Revisiting Some Ancient Wounds Then Letting Them Go Again

 

I did naughty things as a child of course.

Most are forgotten in normal ways. I did wrong. Correction happened. They drifted from memory.

The ones that remain as the strongest memories are different. My head threw three at me this morning, all from forty to forty-five years ago. Two arose because my child brain saw the world in an atypical way. Autism I guess. And my way of seeing wasn't going to be understood by anyone else just as I couldn't understand the "normal" way of seeing, only learn to obey and conform and mask. That's just how it was. Neurodiversity wasn't even a word then and Jim Sinclair hadn't written of ways of being.

The other event I realised many years later arose from dissociation and from having no memory whatsoever of doing something because "I" hadn't done it and so naturally assuming someone else must have done it. I got in such trouble on all those occasions and it's only in the last five years that I've truly understood what was going on.

Then there are the memories blocked and maybe lost forever, held by the very survival parts that lead, on occasions, to dissociation that's sometimes helpful and sometimes deeply unhelpful.

Then there are missing times when I've a few times ended up losing friends for things I can't remember or conceive of but which wounded them. Understanding came late and understanding helps immensely. It can't restore a friendship but perhaps it can aid in not destroying others through ignorance of the disconnects and parts that exist within me because of a past I cannot remember and which they don't want me to discover.

I revisit adult wounds too. Those that are my own doing. Those that came from others. Those that come from events when dissociative and not even knowing that dissociation is part of my life. Those that come from everyone having unspoken personal rules and expecting their rules to be obeyed.

We all revisit though. It's the human thing to do.

For all the talk of living in the present moment our heads will keep leading us back to the past.

And so now I meditate. Focus. But at least today lie in the half awake and revisit the scenes of everything I couldn't possibly have understood when I was seven.

Forty years on I know consciously I don't need to live my past.

Our brains don't much care about our knowledge though, do they?

Even in my dreams last night I revisited. In a dream the journey took us past a place and I said I'd used to have lots of dreams in that place. It's a large and strange market with a big meeting hall adjoining. Last night the outside of it was in Chester. Except a part of Chester that's not real because usually those streets are elsewhere. A meta-dream. The recurring dreams begin again but if I don't go to those places where he and she have influence or presence then perhaps we may avoid terror.

May my sleep not revisit those old worlds. Not again. Never again.

May our awake times learn not to revisit old wounds on days filled with promise. May we learn transcendence in presence not in the creaking decay of what is no more except in the half remembered glimpses held by neurons.

The poem that led to these small thoughts

Don't Shoot For The Moon, Whatever You Do. Unless You're NASA.

 Warning:  This is the silliest thing I've posted for a very long time.

Shoot for the Moon.  Even if you miss you'll land among the stars.

I implore you. Don't do it.

Given physics and the cost of rocket technology it's much more likely you'll smash into the ground if you shoot for the moon. If you hit water it'll still hurt lots.

If you did manage to escape the gravitational attraction of the planet and missed the moon you would be dead for thousands or millions or even billions of years before reaching a star. You may never reach one at all. And you might get caught by a black hole or smashed to pieces by a piece of rock.

Even if you did have a suspension unit to keep you alive for so long, what are the chances that you would land not crash and what are the chances that you would fluke a habitable planet with an abundant food source and no large creatures or microorganisms to bump you off?

If you did hit the moon that's an incredible achievement for an individual endeavour of course and NASA would be very annoyed if you got there before they get someone else there if their current program goes to plan. In this case though, I don't believe in you!

The moon isn't the best place to be. Why would you aim for there if you weren't part of a space agency? No rain or storms but it's a bit cold and while the atmosphere is pollution free it's also almost entirely atmosphere free. There's not even a KFC and Deliveroo don't deliver that far. It's also an extreme move even for the most dedicated hermit and there's neither WiFi nor a landline and the municipal plumbing is underdeveloped. Plus the lunar charity shops never get any good donations.

So my advice is not to shoot for the moon. Even if you have a sufficiently well developed personal space program or have illegally invented a firearm far more powerful than anything the army has.

No. Don't shoot for the moon.

Get an extra cushion. Make a cup of tea. Read a book. Watch a comedy.

Life's good enough. Accept its beauty even on days when you've just posted about how rough it's being.

You don't have to shoot for the moon.

Your life here is good enough.

It can hurt here but it's better than trying to survive alone on the moon.

[This post has been brought to you by Autistic People Struggle With Idioms Inc.]

A Queer Person Gives Glory To God By Being Queer

 

Quotation by Thomas Merton
Photograph source unknown

I nearly quoted this statement by Thomas Merton in the two blog posts I wrote recently in response to religious homophobia.

There are lots of ways to read the quotation and it's perhaps dangerous to read it out of the context of its chapter. There is a lot more in the chapter. It is, after all, by Merton. The quotation is merely a beginning.

But one way is the way of the last sermon I ever preached back when I was a theist. We are beautifully and wonderfully made. Part of that is our sexuality, gender and our potential to love others generously and love ourselves just as generously. I still use the word god. It means something else now.

So a homosexual gives glory to god by being gay.

A transgender person gives glory to god by being transgender.

A cisgender heterosexual of course gives glory by being cisgender and heterosexual.

Some disagree, some with unintended words of violence to humanity disguised as claims of love, but to me that's like wanting a tree to be a different tree or a flamingo to be a sparrow. In my old theistic belief, god made you fabulous.

In any case it's hard to give glory to God, to reality, to each other, to complexity, to being, to a full dose of awestruck wonder, without self acceptance.

Yes. That's only part of the story. I know. I can hear the old religious voices in my head responding with a series of Buts. The old religion could put many buts in the way of radical self-acceptance. It took a lot to learn to respond to the buts.

I also know that acceptance is a beginning not a stagnation. So as I read about nonviolence this week I looked inside and found violence and I find it in the way I sometimes speak too. Love your enemy? Accepting both the nonviolence and violence within is a place to work with the shadows. Accepting both our purity and our messing up, our progress and our non-progress is an act of balance and we can all fall either way. I know I can but that's okay too. Even Blondin must have fallen many times before gaining the skill to attempt Niagara and Alex Honnold fell many times before ever seeking to climb El Capitan or Half Dome with no rope.

No. That's not being down on myself. It's recognition of complexity, a complexity we all have as humans and which a tree doesn't have. We all shine like stars and we all throw mud. Often in the same day, sometimes within the same sentence. That's our brains' evolution not the intention of any designer.

It's the examen, the noticing, the wanting to be more aware of what raises the many defences and fires the arrows. It's a difficult way. As I read of nonviolence in different traditions I realised again how much easier violence is in all the little ways in which it manifests. Is the dark side more powerful? (pauses for thought). "Quicker. Easier. More seductive." Perhaps the most wise response ever given by a puppet in a movie! We all know it to be true.

Sometimes it would be nice to be a tree in an ancient forest, not even aware perhaps of lumberjacks and industrial scale forest destruction. Better to be an ent though and have the ability to act when needed. I think I'd be a happy ent.

Sometimes it would be very nice not to care and to not have this temperament that won't let go. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to think more about soap operas and Love Island than to be a nontheist but still have a pile of Thomas Merton books to get through!

Things That Went Bump In The Night - Knocks On A Bedroom Door

 

One year ago today

Three years ago tonight

Three raps, urgent, loud, on my bedroom door.

And I wake. Hard, harsh intrusion.

Terror lie, listen for pinpricks, burglar creeps,

Or ghostsound in an upstairs hall.

Adrenaline outpourings to an unknown god.

That happens sometimes in this house. Knock, knock, knock. Who's there? No, don't ask. Just in case there's a reply from the estranged twin underworlds of crime and Hell.

After a while I can convince myself that nobody, alive or dead, was knocking on the door. It's the pipes. The wood. The roof. The expansion contraction of the cooling house. But I can't quite believe it and fear reigns, believing they will knock again that robber or dead child is there, that if I move I'll be attacked or worse, have to comfort the lost or experience their agony.

Then I have to look, like the second to die in the horror movie.

And that's why, approaching 4am, I'm sitting downstairs and every light in the house is on. Even now something in my mind can't quite believe in the rational explanation.

Gone are the days of confirmatory hallucinations. Only memory remains and it's the hate sunk eyes and fallen skin of the man in the sour ripped purple suit.

When I'm able to return to my bed, knowing I am alone, I'll still be listening. Fearing three more angry knocks on my door. Wishing I still had a god to deliver me from evil. Not that he ever did or ever could but the story comforted when I felt presences in Fawdon, in Crawley, and when I used to see the old woman who died in the Victorian college lift shaft or place-memory murder at the castle.

Where does hallucination end and vision begin?

When does contracting wood become a stranger at the bedroom door?

When does another world tumble into ours?

Don't ask those questions at 4am when hormoned fatigue is sovereign.

At 4am the answers may turn out to be here and now. At 4am phantom or Fantomas may be waiting for me on the stairs back to bed.

Six years ago today

One Hundred Million - Sanctuary for the Displaced

 

One hundred million. Chained by separation.

A first world problem.  A first world complaint.

Last night I received a message asking for responses to "Sanctuary" by lunchtime today.  That's tough for me.  Usually a word will wander round my head for a week and then some kind of response might fall out on a page.  Nevertheless thoughts arose as distractions in meditation and I wondered whether to write last night.  And that's the point at which Windows decided to update, scuppering my plan.  Isn't my privileged first world life difficult?!  So many problems and hardships and the immense stress of computer updates.  So many things to complain about.

This morning I've tried to write.  Most of the thoughts from last night are gone now, lost in a maze of peculiar dreams.  I had a spare hour to sit down with a keyboard and see what happened.  What happened is mostly not to do with sanctuary at all.  I honestly find my response this morning simplistic, almost banal.  One photograph from a refugee camp, one conversation with an asylum seeker, one shared moment of humanity tells much more than my words.

I have no experience of being displaced.  I have no experience of working with those who have been displaced.  Like most people I don't claim to have any answers to what is a growing problem that will almost certainly continue to grow globally especially as climate chaos increases.  I sincerely think the words of others have far more weight than anything I could write.  

Nevertheless, these are my words.  I'm posting them largely because it's an easy way to get them to the person who asked for them, definitely not because they carry any authority or any of the wisdom that comes from experience.  I might have refused to write at all except I know that the project that this may be a very small part of has refugees, asylum seekers, displaced people at the centre and it's organised by a charity that places the voices and experiences of such people at the apex of importance when discussing the issues, educating, campaigning and doing everything else it does in working in this area.

It's a privilege to be asked, not a divine right for a western white woman who may not be comparatively rich in her own country but who is fabulously wealthy compared to much of the world's population.  I've been watching a video series about life in South Sudan.  My life is carefree compared to the lives of South Sudanese people.  Windows may update.  I may only have an hour to spare this morning - and I'm running late.  But I don't have to walk miles through flood waters infested with venomous snakes just to find enough wood to sell that I can eat.  And I don't have to keep doing it if bitten.  Nobody is trying to drown me.  I have no answers for those people either.

................

They told us of Archimedes,

Inspiration, naked in a bathtub.

They told us how water is displaced

By a crown of power or by a person.

They never told us how power

Could displace a person.

One person flees a home

One hundred million displaced.

We scattered petals on the sand

For those lost, defeated in the desert,

Threw petals while crossing the Tyne

For those drowning each day.

One hundred million scattered

One hundred million scared

One hundred million seeking

The simplicity of what I take for granted.

Today, in freedom and peace, I ride a

Metro train to Tynemouth and smile at art.

Shatila refugees brightened our coast.

Palestinians from a short-term camp for

short-term problems outlasting a generation,

Two generations and still their numbers grow.

Five million now packed tight in deprivation

Ten million more subsisting beyond the camps.

I am closer to the one percent than to the

Two percent who fled from floods, governments,

Guns, paranoia, persecutions, and all

the crimes our species finds so easy to commit.

At least for now.

Hate-crimes increase while writers, religions,

The blind in spirit encourage the hate and

Government ministers threaten to strip human rights

From those like me.

One day we too may have to flee.

I am not the one hundred million seeking sanctuary,

Not the rainbow homed, torture scarred, homosexual.

Not one of those displaced internally,

Fighting for lives unwelcomed on their own land.

I cannot, must not speak for them,

Impose my safety on theirs in a land of Hassockfield IRC,

Forced evictions, and threats of deportation,

Or think my white western woman idealism

Has any clue what it is to run from bullets and brutality.

Yet I want for myself what they want for themselves.

Safety, acceptance, a place to call home, community,

Eyes of compassion not suspicion

The open hand not the fist

Freedom to be, to create, to worship or not worship.

We seek space to breathe deeply, to find healing,

To have our dignity enshrined in society and law.

Sanctuary is no complicated thing

It’s essence an agreement to find our commonalities

To see the beauty in our differences and

To accept that stranger and friend can be the same word.

I am not the one hundred million.

While they may want to return home,

I am already here.

They face wars, civil and international.

Violence, imprisonment, death, disease.

They cannot return.

I need only turn a key in a door

To be free in centrally heated peace.

Revamp slavery act to halt the tide of migrants

Quicker deportations to halt the surge of Albanian migrants

Channel migrant crisis out of control

The words of the front pages today.

Migrant. Migrant. Migrant.

No beds. No fresh air. No toilet doors. No compassion.

The words of a front page yesterday.

But how many of us care? Truly care?

Is it health, hopelessness, or merely selfish complacency

That means that even I do sweet FA?

One hundred million displaced

And I’m just another pointless keyboard warrior.

At least for now.

One day I too may be forced to act, campaign, offer myself.

No government can force compassion.

Perhaps it will flow like the petal strewn Tyne

Out of the depths of my own despair at the next headline.

There will be more headlines.

The one hundred million increase every single day.

Every one, more important than words in a newspaper,

More dignified than any thought or phrase on this page.