gone for at least several weeks without at some point of every single day wanting to be dead. I think one would say that this is a good thing, right? In fact, right now, I am so happy, I feel like giant chunks of my own soul are being born and reborn right before my own eyes.

This last decade, not so good. Chronic health problems invisible to the eye which stretched me so far I really don't know how I didn't snap. Marriage breakup, heart breakdown. Then falling for someone because it felt so right to me, and yet was a land I couldn't enter anyway. Like some kind of blocked drain, piece by piece, all of my shit has come to the surface over the past 10 years. If I could have seen down through them, seen through the past decade and out the other side to here, I would have put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger without hesitation because, as dramatic as all this sounds, I have never thought I could go through so much pain in such a compacted time and still be standing up at the other end. I can barely write about all of this stuff still. I imagine I shall need a good five years or so to disseminate it all, to let it all absorb, to have some unreeling years in between to get a good feetplant.

And yet in the midst of all of that - joy so intense that my heart feels like it's going to pour out of my chest. A cracking open, and out of all of that, greater love, and no one but me will know how painful and horrible its been and no one will know how much more I cherish myself out of the birthing. And, in some kind of crazy way, a renewed ... awe for God, that he lets us go so close to the wire. Seriously, he is serious about getting shit out of his kids, and he won't stop even when we scream, defy and deny. Sometimes I wonder if he's not insane ;)

Yet I look about the world and my suffering pales in comparison. Not to minimise my stuff of course. Indeed, I make no apologies for any scrap of joy I get out of the rest of my life because I know, on some kind of cosmic level, I have said yes to God curetting, cutting and scraping, because I want it, this unnameable thing, the great Yes. I can taste it even though I haven't tasted it before and I can feel it even where I've never felt it. And I want it because I know it's worth it. I know it's that pearl of great price except I don't know how to refer to it except in analogies 'cause I've never been there before. But it's home. I know these things in my bones. I just know.

This is hard for me to write. I'm tempted to delete it. As crazy as it may sound, being I'm honest and open and out-there, I have a corresponding room in my soul where I find it really hard to speak my own truth, 'cause in a lot of ways I got taught by the significant males in my life that there were shameful reasons to hide my own truth away. I can't explain this to many people. I think they think that because my main front reception room is bright yellow that I don't have any black rooms but I do, and they have been hidden for so long, and it's only now all the shit has come to the surface that I really finally feel like I can start speaking my own truth. And that feels like some kind of amazing healing thing.

It's the weekend, in the middle of Winter, and I feel good and my heart feels more whole than broken, and as I write this I've got tears welling in my chest because life is so raw and so beautiful and so fucking painful, and the world is reeling to and fro, and somehow, despite how ridiculous it all seems like, God's got it going on.

Can a christian sing the blues?

Can a Christian Sing the Blues? Damn fucking right.

I'm feeling angry. I've had it with this stupid goddamn growth process. I'm sick of the world reeling to and fro. I'm sick of crying every fucking day. I'm sick of small portions of light and glee and then the shutters come down. I'm sick of a faulty immune system. I'm sick of myself. I'm sick of God sitting on his hands.

I yelled at God last night in a sentence that included the word 'fuck'. I meant it, and I don't feel in the least bit apologetic about it, either (funny, I don't feel apologetic about being angry at him, but I do feel apologetic about feeling depressed. Hmm ...)

Thanks to Abmo at Windblown Hope for the link.

While I'm linking, I snorted/lamented my way through this excellently written piece of horror that documents a particularly creepy kooky American charismatic experience: Jesus Made Me Puke

Diamonds on the inside ... amongst the pigswill

No one is to be called an enemy, all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm.
You have no enemy except yourselves.

St Francis of Assisi

Sometimes I think I'm gonna collapse under the weight of how GODDAMN BORING IT IS LIVING IN THIS TIME AND PLACE! WE ALL LOOK THE SAME! WE ALL LOOK THE SAME!

Sometimes I think living 100 years ago would have been more exciting. Sure, it would have been harder work (and my privileged position even surmising about this would probably have all the women who lived in 1908 shaking their heads at my ridiculous patheticism, sitting here with the luxury to blog on with my own blatheriness every day cos when I do a load of washing it's done in 10 minutes instead of standing at the mangle for 3 hours). But at least along with the sweat there was a bit of colour, a bit of vibrancy, a bit of texture, of shading. At least people got together in their communities and did stuff unrelated to the bottom line. They used to get together and dance and stuff! I know - how weird! (And it wasn't music you had to have taken ecstasy to access, but perhaps I'm just getting all old and ornery).

Wow, Western civilisation, take a bow. Surely you are at your glowing illustrious pinnacle. You have become a society in which nobody feels welcome in, everyone feels like a failure in, we all look exactly the same, and everyone is too scared to have an original thought. This while our leaders extol our democratic freedom. Freedom for what? Freedom to what? Goodness, we are all so damn terrified of ourselves and each other, we're gonna spontaneously combust at our own shadows. What kinda freedom? Freedom to hate each other's guts, and to hate ourselves just as much.

Surely the Body should be different. Shouldn't we, a called-out people, be demonstrating on occasions the wide vistas that are ours, the real reality of God, a reality with spiritual diamonds dripping off the trees, a reality of silver linings, where "they all lived happily ever after" is something we anticipate?

No, we just look like everyone else, and it's not even like there's a whole stack that we are losing out on anymore by buying into the patheticisms of this society. But we're hooked on the high carb, empty sugar, television vacuity that stops us from feeling our own pain. Isn't that what it comes down to? We don't want to feel our own pain. We don't see any redemption in pain. We forget the Man we follow.

We don't really believe that God is going to do what s/he says. Not really. We expect everyone else to believe it but we don't really believe it ourselves. If we did, it would change everything. If we did, we would open ourselves and him/her up to our pain because we would know that God drips redemption from every pore. If we did, we would live our lives like we have some kind of vision at all. But instead we perish along with everybody else.

Of course, my irritation this evening is almost certainly just transference outward of the irritation I feel inward. I have started really noticing how it is that when I feel irritation or anger at other people, invariably it comes back to the areas of myself I am trying to ignore or minimise. That sucks. But it is true - I can only love others to the extent that I have first loved myself. This includes most especially the parts that are the ugliest. The ugliest ugliest, leprous parts of ourselves. The parts we want to hang our heads in shame over. Get stoned over. Watch television over, get a quick lay over. Whatever your drug of choice is. The bits we want to run away from. Those are the bits we need to learn to love. Because it's not until we can learn to love those bits in ourselves that we will not shrink away in horror when we see them in ourselves and in other people. It is our strength. Our strength in weakness. It's how we get to love the world. And the world is bound up in Christ on the cross, saying, "I thirst."

And it's all totally impossible. And it's all totally possible. All things are possible if God says so.

Love yourself. Even though it opens up wounds. Love yourself. You're worth it. Loreal says so. Sure, you're full of foul smelling pigswill. So are we all. But wait - there's more. There's cool stuff under that stinking mess. Love yourself. You'll be amazed at how good you get at it. Then you can love other people. And then maybe they will learn to love themselves.

And we will all live happily ever after.

No, I am not a liberation theologist. I just sound like one this evening. I also sound grouchy, but I'm actually quite snazzy, thanks for asking :) I was, however, planning on not blogging for a few days, give myself a break. But instead I've just rehashed something I've already said 100 times before :)

What is worse than suffering?

I was sitting outside before, hitting the ball for my dog (this is his vocation). He went to get the ball and fell over. Mocca mentioned that he had fallen over last week too. And so the gears started whirring in my brain and I began imagining, playing What If? Today's what if featured a doggy melodrama - Lester cast as the poor canine with a wasting disease. What would I do if Lester was wasting away with a wasting away disease? Would I get him put to sleep? When would I get him put to sleep?

My conclusion was that I didn't know (these are most of my conclusions these days. It is a strangely satisfying conclusion). I thought that I would have to wing it and suss the situation out intuitively as I went, see what the Lord of the Starfields had to say about it all. I thought about how the "put your animals to sleep at the first sign of any suffering whatsoever. An eyelash in your dog's eye? Put it to sleep" fraternity would react to that. They would think that I was horrible, allowing my dog to suffer that way. As if there is nothing that goes on in suffering except suffering itself. No redeeming qualities, especially for a dog.

But what do we as a culture know about suffering? I mean, it makes sense that we run from it, right? Suffering hurts = run from suffering. We medicate it whenever we can. Got the flu? Take antibiotics. Got a heartache? Get drunk/stoned/fucked/angry/whatever your personal predilection is. Getting old? Get institutionalised away from our sight. Disabled in any form? Keep it to yourself. Our culture has sanitised suffering out of the public square. It doesn't fit with the economics. We scapegoat those who are publicly suffering. It must be their fault. We just don't want to know.

But, then, as in so much of life, while the left hand is doing one thing, the right hand is doing another thing. While your flesh is writhing in the suffering, the injustice of it, the horrible God who is allowing it ... your spirit can be rejoicing if its vision is long-range enough to see that God will never allow any suffering to go by without wrapping it up, in the next age or so, with his brand of justice (not our brand. Our brand is a tad too ... harsh, shall we say? We misunderstand continually the difference between justice and vengeance). So if your spirit can hold to this, to know that suffering is not only a shithole but it is also a furnace, and that we get purified in the furnace, then there is some measure of rejoicing on that part of us which is wise beyond imagining. Which feels like cold comfort to our flesh. But hey, what other sort of comfort do you want when you're in a hot furnace ;)

So, I don't know what I would do if my dog was dying of a wasting disease. But I would hesitate to do the first thing my culture suggests. There could be reasons, after all, for my dog to stay alive, to live out his life a bit longer, that I know absolutely nothing about, rhythms that we cut short when we "one size fits all" everything, even death. How the hell would I know what the best thing would be to do? But again, I would have to be aware of the possibility when the time came, much as I would hate to think I would be so wussy, to hide behind that reasoning as a way to continue my dog's suffering because I wouldn't want to enter into my grief. But I would seriously hope not.

So I've been thinking, suffering isn't the worst thing that can happen - although it feels like it at the time (and when I say suffering I'm talking about the generalised middle-of-the-road stuff, not so much the traumatic, violent variety - although even middle-of-the-road suffering can feel traumatic). But then I was wondering, if suffering isn't the worst thing that can happen - what is? What do you think? Is there anything that you can define that would be worse than suffering? I've got a few ideas but I want to see what you guys have to say first :)

Expectancy versus Expectation

I have a touch of a cold. Nothing major. Just enough to contribute to my psychological and emotional malaise of the last couple of weeks. Nothing feels simple right now and many things feel heartbreaking. I am finding the things I am dealing with go to the bottom of my soul, into anterooms of shame. It's like everything that has happened to me in the last decade is conspiring to open up those rooms and reveal what is in them. What is in them are feelings of smallness, insignificance. I can't tell you how ugly and stupid I feel right now. I'm hoping that some sort of healing is going on. Cause you never can quite tell at the time.

I am reminded of the difference between living with expectancy and living with expectations. My expectations at the moment are that I will be able to continue on my creative path - whose wheels have kinda fallen off a bit lately. It's all I can do to get my morning pages done, and do some of The Artist's Way, and at least aim to get some artist dates under my belt but pitifully failing most weeks. My expectations are that I will continue on my healing path and get out of this extended season of self-absorption. I want to find some community. I want to find new people to share my life with. I want to be able to be vulnerable enough to open myself up to new friendships and relationships without feeling like my guts are spilling out the sides. Some days I think I'm almost there. Other days I feel like this whole little trip to fix some of Susie's more sordid interior bits will never. ever. end.

Now, none of these expectations are bad in themselves. But when they're not happening in the way I want, then the secondary things that follow from that cut in and try to cut me off at my knees, make me feel a million times worse, if I let them. The difference between expectations and expectancy is that one is centred on myself, and basically ends up being all about how I am failing to do whatever it is I've set for myself. The other is centred on the moment, on God, on all the good parts of life, and does whatever is there in front of me to do. It's a place that I long to return to. It's a place that has been elusive these past few weeks. My meditation has gone out the window and that single thing alone is enough to send me reeling from living in expectancy into thrashing myself with the whip of expectation.

Sigh. Why does it have to be all so godamn difficult?

Layer Upon Layer Upon Layer

We used to have this Sara Lee apple danish ad here in Australia in the 70s or 80s where the Austrian woman was waxing lyrically about the "layer upon layer upon layer" consistency of the amazing sweet she was eating. If I could defragment my brain's hard drive the way I can my computer, I would probably scrap that little memory taking up 10 or so bytes in my head, and move extra space to my short term memory so I can remember where the hell it was I left whatever it was that I've forgotten I've lost. But again, as usual, I digress.

I am much more aware of just how many layers I have. There are many. I feel like God has gone down to the depths of them recently. There has been so much going on in my layers over the past year, it's a good thing we can't see into the future because this last year would have appeared utterly unbearable if viewed in its entirety. The stuff me and God have been dealing with is the ultimate stuff. The really really big stuff. The core foundational identity stuff. The stuff that I have known has been there for years and years. And oh, boy, the pain.

So it hurts when you're changing and being changed and being healed in some measure. And so I've been angry. And my emotions have spilled outside of myself and overflowed onto the footpath. And God has felt more far away at times in the last few months than in, say, more heady spiritual times that have occurred over the past 10 years. But you know what, bloggers? It's alright. As painful as it is, it's alright. Because I feel in some strange way on some mystical level that I have agreed to allow Papa to do all of this. He knows what he's doing. It's a necessary process of disorientation. It's felt horrible because so much stuff has been dredged up. That's settling now, but I still can't really see what is going to come in its place. But God can.

Knowing that God is doing it is enough for me to trust him/her. And I do trust her/him. And the fact that he has grown me to trust him, with the father issues I have had, is a miracle all on its own. S/he is truly, amazingly creative and loving and kind in the way that s/he deals with us. If only we can grasp this, it will change everything. It will change the world. It has before.

(It is already - can you feel it?)

So in the past, when I would be going through difficult times or whatever, facing difficult things, working my way through stuff, on top of the discomfort of those sorts of situations I would have this horrible chain dragging behind me of thinking, "If I was a good Christian, would this kind of thing be happening to me?" It felt like that's what the Christian culture was telling me - that I should be doing it shiny for Jesus. It seems ludicrous to me now that I wouldn't be able to recognise that for the stinking religious garbage it is - all that is there is human power and control and refusing to lay down and die to your own thinking, your own stuff - but when you are in the midst of that garbage and haven't known anything else, you don't know any better. Even though the ache in your heart doesn't go away, the hope somehow if God is how we hope him to be, then maybe there could be a way for him to make all this stinking stuff alright. After all, look at Jesus, right?

I feel like I've come a long way since then. Tonight, I feel a lightness in my being that has many times been sunk in the past year. I seriously didn't know that life could be this painful. I have wanted to die at times this year ... and yet, at the same time, paradoxically, this joy has been there even within those times of despair. It's always there. But sometimes we can't see it and we can't feel it very well. And that's okay too. Because one of the problems of being made of dust is that when God moves around spiritual furniture, great clouds of ourselves puff up into the air, obscuring anything else. It's just par for the course, bloggers.

Don't let anyone make you feel bad about that. You get to rest even in the midst of your pain, as difficult as it is, as much as you need to scream. Don't let any well-meaning shiny happy people steal your peace by trying to make you feel like you shouldn't be in the place you're in if you are walking the right path. He's got you on your path. He knows the times when he's got you sitting on a boulder on the side of it for a respite while he does some stuff in you. He knows sometimes you're gonna run and sometimes you're gonna walk, and sometimes you're gonna sit down again and look as if you're going nowhere or backwards.

It's all okay. It's gonna be alright. Because not only are we made of dust. We are also made of stars.

Too Empty and too full

Do you ever feel too empty and too full at the same time? Feeling like doing this Artist's Way thing has suddenly opened up an extra layer of stuff. Funny how sometimes stuff just comes along, and you don't know where it's come from, but it's time to deal with it. Big fat blobs of anger welling up. Sheesh. Where the hell's that from? Dunno. Who knows - maybe it's anger from 1979 or 1986 or 2003 or yesterday. Don't know and not really important, in some ways. What's important is facing that I'm feeling it. Bring it to the light and it gets transformed into light.

I'm too in my head today. Not enough calm, too much ruminating about the past and the future. Not enough being present, right in my body. Too much pretending that I'm not feeling certain things, or that I am feeling certain things, when I'm not. I dislike being dishonest with myself. I despise it in other people but I do it myself. (Which is probably why when I recognise it in other people I despise it, sometimes in a rather overreactive fashion). I don't know why I do some of the things I do.

Then the slowdown, the turning and facing whatever emotion it is I'm feeling. Feeling it in my body. Acknowledging it. Not running. Feeling a certain sense of peace, of resolution. This is how reality is. This, right here, whatever it is. It's dealable, whatever it is. As long as I stay in the now and just live with it instead of wishing for it to be different.

Then 20 minutes later back to square one again.

I'm tired of feeling emotional about things. It's this cleanse, thing, stirred everything up. It's one or two other things stirred everything up too, but I don't even want to go there. (I am tempted at times to start up a blog written by Mary in Kalgoorlie just so I can write completely and utterly honestly about what's going on in my head and heart without thinking about who is reading this, and if I say this then this person will be upset, that person will be offended, that person will be traumatised. That's the problem blogging when some of your readers are people you know in real life :) And this is probably why journals exist. Sometimes in my more cynical moments this whole blogging thing feels like one stupid commodifying of my own thoughts. Why don't I just write in my journal for myself, and be done with it (and occasional opinion pieces, and be paid for it). I have developed a bit of a love/hate relationship with blogging. The limitations of this medium are so many and varied that sometimes I just can't be bothered with the whole stupid thing. It's so far away from reality at times that it makes me want to belch. But hey, tomorrow morning I'll wake up less grumpy than I am right now, with an inkling for a post, and there I shall be once again, scratching the itch.

Anyway, I digressed. I think one of my problems is, after having such a godawful time of it with illness and marriage breakups, sometimes you decide when you get to a plateau and start feeling good again that you never want to feel bad again. Which is just silly. I want to just be with whatever is going on. I don't want to fight whatever life is throwing at me, resisting it. Pointless resistance. Fighting it makes it bigger and uglier and deepens my wrinkles and makes me die just a little bit more. In the bad way, not in the good dying way.

Mocca came and picked up Lester the other day and when Lester knew he was going to his dad's house, and following him out the door, Mark said, "He's going pretty good considering he's the product of a broken home." And we both smiled but it was still a smile through the dull ache. And I thought, I reckon we're both going pretty well considering we're the products of a broken home.

And I am going well. I think that going well can mean that you have periods in your day where you're crying while driving your car because that damn Yesterday's Gone song is playing and it's too painful to listen to it still. And then an hour later you can be fine, on top of the world. I think maybe that this is an okay thing. Life is messy.

And I feel empty creatively. But it feels like a good empty. Like I'm restocking the well. One thing I have realised, when reading aloud my list of "basic principles" each day about creativity: the one which makes me most uncomfortable out of the whole list is this one - "It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity." I'm still not even really sure why it is I'm scared about that. But I am. I think maybe it's because it's just another version of dying to myself. Opening myself up to more creativity means putting myself aside and letting it happen. And even though I love putting myself aside I hate putting myself aside. Because even though I love throwing myself into the void, throwing myself into the void scares the shit out of me.

Hehe. Didn't think there'd be a post without paradox, did ya?

A strange prayer

"Because we are practical people, driven toward effectiveness, we look for a solution to our many problems. Perhaps a key is given in the very word 'solutio' which in chemistry refers to the combination of several ingredients into a new mixture, each dying to its own substance. There is a natural resistance as I hold on to my exclusive story against a Larger Story. Usually we will not let go unless we are forced or wounded. In the mythologies of all the great world religions, the wounding is the passageway from the little world to the Transcendent World. The ego must be defeated before we will submit to the 'solutio,' before we will fit our small world into the Bigger Picture. If the wound leads us to this passing over, it is rightly called a sacred wound. If it leads me backwards to an entrenchment in my small protective ideas, the wound is more common embittering wound. Here, I am afraid, is where much of the world and the church lies festering and bleeding, embittered that life has caused us pain."

Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace

In that case, Papa, crack us open. Lead us gently to a safe wounding. But crack us open nevertheless.

Suffering

I think I am turning into a crazy mystical woman :) The day draws ever nearer when cats shall begin to appeal to me and I collect 10 of them. Then I shall stop washing, remove myself from society and start eating only lentils.

My intentions for today are not coming to pass. I feel unnerved, as if from some alternate universe I'm trying to get my own attention. I can't hear what the alternate me is saying, but it's distracting me from the day I planned, a day of soup making, reading for my literature class, housework etc.

There are all of these things I want to talk about, spiritual things that I feel I'm beginning to learn, but which are untranslatable, falling down as they do in the gulf between my spirit and my mouth. I think I need to write some fiction before I go a bit loopy(er).

I wanted to talk about suffering. Having just come out of a two-month long bout of it, I feel like something has shifted. But again, it's indefinable, spiritual and untranslatable. I am getting used to this feeling. It's like every time I go through a furnacelike experience, something gets drossed away. And when I come out the other end, no matter how unbearable it was at the time, I whisper in my spirit that I welcome the next time; I consent to doing it again. It's like a spiritual birthing process. But I don't know what the baby is.

Well, it's me, isn't it. There is purpose in everything. All of this falling to the ground, dying. It effects. It unsmudges a portion of the glass.

Can someone explain to me what this verse means from Colossians: "I am glad when I suffer for you in my body, for I am completing what remains of Christ's sufferings for his body, the church."

"What remains of Christ's sufferings"? Huh?

Blergh

And blergh and blergh.

And on it goes, being blergh. And then I feel okay for a bit and get a bit of perspective and see a good sunset on the train on the way home with the great unwashed (I hate catching the train with the loathsome populace. I always detest humanity in proportion to how crap I'm feeling myself. Today I felt positively hateful towards my fellow human. Sad).

Then I see the sunset and think, look how beautiful that is. God is here. And then I realise that it's not all blergh.

And then later on I feel blergh again. Return to top paragraph. Repeat.

I guess I should console myself with the bell curve approach. At least I'm not Mocca, who, whilst playing a friendly game of work netball yesterday afternoon, got upended by someone, and came smashing down onto the ground. He broke his fall with his wrist and his head. His head had concussion, and some stitches put in it last night (9 hours after the fact; hail our marvellous health care system). His wrist was so badly fractured with bits of bone sticking up a la Nathan Brown that he had to be put out for them to reset it. They operated this afternoon - a four-hour stint. He's not having much fun, but being his standard stoical self.

Me, I'd be more like the guy in the cubicle a few doors down who was whingeing and crying out to people to stop the pain. I'd be yellin' for the morphine, too. I don't have it in me to be stoical, as much as I'd like to be able to suck it up.