Friday, October 31, 2014

What is Good and Evil

Watching storms appear and disappear on the radar.  Driest October on record.  Hottest too.  When will we wake up and do something serious about climate change? 

Don't know how people cope with stress.  I'm retired, living the dream, our bills are paid, my husband loves me, I enjoy perfect health yet there is anxiety.  Sometimes, when I'm walking the dogs, I feel if I could just walk fast enough, I'd outrun it.  I'd run except I pay in aches and pains and sleepless nights.  So I walk; faster and faster and faster, like I'm trying to break the sound barrier, or disappear into a wormhole to arrive in another place, another dimension.  Fantastical yes, but it feels like that.  Outstriding stress. 

Then I take a series of deep breaths, get centered, accept that I can't save everything, that pain and suffering and death are as much a part of life as joy and peace and birth. 

It's still the great unanswered conundrum that I've never read an acceptable answer to.  Pain and suffering and death.  If we have the concept of goodness and joy and happiness and it seems to be bred into us to seek it, to celebrate it when we find it, and to castigate ourselves when we are the cause of the loss of it to another being, then why is the world so monstrous? 

I love praying mantis'.  When I find one of the inch long brown ones in the house I carry it outside so the cats won't find it.  But that mantis will catch a bug and eat it alive, starting at the head.  Do we accept and celebrate the cruel as well as the kind?  Is it all, in the end, one and the same?  Do we make a choice, coming down on the side of the Fred Wests, ISIS jihadists and Gacys, finding our happiness, our valid happiness there?  Do we not see the big picture and that's why we get mired in morals and ethics and depression? 

It's not theoretical science to say we are just a collection of oscillating waves and fragments of space that disappear as soon as an attempt is made to quantify them.  So if it's all a dream, do I just embrace the dream, mine and everyone else's as having equal value?  Is there really no good or evil except that I have an opinion of it?

Can't accept that.   Almost a physical sensation of revulsion.

 So guess I must accept the stress of knowing how much pain and suffering and death there is in the world.  And, selfishly, try not to think of it too much.  To keep on taking those deep centering breaths and paint pretty pictures.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Non Smoking Zone

Sometimes it just hits me.  How insanely fortunate I am.  Food, shelter, love, companionship, satisfying pursuits, sanity, health, (just noticed I put food first.  Typical).  There's a dull patina of guilt associated with the above list.  What did I ever do to deserve them?  Must come from a past life as I've certainly not led an unselfish, unsullied life this time around.  Nevertheless, there they are.  Blessing beyond measure. 

Since quitting smoking 2 1/2 years ago, even my breath has been the source of a healthy dose of gratitude.  When I think of it, breathing, I have to take a deep chest full with unbearably gratifying breath.  How good is that?  I could be dead (no breath), hooked up to a respirator or suffering from asthma or emphysema or some such thing where breathing is an ongoing fight.  Instead, despite over 40 years of smoking, I've been given a second chance and boy, don't I know it!  When I am mindful (read - when I am here and not lost in some storytelling popcorn eating haze of daydreaming) I gulp big lungfuls of air just for sheer delight.  It's so delicious.  Perhaps people who have never abused themselves with cigarettes can't understand but when you smoke your lungs lose elasticity.  You can't take a deep breath.  Impossible.  You inhale so far and it's as though you've hit a wall.  Here and no further so there is no satisfying stretch, like stretching cramped too-long-sitting-muscles.  It is quite awful.  I used to almost get there by opening my mouth and trying to stretch using chest muscles in a poor and ultimately frustrating facsimile.  Now I don't have to.  Sure, there's a long way to go.  Forty years of smoking damage isn't undone in two but the difference even now is profound.

And I feel so sorry for the people I know who smoke.  Can't help them, can't even say anything because I know what it's like when you smoke.  You're addicted and mentally turn off anything that damages the fragile reasons you've made to give yourself permission to smoke.  I did it so well, so thoroughly for so long.  Nothing anyone could have said would have made me change my mind.  So they smoke and they cough and they smell and they have to budget for their smokes as it's unbelievably expensive now and I am sorry.

I am free and oh, isn't that breath SWEET?

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Richard returns today after 2 days on the coast.  He's catching up with Helen and his old mentor, Heather.  Have asked him to 'inhale' the coast, to hold the image of the sea as a goal so that we stride ever closer to The Move.  Have a picture of our house from the ad in the newspaper stuck to the fridge.  Have printed across it in bold black letters SOLD as a kind of sympathetic magic or a metaphysical attempt to rearrange the vibrations to match the dream. 

The burning has already begun.  Neighbours on either side have burnt some of their hills.  But there's so much more to burn and the season is young.  I don't want to be here while they do for I can't pretend or distance myself from the destruction and death. And it gets harder each year.

Every morning around 6:30 a commercial jet flies overhead.  It's trajectory is Coolangatta.  Every morning I stop what I'm doing and watch it pass, the sun gilding the fuselage and wings.  The sun from over the ocean.  The sun which glows on Byron and Cabarita.  The sun that the Tweed Valley birds sing into being.  Our sun.  When I see it I'm there, in that ancient green caldera, in our house with a view of Mt. Warning, with the smell of the sea on the breeze and the gurgle of water from all those rivers and streams sliding along my bones. 

I do try and be patient, really I do.  The right time and all that.  I know it will be the right time but I devoutly wish that right time comes soon.  Every time I ride or walk the dogs or even go outside I see the beauty and the magic of this place.  It isn't the place that repels me but what is done to it.  Our neighbours have sold their 100+ acres to the son of our neighbour.  Much of it is bush.  I suspect the son will follow the father and slash and burn the bush to make it suitable for cattle.  I ride that country all the time.  I'm not sure if I could stand to see it destroyed. 

But you attract what you fear, whatever you hold in your head.  The more I fear the destruction and the burning the more I make it real. 

Ah, the guilt.  It seems guilt is my second skin.  Haven't been able to do yoga for 2 days because I've done something to my back.  And it's hard work not to feel guilty about it.  Really. 

But one good thing.  Am working on a coloured pencil drawing, of the back of Camus' head (again, he's already immortalized in a pencil drawing) as he gazes into a weird blue forest with a flying black cat high above.  Sounds weird and I did despair that it would work but it's starting to come together.  I really like it.  Shouldn't say that about one's own work I suppose but as I make things that I like it would be foolish not to like them. 

Am thinking about taking a drawing/colouring class starting this month.  Need to talk it over with Richard.  It's every Tuesday for 8 weeks.  Will see.