I am non-existant.
I am an echo, a relic of an afterimage.
I am the last exhale.
Question: Is using “I am” and “non-existant” in the same sentence an oxymoron?
More: Do you notice the void I left behind? Do you remember I used to exist?
.
Thus, I do not exist. Not even to myself.
And perhaps, I never did.
Who was it, then, who drifted through your soul?
A psych-folk version of an old Appalachian classic:
An interesting version with throat-singing:
Oh yeah, and liars. Had enough of them. Ahuh
October…Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
On the very day of the second operation on my breast because they didn’t get clear margins the first time, my sister was re-diagnosed with her brain tumour. We did the same Look Good Feel Better class together. We started chemo within days of each other. Last year we did the Relay for Life together, as she, ironically, lead the Survivors’ Walk. We cried together, we held each other, we talked about our mortality and death the way we couldn’t with anyone else.
Losing Natalie is not ‘just’ about losing a sister, it’s about everything we shared on the cancer road these last three years. Along with grieving the impending loss of Nat, I fight some pretty serious demons which are all caught up in it, that cannot be separated from it, as I am not yet in remission myself. To say I am terrified of ending up where Nat is now is a giant of an understatement. Of all the people in the world, Natalie is the one who would understand. Tragic irony. For me, October will forever not only be Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but also Brain Tumour Awareness Month.
Sisters in blood and cancer.
My sister is dying. The end has started. It won’t be long.
Get me out of here.
An old song. A great song. A true song.
So I’ll leave the ways of making me be
what I really don’t want to be,
leave the ways that are making me love
what I really don’t want to love.
I am having a life-long love affair with Nick Drake 🙂
3.20 am and my gallbladder has been keeping me awake, so I have decided to put the time to good use.
I have a soul-mate who always brings me back to centre. Even though our busy lives and children may keep us from being in contact as often as we’d like, even when we haven’t spoken for a while, she’s always there, sometimes through little facebook statuses, through thought, through an occasional journal post, or through special books she has sent me, to remind me to ‘come home’ to the soul, to peace, to where authenticity sits.
One of these ‘means’ is a book written by Thomas Moore (which I have written about before) called ‘Original Self. Living with paradox and originalty/authenticity’. Whenever I’m feeling somewhat lost, like I need to find signposts to find my way home, this book does it for me. Balm for the soul. Thomas Moore offers up 50 meditations (or essays) that you can dip in to in any order. For once, I’ve decided to start at the beginning and work my way through.
In his essay ‘Honor the seasons of nature and the rhythms of your life’, Moore says that in our contemporary lives we, in many ways, no longer live with the cycles and rhythms of nature and our souls. What really resonates with me is his use of musical metaphors to talk about the soul life. He says:
Accustomed to control, we forget that our physical and emotional life is musical, with all sorts of sensations, fantasies, and feelings coming and going like the flighty motifs of fugues, sonatas and canons.
Estranged from the music of our own lives, we endure our ordinary days with existential anxiety.
We are so caught up with our external, ‘every day’ lives, we lose contact with the musicality of our soul life, and feel ourselves disconnected in some way, hollow, without meaning. We live disconnected with Earth, as Gerald Manly Hopkins says in his sonnet ‘God’s Grandeur’ “the soil/Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod“.
Moore exhorts us to simply be present in the now, to life, but also warns that “living in the moment can become a moralistic principle, a burden rather than a way to intensify life.” It’s okay, he says, when the soul drifts into daydreams and memories, these are cycles of the soul, unlike the obsessing over the past or worrying about the future–things of the ego. Yes, we all have egos, but our egos needn’t ‘run the show’.
A good dancer or musician allows the music to take over, becomes absorbed in the complex harmonies and tempos, and is the servant of the materials at hand. The secret of a soul-based life is to allow someone or something other than the usual self to be in charge.
Ah, those memories of blissfully dancing by myself in a dark corner of a nightclub, just totally giving myself over to the music. Or all of those teenage hours spent with (not at) the piano, totally immersed in the emotion of music. Surrending to the soul. Aside–here’s a nice little piece of synchronicity–I am currently reading another non-fiction book by an Australian pianist called ‘Piano Lessons’, in which she talks about her teacher, and, well, of course, the lessons, and those terrible teenage years and trying to fit in, yet failing because of being ‘too smart’ and too musical. And oh, how it takes me back.
We are nature, and to be profoundly in sync with the seasons and the weather is an effective way to be in tune with our deeper selves. Obeying the sun, regarding the moon, imitating the plants, moving with the winds, we find that elusive sense of self that we thought was only interior and not part of the world.
More synchronicity. Just finished reading a book on the ‘sacred feminine’. Rather a bit too new-agey for me, but still a very timely reminder to live closer to nature, to ‘regard the moon’ as I used to. My moon, my love. To be a little more pagan in life! I am enjoying more time in the sun, in the garden.
Dr Moore–once Catholic monk, professor of religion and psychology, with degrees in theology, musicology and philosophy–thank you.
And to my soul-sister–thank you even more.
PS. Mr Hyde decided to pee on a handbag in my bedroom last night in preference to using his litter tray in the laundry. He has used up another of his nine lives.
Shocked to find my last post was in December last year. I have now moved into a tiny little dollshouse of a cottage where I intend to stay for all of my foreseeable life. White and blue, sunny verhandahs, a little chandelier and my pictures hung, my iron bed the home of countless feathers and down stuffed into pillows upon pillows upon a ‘feather bed’ mattress topper. A proper home for my piano. A delightful back yard with fruit trees and herbs and even a hammock. And a cat, who’s christened name is Bilbo, but I am convinced his spiritual name is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, depending. Wolf Blass Pinot Grigio. Any Sauvignon Semillon Blanc from the Adelaide Hills. Birds. Fresh air. Just being so bloody grateful for being alive and healthy.
A lot of the time, I am insensibly happy and content. Sitting on the front verandah in the sun with a cup of coffee and a book. Looking at my home, inside and out and the beauty of it. Having friends over who don’t leave until the early hours in the morning and who exclaim over how gorgeous and delightful my home is. Innumerable kisses from my loving big little boy. Adoring looks from Dr Jekyll.
But always the underlying. Always. Underlying what? Sadness, for my sister, for my parents, for my sister’s children, for life for beauty for everything. Deep grief and heaviness and, yes, depression. Guilt. Oh so much guilt. Guilt at having survived cancer (careful, early days yet Dris) while my sister is 30 years too young to be living (or should I say dying?) in an old persons’ nursing home. Does she resent me? I can’t get a smile out of her, while she beams for others, I know it’s (most likely, always a qualifier) illogical to think this, but it’s inevitable and it’s there. And on top of that worry because I have mammograms and ultrasounds next week (always an unconscious depression settles in before that annual even too). Worry because, of course, what if its’ come back? I could not tell my parents. Or anyone in my family for that matter. ‘Doing Cancer’ is already hard enough for those of us who are single, but second time around, I’d have to do it totally and entirely alone. My parents are barely coping with what is happening with my sister. No. Not feasible. I could not load that on them. Then I must try and remember to stay in the present and not worry futilely about the future and what may or may not come to pass.
And anger. Anger that this (unfair) thing is happening. Anger that my parents should have to go through this, not to mention my sister, anger that we ALL have to go through this.
But also a more personal anger. So blocked creatively and have been for the longest time. I feel the block viscerally as a ball in the middle of my chest. Unable to write for SO long. A couple of years. I used to find such a release in it–creatively, for just being me, for communicating. If I could cough up this ball. Oh I know where it stems from. A period of time of constant ridiculing and belitting of my ‘writing’ by someone who supposedly cared more than that. And I’m quite angry at him for perpetrating that upon me. And angry at myself for letting myself be affected by it! I believed too much in every word uttered.
Which leads me straight into my womanhood, or lack thereof. Again that same person has a lot to answer for there for certain absolutely unforgiveable comments about my unfitness for ‘heterosexual relationships’. It’s no wonder I feel so divorced from my feminity and sexuality, when you add to that the changes that cancer treatment makes to the body–the scars to the breasts, the effects of enforced menopause, the weight gain. I feel like I do not not how to be a woman. I do not feel like a woman. And I hardly even try and appear to be a woman. After all, I am ‘unfit for relationships’. I have lost my sense of womanhood, my femininity, my sensuality, my sexuality, my mystery, my allure, my whimsy, my creativity … everything that makes up that part of me. And I’m mourning it GOD DAMN IT. And THAT makes me angry too.
So in an effort to counteract all of that, in an effort to find the me that is missing, I am back to reading nurturing non-fiction, and meditating. Trying to find my centre. Trying to find my Goddess. Trying to shed that heavy dark cloak of negativity put on me by the person who has stifled and shrunk me so I would believe I am less than what I am. Oh God, please, trying to find the ability to write again.
I live inside my head, and I’ve always been my own best company. But to be fully known? To be wholly and tenderly understood? That’s something I haven’t had in eighteen years.
from “The Nobodies Album” by Carolyn Parkhurst, p166.