My brother called me this morning and we talked for a long time. He lives in Sydney and calls me while he walks along the bayfront in a park near his house, a place I walked when I visited him, so it's easy to picture him doing it. I guess it was really early in his day today. We got on to some unplanned subjects but it followed from my journalling today and was deeply gratifying. We generally have a lot to work through from our shared experiences, and I think we heal each other most of the time. He's skilled. We're not afraid of each other. He's one of the few people I can say I truly trust, and it's good to feel that.
The things I have been bringing to the surface are emotions that are part of the grieving many of us are doing, in my case, mostly shame and guilt from the past. I seem to have a deep bowl there. I feel like it is useful to see what comes up in my memory, feel that emotion as clearly as I can, and write it down. My journalling is super useful to me as I know I don't lie to myself in there. No one reads it, and it's not meant to be shared, so I just ramble around being myself and then I rarely even reread it, though I do save it. I have piles and piles of the journals. I don't hold back.
Generally I find my journals too painful to read again, but some of the really old ones have historical information that is good to know, Early on (I've been doing it since about age 19 or 20) I noticed that I repeated myself a lot and that helped me face some things that were hard to face, for instance relationships I needed to extract myself from. If you keep telling yourself something you should give yourself a listen. I sitll remember many things I wrote to myself in my younger days, and they pop up in my memory as lessons for today. One that came up yesterday after I got my little delivery from a kind friend was "Outlaw self-denial; it's rarely necessary." That came from some psychologist I read a book by, and I keep trying to tell that to myself. It has a couple of levels, the giant subject of denial in general, one of my most powerful practices, and the physical self-denial of depriving myself. Deprivation is one of my main organizing themes that has worked through my life and I know I keep mentioning it.
My brother today suggested some AA techniques and I will give them a try, since the goal with those is usually some type of self-forgiveness or at least progress and that would be good for me with some of these examinations that repeat. I see this work as a kind of ascending spiral, in that each time you come back to something, you kind of get to a new level of it, hopefully a higher level I guess. Anyway, I feel the need for a little goal-setting within this period that is so productive in some ways and so unproductive in others.
Day after day, I am not getting to the tasks I assign myself, the physical ones like exercise and cleaning and printing things and volunteer tasks I have taken on. All of them will need to be done at some point (cleaning is endless of course, and exercise is just maintenance and the avoidance of it has its own consequences.) I read an article that described this non-productivity as a trauma reaction and that seems true. You can't see much point in cleaning your desk when a tsunami of grief could be lapping at your yard.
If it were sunnier I would be out in the yard but we're looking at a week of rainy cold weather again. In one sense that is discouraging but in another, I welcome it. I feel like all this writing and thinking and feeling and sharing of the feelings is good for me. From the reaction of some readers I think it might be good for others as well. Regardless, I am compelled to continue it and we'll see how it goes.
I find I don't really want reassurance from others, or even acknowledgement, with most of it. Sometimes I want a pat on the back or maybe I want a little direction...my brother gave me some ideas and I found that worked for me. My son suggested a film scene that resonated...I plan to watch the film later this weekend if I can get it on the library streaming services. I have been getting great value from Facebook these days with all the things people are posting and sharing, things that inspire or soothe, even things that horrify and challenge. I am welcoming all of it as long as I keep a safe distance.
I have noticed for a long time that I like to keep people a little bit in the middle distance in general. True and close intimacy brings up so much noise and confusion that I have to take it in small doses. I function pretty well in this internet world where it is all on my own terms and I can turn it off and walk away. In my normal life that I'd like to resume, I had the one peak Jell-O Art process that involved months of fairly intimate collaboration and then an explosion of emotional release with so much approval and shared delight that it lasted in an overwhelming way for a couple of weeks, or anyway, hours. Sigh.
Then I would have Saturdays at Market, one day a week so full of every kind of emotion and sensation that it would take several days before and after to roll with it. Opening Day was supposed to be next Saturday. I think that is going to be a difficult day. I will be home alone and glad to be so, but it will just feel like loss. Unretrievable and deferred potential, uncertainty and fear. I will not be the only one "going through stuff." There will be hundreds of people feeling that loss. We'll have a community in that, a community set aside at least temporarily, some of which we hope to salvage and piece back together. Nobody knows what it will be like to put it back together or when we will get to do it. And Fair is the same for me as Jell-O, a huge and sustained effort with many levels of intimate collaboration, and then that explosion. We might have it, and we might not.
The waters have not crashed over us yet. We have not yet been fully swept away, with the attendant loss of loved ones and opportunities that will not return. We sit in dread. We can't do our work and we can't sit still. We are trying to rise, every day, to this challenge and do our best. We are in trauma.
Yet, we are still together, finding new ways to be that and new people to love. We are busy inspiring and feeding each other. Some of it tastes bitter and some fills us up with sweetness. We gaze into the waters, and what will rise, we don't quite know. We don't want to find out, yet, we have no choice.
We do know it will find its level and it will accept whatever we throw into it, our tears, our fears, our joys and the detritus we no longer need or want. Water is cleansing. Washing our hands is our current metaphor.
What we are experiencing has a very clean aspect to it, raw, but real. This is not the way our society generally functions. We are used to a ton of artifice and shiny obscuration of what is really happening. Nobody I know is still seeing that glamour. Everyone I know is seeing through things right down to the core.
I believe we will use this power. We will gain from it the way to reclaim our planet and our souls. We have to be patient, and then not fool ourselves into trying to recreate the false shiny. We want, as we have always wanted, the real.
I find your honesty and your ability to describe the nature of things, seen and unseen, painful and joyful, very moving and uplifting. I feel hopeful. Thank you.
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