Flick's Poetry & Thoughtfield: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.” Rumi
If you knew me you would brush away my weeping with a thousand gentle touches as weightless as a cooling breeze, soft as purest light, silent as a dark night’s moonbeam. If you knew me, your heart would know that you are my healing, you are my sacred self, you are the Belovéd.
8th of July 2020
Written from the inspiration of the mysterious nature of life and love. When we think, say, or write something of tenderness, who are we truly writing this for or about? Perhaps it is about ourselves? Perhaps I am the ‘Belovéd here? 🙏
I had been thinking for some time that I would like to change the nature of my blogs. This wonderful short video written by the creatively erudite Eve Ensler, has come up for me this morning on social media and has given me the hefty nudge I’ve been needing!
All my life my body has needed, no…. y-e-a-r-n-e-d for a revolution, I tell you a damned great big, rooted in the fertile ground of Mother Earth, Revolution! Well, here I am at long last, ‘facing’ my body, standing in that revolutionary soil, feet first, head-on.
It’s a tragic and terrible thing to ‘awaken’ and find yourself emerging from sleepwalking through life. She, I was a ”fat little girl” who ached from the disrespect coming at me… the energetic violations of a world hell-bent on making me wrong, or at least, squashing my voice, squashing me, suffocating the screams. They weren’t actual screams you see, they were on a parr with Edvard Munch’s ‘Silent Scream’ … a scream that rips apart the fascia in the body, MY body.
Climbing trees to escape was my way. Hiding in that oak tree where no one could see me, hear me, smell me …. touch me; I didn’t want them to touch my soul. I hid in fields of tall grasses, hollow trees, dry ditches where Cuckoo Pint grew with such voracious sexual beauty that they embedded themselves in my six year old mind, to be replicated, unwittingly, in my fifties on canvas.
Cuckoo Pint growing wild in the British countryside.
‘Passion Fruit’ Acrylics on Canvas circa 2005
I hadn’t realised as a child (who would?), that I wanted to break free with the insanity of a woman who could be stoned at any given moment, the psychological pain in me was so great. The wild young thing who had rising passions … in the body in the Soul …. in my heart… passions for sounds, colours, shapes. The desperation to be dramatically daubing colour everywhere…. in my hair, you know what I mean, like people do now…. oh-bring-it-on…… I feel it brewing… damned convention, wretched polite society, that girl is still there waiting to be met…. Of course she found the Cuckoo Pint voluptuously divine in its shape and colour. Of course she recognised its significance in her own physicality…… but not in words…. it was a kinesthetic sensing and knowing. Only looking back do I see the fog, smog sticky old bog in which she tried to breathe. N.B. not being able to breathe can cause brain fog….
You could ask me, “but what happened to you in your childhood then?” and my answer could be and is….. “You will have to listen deeply. You will need ears that can permeate the impenetrable. You will only understand if you can come to the rawness of the psyche with me, where there are the bones of the bare and broken; the molten lava of Gravitas and Expansiveness of Life.”
This is where I now invite you to come on my journey with me. My amazing life of a woodman’s daughter where suddenly, smashed and grabbed at the age of fifty-eight, it all changed. In 2011 the diagnosis of colon cancer was upon my body and my heart and then ALL that follows on from that is not even circuitous, but more a direct shaken by my bones sort of story….. the story of little c. Please note, dear traveler, there is no Big C in MY life and never will be… I am bigger than it will ever be, regardless of how this all spins and weaves its way through to my transition into the next bit of my journey ……
This is the first of, who knows how many posts, exploring my body’s need to be all ‘present and correct’ just as it is! If you’re interested or know of anyone who might relate, please share……
I’be just been to the most wonderful Qigong session. I was brought back to my heart and to at least one rather profound revelation.
We did a ‘standing posture’. We don’t usually do these, but I remember them well from my Energy Therapy Training at Snowlion schule. As if I needed to be made even more aware of pain! Argh…. I heard a voice in my head say “I am in so much pain when I stand still.” Yes, it’s true. Physically I am in a lot of pain if I just have to stand. As it is, that Nirvana state which is possible is nowhere in sight for me. But it meant more than that . It was telling me that when I don’t keep working at/on/with moving on, getting things done, being busy, I AM IN PAIN.
I recall how my maternal grandfather and my mum used to do potato picking up to earn money. I would go with her sometimes, yet I hated getting mud and dirt on my hands. Not when it was wet, but when it dried on me. It was as if I couldn’t breathe.
On one particular day, my grandfather really shouted at my mum because I wasn’t helping pick up spuds. I think I was about 8 or 9 years old. “Lazy little bugger” are the words I remember my Grandfather saying. That upset my mum, pushing her into anxiety and shame – about me and about herself….. The bad mother syndrome, foisted on to women by angry men. She felt that at my age, I was too young to be forced to do it, however…. that was not her response to me. In turn she laid into me and was really ratty with me for what feels like, the rest of her life 33 years to be precise.
And so that label stuck. I then went on to spend the rest of my life until 2011, forcing myself to keep going, to jump up quickly from the chair, to run upstairs, to cycle everywhere, to work hours on end. My belief was that I had to do anything I could to not appear – ‘fat and lazy’. I had to jump through hoops of fire and not get burned.
After gradual decline, post mum’s passing, I became seriously ill with FMS (fibro) filled rapidly by cancer; the rest is history.
Now, those ego driven, scared, hurt behaviours of the child – ME, are impossible. Too much has happened. Too many hurts have fermented and exploded into dis-ease, in me.
So – facing the stillness is now imperative. Perhaps I shall find myself hidden in those layers of pain. Perhaps – could it even be that it’s all okay? Maybe it is.
OK – I don’t do overwhelm at all well! I never have, but it was easier when I was younger…. There was always a way of transcending that terrible feeling of being weighted down. Not anymore – so what has changed? My perception. I have an auto- immune illness and and I’m a lot older.
I don’t like to moan about life at all, so finding a way of expressing the feelings of being in this staggeringly snare filled jungle of briars and nettles, is like having my breath stopped. ‘The Silent Scream’ comes to mind. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, yet it is the most isolating feeling – a madness which threatens even the stability of the best of us.
So…., how to remedy it? I have just read back over what I’ve written. The answer doesn’t lie in the making of lists, prioritising etc, at this point. When suffering overwhelm, it is just too much to do that as I can’t ‘think’. No, the answer lies in my statement, “it’s like having my breath stopped”. So I take it right back TO my breath.
I sit quietly. (Preferably without my cat on
My lap – dribbling!).
I close my eyes.
I hear the sounds outside of birds singing.
I feel the air on my skin.
I feel the chair under me and supporting my back.
I bring awareness to my breathing, noticing I am gripping my upper abdomen/solar plexus.
I get curious, sensing the movement or lack of movement, in and out as the ribs lift and fall, enabling the lungs to utilise the intake of oxygen.
The movement is small, I begin to feel the tension falling away, dissolving and freeing.
I notice how I have stilled my mind through my awareness of my breathing.
I sit, allowing myself to deeply enjoy my own breath, my own sense of self.
Now I can move forward…. ‘Overwhelm’ has dissipated and I can begin to make a lists of priorities.
I drink a glass of water to flush out the toxins which the overwhelm is likely to have produced.
Go quietly……
with the rhythms of time
into the mystical space
between wakefulness and sleep.
There, in another world,
suspended in the mist,
I am weightless,
a pleasing, matter-free being.
Communion with timeless space
floats the portal ever closer ….
the doorway into dreamy sleep…….
Come meet me there
for we have dancing to sing
and stories to create……
till we again segue into another earth day.
It is painfully strange,
this waiting for the day
when I shall go under yet
another knife, a sterile room
a surgeon’s steady hand…..
Pumping herbs and starving
the sad offender is a persuasion,
for, I do not need it in my life,
however much it wants to stay,
devouring my hurt body,
bit, by human bit.
They cut it out, poison it to death,
look at it, the specimen that it is –
bare and raw…..
Where oh where is the compassion
for its existence….?
The honouring of what it teaches me?
The space to work with it and change it?
Just leave me be, to chat with this
‘Dark Queen’ inside my soul……….
She is weeping you see,
Longing to be honoured
weeping to be Loved.
Cuckoo Pint growing wild in the British countryside.
‘Passion Fruit’ Acrylics on Canvas circa 2005
BubblingWordClouds 