Shhh

Epiphany of sorts.  I am distracting myself from my own life.  I distract myself with 'noise'; television, radio, computer, books, busy'ness.  Why am I afraid to be alone with myself?  I actually thought I liked my own company and smirked a little at those who needed the constant reassurance of company to feel safe, as though being alone was being exposed and vulnerable on a wind-raked mountain ledge.

Now I'm not so sure.  Humble pie time.  My unease isn't as obvious which is why it is perhaps more deleterious to mental/spiritual health.  It was easier to ignore.  I've started doing yoga without the radio, without even the CDs of birdsong.  My finger almost shakes when I press the OFF button.  It was always difficult to turn the radio off, just that little reluctance creeping out, but I decided not to notice.  Now I notice.

First thing in the morning after coming in from chores, before coffee, before anything else I turn on the radio and computer.  The music is classical and although most of it is beautiful it still fills the silence with sound, the computer with fingers of global information.  I am connected!  Except of course it's an illusion.

I have been lonely for my own kind.  Not sure what my kind is except I haven't found them here.  Another reason why I am anxious to move.  Suspect green tree hugging animal loving art making book loving yoga doing vegan eating spiritual questing meditative wannabee types will be more common in the Tweed.  

Have no illusions that I'm good friend material.  If I was I'd have more friends.  I'm too judgmental in that what interests most people doesn't interest me.  Moreover, not only doesn't interest but bores me.  And I get impatient because people seem content with gossip and shopping and the suburban life.  That's quite funny as I find the minutiae of living fascinating.  I can bore the socks off people talking about the lives of local birds.  Insects interest me, the patterns of clouds, the weather, the ever changing scenery, the sounds which surround.    I try and be interested in others, to not talk about myself all the time and I think I succeed but then I get ornery because it seems they always talk about themselves. 

Have a friend who I spent a great deal of time being supportive to when they went through a bad patch.  Out of the bad patch, if I said anything about what was going on in my life, their eyes would glaze over.  I bored them.  Then I thought why am I working so hard at something that should come easily.  The people who have been my friends, even if our paths separated us after a time, were easy to be with.   The energy flowed back and forth without impediment.

So I'm going to quit beating myself up because I'm a loner.  I share this house with my best friend and therefore I am luckier than most.  And I'm going to embrace the silence as perhaps silence will unveil the closest friend I'll ever have.  Me.

He died and I didn't know

I've been procrastinating writing this because I haven't absorbed the news myself yet.  My ex-husband (my twice ex as we married twice) died one day after his birthday on November 15, 2009.  He was just one day 54 years old. 

Richard's ex-wife has been unwell.  His boys have been down to Tasmania to see her.  There has been much concern about her health and the future.  In the midst of this I thought, why don't I Google Wayne and see if I can find any news of him.  What I found was an obituary notice. 

There are those times when one's very skin seems to stretch and thin and the blood and sinews scrape uncomfortably against the air.  That was one of those times.  The veil between reality and perceived reality ripped wide open.  Although I haven't brooded over him or even missed him he was still 'out there'.  I thought of him every year at least once - on his birthday.  On his birthday I silently saluted him, wished him well, was conscious of his being in the world, my one time lover, friend and husband.  And for 5 years he has been no more and I didn't know.

Part of me feels like crying but I can't.  I want to mourn but am unable.  Something's torn but time and distance and experience has dulled the pain to a dark dim ache.    He was married 27 years and had two girls.  Was he a grandfather?  He was so good with children and animals.  Part of the tribute to him regarded his love for animals; horses, dogs and cats, how he cared for and nurtured them.  In lieu of flowers people were asked to donate to an animal rescue organization.  The one photo I found of him he sat astride a dark horse on a pale leather western saddle.  He was big, too big (did overweight contribute to his death?).  I think he still had that funny little moustache he cultivated after we divorced the first time but the photo is too fuzzy to be sure.  His hair is grey and although his face is fleshy there are still traces of the young beautiful Wayne I once knew.

Why did he die so young?  He died in the hospital where he was born.  Had he been ill?  Was it sudden, an accident?  I have written to his sister to ask.  Whether she replies is another matter.  I am owed nothing by the family.  Still, I would like to know.  I have been thinking of little else since I found out.   I started to struggle against that but think it is better to let the thoughts run their course.  We were husband and wife for 7 years.  That counts for a little long distance grieving I guess.

Hung Up in a Dream

I got hung last night.  Just after seeing my friend hung.  Knew after watching her die that I would be terrified and in agony for only a short time.  It didn't make the prospect any easier.  Then I woke up.  With a terrible headache, like a hangover headache except I wasn't hung over.  My heart was thudding, in my head and in my chest.  I was dead scared.  Pretty foul nightmare.

So what does it mean, being hung?  Being hung up?  Being trussed and unable to move (forward) or at all.  Do feel that actually.   Being stuck, however, isn't terrifying.  I couldn't watch her die.  I did turn away at the last minute, coward that I was.  I was so full of my impending death I had very little emotion left for her.  Have no idea who she was.  An aspect of me I suppose.  She was about 20 feet away and something, a bookcase? table? blocked the view of her lower body  I could only see her head and shoulders. 

I got up and drank a glass of water.  When I woke in the morning my headache was no more.  Feel that it wasn't a menopausal headache, which I do get sometimes, blasted things strike in the middle of the night, but was related to the nightmare.

So I haven't worked on my drawing for days.  Have no idea what to do with it.  I haven't sketched.  I have finished an Elizabeth George book instead of doing anything creative myself.   Don't like  when I coast along, going through the motions and don't make anything. 

Ran into a ex-neighbour last week.  She separated from her husband and moved away.  She was visiting some friends at the end of the road.  She's getting a book published, she told me.  She's working on 8 books, the first one should be out by August.  She has a publisher and an editor.  She's had the manuscript read by a few friends and it makes them cry and laugh just where she wants them to cry and laugh. 

I was dumbfounded.  This woman is the last person I would think of as being a writer.   Shows my arrogance I guess.  What is it about writing that makes it an elitist activity?  If she has something to say, she doesn't need an Oxford Dictionary vocabulary to say it. 

She's using a nom de plume, she said.  So how will I know which book to buy and read?  She said she'd let me know and took my email address.  Part of me, the suspicious part, remembers the stories she told about the stallion she used to have.  This magnificent warmblood stallion  would set the show world on fire.  And that's all I heard about him, what she said.  Is this book the same?  She said the book takes place in reality and in fantasy and it bore some resemblance to 50 Shades of Grey except not so slutty.  Had I read 50 Shades?  No, I hadn't.  So I'll wait and see. 

I want it to be true.  I'm not a writer but I've written a book (bad) and a half (worse) so it can be done.  Another part of me, the green envious part, screams how is it SHE can write, is about to be published, and I can't?  Huh?

I can draw, however.  If I have a talent and a strength, that's where it is, if I'd just get out of my own way and do it.  For that's the problem.  I'm so afraid of doing the wrong thing that I do nothing.  Silly, huh?

Sometimes you just have to keep going.  Whether you're trying to track down the wounded bird you thought you heard in the bush and have wound up ankle-wrapped in grass taller than your head or you have embarked on a rather large graphite drawing and well into it you discover you have no idea what you're doing or you cruising along happily married and then discover your husband has a progressive disease and that the future  envisioned will be entirely different than what you'd scripted.  Even then, you just have to keep going. 

Sometimes I scare myself by taking the long look into the future.  Rather useless obviously for the long look I might have taken two years ago has absolutely nothing to do with present reality.  In fact, if I take long looks in historical two year blocks, what I'd envisioned and the ultimate reality probably have little in common.  Oh sure, we've lived at our present address for 20 years (and who would've thought that given my peripatetic lifestyle for the previous 20 years?) but other than that?  Did I think I would get another horse or do endurance riding?  Did I think I'd be a vet nurse or learn complicated cocktails as a bartender?  Did I think I'd learn to cook and even more amazing, actually love it?  (Of all the things that I've done, that's the strangest.  As strange as suddenly discovering I went all gooey and needed to bear lots of babies!  Thankfully that didn't happen.).  I've taught conversational English and am learning French.  I became involved in bird rescue and have eleven permanent residents.  I learned about clicker training and devolved from treed to treeless saddles and bitted to bitless bridles.  I've won two firsts for drawing.  I've written a book and a half, quit smoking and become a yogini.  No cures for cancer here but a good and varied life.

So I'll keep going.  Being a carer needn't be all bleak and horrible and although it is a progressive disease, it is not a violent dissolution so there's lots and lots of time to prepare.  After all, he has no choice.  He has to keep going too.  We may as well hold hands and go together.

Meditating and Charlie Hebdo

Grey and green outside, like being underwater.  Absolutely still.

Not 100% on my New Years Resolutions (I had a second bowl of salad for lunch today which, considering the size of my bowl isn't as harmless as it sounds), but am being more consistent with the meditating.  The only way to improve is to keep at it. 

But difficulty arises from an unexpected direction.  Chattering monkey mind is one thing.  Suspect with time I'll get a handle on it and be able to focus more effectively for more than a nano-second.  But Restless Body Syndrome is something else again.  Anyone who has ever experienced Restless Leg Syndrome will understand what I mean; that irresistable urge to move the legs to relieve an uncomfortable impossible to ignore feeling of itchiness/creepy crawliness..

That's what I'm experiencing at the deeper end of meditation but it's not confined to my legs.  My entire body, including my brain, is awash with this most miserable of sensations.  Other times the discomfort has been so intense that I've quit the meditation.  Today I decided to see it through, no matter how awful it felt.  There must be a coming through this to the other side.  If there is I didn't make it today.  I held on, poised between that feeling of being in a meditation and that yearning awareness for the end-of-session chime to go off.  The chime sounded but I was no closer to the other side than I was at the beginning. 

Would like to know what it is  and why it is happening.  Feel like there must be some sort of breakthrough at the end.

Like there must be some sort of breakthrough with the human species.  Late yesterday afternoon, during the daily whippet walk, I stood in a hollow made green by looming trees, and listened to the sawtoothed drone of cicadas  punctuated by the sharp melodious crack of a whipbird.  While the three of us stood there listening, absorbing the feeling of  Aliveness which surrounded us, a black butterfly with red epaulettes bounced on invisible air currents across the road.  Life, beautiful LIFE surrounds us.  Paradise for the price of awareness yet we insist on strapping bombs to 10 year old girls to blow up shoppers at a market place in Nigeria, or shoot cartoonists whose sense of humour is the schoolboy humour of Mad Magazine made political.    The only danger the cartoonists represented was the danger to good taste.  Sure their cartoons are offensive.  So is porn or a badly made omelette.  Big deal. 

But that's not the purpose of this violence.  It is to instill fear, so that no place ever feels secure again.  Happily over a million copies of Charlie Hebdo are being printed this issue.  I would love to blanket the world with the offensive images.  More than that I would love to find a way to laugh directly at ISIL.  Evil can't stand humour.  It robs it of its power.  Guns kill, humour, satire and belly laughs disembowel.

Resolving the New Year Resolution

I never make New Years Resolutions.  Can't think of one I've made so can't think of one I've kept.  But I'm 59 now and suppose it's not too late to try.  If nothing else making a resolution will help in mindfulness, that small itch of discomfort when I'm about to ignore it.

1.  I make more of an effort and fewer excuses about meditating.  It has been all too easy in the past to make no effort to meditate if that 15 minutes doesn't come immediately after completing yoga.  That will no longer do.  Meditation practice, even my sporadic attempts, makes a difference in ways I wouldn't have imagined.  For instance; usually I am quite (but quietly) resentful about the big family xmas do.  This year I just flowed with it.  I didn't have to try and overcome antipathy, it just happened.  I've noticed that about a few things.  It's a small change, this flowing with life, but significant, like driving on a road without having to brake for self-created speed bumps.

 2.  I don't do seconds.  Second helpings, that is.  I am 5'4" and weigh 56 kg.  Usually weigh 55 but it's crept up and stayed there.  Have to get it under control.  The banning of second helpings is one step.  Portion control another.  It's as though I don't feel full unless I am really FULL, which is not conducive to weight loss or even weight maintenance.  It's a mind thing.  If I can successfully quit smoking I can come to grips with this. 

3.  And finally, I will write more.  Was going to say write more honestly but how can I when writing the unvarnished truth has the power to hurt others.  Can't do it. 

That's it.  Happy New Year.