I'm packing now and sad to be doing so. Glad I will see my husband and friends in my adopted city soon but sad to be leaving the one place that feels like home...actually, there are two places now, but this is one of them. Another is an obscure little island in Scotland.
The reading went well and I wish I could work that momentum, stay here and see the project forward but instead must do the wrenching leaving thing again...and back to what resembles something like real life after a long flight. To a place that because of my accent will probably never feel like home, even if there are people there who are very, very dear to me and I know if I left that city, I would miss it too. This is what happens. Seven years in another country and you can't shake that place either. I think if I moved back here, where for seven years every time I've visited I've been on holiday, I would miss the other place and vice-versa. There is no re-do or undoing of experience. It's so strange that way.
I cried last night because of the stress now over of the reading, because I felt lonely afterwards without having my husband around to celebrate or just to play backgammon with and chill out or talk about what happened and all that. So I am a person torn by many competing demands and ideas and goals and desires. Or I could say it this way: I have a full life that spans continents and I am lucky for that. And both are true.
I should finish packing now, typing this is a way to delay that last step and go back to where I am a 'permanent resident.' but is it home? Especially if the refrigerator isn't working?
We'll see...maybe the refrigerator will be working and maybe I'll feel like I'm home. Life continues to surprise me. What will be unique is that my husband will be there when I get home and that hasn't happened in a long time since we both travel so much, he more than me. A home-coming therefore will happen, and for this I am grateful...
But still I feel sad...comings and goings for someone who was forced to move so many times when I was young and usually each move was to someplace worse...well, it's hard. So probably packing and a nap will be a good thing.
Next blog will happen where I live and not in transit most likely. Hmmmmm.
A series of anonymous rants, raves, dreams, nightmares, thoughts, beliefs, loves, hates and general stuff about living life on the edge of global capitalism being a transcendental existentialist artist writer bi-continental long term sober alcoholic addict and survivor of every known kind of abuse (like so many)…in other words: life with no windshield. Come on in, you’re welcome here whoever you are, there’s a cool wind blowing and you can feel Everything.
Welcome
This is an anonymous blog and you are invited to comment anonymously on it. You can subscribe if you wish or follow anonymously as well. This is to invite as much honesty as possible from me and you, an open sharing less concerned with performing than listening, communicating, opening to ourselves and each other.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
fear of exposure
Hi there folks. Tomorrow my work gets exposed, which feels like I'm getting exposed. Had a long rehearsal today and was scared and happy and scared again as I had to confront a more traditional approach to work I have developed over time into a far more experimental approach. People were game and there was willingness to see how it worked but a certain limitation in terms of understanding what 'it' and 'works' might mean. I'm playing around with some recognizable conventions so there is a temptation to read the whole thing within that frame, but it simply can't be read that way without delimiting it. On the other hand, it's a draft of a piece and so it does most likely need more work and right now I can't see what is mine to change and what is stuff that needs to change in the approach.
This is the great experiment in working with a director who is Not Me. Scary, scary, scary. And probably good, I guess. Jury's out and I'm sorry if I'm boring anyone who may be following this blog with this story but at least you know this part ends tomorrow. I also know I can take on someone else's POV, especially if it's critical of me, so the combo of the 'normal theatre' onslaught plus knowing people Of Stature will be at the reading, etc., etc. makes me nervous that I will cave and suddenly start trying to make the play Look More Normal...which is ridiculous of course since I couldn't do that if I wanted to...but still.
OK, so I need to go to sleep now as much work awaits in the morning including buying stuff for reception and hopefully getting up early enough for a much-needed AA meeting to ground me in the greater reality: it's just a reading!!!!
But still, because I believe in this kind of thing, if around 3pm Eastern Time you find yourself thinking of me and this event, please send along a kind thought or prayer or whatever works for you. Because I can use it. I can use the energy I feel from you already.
Love and good wishes....from my heart to yours.
This is the great experiment in working with a director who is Not Me. Scary, scary, scary. And probably good, I guess. Jury's out and I'm sorry if I'm boring anyone who may be following this blog with this story but at least you know this part ends tomorrow. I also know I can take on someone else's POV, especially if it's critical of me, so the combo of the 'normal theatre' onslaught plus knowing people Of Stature will be at the reading, etc., etc. makes me nervous that I will cave and suddenly start trying to make the play Look More Normal...which is ridiculous of course since I couldn't do that if I wanted to...but still.
OK, so I need to go to sleep now as much work awaits in the morning including buying stuff for reception and hopefully getting up early enough for a much-needed AA meeting to ground me in the greater reality: it's just a reading!!!!
But still, because I believe in this kind of thing, if around 3pm Eastern Time you find yourself thinking of me and this event, please send along a kind thought or prayer or whatever works for you. Because I can use it. I can use the energy I feel from you already.
Love and good wishes....from my heart to yours.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Lost My Address Book!
Eeeek! I got back to where I'm staying and can't find my address book that I have prided myself on keeping All These Years - well over 10 years...I used it on the train and must have let it slip out of my purse somehow and I am mortified. That plus finding out from my husband that our refrigerator isn't working even though I'm not even there is making me feel out of control. But the address book makes me sad.
I'm landing back in a place I love but no one is here. Feeling lonely and sad. Imagine in about an hour I will feel happy to have some space. Right now feel all turned around. Please say a prayer for my address book, it is a little piece of history and it is gone.
Maybe it means I'm supposed to let some of that history go, in fact I'm sure that's what it means if it means anything. My ex-husband's old details are still in there, in fact I got it soon after we split and still put him in as my emergency contact...since updated but crossed out from when it was.
Maybe it's time to let him go? Whaddya think? Meanwhile, if you know me, know that I don't have your number or address anymore and please send it!
Is it sad to be writing this on a blog? I don't know but grateful to have the outlet...even if it means showing you I get lonely and sad, which fills me with shame....even though all the rest of humanity feels these things too...it's OK for y'all but for me??? NOOOOO.
OK, so yes, obviously yes...
love to whoever reads this and to all the rest of you, too.
I'm landing back in a place I love but no one is here. Feeling lonely and sad. Imagine in about an hour I will feel happy to have some space. Right now feel all turned around. Please say a prayer for my address book, it is a little piece of history and it is gone.
Maybe it means I'm supposed to let some of that history go, in fact I'm sure that's what it means if it means anything. My ex-husband's old details are still in there, in fact I got it soon after we split and still put him in as my emergency contact...since updated but crossed out from when it was.
Maybe it's time to let him go? Whaddya think? Meanwhile, if you know me, know that I don't have your number or address anymore and please send it!
Is it sad to be writing this on a blog? I don't know but grateful to have the outlet...even if it means showing you I get lonely and sad, which fills me with shame....even though all the rest of humanity feels these things too...it's OK for y'all but for me??? NOOOOO.
OK, so yes, obviously yes...
love to whoever reads this and to all the rest of you, too.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
“I’m On The Bus”
This is the newest great line of the 21st Century said chirpily into cell (mobile) phones everywhere…so it it’s good enough for Everyone Else, it’s good enough for my blog. As I am in fact ‘on the bus’ – waiting before leaving for another bus station in another North Eastern city.
And here’s the miracle, my friends, I enjoyed visiting my parents (mother and step-father no. 3 – long story, if you don’t know it already, don’t stress even my long-term therapist can’t keep track of my family…You Are Not Alone…). But at first, was hard, with my mother (aka from shamanistic healing session below ‘the spider’). I could feel the sense of suffocation and was thinking, damn, damn, it didn’t stick, but then a mixture of reaching out to my friend who worked with me and then also beginning to speak finally. Speak my truth as we used to say in some remote decade since gone and it sounds quaint now post-deconstruction, etc…’truth’ what dat? Yeah, yeah yeah…I know all that I wrote a fucking PhD on that, but still…that’s what I did, so fuck ye who would be cleverer than thou…thank you.
OK, so enough griping. The good stuff. I could breathe, in situ. In the ‘heart of the beast’ which of course shrunk the beast because of course at this stage in my life ‘the beast’ is no longer my actual mother but an image of her I have created and old habits, etc. The miracle, which always works is that when my behaviour and outlook changes, miracle of miracles, others do too! Or even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t have the same effect on me.
So I was able to look through old 70s photos with her, tell her I couldn’t hack in anymore when I mentioned something from my childhood, she would top it with a story from hers (old pattern: my childhood sucked, but hers really sucked, to the tune of no memories from ages 8-13, etc…). And she heard me and I watched her stop herself from doing that after I said this. Also she heard something I said about my relationship with my ex-husband she had never heard before (and believe me I had said it before) that gave her an insight into her relationship with my last step-father (that’s the gay one…believe me, my one family could populate a Russian novel written by Oscar Wilde…oh that would be good wouldn’t it???).
One of the hardest things in dealing with my mother was her constant implied or overt justification for all of her current behavior due to the past, including towards me. And while it’s still there, I see a shift and this is great. And that’s because, most likely, there’s a massive shift in me…so the shamanistic healing work held even through this test, hurrah!
Also, I am very clear now that I made that little moss church on the rocks in Maine for the healing 40 years later. I know this sounds hooey, but I know it’s true. Time is not linear. It just isn’t. That is my experience.
I find the breathing difficulty coming back a little whilst writing this which is curious, maybe the fear, the fear of telling, of saying anything bad about my mother, which of course was so much a fear growing up I never even thought a bad thought about her – it was cut off at the pass…
Also the fear, especially because of her (as she called it) ‘aha moment’ about her last husband that I am subtly or not so subtly becoming, continuing to be her AA sponsor/therapist etc…I don’t want this role nor have signed up for it but as I grow and share stuff with her it affects her…good or bad? Not so sure. Leave that one up to the universe to sort out.
And now I’m on my way back to the Big City to have a public showing of some of my work. Scared and excited in equal measure about that. Did I mention yet I have no visible means of support? I feel so weirdly free and that probably has something to do with Not Having a Job. OK, so I have to do some work when I get back to my adopted Big City in The Old World, but I mean it’s not a real job…as a matter of fact at 47 I am proud to announce I have never had a real job. Should I be proud of this? Don’t know, but the artist part of me, i.e. the central part of my entire existence, is happy about this…however, the other part of me that knows I live in Anglo-Saxon cultures that simply do not acknowledge creative work as work is one of the reasons I feel this way.
I was able to discuss with my mother and stepfather the Big Writing Project, which I have embarked on – not this blog but something else, and that was good too. Because they got it to a large degree and my mother surprised me by getting a particularly complex bit and explaining it to my stepfather. Some of this blog may end up in that project, but not sure yet…so far leaving this as what it is – open, discussion-based not particularly ‘writerly’ – however, there’s a freedom here that may be useful too…not sure.
I think that large writing project, however, if it does get done and I sure as shit hope it does, may have to be published anonymously, though not sure about that either, as I want to work between fact and fiction in a certain way that publishing may be possible under my name. This whole issue of exposure is such a huge one for me. Growing up I had to be as invisible (except for certain accomplishments that were acceptable) as possible, certainly anything I actually felt or thought, which as mentioned above were so buried I didn’t even know what they were…So to even expose myself in this way – anonymously – seems like a huge risk but with my name, oy. That’s not just about the anonymous program stuff, that’s about visibility and risking it.
The piece that is happening on Monday, the person directing it will not be taking the risks I usually do, but I told him that’s OK as I know I grew into all that and did not go barreling down the road I’m on now all at once. I am curious too, very curious, to see how this will play out. My work will be visible on a different level to a different kind of audience and that’s scary and exciting as I’ve already said. Can it survive? Will it be OK? Is it OK to make people angry? Scared? Excited? Laugh?
All of that at once?
The trees are changing, leaves of bright yellow, orange and red…the dance of autumn perhaps my favorite time of year and one I usually miss in NE USA. So grateful to see it now.
I’m meeting someone soon who I met online in a meeting, on her first day sober. Never met her in person before. That was a year and a half ago, we ‘met’ when I wrote about how scared I was, and I was terrified, whilst writing the draft of my PhD (in May and it was due in July). I just shrieked in words much to the consternation of more orthodox AA folk who thought I Wasn’t Sharing the Message. However, this woman, who was attending her first meeting, thanked me for my honesty and she is still sober today…which leads me to a new thought, which I shared in a meeting yesterday: Honesty is Service.
Any alcoholic worth their salt who walks into an AA meeting for the first time will have his/her ear pricked up and ready to hear bullshit and upon hearing bullshit will think: bullshit and walk out. An alcoholic who hears the truth about his/her condition from another alcoholic – and this includes Feeling Everything and Total Fear, etc… will know she’s in the right place and maybe will stick around for me. Happy clappy talk about being free and happy said through clenched teeth aint gonna cut it. Not for a suffering alcoholic. But that’s me and my opinion…having said that, there probably are people who walk into an AA meeting and need to hear happy clappy talk and that’s what keeps that person sober. This is why it is So Good none of us, including me, runs the show…we’d ruin it with Our Big Ideas about What Everyone Needs… when we just don’t fucking know…
Thank you again God/dess for saving us from ourselves.
It’s lovely writing all this stuff to you, whoever you are who read this. I know some of you and don’t know others and there’s something amazing about that. Thank you for reading. I think I will sign off now and post this. Time to look at leaves and puffy clouds….
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Verdict
So, my verdict on the shamanic healing mentioned in second to last post, is that it has had a very good effect. I feel calmer, stronger and somehow more protected, and so far it’s holding. That is lovely.
I am on a train again, which seems to be my favorite place so far to write blog posts and it is blue blue blue outside and sunny, just perfect. Going up to visit my mother and step-father and go through the ‘70’s box’ of photos and writing and such. My mother called to say she just found a novella I hand wrote in 1980 (it was 1980 folks and I am So Old I went to school Before Computers…ahhhh, ooooohhh).
We are now at a stop that reminds me of the past, a Northeastern small city my father used to live and where I visited him in the 1970s before he moved out West. He brought me to science museums, which I loved and art galleries, which I did not love. How I ended up in the arts instead of as a marine biologist who would learn how to talk to dolphins and thereby save the world (the original plan circa 1977) is beyond me. I loved dinosaur bones, chemistry sets, chess and such. I also loved Barbie Dolls and playing games with my best friend (recently rediscovered) that involved animals, domesticated and wild, abused or pampered by owners…and in which we fought over who would play the victim. Pause there for a moment to allow that one in…hmmmm….
And so here I am in that small city, also the place I was supposed to go to college but instead chose another place, a weirder, smaller more idiosyncratic place to go to school, having had it with being the scholarship kid amongst the children of the rich and famous who would themselves become rich and famous (which for the record they have, except for the ones who have died prematurely of drug and alcohol overdoses and cancers…)…but of course the place I went also had its share of these folks and an inordinate amount of people who now rule Hollywood…I of course work in basements making experimental work, which is something you really should Only do if you have a trust fund, but do I? No, just the attitude. Fab.
OK, so the next small Northeastern city we are about to arrive at is where I was born, and we lived for a whopping 2 weeks before moving to a small town in another Northeastern state. It has a poetic name and sometimes makes me feel special. We are now moving past the requisite car junk yards that seem to live along with rivers, streams and abandoned warehouses near US railroad tracks. And power lines and stations. I was going to take the cheaper bus today but could not bear another bus ride so closely on the heels of another one, plus got my period today, which was a surprise as it’s on some kind of weird wheel of fortune peri-menopausal plan now…and I thought I was done, but No, it’s Baaaaaaaaaack. Hmpf.
I have had in recent times some sad issues with fertility and do not have any children, the most gruesome scene was the miscarriage the day after the wedding. That truly sucked. Flushing down a bunch of blood, realizing it might be a fetus, scared shitless in another beautiful place we were visiting for our honeymoon. Crying and crying and crying….that was after an operation to make it possible and etc., etc…and so now I thought, OK game over, period gone, let it go and now this. I am, if I’m honest, sick of hope when it comes to fertility, the great guilt factory that it is for we the childless women…those who cannot Conceive. Or have conceived and have had abortions and then Cannot conceive…and all that, all that, all that…anyone who has been around and around this fucking merrygoround knows of what I speak. Thank God/dess I have some Amazing friends with whom I can speak about all this honestly, who have their own issues with it and experiences, and strength and hope and sadness and grief and joy and secret senses of relief that dare not speak its name and then the sadness again and Knowing there is something to being a biological parent that must transcend so much and connect you with so much and yet also Knowing that somehow I can do that even so in some small way, even if it’s not the same…but knowing, knowing, knowing I am connected, deeply to all living things and beginning to really feel this in my bones and the immense relief of it all knowing it’s not All About Me. And Thank Christ for that! Or Whoever…
There is a wildness to the US countryside even in the Northeast that is unlike anything in Europe, which has beautiful, amazing places, but you can feel how Long people have been there cultivating it. Here, it feels no matter what it’s wild. A BBC correspondent in the US said something very smart, he said: to understand America and Americans and their relationship to God, you need to understand that it’s a first world country with third world weather…and I laughed and knew he was right. There were tornadoes recently in Queens for fucksake! Tornadoes! In the UK trains stop running when there are too many leaves on the line. It’s just different.
Ah, and I finally figured out how to answer comments on the blog, so we can finally have something more like a discussion. I’m really happy for comments to address any and all things brought up here or even new stuff.
As for something I don't want to talk about but probably should, I had a meeting with someone who is directing something of mine that will be shown publicly and it was good then hard then I realized he was kind of freaked out and then I got scared and then I had to figure out what was his fear and what was my own. He is realizing now I believe how complex this thing is and how it's not a 'normal play' but still wants me to make it that for him, which of course I can't. I also trust him to find something in it that is his, as I create things with maximum freedom for creators...However, I also had to admit I have my own fears - to myself - and allow him to have his - as I've been riding on train and doing my own thing I haven't felt so gripped by it and writing about it brings it closer in again, so will say only this now: his fear is his fear and I'm not in control of that. My fear is my fear and I can work with that...I say now a prayer for healing of my codependency that I need not surrender to the fears of others nor pretend my own fear is someone else's nor project my own fear onto someone else. And it's OK to care, even if it's scary...it's OK, it's OK, it's OK....
And as I said to a good friend earlier today, thank God he cares enough to be freaked out, that's a blessing. Someone who's just going through the paces would not care that much. Anyway, here's hoping this is one of those constructive challenges rather than (figurative) train wrecks! I believe it is, for the record, a constructive challenge, but my fear at the core of all this is: of course, of course I'm Just a Fraud and he Sees it...me and my 'so called experimental ideas' are rubbish, etc., etc....but now at least when this happens I bring up images of an internal warrior and a shield to protect me and realize that no matter how real seeming these voices are, they are not real, they are dumb cartoon animals with fake teeth and bad breath....old, old, old....
Which does not mean my stuff is perfect or I don't have anything to rewrite or to learn, but Does mean it's OK to trust 40 years plus of working in an art form and the ideas that have come from that... ya think? yeah, probably....
And to anyone reading this who knows who I am and have worked wth me in the past or now, let me salute you for your bravery as I realize when I am suddenly in the world of the 'more normal' theatre how brave we are and especially how brave you all are...we take risks that are actual risks and that means something in this risk-averse, life-averse world...it does, it does, it does...
So I salute you and anyone else reading this who takes real risks...and as Robert Rauschenberg famously said: "You can take risk without risk." Amen dear departed one, revered spiritual ancestor...Go with your gods....
And of course, just before posting this I get back an email from the director, which indicates he totally gets it...Me, of Little Faith!!!!
Monday, September 20, 2010
Design Change!
Hello,
As you have discovered if you are reading this, the design has shifted on the blog. It was an attempt to be able to comment on the blog myself, but that did not succeed...however, I have decided blue is better than fake books. Hmmm. Also, disturbingly, am finding myself checking the stats on the blog for how many people are reading it, etc. This is not good as it of course fuels all sorts of performance stuff but of course I can't decide 'not to care' either. Not sure what to do about this right now.
Very tired after going back and forth to see a very good friend through a difficult weekend, which I will not discuss as that is her story...however, I also got to see my favorite thing in the world: crashing waves thanks to Hurricane Igor. About to go and visit my parents on Tuesday, which will be interesting after the healing stuff done earlier regarding my mother (this step-father now is not part of the family bad times from the deep dark past...). Also have a public event coming up after that which involves my work and beginning to feel The Fear about that and hoping it will dissipate when I remember once again that I am a human being deserving of oxygen on this earth and such-like...don't have to earn my right to be here, etc., etc....This all takes me a depressingly long time to figure out.
OK, off to bed now and apologies for relatively uninteresting post, just wanted to let you know design change was on purpose. And to ask for any prayers, good thoughts and whatnot for putting my work into the public sphere.
As you have discovered if you are reading this, the design has shifted on the blog. It was an attempt to be able to comment on the blog myself, but that did not succeed...however, I have decided blue is better than fake books. Hmmm. Also, disturbingly, am finding myself checking the stats on the blog for how many people are reading it, etc. This is not good as it of course fuels all sorts of performance stuff but of course I can't decide 'not to care' either. Not sure what to do about this right now.
Very tired after going back and forth to see a very good friend through a difficult weekend, which I will not discuss as that is her story...however, I also got to see my favorite thing in the world: crashing waves thanks to Hurricane Igor. About to go and visit my parents on Tuesday, which will be interesting after the healing stuff done earlier regarding my mother (this step-father now is not part of the family bad times from the deep dark past...). Also have a public event coming up after that which involves my work and beginning to feel The Fear about that and hoping it will dissipate when I remember once again that I am a human being deserving of oxygen on this earth and such-like...don't have to earn my right to be here, etc., etc....This all takes me a depressingly long time to figure out.
OK, off to bed now and apologies for relatively uninteresting post, just wanted to let you know design change was on purpose. And to ask for any prayers, good thoughts and whatnot for putting my work into the public sphere.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Of Stink Bugs and Shamanism
As a pre-script to the below text written yesterday when I was riding the train, I want to add that the fears I discuss below are now completely gone and I feel amazingly good, strong and calm if a bit travel-sick…However, in honor of the spirit of this blog, as I’m trying to allow it to happen, I want the process I go through to be as raw as possible and not tied up in little: see what happened, how I solved it and so aren’t I cool type bows….However, it should also be noted yesterday there was a tornado out of nowhere apparently in a place where there are usually no tornadoes…
How do these two things you relate, you may well ask. Well in the state I was just in (literal that is though you could draw metaphorical conclusions too…), which is below the Mason-Dixon line and includes a lot of trees and heat, there are stinky bugs. These are bugs that apparently are imports from China that are not dangerous to humans, but eat crops, have no natural predators and when you try to kill them, they make a huge stink. They invade the house and look kinda creepy. We kill them by vacuuming them up which smells bad but is effective until the next lot shows up, the cockroaches of the south….
OK, so that was the bad part of seeing my oldest best friend in the world. On the flip side, she is a modern day shaman, which when I first heard this made me want to run screaming into the hills. My father, who died this year, fashioned himself to be a Toltec wizard and smoked a lot of pot, as did his partner, who said that’s how she connected with her ancestors (she is half-Native American) but to this outside (and enforced) observer seemed to do nothing more than add to her bi-polar disorder and recovery from other forms of addiction. My father had been aphasic from a stroke and apparently found a way to demand pot every day for years before the massive heart attack that killed him in January. His partner was afraid she had turned him to a pothead. I assured here that train had left the station years earlier, which relieved her no end. I was not sure if that was a good or bad thing but couldn’t stand watching her take the blame for Everything.
My father also worked for a self-styled New Age prophet type, who had spirit guides and the works, and the whole thing just frankly – especially uncut and when it involves websites, cassettes and expensive workshops - gave me the creeps.
But here was this friend of mine, who I was reconnecting with over 30 years later, believing in something like this stuff (thought a seemingly more grounded and less evangelical version), not trying to make me believe what she said and also grounded in 12-step recovery, which made me want to trust her. Eventually, after much discussion, I asked her to take me on one of her journeys, both expectant and scared shitless and skeptical…and hopeful.
My experience, which would be incredibly hard to describe in a blog, was quite powerful and gave me a sense of freedom from some old ghosts or ‘attachments’ as she called them. The people that came up were mostly abusers from the deep dark past and feeling where they had ‘attached’ to my body and expelling them was both scary and a huge relief. The sacred space I described for us was a place we shared in childhood, but one in which I had created a kind of church out of moss and lichen on top of ancient rock beneath old pine trees even before I met her, maybe, I thought afterward, in anticipation of this moment?
This is added on today: the images from this journey I’ve decided are important to share: large snakes coming out of my body from all orifices and digestive tracts – this was my first step-father who sexually abused me, a massive spider detached from the front of me with great effort and fear – this was the attachment of my mother who turned into a smaller spider and had to be shooed away many time. Other vaguer similar images to do with my father and sexual abuse and many ropes around me from the babysitter who thought I was evil, held me hostage and almost killed me. Cutting those ropes once and for all and having to shoo her away too, my friend seeing her like a cartoon witch from Bugs Bunny, which made us both laugh. Finding a shield to protect me after like blue energy and an internal warrior like Arjuna. This has shifted to dancing women inside and out, quite beautiful really. I’m saying all this because it happened and I believe I am beginning to feel a profound feeling of freedom and release. My friend predicts digestive issues may vanish, and before she said that I began to suspect the same thing. Will see…
And then, after all this when I woke up in the middle of the night, and probably because of my nascent fear of this kind of thing, I felt Total Fear. I am still now battling between believing this was one of the best things I ever did and fear about what it means. I have a highly developed if low-concept sense of a power greater than myself and this is sacred to me so the idea that anything could supplant that is terrifying to me. On the other hand, so is taking care of myself, for real and in some ways that’s what this offers, a way to do that. But because I allowed Someone Else to help guide me to this place (places I asked to go I must add), I fear it, like what if now I can be manipulated in horrible ways, etc.?
My instinct is that this fear is old patterning from my childhood as this friend does not give me a sense of creepiness even if she, like me, is imperfect. On the other hand, my fear is an old one: did I trust too much too quickly?
On the other other hand, when I was first in AA an Al-Anon I thought ‘what if this is a cult’? And the fear came in…but the revolving leadership and lack of money involved, etc., etc. let me go through this fear and reach the other side. This is trickier because it involves one other person and her belief system, some of which I totally get and some of which frankly I don’t. I know her motivation is loving and our connection is deep and heart-felt even after all these years - that I feel deeply, but some part of me remains fearful. On the other hand, I had amazing dreams, after I let myself sleep, and a lovely talk with my friend before I left.
One dream was of a watch with a tiny bird next to it that was smaller than the watch – time flies I wondered when I woke up…another of two young women being resuscitated back to life by two men, both of whom I knew and me feeling moved to tears because somehow I knew I had taught the men how to do that and these young women would live.
A large crow circled the train station where we waited for my train to take me back to the Big City from the rural areas…Please don’t run screaming when I tell you that I was told my ‘power animal’ is a crow and so was my father’s. My friend tells me crows speak between the spirit world and our world. I never know what to make of these ideas but I did feel: nice crow, cool. And a kind of connection.
Love love me do…you know I love you…I’ll always be true so ple-e-ease, love me do…
So, the question is: do I trust my best friend from childhood or inchoate fear, some of which feels like it might be coming from the very old ghosts we cut the chords with in the journey we did together?
I believe I will know the answer to this question as time goes on and have time to feel through the results of this incredibly powerful work. Do I feel more or less fearful in general? Does the idea of an ‘inner warrior’ and the experience of it - so strong last night - last? In other words, as I judged AA in the end, does it work? Yes. Good.
Speaking of which, walking into an AA meeting that looks like you walked into the Wrong Bar is such a trip. I walked into one such meeting with an African-American friend and as we opened the doors into the usual fluorescent-lit church basement I saw a sea of older white male faces that looked like they might still have a grudge against the North for the Civil War, I doubted my sanity. But as usual, the old ‘hillbilly’ (not my term but the locals own I hasten to add lest I seem horrifically un-PC God fucking forbid) who told his story sounded just like me, got sober a month after I did in 1987 and had an amazing sense of humor, grace plus lilting Southern accent. This was followed by an older black guy sharing back, who had few teeth but whose heart and brain were in tact, and another large man about the kind of raw pain that you only hear in AA meetings – and sometimes SIA (survivors of incest anonymous for you who are not the People of the Acronym) – but only in AA is the person definitely going through this pain without the anesthesia - and then there I am with a bunch of people (in my PC way I had defined not as hillbillies but as ‘old coots’ – so much better don’t you think??) who if I’d walked into their bar to have a drink (esp. with African American friend in tow) would have been, let us say charitably – rude, are embracing, loving, amazing and ask me to speak – the city slicker with the PBS accent. And then swarm around my friend and I afterward saying how great it was to hear us and chatting our common Recovery Language…which, yes, can be unbelievably cliché ridden, almost unbearably so, with the weird uncomfortable-if-you-have-a-fancy-education fact that the clichés are 99% of the time True.
So there I was a foreigner in most ways welcomed in every way and grateful once again to be part of a fellowship that is so embracing to everyone who stumbles (and usually the first entrance is a stumble if not an incredibly haughty attempt to slink into the back clinking rings and heels thinking I am not like these people, these people Are Losers….etc….whilst puking and/or shaking so much the coffee in styrofoam cup ends up on floor as you smile tightly at the person next to you hoping they won’t give you their fucking phone number and by the way why does everyone look so psychotically Happy???) in the door having tried everything on earth before this sorry church basement where you have the best (if not only) chance you’ll ever have to find a Power Greater than Yourself that can help you stop killing yourself.
But hey, we’re just a bunch of losers, so ignore me…
I’m on the train again whilst writing this and looking out the window seeing large bodies of water always makes me happy as where I live normally in a Foreign Country is land-locked and the only place that I feel entirely safe like ever is near large bodies of water and the occasional stupid church basement (not all as not all meetings are safe or seem safe). However, outside it’s raining and raining and raining…but from inside of a train, it feels safe except now we are driving by those horrendous industrial sites that do God Only Knows What that allows us to Eat Chemicals, Breathe Shit, Buy Crap and Feel ‘Good’ because ‘You Deserve It’….but once again I digress…
Oh and by the way, I can’t figure out how to comment on my own blog, as ‘Blogger’ is being really weird about that so please know I love reading your comments, they are moving to me and I hope this can be a safe space for anyone and everyone to allow in the dark to scare away the dark…or simply bring in sunshine if that’s where you are that day. I am pleased with the affirmation already received and hope these musings, in whatever form they take can be healing not only for me, but others as well…and once again, I am happy for you to use the comments section to share your own thoughts, feelings, demons, angels, ghosts, dreams and nightmares…as they all make us human…
Finally a Sufi poem, which moves me and relates to stink bugs, shaman and the whole human life thing in between:
This being human is a guest
house. Every morning
a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and attend them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- Rumi
Be well my Friends….
How do these two things you relate, you may well ask. Well in the state I was just in (literal that is though you could draw metaphorical conclusions too…), which is below the Mason-Dixon line and includes a lot of trees and heat, there are stinky bugs. These are bugs that apparently are imports from China that are not dangerous to humans, but eat crops, have no natural predators and when you try to kill them, they make a huge stink. They invade the house and look kinda creepy. We kill them by vacuuming them up which smells bad but is effective until the next lot shows up, the cockroaches of the south….
OK, so that was the bad part of seeing my oldest best friend in the world. On the flip side, she is a modern day shaman, which when I first heard this made me want to run screaming into the hills. My father, who died this year, fashioned himself to be a Toltec wizard and smoked a lot of pot, as did his partner, who said that’s how she connected with her ancestors (she is half-Native American) but to this outside (and enforced) observer seemed to do nothing more than add to her bi-polar disorder and recovery from other forms of addiction. My father had been aphasic from a stroke and apparently found a way to demand pot every day for years before the massive heart attack that killed him in January. His partner was afraid she had turned him to a pothead. I assured here that train had left the station years earlier, which relieved her no end. I was not sure if that was a good or bad thing but couldn’t stand watching her take the blame for Everything.
My father also worked for a self-styled New Age prophet type, who had spirit guides and the works, and the whole thing just frankly – especially uncut and when it involves websites, cassettes and expensive workshops - gave me the creeps.
But here was this friend of mine, who I was reconnecting with over 30 years later, believing in something like this stuff (thought a seemingly more grounded and less evangelical version), not trying to make me believe what she said and also grounded in 12-step recovery, which made me want to trust her. Eventually, after much discussion, I asked her to take me on one of her journeys, both expectant and scared shitless and skeptical…and hopeful.
My experience, which would be incredibly hard to describe in a blog, was quite powerful and gave me a sense of freedom from some old ghosts or ‘attachments’ as she called them. The people that came up were mostly abusers from the deep dark past and feeling where they had ‘attached’ to my body and expelling them was both scary and a huge relief. The sacred space I described for us was a place we shared in childhood, but one in which I had created a kind of church out of moss and lichen on top of ancient rock beneath old pine trees even before I met her, maybe, I thought afterward, in anticipation of this moment?
This is added on today: the images from this journey I’ve decided are important to share: large snakes coming out of my body from all orifices and digestive tracts – this was my first step-father who sexually abused me, a massive spider detached from the front of me with great effort and fear – this was the attachment of my mother who turned into a smaller spider and had to be shooed away many time. Other vaguer similar images to do with my father and sexual abuse and many ropes around me from the babysitter who thought I was evil, held me hostage and almost killed me. Cutting those ropes once and for all and having to shoo her away too, my friend seeing her like a cartoon witch from Bugs Bunny, which made us both laugh. Finding a shield to protect me after like blue energy and an internal warrior like Arjuna. This has shifted to dancing women inside and out, quite beautiful really. I’m saying all this because it happened and I believe I am beginning to feel a profound feeling of freedom and release. My friend predicts digestive issues may vanish, and before she said that I began to suspect the same thing. Will see…
And then, after all this when I woke up in the middle of the night, and probably because of my nascent fear of this kind of thing, I felt Total Fear. I am still now battling between believing this was one of the best things I ever did and fear about what it means. I have a highly developed if low-concept sense of a power greater than myself and this is sacred to me so the idea that anything could supplant that is terrifying to me. On the other hand, so is taking care of myself, for real and in some ways that’s what this offers, a way to do that. But because I allowed Someone Else to help guide me to this place (places I asked to go I must add), I fear it, like what if now I can be manipulated in horrible ways, etc.?
My instinct is that this fear is old patterning from my childhood as this friend does not give me a sense of creepiness even if she, like me, is imperfect. On the other hand, my fear is an old one: did I trust too much too quickly?
On the other other hand, when I was first in AA an Al-Anon I thought ‘what if this is a cult’? And the fear came in…but the revolving leadership and lack of money involved, etc., etc. let me go through this fear and reach the other side. This is trickier because it involves one other person and her belief system, some of which I totally get and some of which frankly I don’t. I know her motivation is loving and our connection is deep and heart-felt even after all these years - that I feel deeply, but some part of me remains fearful. On the other hand, I had amazing dreams, after I let myself sleep, and a lovely talk with my friend before I left.
One dream was of a watch with a tiny bird next to it that was smaller than the watch – time flies I wondered when I woke up…another of two young women being resuscitated back to life by two men, both of whom I knew and me feeling moved to tears because somehow I knew I had taught the men how to do that and these young women would live.
A large crow circled the train station where we waited for my train to take me back to the Big City from the rural areas…Please don’t run screaming when I tell you that I was told my ‘power animal’ is a crow and so was my father’s. My friend tells me crows speak between the spirit world and our world. I never know what to make of these ideas but I did feel: nice crow, cool. And a kind of connection.
Love love me do…you know I love you…I’ll always be true so ple-e-ease, love me do…
So, the question is: do I trust my best friend from childhood or inchoate fear, some of which feels like it might be coming from the very old ghosts we cut the chords with in the journey we did together?
I believe I will know the answer to this question as time goes on and have time to feel through the results of this incredibly powerful work. Do I feel more or less fearful in general? Does the idea of an ‘inner warrior’ and the experience of it - so strong last night - last? In other words, as I judged AA in the end, does it work? Yes. Good.
Speaking of which, walking into an AA meeting that looks like you walked into the Wrong Bar is such a trip. I walked into one such meeting with an African-American friend and as we opened the doors into the usual fluorescent-lit church basement I saw a sea of older white male faces that looked like they might still have a grudge against the North for the Civil War, I doubted my sanity. But as usual, the old ‘hillbilly’ (not my term but the locals own I hasten to add lest I seem horrifically un-PC God fucking forbid) who told his story sounded just like me, got sober a month after I did in 1987 and had an amazing sense of humor, grace plus lilting Southern accent. This was followed by an older black guy sharing back, who had few teeth but whose heart and brain were in tact, and another large man about the kind of raw pain that you only hear in AA meetings – and sometimes SIA (survivors of incest anonymous for you who are not the People of the Acronym) – but only in AA is the person definitely going through this pain without the anesthesia - and then there I am with a bunch of people (in my PC way I had defined not as hillbillies but as ‘old coots’ – so much better don’t you think??) who if I’d walked into their bar to have a drink (esp. with African American friend in tow) would have been, let us say charitably – rude, are embracing, loving, amazing and ask me to speak – the city slicker with the PBS accent. And then swarm around my friend and I afterward saying how great it was to hear us and chatting our common Recovery Language…which, yes, can be unbelievably cliché ridden, almost unbearably so, with the weird uncomfortable-if-you-have-a-fancy-education fact that the clichés are 99% of the time True.
So there I was a foreigner in most ways welcomed in every way and grateful once again to be part of a fellowship that is so embracing to everyone who stumbles (and usually the first entrance is a stumble if not an incredibly haughty attempt to slink into the back clinking rings and heels thinking I am not like these people, these people Are Losers….etc….whilst puking and/or shaking so much the coffee in styrofoam cup ends up on floor as you smile tightly at the person next to you hoping they won’t give you their fucking phone number and by the way why does everyone look so psychotically Happy???) in the door having tried everything on earth before this sorry church basement where you have the best (if not only) chance you’ll ever have to find a Power Greater than Yourself that can help you stop killing yourself.
But hey, we’re just a bunch of losers, so ignore me…
I’m on the train again whilst writing this and looking out the window seeing large bodies of water always makes me happy as where I live normally in a Foreign Country is land-locked and the only place that I feel entirely safe like ever is near large bodies of water and the occasional stupid church basement (not all as not all meetings are safe or seem safe). However, outside it’s raining and raining and raining…but from inside of a train, it feels safe except now we are driving by those horrendous industrial sites that do God Only Knows What that allows us to Eat Chemicals, Breathe Shit, Buy Crap and Feel ‘Good’ because ‘You Deserve It’….but once again I digress…
Oh and by the way, I can’t figure out how to comment on my own blog, as ‘Blogger’ is being really weird about that so please know I love reading your comments, they are moving to me and I hope this can be a safe space for anyone and everyone to allow in the dark to scare away the dark…or simply bring in sunshine if that’s where you are that day. I am pleased with the affirmation already received and hope these musings, in whatever form they take can be healing not only for me, but others as well…and once again, I am happy for you to use the comments section to share your own thoughts, feelings, demons, angels, ghosts, dreams and nightmares…as they all make us human…
Finally a Sufi poem, which moves me and relates to stink bugs, shaman and the whole human life thing in between:
This being human is a guest
house. Every morning
a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and attend them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- Rumi
Be well my Friends….
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
God help me....
God help me, I’ve started blogging. Let me explain why as a member of the last of the analogue generations I am doing this, more to myself probably than anyone reading this, who presumably also blogs and says to blog as a verb, as I am, as we all do now as if this were something human beings have done for millennia when in fact it’s so recent and yet so ubiquitous that it takes on an eerie sense of inevitability when it is anything but….
So this preamble answers the question already, doesn’t it? I can whitter on and on and on and for the rest of my writing that I do, that’s not necessarily a good thing. It might not be a good thing here either, but in the world of ‘blogging’ no one can stop me, no one has to read me and like so there.
I am writing to experiment also with anonymity in public, not because I think I’m so important you can’t know who I am or that I am particularly mysterious but because I have a horrible tendency, already visible from the above writing to perform and I am hoping eventually I can stop and if I’m not performing, or at least performing a certain persona I usually associate with myself, perhaps I can find out about other parts of myself and the world in general that would not normally surface if I attached My Name to it.
So it’s a reality project really…a strange thing to embark on in a virtual world, I acknowledge and yet, and yet, and yet…perhaps this is what is on offer here. Perhaps this is the good bit in that which I usually disparage especially when any of my friends try futily to get me onto that demon spawn: Facebook. That place wherein everyone not only hands over the last shreds of their privacy but can ‘friend’ and ‘unfriend’ each other in an horrifying replication of junior highschool as if once was not Bad Enough….but I digress…
From what exactly do I digress? See this is another thing about ‘blogging’ that intrigues me, there appears to be no need to stay on point or even have a point and for that I am grateful…and the anonymity thing, for me, is to stay on this track and hopefully avoid self-promotion but instead offer a service to myself and God/dess help you anyone else who is reading this of a life being examined, felt, shown and turned inside out in public-private.
Why?
This is the question that has stopped me from blogging for years. And the only reason I have right now is that a friend of mine is doing her version of this and I admire her and her blog for it. She has some specific stuff she’s working through but that doesn’t keep her from digressing, which seems as important as any other part of the desire ‘to blog’.
I will think of this as a fictional-factual place…something in between where reality may sneak in, as reality is of course both real, as in tangible and also about the multiple stories we tell ourselves without which we would never have come up with the word ‘reality’ in the first place.
Read recently in the NY Times I think about certain tribes of people that exist still with no sense of ‘solipsistic’ direction and instead speak of north south east and west and if they are referring to north, and it’s behind them, they will point to themselves, not to refer to themselves but to point north as if they are invisible or at least irrelevant to this idea somewhere else. Can you imagine? No, me neither, which is exactly why I hope those people don’t get wiped out to make more McDonald’s Happy Meals, though I imagine in this day and age that’s just too fucking much to ask.
Sigh.
Anyone who does know me will already know who I am by what I have just written above. Hi there! You’re right, it’s me!
I can’t point to myself as if I’m invisibile and mean ‘north’. I blog now. I blog therefore I am, etc. God only knows how many people have written that last line, ah well…
Did I mention, I’m trying not to edit, so all my dumb ass ideas will come out too. So any thought I have that I’m such a smarty pants will disappear as well. This would be all for the best, as I imagine, if you have read this far, you will agree.
It’s any identity project/reality project…but the issue of identity is as above so relative to the culture that it’s political and philosophical too, because it is, it all is, I still believe that after all these years of feminisim, post-feminism, post-post-post feminisim, etc..ad nauseum, the personal is political. Because how could it not be?
It’s in the way you walk
It’s in the way you talk
The way you sing off key…..
You can’t take that away from me….
This is actually how I write stuff, plays mostly, so at any point this may turn into a stage text with voices and stuff
And then it may end up in a play, so like don’t use this shit without asking, OK?
I’m about to go see a friend of mine I haven’t seen in 34 years. She was my best friend in grammar school and we lost each other in our teens and just found each other recently. Does that happen without the internet? I’m not so sure. She lives in an unlikely place and I am on the train to that place. I am returning to the scene of the crime. Not to her place but intermediary points. And she was there, she was the witness to my childhood, which was also the scene of many crimes. More than any child should have to endure but that a depressing amount of children do.
You know the drill, alcoholism, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, the whole fun family of childhood horror, wherein as the child you decide the parents can’t be wrong (and in my case there were many parents) and so You are wrong. This is not new, many have said it, many have experienced it. It is mentioned here because it’s true, or as true as anything is true and the water I see next to me outside the train window is true or the fact that you who may be reading this are alive, alive enough to be reading words on a screen with a blinking cursor for company and me, your new anonymous friend.
Anonymous too because yes I am also a sober alcoholic and alanonic and all that too. And we are supposed to remain anonymous, not that anyone does anymore, but as it’s in our traditions, I like to hew to it, because it keeps me out of the drama-rama pool, though sometimes I’d love to break that anonymity in public, I will tell you yes I would…
But, no. 23 years of life that exists thanks to belonging to an anonymous fellowship of people who make no money and have no leaders and give you your life, money and family back. Not gonna mess with it. And for any of you who think I’m in a cult, see above. If it’s a cult, it’s a bad cult – no one makes money, no one is the leader and it gives you your life, your money and your family and friends back and the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. I’ll stick with the crappy cult.
Are you with me? Still?! Wow, I’m so impressed if so, and you’re probably a friend either known or soon to be known.
Tell me tell me tell me tell me do about your life, the way you see things and if you can point through yourself to ‘north’. There is so much more to heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophies….
Basta for now…here it goes into the virtual wilds….anyone out there????
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