Sunshine through the clouds ~ a respite from darkness

Sunshine through the clouds ~ a respite from darkness

It’s been grim, this last year. Things have happened that have upset me vastly. Today marks the year’s mind of the death of something special, something I have mourned and truly grieved over as much as if a person dear to me died. The reality is they never truly existed. There have been home and family issues I don’t like to talk about and work issues to boot. I hit a rock bottom on my birthday and I reached as low an ebb as I have been in many years.

Depression sucks. Even without it, the last year would have been hard. With it, I went into a very dark place indeed. But I continued to function, somehow. Last week, I saw a full-blown shrink, and talked a bit. Actually, mostly she read the letter I’d sent and asked questions. Gently, sensitively; she respected my views. I was offered a tentative diagnosis and was told that the waiting list for a talking therapy is four to six months. She respected my wish not to take any medication; I’d explained at some length my reasons.

I’ve become aware that perhaps sometimes I seem to be asking for help and then refusing to take it. I’d like to make it clear that as far as mental health medications are concerned I believe they can be a lifeline to those in mental distress and they may well be essential during acute phases with a  great number of people. However, during the twenty or so years since I first saw a consultant psychiatrist I have tried a significant number, probably from every family of drugs. My experience was always negative. Side effects made normal existence impossible, even if I did, as advised, persist with them. My body did not adapt to them and any benefits they may have had were swallowed up in being virtually comatose for weeks. My first consultant only prescribed the then-new wonder drug Prozac as a means of stabilising me enough to undergo some form of psychotherapy. This was our agreement; it was what he felt I needed. He was the last psychiatrist I truly trusted and if you’re out there Dr Lee, thank you. However, we moved house and areas before I reached a point of being stable enough, and the same pattern was repeated. Each time we moved, I got sent to the end of a new waiting list until finally, I asked when would I have a chance for a therapy. At that point I was told that was only now available in that area for the acutely ill. I persisted with the Prozac for some years, believing I couldn’t do without it. At some point, about ten years ago, I slowly came off it, explored a lot of alternative health measures and found I could do without it. Moreover I discovered that a number of things I had thought to be the effect of the depression was in fact a side effect of the Prozac. They were things that made life that bit harder to endure, let’s just put it like that. I am not against medication. I am just wary of them. My experience has been poor and I see time and again people experiencing such dreadful side effects that must make life even harder. Some people have no side effects at all and for them, the meds are the ticket they need back to a normal life. But it’s so very individual. Medicine is like that. I have a dear friend who cannot take co-codamol and throws up if she takes it; I have a bad reaction to Ibuprofen and other anti-inflammatories but I can cope very nicely with codeine. Just as our bodies are unique, so too are our minds.

My own instincts about my body are often spot-on. I refused to have a hysterectomy to deal with certain gynaecological issues, partly because while it might solve one, it would create several others and exacerbate still more, but also because I had a sense of it being time-limited. I had a “knowing” that menopause was closer than they thought based on blood tests or whatnot. It turns out I was right. Quite without apparent warning, it kicked in just after Christmas and the torment of hot flushes every ten minutes just added to my sleep problems. Lack of sleep, hormonal tsunamis and depression just piled on top of me. I had constant thoughts of harming myself.

This is where it changes.

I was referred to see a gynaecologist but by the time my appointment came I had found a solution. Having tried several herbal remedies to no avail, I found a cream that you apply externally (yes, hormones). The very first night, it worked. Using a topical method means the hormones are absorbed quicker and without the liver breaking them down. The consultant prescribed the same hormone but in tablet form. I’ve not taken any yet; I may not need to. I’ve weighed the possibly carcinogenic effects against the benefit of using the product for a limited period of time while my body adjusts to its new state. It’s worth it. Being woken in a terrible sweat ten times a night is simply unendurable on top of everything else.

I was having sleep issues even before the hot flushes, so it’s something to do with the underlying, pervasive depression. Regular readers will know my search for a solution has been pretty wide. But then I remembered I’d taken 5htp in the past and it helped my sleep. So a fortnight ago, I bought some more. They have worked for me. The only side effect I’ve had is extremely vivid dreaming and sometimes nightmares. Yes, I know. For once a side effect I like. I’ve bemoaned my lack of dreams a long while.

What I hadn’t realise before is that 5hpt is also an anti-depressant. And it is working. I’ve not felt this way for a long while. It’s like stepping from midwinter to early summer in one bound. Oh, I still feel down and upset at things, but in a different way. I feel I can cope with it. Before I felt I was constantly on the brink of losing it.

Now, the curious thing is that I have never wanted a magic pill to take away my symptoms, to just make it better. Not really. I’ve always wanted to understand what is truly going on at a deep level. The why of depression if you like. I have long had an instinct that the answers to this question are somehow very important. This may be why I have perhaps seemed to some as if I have rejected their suggestions; I don’t just want to feel better, I want to BE better, to seek wholeness and healing on a very powerful scale. Many of the short term strategies I have tried over the years are effective only on a short term basis because they do not address the issues that hide at the core. Nowadays, while I do get plenty of exercise walking and cycling, it would be unwise to seek the endorphine rush (itself quite addictive) of extremely strenuous exercise as I have hyper-mobile joints that are subject to damage. Believe me, I have looked into and tried a great many of the suggestions people have made for dealing with depression.

But now the real work can perhaps begin, the soul archaeology that seeks the neglected soul parts, the shadowy bits I am repulsed by and refuse to acknowledge and I can say: here I am, now we can talk perhaps?

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Fuel from the unconscious ~ why dreaming is vital to me as a writer

Fuel from the unconscious ~ why dreaming is vital to me as a writer

One of the other less obvious effects of insomnia for me is the absence of dreams. I simply don’t seem to dream “properly” when I am suffering with sleep problems. Some people never remember their dreams but I’ve trained myself to recapture the key images and experiences of a dream and mull them over during the day. If I can, I write them down. I have notebooks with scribbled dreams dating back years and some dreams from childhood still haunt me. I work over old dreams, aiming at uncovering information from deep inside my psyche. I’ve been trying to do a lot more of this yet lately it has been rare for me to dream and remember more than a few tattered fragments the next day.

The sheer tiredness has meant I’ve not been able to do much creative writing at all, and no less than three novels are sitting on my hard-drive in varying stages of completion. There are other reasons why my creative drive seems to have gone AWOL but I’m not going to focus on those now because once I get sucked into that particular nightmare, it scuppers all reasonable thought.

Without the input of my dreams, I feel as if I am writing blindly, without any inner vision to carry me forward. It’s a nasty feeling, like driving with your eyes half shut and I find that those who advocate just forcing yourself to write when feeling blocked perhaps are asking(of me at least) something impossible and undesirable.

It’s the inner vision that carries any artist forward in their work, that shining thread of something that drives the work forward. I have little drive without the impetus that dreams bring me.

I’d like to share two passages from Away With The Fairies. Both illustrate scenes I experienced in dreams and was unable to forget in the light of day. They also show the power of the unconscious working its way to the surface and to consciousness in the mind and life of an artist. Isobel has suffered two serious bereavements and has failed to express her own grief; the paintings she produces are to some extent extensions of her inner workings to try and embrace death and dying.

From p74:

“Can I see what you did today?” he asked, eagerly and silently Isobel unwrapped the board and held it up for him to inspect.

He was silent long enough for her to become uneasy.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked.

“I’m not sure I understand it enough to like or dislike,” he said, thoughtfully. “It’s amazing but you must admit it is a bit, well, disturbing.”

She shrugged, and said nothing.

“Well, it is,” he said defensively. “I mean, have you had a proper look at it?”

“What do you mean, have I had a look at it? I painted the bloody thing, I’ve been looking at it all day,” she said crossly.

“Have a good long look at it now,” Mickey said. “Now you’ve had a bit of time to detach from it. Look at the shape of the mound and the way you’ve got the interior showing as well as the exterior. What does it look like now?”

Isobel stared at the painting for some minutes, blankly, until with a reeling sense of shock that she had not seen it before, she finally saw what Mickey was trying to show her. Even though it hadn’t been at all what she’d painted, she could see now that the entrance to the tunnel and the shadowy depiction of the cavern inside had the look of great hollow eye sockets, and the bare pale frost covered surface of the mound had the look of ancient bone, weathered and scarred by time. With growing horror, Isobel saw that what she had painted had the look of a skull, an ancient flensed head, crowned with monstrous trees that writhed and wriggled their roots down into the skull like burrowing maggots or worms.               

From Page 143

Loneliness and isolation were both swept away once she set up her easel and began to work. She was drawn into her own visions and only when she was in actual pain from cramped muscles and complaining bladder did she stop to rest and look at what she’d done.

Standing on the mound, surrounded by the smooth boles of the beech trees, was a stag, fine and strong and unafraid, the shape of its antlers echoing the barely seen branches above. The ground at its feet looked more like skin than earth, and in places it seemed to have ripped or cracked open, the crevices showing what lay beneath the surface. Closest to the surface the cracks showed heaps of carcasses of deer, piled up and rotting, some newly dead, others in advanced decomposition. As the eye was drawn down to deeper layers, the cracks showed bones and skulls, the antlers still attached and as the very deepest layers were revealed, the bones were crushed, by time perhaps or by simple weight of the corpses above, till at the very bottom, only bone powder remained that blew out of the crevices in clouds like the smoky vapour from an autumn puffball. Above it all, the stag stood proud and alive, and unaware or uncaring of the horrors below it.

“Bloody hell,” breathed Isobel when she saw what she had produced. She had been so absorbed by the work that she had been unable to see the whole, the complete picture till now. Obviously she had seen it but she had not taken it in, had not registered the finished images.

Now Isobel is in some ways a powerful alter ego of mine, and a character I identify with strongly; tying my night time visions into her experiences was very natural process of letting my unconscious mind direct my conscious one. Words flowed like spring water, easy and a plot unfolded without having to stretch and strain at contriving one.

Without this resource I am pretty much a hack writer, good with words maybe but useless at reaching anything deeper. And without that deeper expression, there is little point in me writing until that returns or is proclaimed missing presumed dead.

I’m not giving up hope yet. I’ve been taking a supplement called 5htp and it seems to have been helping me sleep a little better and even dream too. If I can get decent sleep, then maybe my dreaming will return. 

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Doors within Doors ~ deciphering the dreaming

Doors within Doors ~ deciphering the dreaming

Last year I found myself taking lots of photographs of doors and doorways, some open, some closed and some even bricked up.

 The best ones (visually anyway) were ones that were taken from the inside looking out. The view is framed by the doorway and the view is enticing.

The real reason I am fascinated by doorways is not merely aesthetic but symbolic. I dream a great deal about doors; often in the dream I try to exit a building only to find that the doorway is somehow far too narrow to squeeze my bulk through. Or I dream that my door to the world will not fully shut and remains stubbornly open and vulnerable to intrusion by the exterior world. Or that I am unable to open a door to escape from a house. Many of my dreams see me exploring, often fearfully in darkened rooms and corridors, a great house, vast in size and packed with rooms full of wonders and terrible things. I go up stairs that never end, trying to find a way off the exhausting ascent. Often stairs are for the trigger for realising I am dreaming and then I can take some control and enjoy “lucid dreaming”.

A common door dream I have at regular intervals is one where I find a secret door in my home, that has been there all along but I have forgotten about, and which leads to a series of rooms that are hidden but somehow familiar. I discover what amounts to a second house, annexed to the main one, and I explore that avidly. I wake feeling disappointed that these extra rooms are not really present. The extra rooms have the feel of having been recently inhabited but I never meet anyone there.

But the dreams that end up haunting me most are the ones where I am trapped within a building and cannot find a door that takes me out into the open air, and into nature. Sometimes I go through doors that seem to take me outside but in fact they turn me back to the inside. I often wake distressed and claustrophobic from these.

About a week or two back I had one of these dreams but it had a rather interesting twist. I was in a caravan and I wanted to go out. The door was there so I opened it. Behind it was another door. I opened that. It went on, opening door after door without ever revealing the way out. A voice, just off camera, said to me, “This is a spirit door, it is there to confuse the spirits.” It made perfect sense and within the dream I seemed to remember some Tibetan practise of putting in fake doors to trap evil spirits. I lost the dream a moment after that but I do recall I may have tried to exit via a window and the dream went elsewhere.

I woke with a sense of having been given a clue.  A door is not always a door; sometimes it is a trap. In the last novel I wrote (not yet named or published) the main character ended up in a catatonic fugue state, as a result of extreme stress and trauma but the final straw was moving through a gateway in his own garden. Now previous to this, he had experienced a deep shamanic trance state where he had met and talked with his dead mother herself stuck in between worlds, and captive by her own choices in a moment frozen in time in that same garden. Their conversation finally freed her from this self-imposed imprisonment and the son acted as a kind of psycho-pomp for the dead by allowing her to pass from the garden into the next world via a seldom-opened gate in the garden wall. His own desire to escape from the travails of his life meant that the next time he passed in reality through this gate, it sent him back into a limbo world like that timeless night-garden and trapped him in a non-responsive state.

I’ve battled with this desire to escape, escape from myself and my life and who I am for a long time. I think this is what fuels these dreams of doors and doorways and why my unconscious plays these tricks on me.

I somehow feel that perhaps within my dreaming I have been so focused on going through doors I have not considered (like the hero in my novel) where they actually lead. Do they lead to the open air, the wide skies and freedom or do they lead like the gateway in my hero’s journey to a limbo land of nothingness and waiting?

I do not know.

Last night though I dreamed a slightly different dream. Without conscious action I moved within a dream from an interior setting to an outside one. I had no awareness of the transition from being at a computer holding an instant messaging conversation with someone who will probably never communicate with me again, to being outside and at the foot of an impossibly steep hill. Others (I don’t know who) were with me and while I thought the hill too steep to ascend, someone showed me that it was only the first six feet that were hard, and suddenly, I was hauling myself up onto a path that was far higher up than I expected to be. It was a hill that seemed to have been a sort of ancient hill fort that had been built upon and used for a long, long time and once I was past a certain point, I was able to stand at the low walls and look out across a vast and brightly lit city below me. I wasn’t at the top, but I was a good halfway and the rest of the climb didn’t look that hard at all.

The following lines are from T.S Eliot’s East Coker, in the Four Quartets

You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

It seems to be about a form of conscious unconsciousness. Maybe like my hero in that novel, I need to go through a form of dispossession of self.

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Hopes, dreams, desires but no resolutions

Hopes, dreams, desires but no resolutions

 

I’m running a little late with my New Year’s Day post, but we do have over 360 days left still.

I’ve avoided making resolutions for many years because being a past-master of self-sabotage, I’ve always managed to jinx myself before I’ve even started, so the most I am going to work at is intentions, hopes, etc.

2012 is a much-hyped year but I am not even going to dignify the silliness by attempting to talk about the end of the world!

My hopes for this year include: my daughter’s full recovery from M.E. This is a very important one, and also is something I want very much. Other hopes include: finding a decent job I enjoy that doesn’t drain the life out of me with office politics and also pays well. This one is something of a forlorn hope; not convinced how many companies would like to employ a middle-aged woman trying to launch a new career, regardless of how able I actually am. More realistic hopes work-wise include doing an increased number of Continental trips, teaching a steady amount over the whole year. Unrealistic hopes: a pay rise and better working conditions for my teaching job.

I am also hoping that the steady month on month increase in sales of my books continues to grow and that people who enjoy my writing will pass news of it onto others. Without a marketing budget, I do rely on word of mouth.

Dreams: somehow finding my mojo again. I feel like the sheer slog of getting books promoted has driven away my joy in writing. During the winter months, I have a lot of time on my hands that I could use to write. I get little done and I have no motivation to get myself back in the saddle. Lots of people have been talking about strategies and five year plans and so on, but I realised that being the disorganised mess I’ve always been, setting that sort of thing out is just going to be another stick to beat myself with for failing. I am a writer, I am not a businesswoman or a marketer. I can’t force myself into a mould I cannot ever fit and so I want to be true to myself and retain my own personal integrity. Some people might sneer at that and mutter that I am doomed to fail as a writer. So be it, then. I’d rather fail as a professional writer than fail as a human being trying to live an honest and personally authentic life. This means I shall continue to steer clear of practises that I have seen others use to sell books and which do not sit comfortably with my own ethical and moral stance.

More dreams: I want to do a lot more deep, inner work. Meditation, drumming, journeying, retreats and pilgrimages. I’ve not made a plan, but I have a number of new books to work through.

I want to read more generally. I am bored of most books, and have been finding a great deal of comfort in the surprise discoveries of certain Indie books, where the homogenising influences of editorial pressures have not slashed and burned the originality out of new works. The books I have written about on here have been a selection of these, not so much reviews(this is not and never will be a book review blog) as recommendations. There are more I wish to “review” but again, I don’t want to feel pressure to do so. I have had requests from various writers to review theirs, and in time, I hope to do so. But I don’t want to change the focus of this blog by concentrating on reviews.

More dreams: I am considering releasing 3 volumes of works all drawn from this blog. Since there are over 600 posts here, articles, poetry, short stories etc, it is impossible for a reader to trawl through the categories and find what might be most enjoyable/helpful. So I envisage 3 books: Tales from the Tightrope ( a book of short stories), Songs from the Tightrope (poetry) and  Words from the Tightrope (articles) all to be released in sequence as e-books and as paperbacks. In terms of the Words one, I’d be interested from my readers which posts would you most like to see in a book.

Desires: to get lost in writing again. I have an extensive back catalogue of novels I shall be releasing, but I also have 2 novels in various stages of disrepair, and ideas and thoughts for plenty of others. But to bring them to fruition, I need to be able to find the motivation to write. I don’t write for the money, or for fame (though a moderate amount of each is acceptable) but for the stories themselves. They have a life force all of their own, and at present, I am unable to really channel that.

More desires: to find some lasting inner peace and not be driven by my fears and my failings. I’m never going to be perfect and I need to accept that I will fail, I will hurt people at times, and that I am human and utterly fallible. I drive myself very hard at times; I want to learn how to step back and say, “Enough!” and rest.

I want to sleep. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it, but I have been having trouble with insomnia consistently for some years now. I have times where I sleep well; at present it is very poor indeed. I think this ties in with my inability to let myself stop and rest. Things that I cannot resolve prey on my mind, very deeply and my mind doesn’t quite shut down enough to rest. I’ve tried dozens of remedies and techniques and some work for a while. But like my baseline depression this goes deep; cut off the shoots, they spring again because the roots remain untouched.

I want to stop hating myself. Of all the dreams, hopes and desires, this is probably the biggest one of all, and the oldest of problems. If I could find out why I feel this way, then perhaps I might be able to change it.

Anyway, a very brief run through of some of the things at the forefront of my mind in these early days of the new year. I’m down with a cold that refuses to come out properly and my face feels mashed and sore with inflamed sinuses, so I hope this was not too garbled.

Let’s see if together, we can make a difference to the lives of others this year, and maybe also our own. For it is in giving that we shall receive.

 

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Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn ~ sorting true dreams from the false

Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn ~ sorting true dreams from the false

“…there are two gates through which dreams reach us. Those that come through the Ivory Gate cheat us with empty promises that never see fulfilment. Those that come through the Gate of Horn inform the dreamer of the truth.”  Homer. The Odyssey Book XIX

   As some of you may know, I teach a lesson on dreams and dreaming with my higher level students, and I classify dreams into three categories. Those three are: night-time dreams, daydreams and dreams that are lifelong goals, aspirations and ambitions. All three are actually very closely linked as they all originate deep within the human psyche or soul.

   The third type of dreaming is one about which much is written along the lines of “believe in your dreams”, “follow your dreams” and
so on. A whole industry of books, workshops and related paraphernalia (including fridge magnets and inspirational posters and mugs!) has grown up around it, as well as a thousand and one gurus to help you chase and achieve your dreams. So much of this is exploitative in the extreme, and while I firmly believe people need to keep their dreams, I also believe that Homer was onto something quite profound when he wrote of the two Gates.

  A colleague whose opinion I value once described me as a pragmatist and this cuts to the core of what I am exploring. I have a clear-sighted vision of what is (and what is not) realisable. I deliberately do not use the word possible, for with imagination, many things can be considered possible that are far from realisable.

  Let me give you a personal example. I’ve been a writer, a teller of tales since before I could really hold a pencil. It’s long been my dream to be a successful author. However, having bashed my head repeatedly against the edifice of established publishing houses, I was forced to withdraw from that route. I had enough evidence from the unbiased words of editors and agents that my writing was good, and I even went so far as to etch their words onto a wand of wood. But that door remained so firmly shut after a few tantalising glimpses through it, that I withdrew completely, stopped writing and shut down. Deep within my mind, the stories coiled and rolled and ran on without me hearing them consciously and eventually they burst out again in a torrent.

   For years, I believed that this dream of being a successful author was one that had effectively come through the Gate of Ivory. Time showed me that it came instead through the Gate of Horn, because with hard work and vision and especially new technology, I can see now that not only is it possible, but it is actually realisable. The dream that came through the Gate of Horn for me was that I AM a writer and that I can be successful.

  A dream that might have come through the Gate of Ivory would have been more like, “You can be a million dollar best seller ~ all you have to do is release a book and the world will fall like dominoes at your feet.”

  The clue to the differences between the Gates is the material from which they are built. Ivory is showy, expensive and misleadingly glamorous. It shines and shimmers in sunlight and is lusted after by ancient kings. But Horn is humble, the material of the common folk, and takes much work to make it into something of outstanding beauty. Look closely, deeply at your dreams. Can you see a possible path from where you are now, to where that dream promises to take you? Or is the route strewn with too many Lottery-winning clauses, too many ifs and not enough solid, hard work and perhaps sacrifices? If the dream promises a meteoric ascent to glory, with minimum of hard work, then stand back and take a hard, hard look at it. It may be one that has slipped through that Gate of Ivory.

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In Memoriam ~ when the dead speak to us

In Memoriam ~ when the dead speak to us

Today is the Autumn Equinox and I woke crying. I woke crying because I dreamed about a friend who is dead.

Debbie was one of those extraordinary people who just brim with talent and ability; she was doing a doctorate in Zoology at the same time as I was doing my B.A in English and Latin. She had a gentle and gracious nature and we almost shared a birthday, so on a couple of occasions we shared celebrations. Not only was she intellectually gifted, she was spiritually gifted too, and was called to the priesthood, training a year or two ahead of my husband.

The first Christmas after we moved to darkest Norfolk for my husband’s first incumbency, I sent Debbie a gift and when a week or so later a card came from her, I was unprepared for the letter that came with it.

“Brace yourselves; I’ve got leukaemia!”

A bright and breezy letter detailing her death sentence followed. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I assumed that she would be one of those people who survived. I assumed that the fact that she’d fought some pretty serious difficulties in her life so far meant she’d survive this.

I was wrong. She died. She was only in her mid thirties.

This morning, I dreamed of her. I’ll be honest, I’ve thought of her at times over the years but we weren’t very close and her passing had saddened but not devastated me. So it was a very strange dream, to be driving up to a house I knew to be hers and going round to the back door. The door was ajar, into a cosy old fashioned kitchen complete with Rayburn and snoozing dogs, and I shouted, “Are you in? We’re here!”. Debbie appeared, older, and with white streaks in her hair, and her face lit up at the sight of me. She held me at arms’ length before hugging me tight and then holding me out again to look at me. Then I woke.

When the dead speak to us in dreams, it is surely a sign that something is shifting in our lives, but what? Why did I dream of a friend, dead now thirteen years, whose life ended prematurely and with work incomplete?

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Meet the Mirror ~ Tip the Time-line

Meet the mirror, tip the time-line

I don’t like mirrors; they show me a stranger who I don’t like or sometimes don’t even recognise. I don’t look the way I think I do, inside, and often the  fact that there is no correspondence between my inner image and what I see in the mirror means I seldom linger at a mirror. I wash my face, put on make up, do my hair and my teeth and hardly look,  because it leaves me so despondent. I’ve never been pretty, but like Maude Gonne (who was a famed beauty in her time and inspired poet WB Yeats to write some very great poetry) I do have my “moments of glad grace” that might pass for beauty for someone like me.

Today I have felt a touch on my left hand a number of times, like a feather brushing my skin, but there is nothing there. At first I thought a hair was tickling me or a fly, but there was nothing. I got a dim impression of someone trying to attract my attention.

Then this evening, I passed the mirror in the bathroom and I saw something else looking back at me, rather than the usual rather tired blonde with a face like an earnest horse that is desperate to show everyone how clever it actually is and I stopped dead for a moment.

Gazing back at me, somehow, was the little girl I used to be and the old woman I will become. They were not phantoms but they were there in my own familiar half-hated workaday face, as definite as my own bones. I saw in my wiry hair the softness of childhood and the spider-silk of old age, all in the same silver gilt my hair is now, poised in its turning to grey. In my eyes, which are the colour of the north sea in winter, changeable and deep, I saw the pure blue innocence of the child I once was and the deep grey green wisdom of an old woman I may yet become.

I paused, struck by something odder yet that the appearance of these two. It was that as I saw them, I could see they were beautiful and yet, seeing my own face, I could not see it in me. And yet, they are me. How can this be, that I cannot see my beauty in this time but in other times, I can?

I’m probably halfway through my life, and yet, what have I done, and what have I yet to do? Both these questions are what my other selves might ask of me and they did not. If anything they just showed me their loveliness that I am unable to accept in myself.

I am not sure what this encounter means but I’d like to share with you a song by someone who expresses it better than I can, this sense of time tipping and the need to mark the passing of time. Carolyn Hillyer writes very beautiful music that sadly I cannot find on
You-Tube but if you visit www.seventhwavemusic.co.uk
you can find samples to listen to and perhaps to buy.  

Meet the mirror, melt and merge there

Tilt the mirror, tip the time-line

Mind the mirror, mind you mark time

Mid-line, it’s your turn to turn time

(Meet the Mirror, from Old Silverhead, songs and initiations of Woman-hood
by Carolyn Hillyer)

I’m feeling very unsettled by this experience and the sense that I am
perhaps running out of time. It seems only a few years ago that I was that child with bright blue eyes, that have long since turned to that sea colour; can it be that it is an even shorter time before I become that old woman?

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The Waiting Room ~ “It’s Strange how some Rooms are like Cages.”

The Waiting Room

“It’s strange how some rooms are like cages…” Paul Simon in The Obvious Child.

Not always just cages but almost like holding pens. You enter them and things stand still while you wait for the designated outcome. Waiting rooms: we’ve all spent far too much time in them. Whether they’re called Waiting rooms or whether they have a fancier title….the
wings, the sidelines, the vestry, dressing room, bus stop… they’re
all still just waiting areas. When you enter them you become
committed to staying till the waiting is over. No one forces you to
stay, there are no locks and no bars, but how often do you ever see
someone walk out before their appointed time? Not very often. There’s an unspoken contract that once you enter, you stay.

Hospital waiting areas are the one people seem to spend most time in; due to the usual policy of doubling up the number of people assigned to each appointment, while you might be expecting to see the doctor at 10.0am, so is another person. They count on people not turning up to keep the place busy and it usually works, because even if you  have to wait two hours, almost everyone will wait. It’s the same with trains as well. You have a fixed object in mind and unless you change your plans radically, that object usually remains the same. So no matter how late your train is, you sit and wait.

What a waste of valuable time I can almost hear you saying! This is
certainly true if you regard waiting as a passive activity, one empty
of meaning and purpose. While there isn’t much to prepare for when
waiting for a train, many other events we wait for actually need the
waiting time for the event to work well.

I spent a fair amount of time in the past backstage, waiting for a show to start. Of course, some of that time was spent in practical
matters, checking props, sound checks and learning lines, but there’s
always a moment that dawns when all the things you have to do are
done and there is nothing to do but wait. And that is crucial to the
performance. That funny little jumping of your heart as you hear the
distant murmur of the audience arriving and settling down is the
burst of adrenaline you need to be able to step out on stage. The
hugs and kisses from fellow performers and backstage crew placate the nerves and bind you together in a fellowship as old as theatre; it
tells you that you are OK, that things are going to go fine and that
people are behind you. I’m not involved in that world any more and
I have few friends that are, but I gather that there are very few
performers who can walk cold from the car and onto a stage and give
their best. I’d never be one of them, to be sure.

The relatives’ room at hospital is another kind of waiting room; the
place you are relegated to when dressings are being changed and when the consultant deigns to visit your relative. It’s also where you
wait after the worst has happened. Have you ever noticed the boxes of tissues? They’re there for good reason. A few years back, we had to rush north when a close relative was taken seriously ill. We arrived in time to visit him in the ICU and he was lucid enough to communicate with us. But overnight things deteriorated and we were called at 5am to say come now. He’d been moved to another waiting
area, a single room off the main ICU ward. He was not conscious
really and after spending some hours with him, I went with my
sister-in-law to get some coffee and we were directed to the
relatives’ room. I’d been up since 5am and Zoe had driven down
from Scotland at 6am when she got the call, so we were tired and
upset. I knew this stage could easily last days and I was shocked
when less than an hour later when my husband came in to say his
stepfather had gone. He’d never been one for waiting around in life
and in dying, he had waited till we’d all got there, and had gone,
just like that. Even the staff were shocked. So we all sat together
in that waiting room, crying and drinking coffee and talking and even
laughing, waiting for the next stage to come. In those waiting hours,
we’d been preparing ourselves, in such ways that I can hardly begin
to describe, for what we knew to be inevitable. I didn’t pray for
miracles; we’d had our miracle when he’d been conscious and lucid
when we arrived and the things that needed saying had been said. I’d  been getting my head around what was happening, so I could deal with it.

That’s what a lot of our waiting is about, or should be: becoming ready for what is next. It’s an active process in many ways, but performed often in a passive fashion. When I wait for a hospital appointment, I am not killing time; I am preparing my mind and my spirit to deal with what is coming. When I am waiting for a class to arrive, I am marshalling my thoughts and my materials and working out what best to start with. When I am sitting waiting at an airport, I may be watching and listening and observing and above all, thinking. Even when I am waiting for a bus or a train I am preparing, thinking about the journey and the day ahead and using the time to ponder ideas and enjoy the pause in my busy day.

Right now I am in a waiting room of another sort; it has no special
physical location and is more a metaphysical place. I’m waiting for
plans and hopes and dreams to start to move forward. It’s a bit
like when you sow seeds in the spring. You look at the pictures on
the seed packet and you dream of those flowers or vegetables or herbs as you sow them, and after it’s done, you have a little moment
where you stare at the bare ground and for a few seconds, you imagine the riot of colour that will ensue in months to come. No gardener hangs around much after that; you might come back a week later to check; to ensure the seeds are undisturbed by hungry birds, or to remove the rampant growth of new weeds, or maybe to peek and see if the tiny earthquakes have started that signal the sprouting of a seed here and there. Another week and you see the tender tip of the first shoots and you sigh with pleasure and anticipation and then go on with your other chores.

That’s the thing about waiting; there are so many things you can do while you’re doing it. And when you do it like that, it’s never a waste
of time, but rather a gift of time that you didn’t know you had.

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Disneyland, Cowboys and Let’s Pretend ~ Is Suspension of Disbelief the Secret to a Happy Life?

Disneyland, Cowboys and Let’s pretend ~ Is suspension of disbelief the secret to a happy life?

 

My first experience of a depressive episode came when I was about six years old. By that point I’d been in full time school for about six
months and was already finding it a baffling experience. There was
way too much messing around and not enough learning for my liking.
Back in the seventies, before any of this National Curriculum
rubbish, teachers got to decide what they were going to teach their
classes and how. I went to school eager to learn to read and write
and all that and within a week was hopelessly disappointed at the
grinding slowness of it all. I even realised that I could actually
already read a bit.

 

The crisis came with P.E. In those dim and distant days infant schools
usually made you do P.E in your vest and pants and that was trial
enough for a shy kid like me. Balance beams and hula hoops were
endurable but one day the teacher told us she wanted us all to
pretend to be cowboys twirling our lassos. I stood for a second, not
quite able to believe it and watched as my class erupted into action.
They galloped hither and yon, waving arms with invisible ropes and
whooping with delight. I continued to stand there, baffled. I
couldn’t do it. I looked on in utter bewilderment. It defied any sort
of logic or narrative; cowboys do not go round wearing vests and
pants from the Co-op, nor do they try and twirl like that, and
if you tried that on a real horse, you’d be on the ground in
seconds…..You’d surely never have twenty eight trainee cowboys
running round together unless this was a special training session.
And we were too close, the ropes would have had someone’s eye out by now….

 

“Come along Vivienne, you must join in!” said the teacher brightly, not realising that this set the precedent for my lifelong opposition to
“joining in”.

Something in my juvenile psyche fizzed and banged in a wholly ominous way and being five and a half, the inevitable happened. The tears started and wouldn’t stop. I think I cried most of the day after that.

 

Fast forward to 2008 and a shamanic dreaming workshop I foolishly attended and standing in the middle of a field with 12 other women and the leader(who will remain nameless) I watched as they all “took on the attributes of their power animal” and after watching for a minute, walked off without a word to pack my bags and catch the train home.

Fast forward to 2010 and Disneyland, Paris, and seeing hundreds of people, adults even, getting excited because people dressed in costumes were coming past them on a float, waving and wearing fixed and weary smiles. “I met Mickey Mouse!” breathed one woman with ecstatic joy in her eyes. I smiled and didn’t say, “No, you met some underpaid French student dressed in a Mickey Mouse suit.” That day was only made bearable by the company of the two teachers and some of the students I spent time with. It was actually painful. Everything was fake and almost everyone was happy to accept it for that day as real. Like an atheist among believers, I felt isolated and ill at ease.

 

During my childhood I played lots of let’s pretend games but within those games there had to be a certain structure of reality. Yes, a felled tree could be our spaceship but you couldn’t just jump out of it; you had to exit via the airlock. Yes, my paper boat could be a ship going down the Amazon, but the dolls piloting it couldn’t carry it over
waterfalls because it would be too heavy. The internal world of let’s
pretend had to follow certain patterns of logic and reason; if I was
being a boy in the game, I had to wear boyish clothes and so on.

 

I find it almost impossible to believe even for a minute in things I
know are fake, like Disneyland. It ruins any enjoyment I might get
because it grates on raw nerves, and makes me suspicious of what else they might be trying to fool me with. I’m the same with a lot of New Age matters, even though I know enough to realise not all of it is quackery and snake oil and that some is utterly genuine and helpful.
The shamanic dreaming workshop upset me badly because not only did it throw me back to that episode at five years old, but because I was unable to get past it. All I could see were grown women behaving like pre-schoolers and a leader who seemed to take more delight it it than I felt was healthy. I felt threatened by it, as if by giving in and suspending my disbelief I was somehow in serious danger. It may sound an exaggeration but at the time all I could feel was a whirlpool pulling, drawing me into a different dimension. Nobody stopped me leaving, or seemed to care much that I was upset; the leader did try to persuade me to stay and when I explained my reasons he refused to accept my point of view. I’ve never dared go on anything like that since then.

 

But observation of people who can seem to get “into the spirit of the
thing” whether for Disney or whatever has shown me something that
disturbs me more. They tend to be people who are happy. They tend to not agonise over things the way people like me do.

 

I asked one friend why she liked Disneyland so much and her response was, “I love it because I can be a child again.”

 

It’s made me wonder if I ever was a child at all. 

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The Healing Temple ~ a prophetic dream, a memory or wishful thinking?

 

The Temple of Healing

 

 

 

Following a dream on one Sunday night about having healing power filling my hands like light or like electricity, I thought that might be it as far as powerful BIG dreams go.

 

I was wrong.

 

I was tired from my morning of teaching, and still recuperating from my operation on Friday 13^th, I decided I would go and lie down and try to sleep. I don’t sleep well, generally and in the daytime, I usually fret too much to doze off. So I put on a CD of relaxing sounds and music(Wind-chime Waterfall, it’s called) and snuggled into bed.

 

I had my eyes open for a while and noticed as I became drowsy a growing number of shapes and lights in the room. I see things at times, hypno-gogic and hypno-pompic visions of strange unearthly but wonderful things.

 

I slept but so lightly I was aware I was sleeping, and that I was dreaming.

 

The first part of the dreaming I found myself fairly high up in what at first seemed very like a vast stadium for sports, but when I looked closely it was quite different. Different parts of the stands were separate from others, looking down onto different areas. I’ve also had a sense of vertigo in big football arenas like the Stade de France, but here, even though I was maybe much higher, there was no sense of it. It was less precipitate and sheer, sloping much more gently.

 

There seemed to be a kind of organ, but that is the only word I can think of, inside a kind of room, and I knew that the music I could hear was coming from that, dispersed and not direct like birdsong but not like the sort of Musak you hear piped into shopping centres. I understood that both playing this instrument and hearing it was somehow healing in a profound but gentle way. There were climbing plants growing freely everywhere and flowers of varying types nodded overhead, and added their scent to the air.

 

I must have walked further down the stands because I could see another vista, this time of pools. They seemed a little like swimming pools but while some were occupied by people who were lying in the water, there was a calmness and a stillness. The people were not splashing around or playing; they were just lying in the waters a little like invalids and I remembered I had been there before, years ago. I had been in those waters, when I was recovering from my death in the first world war; my comrades were also in the waters.

 

Looking around I saw other pools that had no people in them but had fountains and lights and other things I have no idea what they were, but it seemed to put a sort of display on that was healing for those who watched.

 

I cannot convey the vastness of this complex, or the fact that though I tried to see where everything was and how it worked, I simply could not. It seemed as though there was a combination of unknown technologies so alien to me I can’t even describe them at all. I do not have the words for it. There was also a great deal of simple loveliness and natural beauty, and a sense of it being familiar and utterly new all at the same time. There was a clarity of air and of colour and sound that was like being on a high mountain, with the morning light.

 

But the oddest thing of all was the sense that however new it seemed at that moment, I was in the right place, and that I somehow belonged there.

 

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