Bloom (blessing)

A blessing for a friend who just turned 40 and is moving to a faraway place.

Bloom.
Flourish.
Speak what is in your heart.
Live what is in your dreams.
Love, sweetly.  Ferociously.
Touch the warm earth with your feet
And the heavens with your spirit.
Laugh.
Bloom.

Do you know what I love?

I love going on a bit of a blog stomp, rolling from blog to blog, clicking on links and finding what makes other people tick. I especially love to click on the very first post – the one where the person declares they’re having a go at blogging, and why.  It never fails to serve up a personal insight, mixed in with some kind of statement of hope.  Starting a blog is an act of self-belief, because you have to believe you’ve got something worth something to put it out there.

And we’ve all got something worth something, haven’t we?

I love these first posts because they’re often about intent.  I’m fascinated by intent.  It’s more than a goal or a decision.  It runs so much deeper and is more powerful.  Intent arises at a spiritual level, not an intellectual one, and it has everything to do with our sense of connection with what really matters, inside ourselves and in the dimension in which we function, move and achieve.  Sometimes the intent is barely conscious in a person, other times it is laser sharp and unmistakeable.  The intent may not be articulated by the writer, but its energy is there, buzzing with promise.

Success!

It’s been a while.  I’ve had plenty of blog ideas and even scrawled a few of them down on random scraps of paper, but have had some difficulty converting them to coherence, because the other areas of my life have been clamouring for priority.

It’s been a fruitful time.  3 subjects of study completed, with varying degrees of excruciation and reward.  OK, possibly a little more of the former than the latter – there were a few moments when I had to dig deep - but P’s still make degrees and so does the occasional credit.  I delivered a work project successfully, and publicly so.  I got out and about socially to a few poet-y events.  I ticked a few things off a very long standing “to do“ list.

On a more personal level, there are other signs of progress.  The addition of regular high-potency fish oil capsules to my life seems to have reduced my dependency on caffeine for concentration.  Or maybe it’s the extra sleep that I’ve been careful to claim.  I got through a week of walking around town and concentrating through study visits without a fatigue crash. The day or so of active resting afterwards was a great excuse to power through a couple of novels.  Not bad when I consider how tired I was walking and how slow I was reading only a year ago.  My clarity and fitness is nowhere near complete, but it does feel like it’s returning in an incremental whisper. 

And that’s just it.  The secret to success is feeling successful.  I’m sure during these weeks there have been many not-as-good-as-I-used-to-be moments.  In my darkest hour, I stared at the blank page and inch-thick pile of articles that I needed to decode and my confidence very nearly deserted me.  But I chose instead to focus on the memory and sensation of times when I have done what I wanted to, and well.  I chose to actively pursue the state of mind that success creates, because it creates the interior state that drives further success.  There’s a certain magic to it.

It works.  Possibly not with the same ease as in the past, but it is so much sweeter now because of the adversity which I’ve overcome along the way.

Talking bird

I was sitting in the lounge room trying to make a decision, when I heard the unmistakable chatter of a tame bird, just outside the back door.  There were other birds calling too, one sounding like a magpie out in the big gum near the back fence, but this sound was quite distinct, with whistles and very human sounding words mixed in.

So I crept over to the door, expecting to see an escape pet bird parading around.  Instead, there was a single magpie, standing not 2 metres away, looking boldly at me through the screen and twittering and chatting in the most conversational way. 

Despite their many and often pretty calls, I have never heard a magpie talking like that.  Ever.  So I tiptoed away to get the video camera.  But the bird saw that camera, stopped its talking, and then flew off.

If only I could’ve understood what it was saying.  It might’ve been some good advice…

Quotalicious - 40th birthday

It’s never too late to be what you could have been. ~ George Eliot

So, it's my 40th birthday today and it brings with it a swirl of emotions.  Mostly I'm feeling grateful for the hope that I might even make it to 50, 60, 70 or beyond.  Which is not something that those of us who have danced with the crab-footed fiend take lightly.

To celebrate this most expected and surprising of days, I've decided to gift myself the very most awesomest gift I can:  the gift of owning my writer-ness.  Publicly.  This means a blog with my actual real name on it (stay tuned).  And formalising my potentially-writing-for-publication-and-payment status with my employer.  And getting myself a copy of the Australian Writer's Marketplace.  And allowing that it's perfectly ok to meander down that path in a sedate fashion, balancing all the other elements of my life for the greatest possible JOY combination.

This is going to be a sweet, sweet year.

Quotalicious ~ Anne Lamott

In this dark and wounding society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.”  And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing.  After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you've been avoiding all along - your wounds. ~ Anne Lamott

Exactly!

Amy Steinberg



EXACTLY!

Quotalicious

The wound is the place where the Light enters you. ~ Rumi

Overshare?

So it was Thursday (AGAIN), and therefore writer’s group day. 

Theme for the month:  When I was young…

Shortly after the theme was set, my mother (who I maintain a degree of contact with) made a comment about all the reading she did with us when we were little.

I don’t remember it.  Neither does my sister.

Unremarkable, except that I have very vivid memories of my young life, and they are perfectly carbon dated by the details of the house we moved out of when I was four.  I remember being a baby on my tummy, and being able to see the underside of the couch. That was when the floor was still sea-grass matting, and a long time before my mother went wild with the funky wallpaper and a can of lime green paint. 

I remember the morning of my 2^nd birthday, and my 3rd, and the desolate footage of Cyclone Tracy on our black and white telly on Christmas morning when I was three.  I remember the arrival and mysterious departure of various furred and feathered family members, and a million small details like the cupboard where Dad kept his liquorice, the pattern on the floor in the kitchen, the smell of the flowers along the side of the newly poured concrete driveway.  But I don’t remember her reading to me. 

I remember our books, and I remember sitting by myself trying to read them.  The day I started school, the teacher explained that you sound out the letters and run them together, and I remember my astonishment that it was so easy, and the anger that no one had explained the single crucial detail that meant I could now read.  But I don’t recall any moments of closeness, snuggled up, listening to my mother’s voice.

Interesting disconnect, don’t you think?

So I thought I would explore this more, by letting the books in my life tell a story.  I was interested in the device of writing about one thing (the books) to talk about something else (the real story).  I got to the point where, at age 10, I decided I was a writer.  Short of time, I finished it, gave it a quick edit, printed it off and headed out straightaway for the meeting. 

I prefaced my reading with a request for people to comment on the effectiveness of the device.  I thought I had achieved a fairly dispassionate telling of the details, without straying into the emotive.  I was wrong.

I read aloud ok right up until I got to this:

Then one day she buys me and my sister new zip-up cardigans and packs a pair of jeans that are too small into a Jetset overnight bag, and puts us on a plane.  I’m nine years old and clutching a soft toy dog.

The sobs rose up in me.  Someone offered to read on for me, but in that moment there was nothing more important than speaking the words myself.  I pulled out a tissue, took a deep breath, and continued reading with my voice and face contorted with emotion.  

 Without warning or even shoes, we are going to live at Nanna’s.  Mum doesn’t look sick at the airport, but it must be very bad because she doesn’t ring us or write any letters, except once, when she sends us a bookmark. Mine is a kitten sitting on a stack of books.  It is instantly my most treasured possession. I hold it while I read, and keep it inside its grubby yellow envelope until the edges are so worn they fall apart.  When the colour wears off, I carefully restore its tabby striped tail with coloured pencils.  I read a lot.

So, I guess this counts as a Public Ugly Cry.

Overshare?  Or free therapy?

I have lived with this experience for thirty years now, but never openly grieved it.  I guess it took looking at the stark, unadorned details through the eyes of someone else to realise the depth of the injury to the child who was me.  It’s only one paragraph in a long catalogue of displacement, disregard, and disempowerment.

The group was kind. Afterwards, one person said to me that I should always feel like I can read whatever I want to, and how important a process that was for her.  Another spoke to me of all the 9 year old children she had taught with stories like mine, and how powerful it was for her to hear mine and know something of the ending.  Maybe there are some in the group that resent me serving up another chunk of me-me-me, but there again, this may give them permission to reach a little deeper next time they sit down to write. 

The next meeting will be in a month’s time, and by then we’ll all have moved onto the next thing. 

Cake, Strawberries and a Thing

Warning:  soft underbelly exposed.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

No surprises there.  The extended radio silence gives it away, doesn’t it?

Not that my life is bad, or even difficult.  I’m fully able to load up on the gratitude when I’m feeling down. (Feeling thankful helps enormously when you’re sitting in some vinyl chair while they prepare the sharp, pointy instruments they’re about to start poking in to you).

No, this distress is more of the lingering, mid-life, existential kind. 

Basically the things I want to do are clashing with the Thing I really want to do.  I have the opportunity to complete a degree in my chosen field, with excellent advanced standing points and tax deductions.  But at the same time I’m on fire with the notion of embracing my writerness, which I have always suspected was my Thing.  And it’s more urgently my Thing, now that I’ve faced off the biological mutiny of cancer and am now staring down (or flinching at) my 40^th birthday.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for having my cake and eating it too.  A healthily functioning person should be able to work part-time, study a single subject, and squeeze in a number of hours pursuing their Thing each week, while still maintaining a small amount of social contact. 

But I struggle. 

Sadly, it’s not about how many hours there are in a day, but when my brain function will give out.  Some days my stupified brain is so tired from my short day at work, I collapse in the early evening.  I make short term goals and then forget what they were.  Hell, sometimes I even forget what day it is. 

This makes time management an ongoing nightmare. Let alone when you can’t decide what your top priority is or even remember what it was you were doing.

Right now in fact, I should be feverishly reading and scribbling notes, in an effort not to fail not one but two uni subjects.  And yet…

And yet, here I am.  Doing this self-indulgent, possibly not-completely-mentally-healthy Thing.  Looking within.  Writing.  Sometimes I believe this is the best possible Thing I can be doing, and other times I fear that maybe it’s a sign of the pathological in me.  Particularly since I haven’t yet organised myself to write fiction.

See, I’m afraid to admit to the world the extent to which I really, really do not have it together.  While I appear to function on the outside, really I’m quite unstable.  I require a lot of shoring up.  For a long time that illusion was easier to create.  But now, with my cracked brain and my tired body, it requires a greater investment of time and energy.  I’m not able to shore myself up quite so flawlessly as I have in the past. I’m afraid of leakage, most especially in my writing.

But if I don’t write, I’m afraid the whole dam will break open.

It’s a risky business.  If I were to wade out past my psychological untidiness and write, I might find out that I’m terrible at it.  Or worse than terrible, mediocre.  And publicly so.

I tried this writing Thing once before.  I got as far as the third semester in a professional writing course, and faltered.  Part of that falter was the pressing need for a more practical income stream.  And part of it was that I caught the first glimpse that maybe I’m not as smart/talented/imaginative as everyone thought I was.  There needs to be a painful stage of being not-very-good but persisting anyway until I’ve clocked up some real skill.  This means sucking up the hideous embarrassment of exposing my soft not-perfectness, and just doing it.

So I didn’t.  I didn’t do it.  I wriggled away and found something else that would earn me money and allow me to shine, in tiny safe amounts.  But writing didn’t stop being my Thing.  It quietly gnawed away at my insides for nearly a decade, and finally clawed its way out again, probably through one of the holes made by surgical steel.

So here I am again.  Tired, and with a brain and body full of holes, wrestling with a Thing that surprises me with deep joy and even deeper struggle, that won’t go away.  And the Thing is competing with that other part of my life, the moving-forward with the tidy plans I made before cancer came along and fucked it all up.  Throw in some semi-menopausal mood swings, and I’m a joy to live with.

So, this is the hard time I’m been having.  Stuck.  Blocked.  Avoidant.  Bleak.  Resentful of the work needed for the choice that I’ve made and the energy that it consumes. 

On Friday, I was having a particularly bad day, vacillating between I’ll never be a real writer and I’ll just have to drop out of Uni, then.  While ruminating on the nature of success and failure, something twigged.  I realised it’s all in your state of mind.  OK, so maybe I don’t have the time and capacity right now to launch my entire psyche into the deep end of a novel while cranking out High Distinctions each semester, but I can – and I have in the past – find that still spot right in the middle where everything balances.

I can chew that particular cake, and still have it.  And the secret?  A willingness to boldly allow my imperfection, to let the cake to sit lopsided on the plate while it makes room for the strawberries.  Suddenly I can see a path through, one that will allow me to plod along and complete what is needed, but still give my Thing room to breathe and sometimes even dance.

And, at that very moment of decision, of inner shift, I look up.  A rainbow.  And not just any rainbow. It’s searing against the dusk tinged sky, a wide arc of intense light reaching from one side of the sky all the way to the other.  As I drive home, it continues to dazzle in the north east, in the direction I am travelling.

I know it’s only an accident of light and water vapour.  But it seems like a promise.  A reassurance that there will be illumination along the path, if I let my true colours shine, reach wide for what is beautiful, and steer towards my goals with clarity.

Nineteen years

Happy Anniversary ~ to the love of my life.
xxx

The perfect quote?

Don’t you hate that?

Sometime in the last three days, I read the perfect quote.  It summed up a concept that I have since given a lot of mental air time.  I have visited the idea at least once in conversation of the deep and meaningful kind, in my own imperfect and fumbling words.  The quote expressed with rare precision and delicacy the sort of paradox that only the most universal and enduring life truths hinge upon.  It was the type of perfect quote that you read to anyone who will let you, share on Facebook, and enjoy the bubbling forth of creative reply.

But I’ve forgotten where it was.

I have retraced my virtual steps, and even gone so far as to walk around my house and gaze about each room, in case the source pages should leap into focus in my refreshed memory.  But to no avail. 

I try to remember.  I recall the moment of deep, dizzy recognition, a sudden intake of breath, the feel of the smile spreading across my face, and I read it again, this time the swirling words absorbed more slowly. A pause as the crystalline weight of the idea spreads inside my mind.  And then, a distraction, the sudden need to tear myself away from the passage, and a choice to put it down. 

Somewhere in the intervening busy-ness, it has slipped away from me, like a cunning teacher, or a secretive sage.

But I still feel the energy of the message.  I feel it in my solar plexus, as if the words are still connected to my body.  Perhaps the quote has escaped me deliberately, so I must try harder to connect the dots, learn the lesson, know the truth of it in my own way.  Or maybe the wisdom has not left me at all, but has burrowed deeper into my consciousness, in order to expand and find new expression in me, in my words - in my own perfect quote.

Soul Purpose

What is your soul purpose?

I had a very interesting conversation with my Wise Old Sister (WOS) a while ago.  Having just spent the weekend at a core shamanism workshop, I found myself again in the place of questioning my intent, my purpose, and my sense of meaning.  What am I doing here on the planet?  What is the higher purpose of my life?

The concept of being a shamanic practitioner who may be called to share these skills with the community is a tricky one within our contemporary cultural setting.  We are weirdly hung up on having “qualifications”, when the raw truth is there is no regulatory authority on the planet who can issue a certificate when it comes to a tradition which is handed down experientially from teacher to student over period of time.  This occurs as the student becomes ready and the circumstances for learning unfold in the student’s life (prompted no doubt by Spirit).  It is the ultimate ‘learn-by-doing’ modality.

My WOS very patiently listened to me telling her that I’m not really any of the things that I used to think I was (insert whiney voice) and I don’t even know what my life purpose is anymore, and then she said:

Your soul purpose isn’t confined to an activity, or a profession, or any single calling.  It is instead the energetic vibration that you incarnate into this life with, and the number of ways that it can be expressed in is infinite.  Ok, it’s possibly limited a little based on your personality, inherent talents, and desires…but is theoretically infinite in its expression.  So a “healer” isn’t necessarily so just by virtue of hanging out the shingle, or training as a doctor or naturopath, or seeing reiki clients…the essence of “healer” will inform all their encounters.  It’s purely our egos that want to know “what is my life’s purpose?”  Our souls/spirits just get on with expressing their particular gift – hopefully with some degree of mindfulness – very simply through every act of authenticity.  Whether it be by creating something, expressing something, witnessing something, sharing something, healing something, it doesn’t matter.  

(See, I told you she is Wise).

Part of having a radical life revision (in the form of a potentially fatal disease) involves questioning everything – every construct or belief that got me this far in life – and assessing its truth and ongoing relevance.  In the past I have believed myself to be a writer, a healer, a dancer – and even though I was engaged quite heavily in those activities at the time, I now feel closer to these goals not by being “xyx label” – but rather by doing.  By walking it, not talking it.  Sure, some labels might be handy for understanding my motivation, setting goals, enunciating my intent – but really, just walking the path, really allowing myself to drop into it and be open to the unlimited possibilities is much more valuable than any title I could possibly claim or invent.  I suspect the next stage of my maturation involves dropping out of the old egoic spirituality and into just being what I am instead.  Gloriously and with utter humility.  I’m starting to catch a glimpse of Something which is far bigger, wordless in its entirety, and integrated into Everything. 

Wayne Dyer has something very pertinent to say (as usual):

Your thoughts about who you are, what excites you, and what you feel called to be and do are all Divinely inspired and come with whatever guidance and assistance you’ll need to actualize these goals.

∞

Quotalicious "Fierce"

You need to claim the events in your life to make yourself yours.  When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. ~ Florida Scott-Maxwell

"Fierce with reality."  I like that.

Fallow

The reaching tendrils of winter have wound into every recess, chasing out the last of the autumn warmth.

In fact, the solstice, the darkest night of the year, is nearly upon us.  In years gone by I have called fabulous women to my home, and made merry with spiced wine and the ordinary magic of gathering.  This year, however, I’m still weary and I have not the energy for celebration.  I find myself contemplating instead the deep stillness of winter within the longer arc of my life.

I’ve finally taken myself along to a psychologist for some assistance with my cracked brain and scattered wits.  She is encouraging but realistic.  She tells me that a recent study indicated that 49% of cognitively disrupted folks had regained their normal function by the five year mark.  I’m sitting on the 20 month mark. During the second half of that time, I have seen a huge improvement (then, I was having trouble counting money at the shop and dialling telephone numbers) but even so I recognise I still have a way to go to restore my full cognitive wellbeing.

The reality that I’m confronting is that I’m not as capable as I have been in the past.  Not in terms of my skills or intelligence, but in terms of my capacity.  With multitasking stripped away, and fatigue nipping ever at my heels, I simply cannot achieve the same quantity of anything in any given day or week.  I must leave my ego at the back door, amongst the untidy tangle of house shoes, and deal with the practicality of doing what I can.  And surrendering the rest.

This time was preceded by years of frenetic activity when the bounty of my youth lay ripe around me, and was followed by a stark harvest that laid the bones of those years open to the frost.  And now I rest.  Bare.  Fallow.  Still.  Dreaming under the wide sky while the good rain soaks through and the mysterious signs of life work their oblivious transformation from within. 

Who knows what possibility lies dormant, gathering strength from the earth that cradles it, waiting for the returning warmth of the sun?

Quotalicious "treasure"

Well, mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is.... The world is a match for us and we're a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater powers in ourselves.

~ Joseph Campbell

Yanging my yin

And isn't it pretty?

Since my last gloomy offering, I've been busy yanging my yin.

This has consisted of getting sunshine, fresh air and as much activity as I can withstand.  Which, sadly, amounts to not much.  But it is nonetheless movement, and essentially yang in nature, which is what is needed.

Part of the process has been getting on top of a situation that I have been in total denial over for some time and which had very nearly reached a state of complete disaster.  (Denial is a very yin place to be).  So a big dose of yang helped me to swallow a bitter pill, and then ask for the help that I've needed all along.

So, to celebrate this incremental shift in the right direction, and to keep inviting the right kind of energy in to my life, I've given Spirited! a makeover.

The beautiful background art, so alive with colour and light, is by Chiaralily over at Flickr.  The rest of it was me clicking and twiddling with the blogger template designer.  What do you think?  I'm not entirely happy with the title fonts, and I wonder how legible the pink and purple is.  But I love the colour and the feel of it, and I hope you do too.  

Spirited! Feng Shui

If this blog were a room in a house, it would be time to redecorate.

It’s been quiet and more than just a little bit gloomy in here of late.  Apologies to any regular readers (you who have stopped by more than once) who have noticed the absence of oomph.

It’s not like I haven’t been blogging. I have.  I write the posts but somehow they don’t get finished.   I’m distracted.  Or tired.  Or I’ve spent so long just gathering my thoughts that I then need to attend to something else more pressing.

So the blog is much like many other parts of my life.  Shambling.  Disorganised.  Suboptimal.  In real terms, I’m achieving a huge amount more in each week than I was even six months ago, but it’s all too easy to compare this with my life “before”.  Before a few funky cells started their loud, chaotic party and trashed the joint.  Somewhere along the way I’ve lost more than just a breast and some brain cells.  I’m rebuilding not just my life, but whole chunks of who I am as well.  Which, rightly so, cannot be rushed. 

See, there I go again with more of the gloomy, insular talk.

In energetic terms, this represents too much Yin, not enough Yang.  In Feng Shui terms, I need to encourage more chi through the front door.  I need to move the metaphorical furniture and install a happy plant.  Splash on a fresh coat of paint, hang up some art, and scatter some funky throw cushions.    

So, redecorate I will.  Maybe not today.  But the nauseous olive green has got to go, in favour of something fresher, and… more Spirited!   Stay tuned.

Quotalicious

A pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand.

~ Kahlil Gibran

In memory of JV

I tried to look up an old friend yesterday, and found out that she is dead.

I had been thinking of JV quite a lot recently.  She was older than me when we worked together 15 or so years ago, and I was always slightly in awe of her witty confidence. In her own words, she had “a big mouth” and she knew how to use it, but it was tempered with kindness and her understanding of the people around her.  She knew how to get things done by getting people to do them.  I aspired to develop a little more of her brashness, her tell-it-like-it-is-but-funnier frankness.  However, our working lives diverged, I moved states several times, and we lost touch. 

I went looking for her because I wanted to reconnect and tell her how much I have admired her all this time.  How I look in the mirror sometimes now and think I can see just a tiny bit of her staring back - and I like it. 

And now she is gone.  She died “after bravely battling cancers” ten days before my last chemo treatment.  That is all I know.

I’ve tried to console myself with a number of trite sentiments, but it hasn’t worked. Her boys have lost their mum.  She’s lost her life.  How can someone who is so vibrant and full of energy drop off the planet like this? 

This is the bit of the cancer thing that I still just can’t make sense of. 

IMG_1525 by ShellyS

JV,

I’m so sorry you have to walk that painful path.

I hope you were surrounded by love, and it brought you peace.

But wherever you are now,

I hope you haven’t stopped opening your big mouth

Because we all need more honesty and kindness and laughter.

Blancmange

I’ve spent the last few days like a normal person who’s never had cancer and doesn’t suffer from fatigue, and who does normal productive things like painting their child’s bedroom. (Kudos to me).  The colour of paint was chosen months ago (Carnation) but on the spur of the moment, I decided we should add a pale trim colour.

Imagine my delight when the selected delicious colour had an equally delectible name.  Blancmange.

Blancmange.  Roll that around your mouth in like a spoonful of dessert in your French-est accent.  Blohn-mohnge.

I have no idea what exactly Blancmange is, except that the literary playmates of my bookish childhood ate it in the nursery at tea-time.  Usually these teas followed a long day of roaming around, unfettered by parental supervision, solving a smashing mystery or having a splendid adventure.  I was enthralled by the names of unfamiliar dishes like spotted dick and roly poly, treacle pudding or the rather more humble bread and milk. (Someone please tell me that’s not stale bread dunked in milk with sugar spooned over it).  But Blancmange was the most exotic sounding of all the storybook desserts.  In my head it looked like a chocolately brown quivering jelly, with a fluffy snow-white garnish.  Distinctly mountainous.  (Maybe Mont Blanc somehow got confused with Blancmange in my mind).

However the Blancmange paint is a very pale pink, so delicate it is nearly white.  So it’s safe to assume that my childhood imaginings do not resemble the actual dessert. 

I suppose I could google it, but I’ve quite enjoyed the invented dish floating around in my head all these years.  The reality could disappoint.  I prefer the imaginary dessert, plump and glossy, flavoured with endless possibility.

Quotalicious

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else: you are the one who gets burned. ~ Gautama Buddha


Smouldering Heart of the Blues by ecstaticist

Lest we forget

This ANZAC Day, I’d like to remember not only the fallen, but also the returned, and especially those who are broken of spirit.

I want to remember all of those people who marched off to serve their country, and came home with pieces torn out of their souls.

For the horrors they witnessed.  The horrors done to them.  The horrors they committed.  The terrible things made necessary by war, and the terrible unnecessary things condoned in a world gone mad.

I want to remember those who endure the terror and trauma that never really leaves, that seeps and surrounds and informs their days, and their long dark nights.

Lest we forget.

Photograph by Dept of Defence

Knowing things before they happen

This is where it gets tricky.  Knowing things before they happen.

We were out driving in convoy on the weekend, with my parents-in-law following us in their large 4WD.  As we passed a sporting oval, the road was lined with parked cars, leaving one full and one very narrow lane.  I caught myself thinking, they are going to have an accident.  So briefly, it was nearly a physical sensation, not a thought.  Just then my husband made a comment, which distracted me just long enough to put it out of my mind.

Seconds later, we turned into the side street, and the car behind us disappeared from the rear view mirror. 

Yes they’d had the accident.  A very minor one (no one was hurt), but an accident nonetheless.

Which presents me with a quandary.  Should I have attended to the whisper of a sensation and somehow warned the in-laws?  Was that even possible?  Say I had somehow managed within a few seconds to convince my husband to fumble for his phone, to ring his parents, to say something succinct enough to create the conditions to avoid the accident – what then?  I would be a frootloop, right?  (Warning somebody about an event that subsequently does not occur - because of that warning - is not a good way to establish yourself as a credible witness).  What if I’d had the time to warn them and yet it still occurred?  Then I would just be a freak.  And not a helpful one, at that.

Not that it matters now.  There wasn’t time to do anything except note the feeling.  And politely keep my big (presentient) mouth shut after it all came to pass.   

Quotalicious

Find a place (inside) where there's joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.

~ Joseph Campbell



Sphere II by allegra_

It's all good

And positivity, yeah
It is the way for me, yeah
It is truth
It is youth

Love yourself today

Okay?  Okay.

Anger

I’ll admit it.

I’m angry.  Very angry.

I’m angry at the influence the military has had on my life.

There is nothing wrong with the path of the warrior, lived honourably, with respect for himself and his adversary.  With calmness, fairness, justice and propriety.

What is wrong with this military is that it does not pay this basic but essential respect to its own members, and particularly not to their own families.

The result is systematic and systemic disempowerment, and in many cases, damage.

But the man I love possesses free agency.  And if I want him to share my life, this anger is something I need to learn to coexist with, instead of denying.  I need to learn to sit in the room with it, and see it, until it is just something else in the room, but doesn’t fill it.

No apologies

 The trouble with expressing yourself… 

…is that the sad, bad and mad comes out too.

OK, so I’m fully on board with this whole throat chakra thing, and keen to keep pushing energy through this part of my life until it becomes part of my permanent and habitual way of being.

However, there’s a bit of a problem here.  Along with the meaningful and inspired outpourings comes everything else too.  On at three recent and separate occasions, I have found myself "expressing" some of my not-so-nice sentiment.  In fairly spectacular, unexpected and ungracious ways.

You cannot be fully open through a centre of expression whilst simultaneously withholding "some" of your truth.  There’s no room for denial in the blue room.  You’re either expressing or you’re not.

So, I’m not planning on going on a telling-it-like-it-is rampage (complete with swears) any time soon.  But I am going to let go of this notion that what comes out needs to meet anyone else’s idea of "acceptable". 

If you don’t want your toes trodden on, I suggest you tuck them away now.

Untitled by Joana Roja

Intuition vs Science: a revelation

Today I went to see my fabulous GP, but instead of a prescription, I was given a revelation.

I was there to have some paperwork filled out.  The receptionist brought in the records that were transferred from my previous doctor when we moved here from another state.  I asked to look through the notes, because I hadn’t seen them at all since my diagnoses.

I was fascinated to discover that I had complained – repeatedly - about both pain and lumpiness in the outer quadrant of my left breast as far back as Nov 2006.  During visit after visit with my then GP, I brought this up.  I insisted on several rounds of investigation, and the GP begrudgingly ordered scans, more to shut me up than anything else, I suspect.  The ultrasounds were clear each time.

This is because, despite its huge size at diagnosis, the tumour was still invisible on ultrasound.  What was needed was a mammogram and/or a biopsy.  For my concerns to be treated with more than a token response.

I’m a little shocked, to be honest.  I knew I had reported my concerns previously, and been reassured, but I had forgotten how sustained my worry was.  All along my body was telling me something was wrong, and I had heard it loud and clear.

After I was diagnosed I started to doubt my intuition, my psychic sense, my experience as an energetic healer.  What sort of a healer doesn’t spot the growth of an enormous cancer in her own body?  How could I have allowed this disease to manifest so splendidly in my life, completely unawares?

Now, I can’t believe that I doubted myself.  My intuition was fine.  It was science that failed me. 

All along I have asked, Why? What is the meaning of this illness in my life?  Now I’m starting to understand that it might be about learning to express my truth, clearly, even in the face of rational scepticism or the personal biases of other people.  This is the lesson of the throat chakra, and it has everything to do with writing, and healing, and just being myself in the world.  Being. Fully.

Quotalicious

Wanting things to be otherwise is the very essence of suffering.

 ~ Stephen Levine,

in A Gradual Awakening

Mandala Mixed Media Canvas by peregrine blue

Quotalicious

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have."
~ Eckhart Tolle

Truth or fiction?

"There is only one type of story in the world---your story." ~ Ray Bradbury

Today was my favourite day of the month: writers’ group day.  Each month we write to a particular topic or theme, and then read and comment around the table.  This month’s assignment was to write something biographical or factual – no fiction.   Ironically, I have only ever shared short nonfiction pieces, and had been thinking I should probably produce some fiction for a change!

After hearing me bemoan yet another heavily autobiographical contribution, one of the ladies said something I found very interesting.  She said you need to keep writing it, get it all out, and only then can you start on the fiction.

I’m not sure that I agree with her assertion.  For starters it implies that autobiography involves some kind of progressive catharsis.  And that this expurgation has some sort of finite quality to it.  And that fiction requires a more sophisticated relationship with one’s inner terrain than autobiography does.  I would argue that all writing involves an interior process, regardless of the writer’s depth of awareness of it.  The deep truths that drive autobiographical pieces are the same truths that give life to good fiction.  If you can connect to that place inside yourself before you start writing, it will breathe that same energy and connection into what you’ve written, regardless of whether it’s fictional or not.  Fiction writers may labour under the illusion that the stories they write are “made up”, but it all spills tellingly from somewhere in their psyche. 

This is just a scratch on the surface of the thinking I’m doing about writing and “being a writer” (yes, two separate concepts).  I am being aided and abetted in my explorations by Dennis Palumbo’s exceptional book, Writing from the Inside Out. While I disagree with my friend’s statement, it is true that I’ve got a transformative process going on.  And it has nothing to do with catharsis, but claiming.

Cancerversary

On this day two years ago, I heard the words “…lymphoma in your gallbladder.”

I stared out of the grubby hospital window into an abandoned courtyard, and thought, “Just like that, my life has changed for ever.” I knew immediately that lymphoma is another word for c-a-n-c-e-r, and the shock was disembodying. I think I floated around, dazed, near my own head for a minute or so, and didn’t really come thumping down into the experience until I heard the word oncologist. Then it was real. Coldly real, sickening, and applying to me.

It came completely out of left field. For all my intuition, I did not spot this coming, most of all not at this time. Whereas a typical cancer diagnosis comes after a person presents to the medical system seeking answers or for routine screening, this hit me completely unawares. Yes, I was bitter and deeply unhappy and had been for some time, but I held no awareness of the way this dysfunctional energy had coalesced in my body. I was less surprised when the breast diagnosis finally came, weeks later, as I’d had suspicions nearly two years earlier - but had been repeatedly reassured I was too young for either breast cancer or a useful mammogram.

Ironically my youth and fertility disguised the blatant lump of post-menopausal woman’s disease, while leading directly to the discovery of the occult lymphoma. And only then circuitously back to the breast cancer, which was again disregarded, even in the face of a known cancer diagnosis. It took one of the most highly radioactive scans to identify what my fingers and intuition had been saying all along: something’s not right. All is not well in my world.

I have never desired an intimate knowledge of the medical system, and yet my life path was suddenly paved with drab linoleum and lined with a succession of sharp instruments. The detour has been psychic as well as physical, and I’m not yet done with making meaning out of it, either. Maybe I never will. Maybe it doesn’t matter, beyond really grasping that the NOW is all that we ever have.

But the detour has changed me. Obviously some of these changes are physical, like the numb heaviness of muscle and implant where there was once a soft breast, and the strange itchy vacancy where the muscle was taken from my back. Some of them are mental, like the moments when my processing memory drops out and I can’t understand what was just said to me. And some of them are nothing less than sacred, like the exquisite weight and blessing of sitting with a friend on the day she died of a disease that I survived.

What does one do with all of this, the unasked-for foray into a land that my contemporaries have no ken of? The last of my youthful expectation of a long life yawning rosily in front of me has been stripped away, along with my fertility, my sharp memory and my eyesight. I am now biologically aged well ahead of my years. But I hope that, along with being so much older now than I was two years ago, my wisdom has grown in equal measure.

I hope the experience informs my compassion for the invisible stories and strength of people who walk among us, changed by their own unexpected detours. I hope it feeds that still place of presence and kindness towards my own self. I hope it makes me greedy for the joy of a life well lived, moment by moment. And I hope it spills out into the world in unexpected and delightful ways, transformed by the sharing of it.

I read a book

This weekend, I read a book.  A whole book.  In a day, actually.

It’s been a very long time since I squandered (or invested) an entire day on reading.  I did surface for food, sunshine, and eye contact, but mostly I read steadily and greedily until I was done.

How good does that feel?  Better than inhaling a whole tub of frappacino-laced-with-scorched-almonds-and-toffee-sauce ice cream, that’s for sure.

So what held my attention so grippingly?  It was a memoir, of all things.  Lessons in letting go: Confessions of a hoarder  by Corinne Grant.  Engaging, excruciating and insightful all at once, I was captured immediately and didn’t want to stop reading until she had grasped her redemption (or in this case, let go of it utterly). 

What fascinated me the most was that throughout this period when she was privately debilitated by psychological barriers as tall as the wall of boxes in her lounge room, she was still functioning and making a career for herself as a performer “out there” under the steely gaze of the public.  And yet the whole time her self-image, brittle in its outdatedness, was stretched thin under the weight of her inflated sense of guilt, responsibility and remorse, held tightly in place by the glue of unexpressed grief. 

To my mind, this illustrates just how marvellously effective our false masks can be.  People generally are happy to accept these masks because it is infinitely more comfortable than being confronted with the messier truth: that we too may not be functioning/coping as well as we project to the world.

But before all of that, before I could even begin to clear out my life, I had to figure out where it all started.  Irrespective of how it may look to an outsider, hoarders don’t just pop out of the ground fully formed.  Hoarding isn’t something anyone is aware of until it’s too late. Hoarding sneaks up on you in the middle of the night wearing glasses and a false moustache and weasels its way in when you’re not looking.

Before the stuff went, I was going to have to get to the truth of the matter. And the truth of the matter is this:  hoarding doesn’t start with the stuff. It starts with something else.

And that something else is much, much harder to get rid of.

Very interesting, and ultimately inspiring read.  Highly recommended for anyone (not mentioning any names) who has a hard-to-shift stuff-stash in their spare room.