Three Cliches, New and Improved!

A young woman came to return some horsey items I'd lent her months ago.  Without knowing the details I knew she'd split with her boyfriend of five years.  Worse, they'd split three weeks after their engagement party.  They'd moved away, their house was sold and except hearing through the grapevine she was still in the area I knew nothing more.  So she came and we sat on the deck swishing flies and making small talk.  Finally I asked if she was all right.  Did she want to talk. 

"I'll cry if I talk about it," she said.  But it seemed she wanted to talk for without going into details, she told me.  I didn't need to know the details, the result was sitting in front of me crying, hating herself for what she'd done, grieving and angry and forlorn all at the same time. 

"Come on in away from these damned flies," I said.  I got her a tissue and a glass of water for it was hot and muggy and she needed something to do with her hands.  Got myself one too as well as a washcloth to mop sweat.  Thank you Menopause for the wisdom of years and hot flushes!

Wisdom.  I don't know for sure if I helped her.  She has to decide to be helped but I gave it my best shot.  For there is much to be thankful for in my crone age, as opposed to the maiden and mother ages, which I've left behind long ago.    Experience.  The Long Eye.  The ability to see the Big Picture.  And Gratitude that it is not me enduring what she is enduring now.  It was once.  Oh, the details were different but the Grief and the Drama and the Emotional Rollercoaster were the same.  And from such experience cliches are born.  But as ever, one tries to imbue the old and timeworn truths with newer shiny words in the, perhaps vain, hope that they won't be seen as cliches. 

Cliche #1.  This too shall pass.  She is very young.  Her grief and pain are so great, it seems as though they are all that ever was, all that ever shall be.  But the worst despair is worn thin by constant use.  And finally it fades to a bearable level.  It is never forgotten but eventually it only bruises, not cuts in the remembering.

Cliche #2.  Chalk it up to Experience.  She made a big mistake, a whopper of a mistake.  And she's paying big time.  However, this mistake is an experience, an experiment she'll never have to try again.  She'll make other mistakes, just as I do.  But I usually don't make the same mistakes twice, and if it's a Biggie, never.  Nor shall she.  This one has made such an indelible mark on her soul and her sense of self (shame is a great teacher).  One understands the lesson immediately and never ever forgets it.

Cliche #3.  It isn't the End of the World.  She is consumed with guilt, grief and pain and it amazes her that the world continues to continue.  She has lost her soul mate (although, because they are still in almost daily contact, I suspect, given time, they will find a way to reunite).  Why does the world not implode?  Why does it not turn black and die? Because it is the stage in which we play out our lives.  The stage is our construct, it is the infrastructure about which we play and live and love and lose.  It is all of a piece.  We made it.  We Are It.

Cliche #4.  Forgive and Love Yourself.  Do that first and everything else will follow.  Asked her if she thought he would find her tear swollen, snot slick face attractive.  He'd always been proud of her strength, her beauty, her enthusiasm and 'Can Do' attitude.  Now she was weak and needy.  She thinks she is not worthy of his love and is so ashamed of herself that she cannot love and forgive herself.  We spent a lot of time on that. 

How well I know the insidious logic of self-loathing.  How dare we love ourselves?  It is vainglorious to even like ourselves.  Humility and suffering is the western-christian ethic we absorb by osmosis if not by direct teaching.  Especially if you are a woman.   We define ourselves through the prism of others opinions.   I thought perhaps her generation of women had shattered those particular spectacles but it seems not.  She was worthless because he, his friends and family said she was. 

She hugged me as she left.  Asked if I was superstitious because she'd dreamed that I'd died.  Told her, after swiftly double checking that I wasn't superstitious, was I? that dreams are all about us so that if she dreamed I'd died it was because something in me reminded her of something in her, that the funeral was the death of an aspect of her.  Which makes sense.  I hope. 

I hope too that she heals sooner rather than later.  That she will heal I have no doubt.   We're made of tough stuff.  We have to be to survive the things we put ourselves through.  For in the end, it is our story.  Every single second.  And ain't it grand?

Love and Fear, Kiwi and Yankee Style

A letter to my sister.

Hi Tam:

Today New Zealand voted for love, 77 to 44 in favour of same sex marriage.  Today America voted for violence, 54 to 46, against background checks for those wishing to buy guns.  In New Zealand the gallery spontaneously erupted into a traditional Maori love song.  In the US Senate gallery there were calls of 'Shame on you!' as the vote was counted.  To me that about sums it up.  The US has lost its mind.  Some American said something about how the rest of the world looked at the US with bewilderment - how it seemed quite crazy, this fascination with guns and gun culture.  He or she was right.  Can't speak for the rest of the world but here in Australia, the US appears as though it's gone collectively off its rocker.  Madness twinned with paranoia fueled by testosterone and steroids.  Hate fueled by fear.  Why so frightened?  What is everyone afraid of?  Retribution? 
When Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people and injured 21 others at Port Arthur in Tasmania the then conservative government was galvanized into action.  In order to own a gun you had to have a license.  Hundreds of thousands of guns were surrendered (there was a recent amnesty of unlicensed firearms in which even more guns were surrendered).   The keeping of guns in strictly regulated.  Richard has (licensed) guns which he keeps in a secure padlocked cabinet.  Ammunition is kept separately.  The police have been out to check that he adheres to the regulations.  Richard is very much in favour of gun ownership but accepts with not too much grumbling the way things are in Oz. 
And then of course you get the homegrown loonies like the Boston bomber.  I suspect you are right, Tam and he or she is insane.  There's a grown man up the road.  He's in his 40's and lives with his quiet and unassuming parents.  His dad is a friend of ours.  When this 'boy' gets agitated he gets scary if he's not on his medication.  The neighbour brought Richard his guns for safekeeping when the son was having an episode (over an aged  cat that desperately needed, for humane reasons, to be euth'd).  That's all it takes.  The parents are rightfully frightened of this big burly 'kid' but can't/won't have him committed.  Is the bomber such a person?   There are so many 'mad' people out there.   Mad people that are afraid and therefore find reasons to hate.  Hate comes from fear, don't you think?  You can't hate unless you're afraid.
It's all so sad. 
One of my favourite movies is Love Actually.  I'm sure you've seen it.  During the opening monologue Hugh Grant talks about how when the planes were going down during 9/11, the passengers, knowing they were going to die, rang their loved ones to tell them they loved them.  They didn't ring their enemies to tell them they hated them.  Love is our natural state.  Despite all the madness in the world, I still believe that.

And I love you,
Holly

Signs and Portents

Unless you've been living in a cave, you know the world is supposed to end tomorrow.  I'm not sure how that works with the time zones.  Does the end start as a wave and work its way around the world?  Australia is a day ahead of America.  Does the world end tomorrow for us and the 22nd (Oz time) for the US?  I'm glad I'm not in charge for it's a conundrum.

Saw the psyhic John Edwards on Dr. Phil.  He was asked whether he thought the end of the world was nigh.  He thought not.  What he did think was that a major shift in our perceptions would occur.  I would like to believe that we are waking up to what we sow, we reap.  The Newtown massacre of children has become a wake up call for Americans in a way that the other massacres did not.  It was the slaughter of innocence.   Shooting college kids or teenagers at the cinema while a tragedy, well, they've been around a bit, they've seen a little, they had some life behind them.  But these babies had it all snatched away.  And the ones spared will never be the same.  How do you explain that kind of evil to a 5 year old?  To explain is to destroy whatever wide-eyed trust is left.  I suspect some of those kids don't understand much more than a 'bad man' took away their friends and classmates. 

Now in India a 23 year old med student was gang raped on a bus by 6 men, beaten with iron rods, stripped and thrown on the side of the road.  She is on life support because of the severity of her injuries, many of them internal.  The mind cannot comprehend.  India is the worst place in the world to be a woman, worse than Pakistan (which is pretty bad) and Afghanistan.   Twenty thousand women were raped in Mombai?  New Delhi? last year.  The judicial system is so grindingly slow that it can take 10 to 15 years for the case to go to court.  Many cases of rape go unreported because of the supposed slur or because of the length of time required to go to court.  I'm not sure I could maintain the rage for 15 years.  It's been an ongoing problem  because of the way Indians view women.  Now, spontaneously, the populace has risen up and demonstrated, even protesting in such numbers outside some high official's home (the article didn't say who) that water cannon were used to disperse the crowd. 

We have the Arab spring (which has slid into winter in some places), we have America talking gun control (finally!) and India examining its opinion of women.  Germany is going all out to meet their energy needs with renewables, animal welfare is in the headlines almost on a daily basis, climate change, while stalled as far as world governments are concerned, is riding a groundswell of public opinion (because the public cops the fallout) which will result in real change.    Although sometimes I despair that we will ever rise above the heavy dross of our gross corporeality and be and behave as the Shining Beings we are, I do see, with the signs and portents of great good in reaction to great evil across the world, that we will Arrive. 

I keep thinking of the opening monologue of the movie Love Actually.   When the passengers on the planes of 9/11 knew they were doomed, they didn't ring their enemies to have the last word, they rang their loved ones to speak of  love.   In times of great crisis we strip away the superfluous and become our essence, which is love.  But we forget, we get distracted, we believe ourselves to be our ego rather than our spirit.  It is not hopeless but it is hard.  I hope the End of the World is the end of blindness, that the scales fall from our eyes and we see, really See.

My Reality, His Reality

What you put out is what you get back. I'm slow to learn this key and valuable lesson. Just wrote in Balthazar's training log how I instinctively slapped him when he started to mug with his muzzle on my breast. He pinned his ears and why wouldn't he? I'd just hit him. Not hard. I could've slapped the cats that hard and they'd think I was just showing them attention yet the intention behind it was not one of affection. So I received what I gave.

Richard can be of a dour disposition. In private smiles don't come readily to his face. Sometimes I feel like the court jester capering about in a vain attempt to make him laugh or at least crack a smile. This morning he came out while I was feeding the birds. 'Good morning,' with this cat's behind set to his mouth. I started to smile a greeting but then, being in a contrary mood, I returned his expression and his greeting. He grimaced. I grimaced. Then he came over and gave me a hug. I notice when I 'chase' him for a smile or a pleasing demeanour it seems to have the opposite affect but when he perceives my face as 'set' or grim he's after me, 'Are you all right? You look sad.' So who is to say?

I worry about Richard. Try not to, remind myself that in *this* moment, all is well yet the niggling voice of unease whispers in my ear. As I said, in frustration, when Helen was here, I believe him to be mildly depressed. Depression would account for or be a symptom of the underlying worrying he grapples with most of the time. It would account for his negative attitude. If I say the sun is shining, he says it's too hot. If I say we're going to get some welcome rain, he hopes we don't get floods. If I point out the beauty of a flowering tree, he reminds me that it needs pruning. Perhaps it's only the difference between the way men and women perceive the world. Perhaps I am nit picking. But I can say that I perceive *him* as not being happy, not even content. Sometimes, he is reminded of how fortunate we are to live how and where we do when he sees how most of the world struggles for food, freedom, shelter, the basic human necessities, but those times are rare.

I lost patience with him the other day. He'd gone to get his knees seen to by the doctor who sent him for xrays which showed nothing wrong. His knees don't hurt, they get tired. I believe what he feels is true. I'm not denying that. And I am very proud of him for walking as much as he does. But otherwise, like most men, he does little to preserve his own health. Sometimes I even think he has given up and decided he is an old man. He's only 65. When I see him shuffling his feet, bowed forward like an elderly decrepit I am overcome with sadness imbued with annoyance. When we walk our beautiful walk down a spectacular dirt road surrounded by hills and wildlife, Richard is walking while staring at the ground in front of his feet. We walk separately. I am *there* enjoying the scenery, the feel of the wind on my face, looking for what creatures may be visible that day and Richard is a million miles away thinking/worrying. I used to remind him where we were and didn't he want to look but saying anything just made him cranky and I quit. I quit looking at him too for seeing him staring at the ground as he walked ruined my walk. I was resenting him rather than enjoying what I was doing.

It is useless to try and get someone to live their lives as you see fit. It only makes for friction when they don't comply. I *know* that. I do. One can only set an example by the way one lives ones life and if it appeals to others then great, if not, fine. That is a hard thing to do when married and your life is tied in with another. I get mad when I see him give up. I see the difference when he's inspired. He comes alive. His being is imbued with energy and purpose. But I cannot find him his joy. He has to. When we walk I get ahead of him and then wait for him to catch up, then walk on again. Unfortunately, I cannot amble. I need to stride out. A failing on my part but when I have tried to walk with him our walk deteriorates to a saunter. A few weeks ago, however, Richard was animated about something we were talking about. I can't remember what it was but I had to stretch out to keep up with him. He was alert, energetic, ALIVE. How can I help him to feel alive all the time? How can I help him remove this cheesecloth curtain he has placed between himself and life?

When I lost patience with him, after his visit to the doctor, I told him what I thought, that he must take responsibility for his health, that a doctor isn't going to give him a pill to fix his knees. I know how crooked Richard is from years of compensating for a sore back (which troubles far less than it used to). I see the bottom of his shoes which are worn very differently. I see his left knee larger than his right because that's the knee he always uses when kneeling. I see the natural crookedness and one-sidedness of anyone multiplied and magnified in him. Of course, I see yoga as an answer to help him. I want to share the positive difference it has made to me with him. More, I want the mental aspect in learning how to meditate, the relaxation, the mindfulness, to be a part of his life too. Naturally, I don't have those things all the time. It's a process but I am aware of them and the benefits are more obvious in my life than they used to be. Most of all, however, I want him to find his joy. I guess the only answer is to love him. Just love him, no matter what. And if he chooses to believe the self-made myth that he is old and shuffling and bent over with care, then I must love that too.

It's ten after five. I've been awake since 4. Mosquitoes. The hole uncovered in the corner of the bedroom, beneath the cat pee saturated carpet, is a portal for all the blood denied mozzies who sing at the screen door every night. My body was safe beneath the fan but my hands, dangling over the edge of the bed in the heat sprawled posture of insomnia, are pebbled with bites. Damn them. The cat pee? Never a problem until we had the termite men clomping around looking for damage. Since then someone has lost their map to the three kitty boxes. Not always but enough that I've removed two squares of carpet. The culprit remains a mystery. I am pretty sure it's not Nairobi. That leaves Natalia or Matisse.

Today it's supposed to get to 39 degress (104 Fahreinheit). Even now a fine sheen of sweat slicks my upper lip and forehead. I can take the heat, don't like it but it's okay. But I worry about the animals, especially the verandah birds. It gets very hot even with screening the full length and two doors into the house for airflow. The saving grace is that storms and showers are a possibility, especially welcome as we've not had good rain in nearly a month. Only 2.5 mm. The grass is parched and yellow. Of course the danger with this heat and the long summer drought is that the storms can be severe, hail being the most dangerous. I've watched storms dance toward us on the radar only to skip around at the last moment. Today might be our day,

Yoga has unlooked for side effects. Twice now I've stood on one foot while removing a shoe to free it of a stone. Taken the shoe off, shook it and ut it back on, tying laces and everything without ever overbalancing. Two years ago I couldn't have done that. Then there is the awareness of posture. Standing at the sink, one legged, feeling it and planting my legs in a soapy handed mountain pose. Or feeling myself slide down the couch or chair into a teenage posture of supreme ennui only to pull myself erect. The mental or spiritual benefits are less obvious. Getting off dairy foods (except those found in chocolate and the milk powder I use to make bread) because I don't want to take advantage of cows and their orphan calves is one. I do feel better about myself for that. Less guilty. Am I better person? I don't know. My spiritual side gets flattened beneath the weight of ego. At least I'm aware of it, sometimes. I get cranky with Richard and try to let go of resentment sooner, not easy for me who mulls and steeps and simmers in quiet anger that I, ME! should be thwarted, ignored, or worst of all, not be seen to be right. The curse of needing to be right. For instance, we go on our afternoon walks wth the dogs. Fresh air, sunshine, country beauty and Richard is stariing down at the road a million miles away. How dare he not be in the moment, be there with me! So I simmer. Then of course, I am not there in the moment either. I'm stewing. I'm better now at stopping that train of thought to nowhere but not free of it yet.

Found a new blog from which I've asked to get newsletters. Goins, Writer. There's a photo of him. He looks like an Irish pixie. Red hair, round face, looks about 12. But he writes well with fervour and feeling. About being a writer. I'm a toe in the water writer. One book, another half a book, lots of notebooks with stuttering story starts that peter out as soon as the buzz of something new falters. And this blog and the trunkful of journals that I'll reread someday when I'm really old. So really, I've written my entire adult life. But am I a writer? Or an artist for that matter with the dozens of drawings and paintings either on the walls or collecting in the dark folds of an oversized notebook. Or just someone who needs to write or draw when the mood is upon me but that hasn't the spark or drive to do anything about my output. Or to try to be good enough to do something about it? Writing and painting are crafts. I use them as self-indulgences. The urge to write and paint are akin to needing to love. The times in my life when I was between love affairs were times when I felt this overwhelming urge not to be loved but to love. Like I was swelling up and would burst if I couldn't find someone upon whom I could focus that feeling. It's the same with creativity. I get restless. There's the feeling of having to do something, make something, create something. Whether it's good or commercially viable doesn't enter into it. I just have to do it, without judgement (at least at at the time).